In case you missed it, the spirit of Mao and his -ism is well and truly dead in today's Chinese Communist Party, according to the SCMP:
Leaders should eliminate the ideology of class struggle and not look on the masses as an enemy when dealing with the increasing number of conflicts between officials and citizens, a party school official said...In his article, Mr Wang said cadres dealing with mass gatherings should give up the ideology of "class struggle" - the friction between members or groups from different social classes. The concept was expanded by Mao Zedong , sparked off the Cultural Revolution, and was used as a powerful tool to eliminate those whose political views contradicted the government's...
Liu Xutao , a political scientist with the National School of Administration in Beijing, said the article was aimed at persuading grass-roots officials in rural areas to abandon the ideological relics of the Cultural Revolution.
"In rural areas, some officials still believe they reign supreme and take on the villagers as class-struggle targets when conflicts break out," Professor Liu said. "As building a harmonious society is the main theme of President Hu Jintao, it's necessary to dispel this wrong thinking."
Maoism's dead, long live...umm, whatever the CCP stand for these days.
When you're at the losing end of an ideological battle, what's the best thing you can do? Why not turn your loss into a victory, simply by wishing it to be so? In today's edition of tortured logic, the SCMP reports:
Economic globalisation will help revive the international socialist movement on its path towards inevitable success over capitalism, according to a leading central government think-tank. But mainland analysts have questioned the conclusions in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Yellow Book on World Socialism, saying they represent only the self-contradictory views of a few leftist scholars.
Academy vice-president Li Shenming unveiled the book yesterday at a seminar on leftist thinking in Beijing, according to the academy's website. It marks the latest stand in a leftist backlash against China's economic reforms..."The international socialist movement is at its low point, but the advance of economic globalisation will provide the material foundation and social conditions for its revival," China News Service quoted the book as saying. "The world socialist movement has not only withstood the powerful impact of the sudden political change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also revived and progressed. It is an invincible principle that socialist societies will grow from weak to prosperous and strong and eventually surpass and win over capitalism."
The book also takes aim at the United States, lashing out at its expansion of political, economic, military and diplomatic power."The new national security strategy in the US is likely to pose the biggest threat to China's economic security. China must be put on full alert to the realistic threats posed by the US' `soft war' offensive," it warned. Hu Xingdou , a Beijing-based political scientist, said the book's findings could be interpreted as China developing a new definition of socialism, different from the authoritarian Soviet system.
"It is true that the international socialist movement has been at a low ebb and there have been various understandings of the definition of socialism," he said.
Professor Hu said it would be right to say that socialism had revived itself in a different form, which allowed people more freedom and offered protection of their personal property.
Liu Junning , a former political researcher at the academy, was more critical of the book. "The findings showed the leftist academics who contributed to the book were confused themselves," Professor Liu said. "It is ridiculous and wishful to say that globalisation, a product of the capitalist market economy, can help China revive the international socialist movement. It is simply a way to boost their own morale."
There's a prize if anyone can work out how socialism is poised for a global revival and eventual triumph over capitalism thanks to globalisation. Most impressive is the section in bold - socialism being redefined to allow for people more freedom and private property. Extra prizes to entrants from North Korea and Cuba, who's examples of socialism give us all something to admire.
If globalisation (ie the free movement of people, goods, services and ideas between countries) leads to the "inevitable" success over capitalism, I'll move to North Korea.
There's always been, in communist revolutionary forecasting, the possibility/hope/expectation/myth/potential for the "success" of capitalism to finally unveil the seeds of its downfall by "going too far to be tolerable to the masses"..... we're still waiting, mind you, but the theory is unfalsifiable.
Beijing has announced new criteria for selecting its next generation of provincial leaders, reports the SCMP:
...a notice was issued recently by the central leadership spelling out the requirements for the provincial leadership changes that will be completed in the first half of next year.
Future provincial leaders must have a high political standard, be professionally capable, have a good record in their personal life and have earned the trust of the public...Special emphasis would be placed on the candidates' record in public administration, combating corruption, promoting consensus and personal qualities such as honesty and modesty.
In particular, the appraisal of future leaders would not be based solely on their economic performance but would also look at areas such as promoting social harmony and achievements in protecting the environment.
All of which is noble and good, but makes one wonder what criteria they've been using previously.
Despite the flak I took in promoting an article written by mainland born, U.S. based political science professor Minxin Pei (the last time about Taiwan), I shall do it again. This time, Dr. Pei writes a very readable editorial for the sometimes geographically challenged readership of the San Francisco Chronicle. He had some brave observations about why we should be pessimistic about political liberalization following on from economic liberalization:
To many observers, Beijing's tight grip on the Chinese economy means only that its reform process is incomplete. As China continues to open itself, they predict, state control will ease and market forces will clear away inefficient industries and clean up state institutions. The strong belief in gradual but inexorable economic liberalization often has a political corollary: that market forces will eventually produce civil liberties and political pluralism.
It's a comforting thought. Yet these optimistic visions tend to ignore the neo-Leninist regime's desperate need for unfettered access to economic spoils. Few authoritarian regimes can maintain power through coercion alone. Most mix coercion with patronage to secure support from key constituencies, such as the bureaucracy, the military and business interests. In other words, an authoritarian regime imperils its capacity for political control if it embraces full economic liberalization. Most authoritarian regimes know that much, and none better than Beijing.
Today, Beijing oversees a vast patronage system that secures the loyalty of supporters and allocates privileges to favored groups. The party appoints 81 percent of the chief executives of state-owned enterprises and 56 percent of all senior corporate executives.
I don't agree with all of his arguments, but they are a quick read and definitely worth absorbing.
Did anyone but me see the comments from Premier Wen in New Zealand???
And yes, the patronage system is going to be the monkey on the back of the CCP. Not sure how you go cold turkey to kick the addiction to graft and corruption without major pushback.
{Going back to the ICAC foundation and the cleanup of the HKPD, the police force threatened massive walk outs if the ICAC actually went through and prosecuted every crooked cop in the city. The ICAC relented and backed off.}
To paraphrase a certain Scottish explorer, it's democracy Jim, but not as we know it. As part of a massive re-organisation of officials, the central leadership is introducing new measures:
China is planning a massive reshuffle of local politicians, linking promotions to how well they adhere to the central leadership's efforts to address social imbalances, an official newspaper said. The moves may affect more than 100,000 officials in township, county, city and provincial posts ahead of a party congress next year that is likely to seal changes in the country's ruling circle under President Hu Jintao.
"The criteria for promotion will not [be based only on gross domestic product] growth and other political achievements, it will also [be based on] the level of popular satisfaction with their administration," the People's Daily, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, said Wednesday, citing comments by the party's organization chief, He Guoqiang. It said the decisions about promotions and demotions be made based on the "scientific outlook on development" - the party's catchphrase for balanced economic and social growth that places fresh emphasis on social equality, especially for poor farmers.
Making officials promotion prospects based on "popular satisfaction"...it begs the question how do you mark popular satisfaction? The ballot box, perhaps?
"Making officials promotion prospects based on "popular satisfaction"...it begs the question how do you mark popular satisfaction? The ballot box, perhaps?"
Easy to answer this one. They use the same methods the police use to get innocently accused murderers to confess to their crimes: you beat the citizens until they tell you they're satisfied!
Gotta give Hu credit, he doesn't miss a single opportunity.
China is doomed to have a peasant revolution, as Stratfor pointed out, too much debt, too many poor and the Guanxi networks are too embedded in the culture.
But, I have to say, I can't think of anything CPC/PRC could be doing that it isn't already trying in order to delay the inevitable.
It is fascinating to watch, like someone juggling land mines, you know it's gonna end badly, but you can't help enjoying the show while waiting for the first "oops..."
I'd be careful about slinging historical inevitabilities there Gordon. 50 years ago the communists thought they would have triumphed over capitalism by now and the whole world would be awash with grand prolitarien revolutions.
Some interesting factoids in today's SCMP about China's civil service:
The China Youth Daily yesterday quoted a survey as saying that just more than two-thirds of mainlanders believed Beijing should cut the number of civil servants and streamline the bureaucracy.
It quoted an economist as saying China had 39 civil servants for every US$1 million of gross domestic product, compared with 2.31 civil servants per US$1 million of GDP in the US.
Ren Yuling , a CPPCC delegate and an adviser to the State Council, told official media yesterday that the budget for running the government was 87 times bigger in 2003 than in 1978. In 2003, administrative expenses accounted for 19.03 per cent of total national expenditure, compared with Japan's 2.38 per cent and 9.9 per cent in the United States.
Hong Kong has about 155,000 civil servants and a GDP of US$181.6 billion, making the Big Lychee's ratio a lowly 0.85 civil servants per US$1 million of GDP. There you have it - proof our well paid civil servants are in fact world-beating, super-efficient machines.
While we all thought the attendees at the NPC sat and listened to Premier Wen's Government Work Report passively, at least one delegate wasn't impressed. The SCMP reports:
A Hong Kong deputy to the National People's Congress has criticised the concept of building a "new socialist countryside" - as outlined in Premier Wen Jiabao's Government Work Report - as "unscientific".
"It is merely a political slogan and it forces experts from academic and planning sessions to support it," Victor Sit Fung-shuen said. "That's why I don't want to stay and listen after I have read all the reports. I am dissatisfied."...
Professor Sit also found fault with the policy of spending 50 per cent of China's gross domestic product on infrastructure, calling it an "act of inefficient economic investment". He said: "Only local officials get the benefits because they assign the projects to their relatives or friends and let local banks pay when the loans become bad debts." State-owned banks' bad debts came from the blind pursuit of building infrastructure, he said.
Despite China's sweeping reforms that have transformed a socialist command economy into a somewhat capitalist-style market, socialist ideology continues to manifest itself whenever there's a chance.
Absolutely read the whole article - it nicely skewers one Marxist academic and points out two recent examples of ideology trying to re-assert itself over reality. As the article concludes, concern about China's wealth gap are best addressed by alleviating poverty (i.e. raising the bottom up) rather than redistribution (i.e. dragging the top down). And one point that often gets missed. The rich getting richer doesn't mean the poor are getting poorer - the whole pie is getting bigger. In absolute terms, everyone is getting richer, but in relative terms some are getting richer faster than others.
The criticism of the property developer seems pretty justified to me. If you don't mix up various classes in one zone you get slum areas like the Parisian suburbs - only good for rioting. Sadly when you put the poor where the rest of society can't see them, little tends to be done to resolve their problems. Also the further out the poor go, the harder it is for them to find work, owing to transport costs. That's why any new housing built in London, for example, has to include a certain amount of "social housing" (i.e. low cost). Governments tend to get around to this eventually, but by the time they realise no police/teachers/plumbers can afford to live in the centre of town it takes a mammoth effort to resolve.
Tim Johnson at Knight Ridder reports on China's latest modernisation efforts...in Marxism. The article rehashes the new emphasis by China's leadership on Marxism in a desperate search for a new ideology. It seems to be building on the work of the so-called "new leftists". The irony is the it is the Communist Party that is trying to get in touch with the ideology of its founding philosopher. An even greater irony is China has enjoyed boom times only since it ditched the policies of Mao, Lenin and Marx. The implication is that China's leadership is starting to fear that the economic boom that has given the party legitimacy in the past 25 years may not last forever, or that perhaps it isn't enough to retain the confidence of its people. This renewed emphasis on Marxism is quaint at the moment and is being manifested as think-tanks and a push to help the rural poor. But is the leadership desperate enough that such thought could eventually pervade its economic policies? Perhaps not yet, but one day it could be. If that happens the interests of the leadership will sharply diverge from the interests of the lead, with massive consequences.
This week also marks 50 years since Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech", where he denounced some (but not all) of the evils of Stalin. China has never had such a speech, secret or otherwise. It is a poorer place for it.
From what I read into all this "new marxism" talk is sounds like China's leadership is just trying to justify government intrusion into the economy.
China has never really followed marxism, it has always simply adapted it to whatever needs it had at the moment.
It seems like Hu is laying the ideological groundwork for heavier redistribution policies and greater government regulation against perceived out of control capitalists.
I think exactly the opposite (or at least the intention of HJT is exactly the opposite - that may not be how it ends up once the party hacks get through with it). As another astute observer in the blogoshphere has already pointed out - revisiting marxism was exactly the route Hu Yaobang took before introducing his reforms. Have any of the western artcile writers actually read all the Xinhua domestic and Liaowang reports on this issue? I think not otherwise they would reflect that HJT is talking about "innovation" and "new thinking" not going back to the past.
For Big Brother and China's KTVs, that is. A new law that will go into effect March 1st, stipulates that all discos and karaoke lounges must install surveillance equipment at all entrances, exits and public hallways. Copies of the tapes must be kept for 30 days.
In addition, all private rooms, a staple of the KTV industry (which is most often a front for prostitution) must have non-locking doors and a transparent window into the room from the public hallway.
It is ostensibly to address the fire that killed Chinese revellers on New Years' Day, but I don't think any sensible person believes that.
Oh, and it also tosses in as a rule that no officials can any longer have an interest (of the ownership variety, at least) in nightclubs of any kind.
I wonder how far this new rule will be enforced outside of Beijing's city limits (or even within them, for that matter?). The clean-up of the CCP's image appears to be underway. Let's see if they can find the janitors to do the job - on a regular basis.
No, this isn't a story about bird flu. Wu Zhong in today's Standard looks at an interesting development in Chinese administration: Beijing's forceful attempts to assert authority over provinces. Definitely worth a full read, but some key excerpts:
Beijing this year is setting out on a major and so far nearly impossible task: reining in local officials who dare to defy central government policies.So in the Year of the Dog, the Communist Party's disciplinary watchdogs and those of the central government are likely to become hounds that not only bark but bite. Their authority flows from China's first Civil Service Law, which went into effect from the start of this year and empowers them to punish and sack any official who disobeys the central government's authority. Given China's huge land mass, the problem of localism has existed throughout history, famously giving rise to the old adage that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away."
Even Mao Zedong, with all his seeming omnipotence, would hardly have been able to weed out corrupt malpractices that were thousands of years old. In his historic 1972 meeting with US president Richard Nixon in his Zhongnanhai study, Mao said his influence hardly reached beyond Beijing, due to "passive resistance" in other regions.
The past two decades of dramatic economic reform have given the regional governments even greater autonomy to run their economies. Local officials have often simply ignored or eluded Beijing's dicta, in recent years becoming so bold that they have begun to defy Beijing's policies publicly...
China's classic tactic against those whom it wants to intimidate into line has long been known as killing the chicken to scare the monkeys. So it's quite likely that the new year is going to see some quaking bureaucrats in the dock, awaiting punishment, prison terms or even death sentences, to scare the rest of the monkeys back into line.
The estimate of 87,000 protests in 2005 equates to almost 240 incidents every day. These protests are typically about one of two issues: inadequate compensation for land reposession, and corrupt &/or incompetent local rule. Literally millions of people are involved in these protests and they represent the biggest potential threat to the continuing rule of the Communists. Can Beijing overturn history and bring the provinces and local administrations to heel? I doubt it, even for the CCP.
There is one very simple and quick solution to this problem, but unfortunately no one has the political will to carry it out today, not since the days of Mao anyway. A good old fashioned Roman decimation. Arbitrarily choose 1 out of every 10 provincial and local level cadres and have them shot. Fear will keep the rest in line. This would probably be far too destabilizing on the party apparatus to carry out, but on the upside it would streamline bureaucratic efficiency.
Time's at a premium at the moment, which is a shame because the revival of Marxism story continues apace, reports Pravda SCMP:
While Marxism is in decline throughout the world, China has taken the lead in the development of the communist ideology, according to a mainland theorist. Cheng Enfu , executive president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' new Academy of Marxism, said Communist Party leaders had never been so keen to push Marxism forward...
Professor Cheng insisted that Marxist theory could still be applied to the problems China was facing in a market-oriented environment, adding that Japanese Marxist economists had been playing a crucial role in Tokyo's policymaking...
Professor Cheng said Beijing aimed to modernise Marxism by building a theoretical system with Chinese characteristics and style, adding that this would contribute to advance and modernise the ideology worldwide. He said China provided a favourable environment for further development and modernisation of Marxism. "Firstly, we have provided the world a new economic theory - what is now called the `socialist market economy'," Professor Cheng said. "Secondly, China has set a precedent by becoming the first to successfully build a socialist market economic system. And finally, we have advanced the Marxist theory of economics in many areas."
China's current economic system bears more than a passing resembelence to that beast known as capitalism...that's what everyone took "socialist market economy" to mean. I know the CCP has been trying to fill an ideological void since it essentially abandoned communism, but Marxism? I imagine Karl wouldn't be too impressed.
Taking a page out of his mentor, Hu Yaobang's playbook. It didn't help Hu to survive the counter-attack by the hard liners by '87 or Zhao in '89, but the work done in the early/mid-80s on revising Marxism were keys to Deng putting the economic reforms back in to the forefront by '91.
Yesterday I mentioned the curious rise of Marxism within the Chinese central bank. It seems this is just one small part of a broader push to revive Marxism within China...which seem incredibly strange given no-one outside North Korean believe Marxist economics works, and that outside of universities no-one believes in Marxist philosophy. The unlinkable SCMP reports:
After more than two decades of capitalist market reforms, Communist Party leaders have pledged "unlimited" funds for reviving Marxism on the mainland. Sources say the programme will also involve turning the country into the global centre for studying the ideology.
Economic reforms have seen the mainland grow richer by abandoning Karl Marx's economic ideas, but President and party general secretary Hu Jintao told a Politburo meeting in November that Marxism was still applicable to the mainland. Leaders are also keen to fill the ideological void that has emerged in a more prosperous China, and the Communist Party believes the answer lies in the ideology that gave birth to it...Beijing will summon 3,000 top Marxist theorists and academics from across the country to the capital to compile 100 to 150 Marxism textbooks, with each work requiring contributions from at least 20 to 30 scholars. Between 100 million and 200 million yuan has been earmarked for the programme, with more than 1 million yuan to be allocated to funding the compilation of each textbook. The project would also see a massive investment of human and financial resources go towards building more research institutes, training more theorists and producing more academic papers, the sources said.
Li Changchun , a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the party's chief official in charge of ideology, told a meeting of propaganda officials and theorists on Monday that the leadership saw the project as instrumental to solving various issues facing the country and had given it "unlimited" support...All university students are required to attend Marxism classes. Secondary school graduates are also required to sit a national examination on Marxism before university enrolment.
And I thought China's space program was a waste of money.
I don't think anyone in China is seriously contemplating turning the clock back. But I think Hu and Wen also recognize that there are a lot of people that think some things were better then (an egalitarian society) and perhaps it is part of their push to encourage development of rural and inland regions. The Shanghai clique always resented Mao for taking their surplus and throwing it at Guizhou and Gansu; Jiang and his cadres totally reversed that policy, and pretty much made it everyone for themselves. I think the current leadership think that there is some room, if only for their legitimacy, for more balanced development efforts.
I guess there will always been some regions that don't do as well as others - Arkansas v. New York, or Darwin v. Sydney. But there is something to be said for national policies that share the new wealth, at least a little bit, with those regions.
In my view, that a macroeconomic 'social' Marxism is what perhaps is being implied here, insofar as 'Marxism' to a certain segment of the Chinese population equates with 'fairness' and 'egality'.
I think that we must be also cognizant of the vacuum of moral principles in modern day, officially still atheist China. Given that the ruling party is still the Chinese Communist Party, not only must they extrapolate any official morality from their history but also they feel they must do so without giving free rein to other religions that could topple its official monopoly on public morality.
So short of creating some sort of old-style 'cult of personality' Kim Il-Sung or Mao Zedong state religion, I think they are furiously racking their brains about how to create a unifying, appealing moral code that at once is consistent with some aspect of Marxism, that addresses modern society's need for moral principles (especially for officials!), and that does not give license or initiative to religious institutions outside of their control.
I personally don't see how it'll be done, but one can understand why they are trying.
I agree that the underlying motivation is likely to be appearing close to the old Marxist theme of social equality - appealing both to peasants and cadres who still have faith in the old system. But it's pretty thorough though - Hu's been promoting the whole red tourism thing and advocating N Korea and Cuba as study models for the management of ideology. Not to mention the whole Marxist re-education programme for all 60m+ CCP members.
Interestingly there were quite a few mutterings during the campaign from cadres in the cities who feel it's a pointless waste of time in the modern era. Can't imagine why... I'm just waiting for the government to start outsourcing these courses in Marxism to the private sector.
An article in the Times of London provocatively covers Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing's visit to Africa to tie up various natural resource contracts, including a US$2.3 bn MOU with Nigeria to get access to one of its oilfields. To quote the article:
China now obtains about 28 per cent of its oil imports from Africa — mainly Angola, Sudan and Congo. Chinese companies have snapped up offshore blocks in Angola, built pipelines in Sudan and have begun prospecting in Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad.
Chinese interests are not limited to energy. One of the biggest Chinese mining operations on the continent is the Chambishi copper mine in Zambia. In South Africa, China-controlled ASA Metals Ltd said last week that it wanted to triple output of ferrochrome — an alloy used in stainless steel to deter corrosion — by 2008. And Chinese investors are seeking nickel deposits in such fragile nations as Burundi.
Chinese-funded enterprises in Africa increased by 77 in 2004 to 715. The new companies invested $135 million with plans for investment of $432 million, a Chinese official said.
Trade has soared. Two-way trade leapt 39 per cent in the first ten months of last year to £18 billion. Exports totalled $15.25 billion while imports reached $16.92 billion. Between 2002 and 2003, trade soared by 50 per cent to $18.5billion — the fastest growth China has seen with any region.
The numbers are impressive, but what really makes the article controversial is the final paragraphs:
Some African businessmen complain that China is flooding the continent with cheap goods and putting domestic manufacturers out of business.
To counter such criticisms, China ensures that its investments are accompanied by medical and other humanitarian aid, scholarships and generous construction projects. Chinese scholars bristle at suggestions that Beijing is mining the continent for resources needed to fuel the Chinese manufacturing machine.
He Wenping, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: “Western media says China is carrying out a ‘new colonialism’ in Africa. That is a deliberate distortion of mutually beneficial China-Africa co-operation. China has built large-scale industries and supplied badly needed skills and funds to African countries.”
I have to say that while some of the regimes that China cozies up to, like Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe are very unsavory, what they are up to in Africa is generally no different from most Western powers. In general, Africa is hardly offering up compelling alternatives to Chinese goods, and this even with the high tariff barriers many of the African states maintain. Seems like alarmist journalism to me from the Times. What do you think?
We have all heard, ad nauseam, about how Zheng He (Cheng Ho) the Muslim Chinese eunuch admiral made a number of naval visits to Southeast Asia and various countries in the Indian Ocean. The blinkered view of these visits as entirely peaceful and altruistic have then been generalized and interpreted that Chinese foreign policy has always been entirely peaceful to its neighbors.
Fear not, though, I am not descending into one of my rants on the subject. An Indian defense analyst has written about a new gambit by China in Sino-Indian relations. India is keen to improve its relations with its Central Asian neighbors to the north and west (starting of course with Pakistan). China has certainly stolen a march on India in negotiating gas pipeline deals with Central Asian countries and Iran to keep itself well supplied with oil. In return for sharing the benefits of power projection in Central Asia, China apparently wants India to share power with it in the Indian Ocean.
A brief note, but an interesting perspective from outside our area...
You forgot to mention that Zheng He and his fleets also, without a doubt, visited east Africa and aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. There is also, as you no doubt know, good evidence that his fleets also visited the American continent at least 50 years before Columbus or Magellan first did.
Except that there isn't really any evidence that is compelling that he visited America, or Australia for that matter. I have not seen a single credible academic source that would stake his or her career on it.
And please don't quote Gavin Menzies, he is not a credible source because even in his book it is clear that those destinations were very speculative.
Many scholars who are critical of Menzies' work generally do at least concede that Zheng He probably did visit Australia / NZ.
The Americas are a more controversial claim, but there is still, at the very least, enough evidence to raise at least a reasonably arguable case.
But no doubt what is considered to be "compelling" evidence or not varies depending on how determined one is to maintain myths of universal Western (white Caucasian) superiority and dominance.
I shall ignore the sinister implication in what you are suggesting I am saying for the moment.
I shall instead say only this - that Zheng He is made up to be much more meaningful a statement about the eternally peaceful intentions of China today than is reasonable or that is borne out by facts.
I do not like it when a mish mash of truths and half-truths are presented as evidence of such eternally peaceful intentions, and to pander to Chinese beliefs of greatness. I acknowledge that Zheng He's voyages were impressive, in terms of what has been documented. I also believe that the fact that they were discontinued because of Imperial Palace politics, and their discoveries not used to improve the lives of the Chinese people.
Fact is, the fact that Italians once ran much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East does not change the way I see the country today. The facts of Cheng Ho do not annoy me, but what does annoy me is how this voyage is today being manipulated for political purposes of every variety.
India's the last country in that part of the world which China is not building ports in - Gwadar in Pakistan, Hanbantota in Sri Lanka, Chittagong in Bangladesh and a couple of places in Myanmar. They vary in size, and doubtless not all will have any military implications, but I think India is sufficiently paranoid that it's unlikely to be rushing into any Indian Ocean partnership with the Chinese soon...
Peaceful intentions? Maybe im lapsing in my daily dosages of Xinhua but Zheng He's boats were warships not pleasure barges. He didn't take 20,000 soldiers with him because he was out for a evening stroll either.
In any case, the strength of the Chinese strategic position in Central Asia, vis-a-vis the US as well as India, has become more significant with the revelation today of another milestone - that China has become the second largest consumer of oil after the United States.
The Central Asian dictators will doubtless feel more comfortable working with China than with democratic customers that are also putting pressure on them to open up their regimes.
Besides everything else mentioned above, doesn't anyone find it ironic that China is talking about how peaceful it is using Zheng He as an example? This a guy guy whose homeland was captured by a foreign army at the time--the Chinese of the Ming. His balls were cut off because he was not Chinese. The Ming killed the male adults of those captured and lopped off the balls of the young boys. Yes, he rose to prominence, but he 'became Chinese' as a direct result of Chinese warfare and expansionism.
If memory serves, Zheng He's homeland was Yunnan province, i.e. Chinese territory since the time of the First Emperor.
At the time, Yunnan was being occupied by the Mongols, i.e. a foreign power.
The reconquest of Yunnan (and all other Mongol-occupied Chinese territory) by the Ming could not be considered expansionism, no more than, say, the liberation of continental France from English rule at the end of the Hundred Years War could be considered expansionism.
Actually Yunnan was one of the last areas to fall under Chinese sway. The reason why the Ming dynasty invaded Yunnan was not to recover territory, but to squash the last vestiges of Yuan resistance.
Ming Dynasty was highly pro-Muslims, whereas, the Qing dynasty was strongly anti-Muslims, over 10 millions Chinese Muslims were murdered by the Qing government during the Muslims uprisings in the 19th Century.
All true, although David the 10 million murdered is a bit of a difficult description when basically the Chinese troops were enforcing their mandate over an area over which they had nominal sovereignty. It is true that the Chinese troops, under the command of their successful and ruthless general, did kill civilians as well as soldiers, it was similar to the holocaust of the Taiping Rebellion which was close to the same time.
Anyway, to put my thoughts on the subject to bed, Zheng He is an interesting, admirable historical figure, but rather a great deal is made of his achievements these days. It is so because he seems to be a very effective tool, in vast swathes of the world in which China would like to increase its influence.
China's major problem is it is ruled by control freaks. The relentless need to remain in control will inevitably be the source of the CCP's fall, because human affairs are ultimately not even controllable by Communists.
There are several telling examples. Firstly today's (still unlinkable) SCMP reports on the government's back to the future attempt to close the rural/urban income gap, and finds the biggest problem is land reform:
The government is planning to bridge the widening income gap between urban and rural areas by introducing a raft of initiatives to invest more in the countryside over the next five years. Absent from the plans, however, were any moves to adjust land policies, though land disputes were seen as the main source of discontent behind the series of violent clashes in rural areas during the past year.
A new movement, entitled the "new socialist countryside", will be the focus of rural development during the 11th Five-Year Programme. A similar slogan, "building socialist rural areas", appeared in the 1950s, but was later dismissed as part of propaganda about building a utopian society. The latest campaign draws comparisons between the situation on the mainland and South Korea's experiences 30 years ago...
According to state media, Beijing's vision of a "new socialist countryside" consists of five components: production growth, affluence, rural civilisation, a clean environment and democracy in the management of local affairs. The vision may look like a holistic approach, but scholars are worried that it may turn into another white-elephant construction spree.
Likely problems include the usual: corruption, political point-scoring for provincial officials by wasting funds on "showcase" villages, increased financial strain on villages as local governments tax to spend. And the program largely misses the point - money alone isn't the solution to rural poverty. Proper land reform, well-deliniated land rights, open and honest courts that will defend the poor from developer and government land grabs and cops that don't shoot those defending their patches of earth are all vital. But the control freaks demand progress, and progress can only come with control. The true beauty of the capitalist market system is it works with a minimum of control, not a maximum of it.
Another example is China's banking sector. With many banks of various sizes swamped with bad debt, China is experimenting with taking in foreign capital in the sector. But now the dam wall of control has been slightly breached, you can expect a flood to soon follow. China is delicately trying to leverage foreign money and experience to resolve its financial system problems (bad debts, poor management and poor controls) but without giving up control. But foreigners are not going to give over huge sums of money, time and expertise without getting some say over what happens to it all. China's government will be expected to cede control in return for these things.
This leads to an interesting consideration - China's currency policy. If you view that policy through the prism of control, then China's reluctance to make changes to either the level of the yuan or to its capital account (allowing the free flow of capital into and out of China) makes sense, even though it defies economic wisdom. This is the dimension that is often missing from economic commentary on China's economic policies. Economics is better considered as "political economy", especially when dealing with a government such as China's where the control premium is so large it often outweighs economic logic. And this concept extends past the world of economics - much of China's actions can only be considered through an understanding of the relentless need for the CCP to retain control at all costs.
The CCP's problem is the reforms of the past 25 years have unleashed growth and social changes that are beyond even the best abilities of government's to control. China's government relies on brute force and technology to control the internet, only to find SMS and mobile phones outstripping their control. Information is difficult to control; economies are difficult to control; people are difficult to control. The best systems allow these forces to flow of their own accord, sometimes stepping in when they fail or lead to adverse results but otherwise leaving things to find their own equilibrium. Imposing solutions doesn't work because (and this may be a shock to many) some people do not know better than others.
Equilibriums are a balance of dynamic forces, sometimes assisted by catalysts. They are not brought about by control freaks wishing it is so.
The WTO protesters should have no doubts as to which side of the border they ought to be on. Reports now place the death toll from the riots in Dongzhou village near Shanwei City in Guangdong Province (where local security forces opened fire against demonstrators last week) at 20 people, up from 3 when the Chinese government issued a statement last week Tuesday.
Amnesty International made a statement that the deaths from the riots were the worst inflicted by the government on its own people since Tiananmen, and the first time since that incident that security forces have actually opened fire. Of course we have no way of knowing that - maybe a few of the mine disasters were mis-reported... The area was cordoned off to visitors, and trucks in the vicinity reverted to tried-and-true CCP tactics of blaring PA announcements of "Trust the Government". According to the Taipei Times:
Yesterday, government banners hung at the entrance of Dongzhou said, "Following the law is the responsibility and obligation of the people" and "Don't listen to rumors, don't let yourself be used."
But the fact that the government has detained the commander on the spot for making some bad decisions (he does not need to be formally charged for the next 3 weeks) does show that maybe something has changed since 1989. The Guangzhou Daily reported on the killings as a mistake that was the responsibility of the charged 'Gong An' commander.
The 170 villagers involved in the protests, as our readers will know, are far from alone in making their grievances known the their governments. The Independent of Britain had this interesting factoid:
Official government figures say that 3.76m people took part in at least 74,000 protests in 2004, but many more go unrecorded.
Local Hongkongers should be even more sympathetic when they find out the protests were over a new (highly-polluting) coal-fired power plant blowing smoke in our general direction. The cause of the protests though were not for environmental reasons, but rather because the government had issued compulsory purchase orders for land that the villagers regarded as derisory. Any questions about whether it's the farmers or the city-dwellers that are getting the short end of the stick in China, or why there are so many unregistered migrants in China's urban areas?
"But the fact that the government has detained the commander on the spot for making some bad decisions (he does not need to be formally charged for the next 3 weeks) does show that maybe something has changed since 1989. The Guangzhou Daily reported on the killings as a mistake that was the responsibility of the charged 'Gong An' commander".
I hoped not to read, at least this time, any excuses for a criminal government shooting at its own people again. But clearly and sadly there's always room for excusing a criminal regime. Sorry Dave, but you could spare us that sentence this time.
"Amnesty International made a statement that the deaths from the riots were the worst inflicted by the government on its own people since Tiananmen"
This could be true if we solely consider the deaths caused by known (and I underline known) square shootings. But in China deaths inflicted by the government on its own people include tortures, laogai system, summary executions, farce processes, disappearances and so on...
Title: China: Putting Lipstick on the Pig (Tiananmen II)
Excerpt: China’s communist leadership is trying to paint a smiley face over its most recent brutal suppression of dissent. Five days ago, protestors were gunned downed by police in a village not far from Hong Kong. The authorities blame a “few instigators” for the violence, but this event is indicative of growing socio-economic shifts in mainland China; namely the disparity between those profiting from communist experimentation with capitalism, and those left on the sidelines.
Note: I couldn't send an automatic or manual trackback.
Posted by Steve Jackson at December 13, 2005 12:15 AM
Hi Enzo, I appreciate the clarification. I don't see myself as an apologist for China. I frequently criticize the country.Anyplace that recognizes its power industry as they key to its growth and yet allows over 3,000 miners to die horrible deaths each year in illegal coal mines has something terribly wrong with the status quo.
But I do feel I am justified in pointing out that the incident, which was terrible, did not end in silence and a collective nightmare where everything goes on as before, pretending nothing happened. Such would have been the standard response 15 years ago. Instead, the Chinese authorities detain the commander and say outright that he was wrong to exercise deadly force. They also use a provincial newspaper to condemn the actions of the commander.
Of course, the government, as I point out, is still at pains to go through the motions of a cover up, not allowing journalists in and shouting empty slogans from trucks. But I think there is some difference in how they handled the situation today from the way they would have handled it in the past. It may be politically incorrect, but I do not think it is an inhuman observation.
That being said, there is still a long way to go before the Chinese government can claim to have anything but a terrible human rights record. Life is cheap in China, and has ever been treated as such. Chinese authorities trumpet the human rights of the community rather than of the individual, taking a totally fatalistic view about their own inability or unwillingness to go that extra mile to ensure the safety and well-being of that one marginal individual. Until that attitude changes wholesale, I do not see that Third World tendency toward denial, obfuscation and irresponsibility for the people involved, dissipating when tragedies occur. Let us simply hope that China's wealth and growing middle class will finally force the governments to recognize people and individuals as being as having the same right to life as top cadres and businessmen.
One should note that in CCP parlance, "instigator" is very mild. They weren't described as "hooligans," "rioters," "criminal elements," or "black hands." Also there was no attempt to make the police look heroic.
Also the tendency to cover up is not a third world tendency. Any government official (or CEO) who *can* cover things up, *will* cover things up whether Chinese or American, Communist or capitalist. It's just human nature. The difference is how much the system will let you get away with covering things up.
The thing about this situation is that given the international press coverage, at this point it is impossible for the Chinese government to totally bury the story, and there are very strong limits to the degree to which the Chinese government can spin the story.
This all makes me wonder if these are improving or not improving. The Financial Times mentioned that it is probably not true that this is the first use of deadly force by police since TAM, just the first one that has massive Western coverage. I've noticed that an awful lot of these incidents happen in Guangdong, which makes me wonder if these sorts of things happen more often in Guangdong, or if it has something to do with the fact that Guangdong is close to Hong Kong.
I have this feeling that if something like this happened in rural Yunnan, that no one would ever have heard of it, and the only real reason that this got a lot of press coverage was because Radio Free Asia had been covering this for the last several months. If the RFA reporter had been in another village, it's likely we would have never heard of this.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 13, 2005 10:35 AM
Looking at political systems, I've come to the conclusion that with a few exceptions, the people in one government are rarely morally better than people in another. Personally, I don't think that people in the Chinese government are less honest, moral, or prone to cover ups than people in the US government. It's just that the system in the US allows much less leeway to cover things up.
One corrollary of this is that if you put US government officials in a position where they can cover things up, they will behave badly, whereas if you put Chinese officials in a position where they can't cover things up or in which they feel that a cover-up is self-destructive, they will behave well.
One other corrolary is the idea that democratic officials are by their nature more moral than authoritarian officials is rather dangerous.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 13, 2005 10:46 AM
- Life is cheap in China....
Life is cheap everywhere if those lives are people one doesn't feel any particular connection to.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 13, 2005 10:53 AM
Joseph, I am sympathetic to your position that culture is far less important than institutions in determining social and individual potential outcomes, and thereby, assuming rational choice, individual behavior. I do think though that in the case of China, it is difficult to separate culture from institutions given the Jurassic-style bureacracy and institutions China has lived with for decades. While polices have changed substantially, the institutional framework in which modern China exists has not, nor has the people of China that have all lived through the same horrific shared experiences of the cultural revolution (resulting in the pendulum swinging the other way towards unbridled capitalism and self-interest).
At what point, for instance, if we make a generalization about an American, due to culture, and what due to the institutions of America? It is hard to separate the two because America has spawned a political culture and an enduring belief in its Constitution that are key components of American identity.
In the same way, I would argue to try to separate the two is simplistic in China. People and the government in China will do what they can get away with (which is a great deal) and so will Americans (which is substantially less). But it is still perfectly valid for me to criticize the government of China for doing something I regard as immoral, because whether a problem is systemic or particular to individuals.
I view the about face in Chinese press coverage of Dongzhou as indicative of the Chinese press realizing they could not get away with dismissing the incident. In that sense, things must have gotten better, even if the intentions and instincts of the press and the government (still more or less the same thing) have not changed.
And let's face it, if a country still lauds Mao even after the millions of people he condemned to death, (among a countless litany of examples) life is cheaper here than most other places.
Dave, the reality is: a despotic power shoots again against its own people and the world knows it despite regime censorship. We should condemn without hesitations.
If we immediately underline that a local official was arrested without noting that he likely is a scapegoat, it looks like if we were trying to mitigate the responsibility of the despotic power by a convenient but wrong comparison: "look" - we are saying - "how better is the despotic power: it only killed 20 or more people, admitted 3 and arrested someone (to wash its own hands). It's not Tiananmen, we should be happy". Of course it's not Tiananmen but it's a new crime against chinese people. We should condemn it. Stop.
I'm not suggesting that it is wrong to criticize. However, the whole point of the exercise is to change things, and one can't reasonably change things if one doesn't understand the dynamics behind things. The trouble with moral indignation is that it suggests that the solution is to destroy the old system completely and start from scratch. Tried that, it doesn't work.
My experience is that people overemphasize "deep cultural factors" and this leads people to vastly underestimate how much and how quickly things can change (either positively or negatively).
If you put Chinese officials in a position where they have to defend their actions, they will very quickly adapt to stay in power. If you put American officials in a position where they don't, they will very quickly start behaving badly (see US behavior in Iraq).
Also acting from a position of moral superiority also implies that one would make better or more rational decisions if one was in a similar position. I have this sense (and this is from reading about police shootings in other contexts) that had anyone one of us been in the same position as the police commander with the same information and pressures, that anyone of us would have likely given the order to fire. (Which is precisely why the commander has to be dealt with quite harshly.)
The other problem with moral indignation is that it leads one not to question historical mythology. For example, Chinese government has had deep bureaucratic institutions for a much shorter period of time than the United States or Western Europe (pre-1949 governmental institutions stopped at the county level, the CCP is the first Chinese government in over a thousand years to have representatives of the government at the village and township levels.)
My own analysis is that a lot of the tension that has been attributed to deep Chinese historical values isn't. It's due to modern budgeting practices (in particular local governments are bankrupt.)
Also I wouldn't be too harsh on the veneration of Mao. In front of the Texas State Capitol is still a monument to fallen Confederate heros who fought and died to defend an institution that was arguably far worse than anything Mao ever did.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 13, 2005 09:58 PM
The last sentence is enough to interrupt any serious debate.
-The last sentence is enough to interrupt any serious debate.
Why? No one today would seriously defend chattel slavery, yet there is a version of history has been written that minimizes the involvement of Southern Confederate generals in defending that institution, and focuses on their "heroic characteristics." It's not that different than what has been done to Mao. (Minimize role in CR, maximize role in defending "us" against "them.")
One could try to come up with counterarguments (i.e. the Great Leap Forward was morally worse than the enslavement of African Americans). But the position which compares the official history of Mao with the "Lost Cause/State's Rights" explanation for the US Civil War is appropriate. So it is worth debating.
I should point out that part of the reason I make this analogy is that I don't like Mao, and if were up to me, I'd have his picture generally removed and replaced with Sun Yat-Sen. But I'm willing to tolerate keeping up some old statues so that we aren't constantly refighting the Civil War (either Chinese or American).
Also, I'm more interested in getting things done than condemnation. The trouble with constant condemnation is that it gets to the point of self-righteousness and that gets annoying after a while.
A lot of my experiences come from being around overseas Chinese democracy activists post-Tiananmen. The trouble with taking a hard line "Chinese government is evil" stance is that pretty soon you get to the point that you are labelling as either evil or traitorous anyone that has anything good to say about the Chinese government. Pretty soon that includes just about everyone who doesn't agree 99% with your view of the world, and you end up just talking with yourself.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 14, 2005 12:51 AM
Joe, I think you are under the mistaken impression that I am some American guy that feels moral outrage at China, and that you feel it necessary to remind me of things that are shameful in the American past or present. This is incorrect, and if you had read my comments more closely you would have figured this out. We both seem to believe that institutions are the most important thing. I would say, though, that you trivialize your own arguments by generalizing about Iraq in terms of American behavior there. You should heed your own words: "Also, I'm more interested in getting things done than condemnation. The trouble with constant condemnation is that it gets to the point of self-righteousness and that gets annoying after a while." If you're suggesting that all *I* do is criticize China, you should look through past pages.
I also don't really see the point of comparing Mao to Jefferson Davis. If we're going back to that point in history, we can compare the Civil War to the Taiping Rebellion (55 million dead). Which one was worse for the non-combatants? No-one today in America defends slavery. But many people in China still believe that the millions Mao sent to their deaths was 'a necessary price.' Which, I really think you have to admit, is a mindset that cheapens the value of life when you can say such a statement.
HKDave: Part of the problem with forums is that threads get mixed up.
No one I know personally in China is willing to defend the GLF or the CR, nor have I read any intellectual or government official in the PRC who has anything good to say about the GLF or the CR, even as a necessary evil. I have heard Western Maoists do so, but I consider their connection with reality somewhat tenuous. The official PRC version of history is that the GLF and CR were "serious mistakes for which Mao was responsible."
The situation with Mao is whether respect he gets among people I know comes with what he did pre-revolution, and this is where the Confederate heroes analogy comes in. No one seriously defends slavery, but there are many people in the South who publicly admire Robert E. Lee and wave the Confederate flag, because these symbols have been "sanitized" in much the same way Mao has been in China. The state of Texas still celebrates Confederate Heroes Day.
I think Mao was a monster, but I regard his statues and pictures in much the same way I regard the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest (who founded the KKK) that sits in front of the University of Texas main building. It's a relic from an earlier time.
There is a problem with rewriting history though. One problem is that there are remarkably large numbers of Americans who seriously believe that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. The second problem is that pretty much no one in China today is willing to say anything good about the CR and GLF. I do worry about a "neo-Maoist" resurgence once the CR generation passes away in a few decades.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 14, 2005 10:00 AM
HKDave: If you aren't American, then I apologize for making a rather obscure historical analogy. I wasn't trying to argue that the United States was morally worse than China, but rather that the process of "historical sanitization" that Mao went through isn't really unique to China, and you get it in the American South.
History is always complex, and people in the American South still have very complex attitudes toward the Civil War. One thing that is odd is that in order to deal with the legacy, people put different statues and symbols. The statue of Forrest is near Martin Luther King street, and there's been an interesting habit of putting statues of African-Americans near statues of Confederate heroes as part of a compromise. In Texas, Confederate Heroes Day is the same week as Martin Luther King Day.
Posted by Joseph Wang at December 14, 2005 10:10 AM
Well, it's been a few days since my last post, so I thought I'd weigh in with a rather topical article I read about SMS monitoring in China in the International Herald Tribune. Apparently surveillance of China's text messages will be stepped up in the wake of increasing amounts of criminal or otherwise illegal messages sent to local consumers' phones. 107,000 illegal SMSs have been found out this year, and 9,700 accounts have been shut down. 44% of the messages were banking scams (I'll be impressed if the standard Nigerian dictator letter can be composed in an SMS), with the others ads for prostitutes, porn or illegal lotteries.
The government is also considering a filtration system that would allow the government to quickly access messages with "false political rumors" or "reactionary remarks" (would that be orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology?).
But ultimately a human being is still going to have to read suspect messages, particularly from known or suspected dissidents. And here's a hint about why the title to this post is what it is - the number of text messages sent in 2004 (when 20% less accounts were probably in existence?)? 217.8 BILLION. And no, that is not some mistake, some Chinese mislabeling of 'wan' as 'million'.
How long does it take you to read a text message? How about a hundred of 'em?
A Chinese fellow at the China Reform Forum wrote an interesting PRC perspective on why the US should stop their dual-track policy of containment and engagement of China. His argument is that China poses no obvious threat to the US, and does not have the wherewithal to pose such a threat in the forseeable future. Because I have heard his point of view repeated by others, I'd like to discuss it in this forum.
I find his arguments fail to take seriously the fact that many Americans do regard China as a threat, despite evidence that it is far from the biggest contributor to the ballooning American trade deficit. Why the irrational fear? It is not just fear of an abstract growing trade gap - it is for their jobs, for their security in the Pacific, and most of all, for their way of life. How can they not when the author concludes thusly:
Sooner or later, the decline of US primacy is inevitable; history has taught us so. My advice is: Uncle Sam, watch the rapid development of globalization and multi-polarization. They will gradually bring to the world a new democratic international system which would welcome no primacy at all. Hence the United States might be the last primacy in human history and it really need not worry about the emergence of any potential challenger.
Chinese foreign policy, and perhaps Chinese in general, are viewed as being incredibly pragmatic in both foreign and domestic relations. Yet that last statement, which sounds very utopian, is becoming part of the Chinese message to the world as it brandishes its peaceful credentials.
In any case, Americans are far less likely than Europeans to agree with such statements. The American concept of self-reliance has always extended to its foreign policy, and the prospect of a happy multipolar world sits about as well with Americans as losing their sovereignty altogether. Naturally, China I am sure feels the same way when America lectures it on how to run itself. Certainly the North Koreans resented it on China's behalf, calling them 'relevations of fascist hysteria.'
For how long, I wonder, can China and America talk at cross purposes past one another? And for how long can people like us not be forced to take sides?
How can a country that threatens to destroy one of its own provinces (Taiwan) with missiles and has missiles big enough to reach the United States, along with a store of hydrogen bombs, and has even threatened to use those bombs on America, not be considered a threat? The fact that China is also building a blue-water navy capable of sending fighting ships around the world and is using them to confront Japan and other countries in Asia not be a threat? Saber rattling is a method of dipolmacy for the Chinese. Now they are building sabers big enough to actually do harm on a global scale. If people can't see the threat in this, they are just keeping their eyes wide shut.
What's the point in being the rulers of an authoritarian society if even your own cadres won't listen to you? The SCMP:
Steps must be taken to strengthen central government power because Beijing's policies and decrees are increasingly being ignored by local authorities, a state-run newspaper warned yesterday. In a signed article headlined "Why the central government's decrees cannot reach outside Zhongnanhai", the China Youth Daily said action had to be taken to promote the central government's legal authority and to stop widespread disregard for its policies...In theory, the mainland is one of few highly centralised places in the world. But in practice, regionalism has run wild following two decades of market-oriented reform, analysts say...another example was local-level distortion or dismissal of the central government's macroeconomic policies.
But it said the most obvious example was the widespread failure of local governments to follow central government orders to improve safety in coal mines and to close unsafe operations.
Analysts have suggested that economic growth and its accompanying disparities among mainland regions - along with diversification of political, cultural, and social life - have driven the country's political decentralisation.
Mo Jihong, a constitutional law expert with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Law, said the article could mean the central government would get tough on regionalism...promoting the rule of law and judicial independence were the solutions to widespread malpractices...The China Youth Daily article cited several reasons behind the widespread malpractices, but added that the most fundamental one was the backward nature of the legal system.
The only other problem is trying to fight hundreds or even thousands of years of culture and political history. Today's system effectively micmicks the "tribute" system of imperial times. Nationalisation and centralisation is a relatively novel concept - Mao tried it with disasterous effects. Since Mao's death the country has largely reverted to provincial and regional power bases with lip-service paid to Beijing as necessary.
Anyway, hasn't Beijing heard of subsidiarity: the idea that matters should be handled by the smallest (or, the lowest) competent authority. Oh hang on, it says competent.
Hu Jintao recently made a speech on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly that sounded suspiciously like John Lennon's most famous solo song, Imagine. Just compare the speech to the song:
HU: Eradicating the current unfair world economic order are preconditions to the world's balanced development, and in turn, harmony.
LENNON: Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of Man, imagine all the people, sharing all the world...
Yes, he speaks of tolerance, of the world living in peace and harmony, which he said was a 'traditional' Chinese characteristic. While Lennon's Marxist ideologies must bring on nostalgia in Mr. Hu, I'm sure his favorite line in the song is: "...and no religions too."
"Lennon's Marxist ideologies"?! How witty! Good thing he got shot through the heart, right?! Maybe you should add that Marxist ideology bit to his Wikipedia entry.
I was merely trying to point out the utopianism of Hu Jintao's latest speech. If you can't take a joke, just don't read it. What sucks is your lack of net etiquette...
I'm off to Shenzhen on Friday, which could be interesting in light of today's SCMP story. It's got the typical Chinese mix: unpaid workers, riot police, a corrupt and bankrupt company, and a press crackdown:
Riot police came to the defence of the mayor of Shenzhen after a meeting with former PLA engineers over compensation ended with the workers trying to stop him from leaving. Mayor Xu Zongheng held the urgent meeting last night at a local school in Futian district with more than 3,000 workers of a state-owned enterprise. The workers - most of them former members of the People's Liberation Army's engineer corps - were angry about the compensation they received during the latest state-owned enterprise reform. They also demanded the authorities release two colleagues arrested last week for arguing with government officials.
The mayor promised to revise the compensation scheme and pleaded with the workers to call off their protest. He also said the new company would not sack any of those involved in the protests in the next three years. But the workers were not satisfied. They booed the mayor when he left the school and tried to block his car. Riot police were rushed in to disperse the crowd. Several hundred workers then marched to the nearby police station and shouted slogans demanding the release of the two arrested workers...
The incident was hugely embarrassing to the Shenzhen government, which had tried to clamp down on coverage of the dispute. Several Hong Kong reporters were detained on Sunday for covering the protest and were not released until 3am yesterday.
...the construction company was badly managed and riddled with corruption. The Shenzhen government decided to turn it into a private business last year. Mr Li said auditors sent in to examine the company's books found it on the brink of bankruptcy and much of its money was missing. He said the company's senior management disappeared, leaving behind huge debts.
Photo below the jump, my emphasis in the story. The instinct for Chinese governments remains to clampdown, to supress, to cover-up. But the story still got out and in this era of mobile phones and the internet, supression won't always work. Even if you're the mayor of Shenzhen.
This should be good. The People's Daily reports a new white paper from the Information Office of China's State Council, titled Building of Political Democracy in China. With a straight face, we're told about the virtues of "socialist political democracy":
In building socialist political democracy, China has always adhered to the basic principle that the Marxist theory of democracy be combined with the reality of China...In the process, China has also borrowed from the useful achievements of the political civilization of mankind, including Western democracy, and assimilated the democratic elements of from China's traditional culture and institutional civilization.
Therefore, China's socialist political democracy shows distinctive Chinese characteristics.
It certainly is distinctive. Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this distinctive democracy:
-- China's democracy is a people's democracy under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
-- China's democracy is a democracy in which the overwhelming majority of the people act as masters of State affairs.
-- China's democracy is a democracy guaranteed by the people's democratic dictatorship.
-- China's democracy is a democracy with democratic centralism as the basic organizational principle and mode of operation.
The white paper says the CPC's leading status was established gradually in the protracted struggle and practice of the Chinese people in pursuing national independence, prosperity and a happy life.
It was a choice made by history and by the people.
If you're still with me, there's also the white paper's plan for the future improvement of this wonderful system:
improve the socialist democratic system, strengthen and improve the socialist legal system, reform and improve the methods of leadership and rule of the CPC, reform and improve the government's decision-making mechanism.
The white paper also stresses the importance of the reform of the system of administrative management, the reform of the judicial system, the reform of the cadre and personnel system, and the restraint and supervision over the power.
Does it make sense? Is it self-contradictory? Is it worth the price of the paper it's written on?
-------
Despite the tremendous achievements scored in building a socialist political democracy, the CPC and the Chinese people are clearly aware of the many problems yet to be overcome. The major ones include: The democratic system is not yet perfect; the people's right to manage state and social affairs, economic and cultural undertakings as masters of the country in a socialist market economy are not yet fully realized; laws that have already been enacted are sometimes not fully observed or enforced, and violations of the law sometimes go unpunished; bureaucracy and corruption still exist and spread in some departments and localities; the mechanism of restraint and supervision over the use of power needs further improvement; the concept of democracy and legal awareness of the whole society needs to be further enhanced; and the political participation of citizens in an orderly way should be expanded. There is still a long way to go in China's building of political democracy, which will be a historical process of continuous improvement and development.
------
The most interesting thing about the report is that it doesn't mention Mao at all, and only mentions Marx very briefly in historical terms. The Communist Party of China is no longer even nominally Communist. The interesting thing is to compare this document with one written ten years ago or twenty years ago (i.e. the premable to the PRC constitution).
Also, the report envisions a one-party democracy. Most people would argue that this is impossible. The time that bothers me about this argument is that most people in 1990 predicted that the CCP would have collapsed shortly, and it didn't.
One other interesting point is it actually addresses that point. The argument that the CCP can't do what this report is trying to do is based on the saying look at country X. The whole first section of the report is saying "China is different and so you can't take country X's experience and apply it to China."
Posted by Joseph Wang at October 19, 2005 10:11 PM
Exactly, which is the news in this concentrated of communist propaganda and sovietic language?
Communist dictatorships always used to include the term "democracy" in their official denominations or documents. DPRK (Noth Korea) is "Democratic", DDR (East Germany) was "Democratic" and so on. Of course they had (and have)nothing to do with democracy.
In this document there's the whole ideological arsenal: One-Party State, proletarian dictatorship, democratic centralism, and so on.
So, which is the news?
P.S. Simon, I know the tone of your post was sarcastic but, as usual, "serious" and "rationale" debate is starting...
Enzo: There are more than two types of governments in the world. Not everything can be neatly classified into "communist dictatorship" and "Western democracy."
Right now, if I'd have to categorize the PRC, I'd say that it is trying to make transition from Soviet-style communist totalitarian dictatorship to Singapore-style capitalist authoritarian dictatorship.
Curiously, my political outlook is very similar to Reagan-era cold warriors as far as political classification. Reagan supporters (like Jean Kirkpatrick) tried to make a distinction between capitalist authoritarian regimes and communist totalitarian ones, arguing that the latter were worse and that the United States should support the former despite the fact that they often had bad human rights records.
I agree with this point of view, I just classify China as a capitalist authoritarian dictatorship. China-2005 looks a lot more like South Korea-1975 than Soviet Union-1975.
Part of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was that capitalist authoritarian regimes would gradually become democratic. Maybe. Maybe not. There's no sign that Singapore is becoming democratic.
Actually, I'm not a fan of historical determinism. What happens next depends on the decisions people make. However, one must consider the *possibility* that the Communist Party of China could indeed create a stable one-party capitalist dictatorship.
Posted by Joseph Wang at October 19, 2005 11:44 PM
Joseph,I don't understand how your comment applies to mine.
The point I've made before is that the document you were trying to interpret was the same old, breathless, ideological, dead rethoric as ever. It was a perfect example of old days communism language (and contents).
Lately (in expat-chinese blogosphere above all), we witness a peculiar and widespread trend: every burp coming from CCP circle is dissected as if it meant a revolutionary change in China history and politics. In reality, nothing happens or things go worse.
The fact that even a Politburo-style document like that were for someone the chance to infer something "new" for the political future of China confirmed my sensation.
I usually find this trend useless, sometimes ridiculous, in this case grotesque.
I love the (oxy)moronic phrase "democratic dictatorship." You are free to do what we tell you. When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you. And so forth.
Richard W from The Three Ts made an interesting comment over at TPD saying that his former students in Dalian genuinely believed that they were living in a democracy in China. Saying that there were village and town elections and many CCP inner-party posts and policies are subject to democratic votes within the party etc.
Pretty frightening to most Westerners I think that Chinese citizens could think this, but some of them do.
From a Westerner's perspective, this is all obviously blatant propaganda. The CCP can explain why black is white and vica versa. They can put a positive spin on anything, and usually do.
Dalian student: they may be hopeful, but they may well be right.
I don't think we are hailing a baby-step as a fundamental change or we are satisfied at the current speed of change, far from it.
However, any baby step is better than frozen feet. Some encouragement of these baby steps, especially some help to solve the problem arises during these baby-steps, may well help to speed up the change.
It ideological rhetoric, but it is not the same old ideological rhetoric. There is quite a lot new in it. Part of what you have to keep in mind is that any politica party (not just the CCP) has to make believe to some extent that it hasn't deviated from its old principles, and so the really eyepopping parts of the document are carefully hidden.
For example, "Chinese Communist Party Formally Drops Maoism, Willing To Learn From Western Democracy" would be a reasonable headline for this document.....
1) I don't know about anyone else but I think it's pretty significant when you have Communist Party of China issue a very long document with a historical review and not mention Mao Zedong or Maoism even once, while at the same time saying nice things about Sun Yat-Sen.
2) As far as the "willing to learn from Western democracy" part, there is this pretty extraordinary paragraph.....
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In building socialist political democracy, China has always adhered to the basic principle that the Marxist theory of democracy be combined with the reality of China, borrowed from the useful achievements of the political civilization of mankind, including Western democracy, and assimilated the democratic elements of China's traditional culture and institutional civilization. Therefore, China's socialist political democracy shows distinctive Chinese characteristics
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The thing about watching political reform is that it is like watching ice melt or paint dry. Each little step is rather unnoticable, but over time, stuff happens.
Posted by Joseph Wang at October 20, 2005 09:05 AM
The most telling point is what I think is the crux of the issue: somewhere in the back of the CCP's leadership's mind is the Singaporean model of semi-authoritarian capitalist dictatorship, albeit of the "benevolent" kind. Can the CCP morph into the PAP? Maybe, but they need to shrug off history, which as Joseph demonstrates and we all know they continue to do even without formally admitting it. They also need to figure out how Singapore's model can apply to a country as vast and diverse as China. I'm not sure it can. But you have to give the CCP credit for recognising the flaws of the old model and their political savvy in trying to construct a new one.
I agree with those politcal scientists who analyse China's political system as being a form of federalism: market-preserving federalism with Chinese characteristics (by which they mean paternal authoritarianism in the Confucian tradition). I have discussed this is some detail in my article titled "The myth of CCP totalitarianism" in the China Articles section of my blog, for those of you who might be interested.
China's unique form of federalism, incidentally, is seen by many political scientists as being the secret behind China's economic success, and its ability to lift over 400 million people out of poverty. It's a model that is clearly working - no other country on earth is climbing the UN Human Development Index rankings list at a faster rate than China. No other country even comes close! Some commentators in the China blogsphere have argued that China's economic success has come in spite of the CCP - but as I said, most political scientists (especially those in the US) say the opposite. They say that it is because of the switch from a centralised planned economy to a decentralised market-preserving federalism, with its Chinese characteristics, which has been the key to its successes to date.
Now, why should we assume that a Western-style two-party system (which is also fundamentally undemocratic) be a magical panacea for any of China's ills? ZBoth independent US studies and Chinese studies consistently show that the majority of mainlanders do not want multi-party elections - that's something else you need to consider. They are generally satisfied at present with the current system, with the status quo. This isn't CCP propaganda - this is what the majority of those surveyed have said, and in numerous studies. Every study, some of them have been vast and on a national scale, have shown the same results - whether carried out by US researchers or Chinese researchers.
There are many problems for China to overcome (the same can be said for most countries) but I don't see why the Chinese can't continue to enjoy their increasing amounts of personal freedom and civil liberties without having to adopt a two-party system like what we have in the West. As Gore Vidal has quite rightly said, in my opinion, the two-party system is really a one party system anyway - the same organisations fund both, the two parties are simply two heads, each belonging to the one monstor, each feeding from the same trough.
Alot of it is dead rhetoric, but I think lying underneath are some actual, erm, ideas. I wish someone would put together a dictionary of CCP terminology. For instance, in Chinese the word "propaganda" doesn't appear to mean the same thing it does in English. That isn't simply because the CCP has brainwashed people to think propaganda is good - as a concept it really doesn't seem to be the same thing as what we mean in English. Alot of this gibberish is, in a sense, code. Someone should write a lexicon.
MAJ: the problem is the CCP is also the same party that got China into the centralised planning mess that they then magically released when they were forced to de-collectivise farms. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think the problem of making a PAP is bigger than the problem of ruling a vast country. IMO PAP is difficult to reproduce, almost as difficult as it is to find another Lee Kaun Yew in this world and that this person can rise to power. (well, they are almost synonymmous) It is pure luck that LKY/PAP fall on Singapore (and misfortune that they didn't fall on Malaysia, or China, or India).
I believe LKY/PAP would do just as great had it been given Malaysis, and perhaps even China.
Simon, I'm sorry, but I don't quite follow your logic here. So what if the CCP introduced central planning when it first came to power? The fact is, like all political parties, the CCP is constantly reforming itself. Surely you cannot deny that it has reformed its own system of governance by introducing not only a market economy, but also a decentralised form of market-preserving federalism in order to facilitate economic growth and rising prosperity. You have to give some credit where it is due. Or are you fixed into thinking that the CCP is a stagnant anarchronism?
I agree with you that the CCP have been able to reform themselves, indeed they're Communist only in name these days. But my point may be best explained by analogy: if I set fire to a house, then run in and rescue the occupants, am I the hero or the villian?
I see your point, but most historians argue that the Mao years enabled China to unify itself and to bring about the stability necessary for his successors to have been able to introduce market reforms, political decentralisation, etc. In other words, the revolution has, on the whole, left a positive legacy. The Nationalists may have been able to achieve the same thing, though many historians doubt it - they were fiercely corrupt, and relied too heavily on regional war lords for support.
And you cannot blame today's leaders for what past leaders have done, can you? The CCP that you claim "set fore to the house" is not the same CCP of today, is it?
I see your point, but most historians argue that the Mao years enabled China to unify itself and to bring about the stability necessary for his successors to have been able to introduce market reforms, political decentralisation, etc. In other words, the revolution has, on the whole, left a positive legacy. The Nationalists may have been able to achieve the same thing, though many historians doubt it - they were fiercely corrupt, and relied too heavily on regional war lords for support.
And you cannot blame today's leaders for what past leaders have done, can you? The CCP that you claim "set fire to the house" is not the same CCP of today, is it?
The sins of the fathers and all that? Today's CCP may be far removed from that of Mao's, but they make no effort to distance themselves, in fact much to the contrary, the cult of Mao still thrives.
The Cultural revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the famines, the entire crazed rule of Mao may have unified the country, but at an incredible cost. Was it worth it? You are saying yes, I would say no. And yes, kudos to the "new" leadership of Deng and co. for changing the CCP, but did they have much choise? No, they didn't if they intended to survive in power post-Mao. The shame of it is the incredible waste of the Mao years. Imagine how far more advanced China's economy could be if the country wasn't subject to Mao's despotism.
Simon, I see little evidence of the cult of Mao still thriving! Only in a commodified form, as Mao kitsch, and more often then not in the form of religious kitsch: Mao trinkets and things to hang from rear-view car mirrors, etc - trinkets that are supposed to bring good luck, etc.
The CCP rarely appeal to the ideas of Mao. Politically he is long dead, and the CCP have indeed distanced themselves from his ideas. You are wrong when you say otherwise.
Imagine how far more advanced China might be had the revolution not succeeded? Well, historians are divided: some say China may have ended up looking more like India or Indonesia, others imagine something more like Taiwan. The Mao years weren't completely wasted if they achieved the stability needed to allow his successors to introduce market liberalisation and political decentralisation (the two go hand in hand). At any rate, today's leaders cannot be held responsible for the Mao years, and once again, the point is, the CCP today is not the CCP of yester years, nor will today's CCP be the CCP of the future.
I am ambivalent towards the CCP - I neither love it nor hate it. Like all political entities that have governed, its legacies have been mixed, and always will be. But on the whole, I think it is today, generally speaking, steering China in the right direction.
"I believe LKY/PAP would do just as great had it been given Malaysis, and perhaps even China."
I disagree with that statement. Singapore is a one-of-kind case, if nothing else, simply because of the small geographical area and its demographics. Not to mention its colonial legacy. Malaysia would've been harder for the PAP to consolidate and govern.
And if there was a PAP in China, it most probably would done something similar to what the CCP had done, with all the requisite bloodshed and upheaval. Any speculation otherwise is pure wishful thinking.
Thanks for your comment. (and your critique + intro to Yadav's critique on Kaplan).
Ruling Malaysia is definitely more challenging than ruling Singapore. However, it is only 6 times larger in terms of population, while 450 times in terms of area and hence natural resources.
I think the challenge to rule Malaysia lies in the more complicated racial mix (no one predominant race).
I do sincerely believe LKY had a good chance had he got the job.
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For China's size, it may be my 'wishful' fantasy. My general problem is, there is really no scientific evidence for the correlation between difficulty/complexity and size.
In other word, I believe LKY can rule something larger than Singapore. Although I am not sure how large is too large for him, I am not convinced of the size proportional to difficulty argument. They may be correlated, but it is definitely not a linear relation, esp for leader with good organizational skill nad has been good at setting up processes and systems
Malaysia does not only have a more complicated racial mix, but also soco-economic groups that Singapore did not have to handle, or in some cases were more easily and earlier managed - again partly because of geographical and population size, and, to point out what you mentioned - natural resources. For example, how many farmers, miners, fishermen, rubber plantation workers, steelworkers etc. did Singapore have compared to Malaysia? Or even China?
If LKY had a 'good chance', I would emphasise just the 'chance'.
And on China - I never implied that there is some sort of 'linear relation' as to how well a leader can govern a country given its size, or the 'size proportional to difficulty argument'. You brought it up.
But human societies are to a large extent dynamic, and this includes factors other than size. For example, the fact that Singapore was a British colony and China wasn't, was a factor as to how Singapore turned out differently from China.
I also stated that the PAP would probably have gone the way of the CCP, because in spite of human dynamism, both parties and their leaders had characteristcs that disturb me.
Let's start with all other things being equal - ceterus paribus: WW2 just ended in China; the Nationlists and warlords had to be dealt with; the country has few or no modern political institutions brought by Westerners, much less the rule of law or a democratic culture. Then, consider the following:
Mao was an ethnic Chinese autocrat. LKY was...an ethnic Chinese autocrat. The Chinese Communist Party was...Communist. The PAP started out as a 'centre-left' party...with Socialist-Leninist characteristics (there is at least one analysis of that floating around on the 'Net, if not published in print).
It has been officially documented that LKY had initially been a 'defender' of democracy, advocating a free press and at one time even in the defence team representing labour union (or student) strikers in the 1950s/60s. And look at Singapore now. Given this turnaround after he came to power, what makes you think that he would have governed any more fairly or better in China?
The only difference is that he probably could've articulated and justified any atrocities more eloquently and much better than Mao ever could. After all, LKY was a Cambridge-educated lawyer, and Mao wasn't.
Excuse me for the long reply. But I have one last thing to say here: I find your statements lauding LKY so much especially interesting - and disturbing.
Ok...it is about LKY. We can agree to disagree. I am an admirer of LKY, despite all the criticism he might attract.
There is not much to debate actually. It boils down to opinion and sbjective faith. (yours and mine).
I think PAP was central-left, they aligned with communist at the beginning until they were threatened. I see nothing wrong with being central left though - but you can disagree.
Yes, the difference, as you stated, LKY is Cambridde educated lawyer, which not only helped him to become, but also to think and act logically and rationally. THIS IS IMPORTANT. LKY also was exposed to all the western ideas which Mao (of Jiang or Hu) weren't. These are FUNDAMENTAL differences.
You do have a point about British influence though. But again, neither of us have solid reason to believe what we believe. I was just telling my "guestimate".
Donald Rumsfeld is in China today and the Christian Sciene Monitor has a great article on the visit and China's secretive military. I was going to cut and paste some key parts and found myself with the whole article, it's that good. Go read it and come back.
There are several interesting points in the article. Firstly this: "The US is no longer willing to trade high-tech military briefings ... for a dog and pony show," says one US official. "I think the Chinese now acknowledge that message." This is a sign of growing maturity and even potentially trust between the two sides. But the key remains "transparency", that is a greater understanding to avoid potentially massive problems later:
Many US strategists, including Admiral Fallon, argue that a military clash with China is not inevitable, despite the fact that the two forces are eyeing each other with greater wariness. But "transparency" has grown in importance for US generals and admirals, as well as pilots and submarine commanders, because the margin for mistakes in a "Taiwan scenario" - the hottest flashpoint - is getting smaller. China's main military modernization is designed to fight an offensive battle to capture Taiwan.
Without transparency, some military operations chiefs say, it is harder to know when one side or the other is bluffing, especially amid tensions. "Western forces have a hard time understanding Asian forces, how they think and act," says Michael Boera, the wing commander of the 36th Air Expeditionary Wing in Guam. "It is a different culture, and we need to guard against misunderstandings that we aren't ready for."
But trust is a two-way street and the article's (natural) implication is it is time for the Chinese to put in the hard yards in this trust and understanding game. And a game it is, as the concluding paragraphs demonstrate:
A central reason China has not always been willing to be transparent or reciprocal is that many of their capabilities and operations have been crude, analysts say. At one point, an elderly Admiral Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, visited a Chinese base and made disparaging comments, deeply hurting the feelings of his host.
Not showing under-par bases or military hardware may be a strategic choice by China, some analysts say, as it can mislead an opponent as to strengths and weaknesses.
Donald Rumsfeld will be subjected to a Chinese shock and awe program during his visit. The Americans are rightly worried mostly about the potential for a Taiwan invasion and China's deliberate ambiguity in its intentions.
The heartening thing is the two sides are still engaged and talking. On the American side there are many both in and out of the military who do not think a military confrontation is inevitable, and the same is likely true of the Chinese side (although their thinking is obviously not publised or reported). The world has a vested interest in making sure these "moderates" are the sides that win their respective internal "wars" on their views of their potential partner or adversary.
Simon said: "This is a sign of growing maturity and even potentially trust between the two sides."
It means nothing or very little.
Simon said: "Donald Rumsfeld will be subjected to a Chinese shock and awe program during his visit."
"Shock," perhaps - who knows what Mr. Rumsfeld will think; he'll be courteous no matter what he thinks (as long as the Chinese don't mistreat their guest)? But "Awe"? I seriously doubt they could really inspire, let alone overwhelm, the American military's 2nd in Command.
Simon said: "The Americans are rightly worried mostly about the potential for a Taiwan invasion and China's deliberate ambiguity in its intentions."
A) There is nothing ambiguous about their intentions.
B) Regardless of their intentions, they lack the capability to match their aspirations. "Don't want to Because we Can't."
Simon said: "The heartening thing is the two sides are still engaged and talking."
I call it "going through the motions." Nothing heartening nor disheartening about it. Again, this CSM article is specious.
Simon said: "On the American side there are many both in and out of the military who do not think a military confrontation is inevitable, and the same is likely true of the Chinese side (although their thinking is obviously not publised or reported)." The world has a vested interest in making sure these "moderates" are the sides that win their respective internal "wars" on their views of their potential partner or adversary."
Be advised, the vast majority of American naval officers don't believe it's inevitable either. However (and this is key to the CSM's and your misunderstanding), those who don't believe in a foregone conflict in the Formosa DO NOT take the Chicoms for friends, potential or otherwise. The reason we don't believe it's "inevitable" is because we know, and the Chinese know (and we know that they know), that we'd clean their clock in any "confrontation". The call for "transparency" is simply an effort by the US to gain intel (the type you want your enemy to have) and ensure the Chinese don't miscalculate. If some people want to sensationalize these events as the triumph of "moderates" in the US Military, so be it - though it's obvious that they can't gauge the situation with any accuracy. This is strictly "Business", not "overtures of Friendship". We did the same thing with the Soviet Union (and, yes, the MSM tried to pretend that those Communists were friends too). Most of the officers I talked to are far more worried about China's infernal politics (and their relationship with their OWN military). To the extent that we give them briefings about our military, it's to make sure they can't play dumb, make excuses, or act stupidly in the future.
So in short, you're saying China wouldn't dare invade Taiwan because they're scared of the American response and know they'll get soundly beaten. These visits aren't exercises in friendship but in showing-off and trying to put the fear of God (or at least America's military) into the Chinese. It's based on the construct that the Chinese are the enemy and are the new Soviets.
The USSR did not own a significant amount of the US Treasury market, nor did they have a massive trade with America. There were not reams of Russian students studying in America or vice versa. The USSR was an industrialised economy with a reasonable standard of living, not a massive developing country with literally hundreds of millions of poor farmers. The two are nothing alike and the chance remains for America and China to find points of common interest and to work on points of contention constructively rather than through animosity.
You call the article and my commentary specious but each of your points fails to demonstrate where I am wrong. There is always an element of going through the motions on official visits - more important is the visit is happening at all. It's taken Rummy 4 years to get to China, despite some very big ups and downs in the relationship in that time.
I agree China won't invade Taiwan in the foreseeable future, barring any moves from Taiwan's independence movement to deliberate provoke such an attack. We just disagree as to why.
After a recent cover picture in Time Asia, a wildly successful concert in Shanghai, and bestowed the honor of "Iconoclast" Li Yuchun and her underling Super Girls held their most recent concert of their mainland tour in Beijing on Sunday to a loud and seriously excited crowd. It seems there is little that can stop them now. Hell, Li Yuchun might get an island in Antarctica named after her.
Indeed the Super Girls are showing real sophistication. Not to be labelled mere teeny boppers, the Super Girls held an auction last week to sell some of their clothes they wore on their show and front row tickets for the Beijing gig. The auction raised over 300,000 RMB for a local charity to send underprivileged kids to university. Certainly these girls know how to please their constituents.
All decked out in white on Sunday night, the Super Girls showed they weren't all innocent baring a lot of Super skin for their debut in the capital. Li Yuchun, often ridiculed for looking and sounding confusingly androgynous even hopped in on the scandalous action, wearing and then taking off a short black skirt mid performance. Alas, all of you 'Chun Chun' fans, the skirt was worn over her pants. Glow sticks were the hot accessory and there was a spontaneous demonstration of future Olympic javelin hopefuls as the show neared its end and thousands of fans launched their 2 kuai sticks onto the hundreds of police officers standing shoulder to shoulder on the field making sure no one got out of line.
Is this the first wiff of democratic reform in China? Most competent people would say no, but that hasn't stopped plenty of journalists from speculating. The TV station that produced Super Girls was so nervous of this implication that they called the SMS votes "messages of support". On the other hand, does Li Yuchun's gender bending, confident persona empower young girls all over the provinces? This blogger thinks this theory is a more likely thesis and a fresh break from the pointless daintiness of most Chinese pop stars today that is outdated in the new China.
The Guardian has now confirmed that the stories of Representative Lu Banglie's death were greatly exaggerated. Lu was severely beaten and then carried to a nearby hospital before being driven back to his home city of Zhijiang in Hubei Province. This occurred some time after Benjamin Joffe-Walt, the Guardian's man on the scene, had already been taken away, and was apparently in some panic.
Chinese journalists are already criticizing Joffe-Walt, accusing him of naivete, wilful exaggeration and even outright lies. One blogger/journalist says that "lies cannot create justice", and that the Guardian newspaper is "continuing to back up the fantasies of Benjamin Joffe-Walt".
Actually, at least one of the most outspoken critics is a pro-democracy blogger who correctly points out that inaccurate or exaggerated or fabricated reporting by western media sources only hurts the democracy movement in China. Here's a translation of part of his post courtesy of eastwestnorthsouth.
''Enough already, The Guardian. You are really earning the contempt of your colleagues. For a long time, Xinhua and CCTV were the representatives of shameless media. But your lies today are even more damaging to the Chinese. In most foreign news coverage of China, the professional standard requires two independent sources of information to establish veracity. But when The Guardian reported on China this time, you only used the unverified "first-person" account of a liar. Furthermore, after this has been exposed, you attempted to hide your mistake.
''The Guardian's error obviously has severely affected the Taishi village case and even other rights cases. Whenever a reader hears about another rights activist being beaten, they will automatically think about Joffe-Walt's fantasy. Lies cannot promote fairness; they can only impede fairness.
''I am a democrat and I support the democratic movement in China. But I will express my anger in a professional manner against any exaggerated or fabricated reporting of the pursuit of democracy. I will not permit a crazy reporter, who once was a Baghdad human shield, to destroy the common ideals of media workers in China.''
"At the same time, I hope this question of a foreign correspondent's responsibility will not become a convenient way of distracting people from the core issue: one of human rights and the suppression of a democracy movement in Taishi.
Will Chinese netizens be successfully manipulated into foreigner-bashing as an acceptable alternative to communist party-bashing?"
It's exactly my position.
The point here is that facts like that one - and worse - happen every day in China. The difference is that this time a foreign witness was present. So the instructions are: fire the witness, not the Party thughs. Déjà vu.
It's this overturning that won't help democracy movements in China, not a reporter's "exaggerated" story. Fire the thugs, not the witness.
No one should be surprised to hear that the "truth" is not so important as the "story" for these so-called journalists and the companies they work for. It has been this way for many many years and it is a common trait shared by Main Stream Media throughout the world - and especially so at the Guardian.
The Guardian and the reporter got what they wanted - a headline grabbing story.
They do not accept any responsbility for the consequences that their shoddy reports will have on others.
If the reporter really wanted to prove something he would have stayed in Iraq and completed the task of being a human shield for those he professed to support.
One good thing that might come out of this is that more Chinese people will think twice before believing what they read in foreign newspapers or hear on foreign television.
I wouldn't dream of calling Benjamin Joffe-Walt a liar. Like all foreign journalists, he is human, and in this case he was naively pursuing a story and panicked when he realized he was in over his head. To accuse him of malicious fabrication seems quite inappropriate, and to suggest that he has somehow damaged the cause of Taishi seems to me to be a bad-faith argument.
Posted by Running Dog at October 11, 2005 09:26 PM
Go to Google and enter a search for Benjamin Joffe-Walt.
Read some of the links but take time to read the link to Michelle Malkin.
Now you will begin to have an understanding of the man.
Go a little deeper into his background. How old is he? What is his background? How long has he been a "journalist"? Who has he worked for? What has he done in the past to distinguish himself or discredit himself?
I cannot think of one way this man has helped the "cause" of Taishi. I can think of many ways he has brought discredit to himself and to his employer。 I can also see how his actions are a setback to all those he sought to help. But then I think this is really not any concern of his since he got what he wanted - the story.
There is no question that the journalist made a mistake (if we believe in Anti, but he only talked to the guy, not visited him). The mistake is hurting the cause of Taishi. I also do not like the fact that he didn't try to help poor Mr Lu at the scene (which he regretted in his 1st report).
Precisely because of the importance and sensitivity of this event, we want to hold the Guardian at the highest standard of all media. We demand more from them than from Xinhua.
Everybody makes mistake some time. The fact that they did not admit the mistake and apologize is more detrimental than the original mistake.
They should at least point out the fact that new info contradicts previous reports by BJ-W, and that they are ready to apologize once they have confirmed first hand info from Mr Lu.
All the previous reports on Taishi were credible. In this particular incidence the facts that a mob gang attacked reported with the support of local gov't is not changed.
However, the Guardian should not give the local gov't an excuse to attack the credibility of all external media in the future. To re-establish this credibility it is important to be honest and brave with themselves.
I have written quite a bit about Taishi on my blog, and I suspect that Joffe-Walt really assumed Lu was dead, or likely to die, and so he consciously added a few embellishments to sensationalise his story. I have discussed this already on my blog, as a postscript to my article on "peasant activism".
What really matters more is how we analyse what is happening in Taishi more generally. I have written in detail about this too, in both my "peasant activism" article (in which I name the university in Guangzhou that I visited which has allegedly stolen land from local farmers) and in my latest article, in which I analyse the nature of the Chinese political system. I think it is wrong, as many Western observers claim, to judge the CCP as "totalitarian". Chinese politics is far more complex than that, and what is happening now in Taishi needs to be seen in a wider context. When one broadens the scope of one's analysis, it becomes clear that what is happening in Taishi is positive for China.
Sorry, if anybody is interested in reading my articles, then the site is at:
f r e e w e b s . c o m / f l o w i n g w a t e r s
I found that the articles translated into English by East South West North, which I discovered via this site, proved to be very very useful in helping me to formulate my own analysis, incidentally. What a valuable resource ESWN has proven to be, time and time again!
Joffe-Walt has now made a name for himself among Guardian readers who don't live in China and, in the process, has made his name mud for many others. He's young, clearly ambitious...and now he's had a baptism of fire. He wasn't ready - but who is ready for anything until they learn from experience?
One of the big criticisms has been the accusation of exaggeration and invention. Lu Banglie clearly is not dead. The ligaments in his neck are clearly not broken. The reference to his neck was probably misguided - but it was one sentence...and we were not there. Joffe-Walt's account leads us to believe that Lu's attackers repeatedly stamped on his head. This does not appear to be consistent with Lu's actual injuries. Another apparent inaccuracy.
But let's remember one fundamental fact - Lu Banglie certainly was attacked. That is not an invention. Joffe-Walt was not the only person in Taishi who believed that Lu might well be dead.
And what about the degradation - the spitting, nose-blowing and urination on his unconscious body. If that is proved to be false, then I will reconsider my opinion, but so far I haven't seen any contradiction of this part of Joffe-Walt's account.
Did he report everything that happened perfectly? No. But how many people ever do - especially in an extremely violent and frightening situation.
Think back just a few months to the South Asian "suspected suicide bomber" who was shot dead on the London Underground. He was wearing a thick winter coat in the middle of summer and behaving suspiciously. He was challenged by the police at the entrance to the station, and promptly ran away - jumping the station turnstiles. He was chased down onto the platform and onto the train where he looked like a terrified animal before being shot five times.
Well, that was the initial account, written by all the experienced journalists based on eye-witness accounts and statements by the police.
Then, finally, the real story came out. The "terrorist" was a Brazilian electrician on his way to work. He was wearing a light-weight denim jacket - entirely normal for the weather in London. He walked casually into the station and passed through the turnstiles using his travel pass, picking up a free newspaper to read during his journey.
He then continued to make his way slowly down the escalator until he saw that his train had already arrived - so he sped up to catch it before it left the station - just like any other normal passenger. On the train, he looked for a free seat, saw one and sat down.
Seconds later he was shot seven or eight times in the head and once in the shoulder. Several other shots were fired, but missed him.
Despite the claims attributed to the police, they did not challenge him at any point until seconds before he was shot dead.
Compare these two stories.
Joffe-Walt was wrong about the extent of Lu Banglie's injuries - and Lu did not die. But he seems to have looked pretty dead at the time and extreme violence did take place. And Joffe-Walt was not the only person in Taishi who believe that Lu was probably dead.
The only thing the reporters in Britain got right about Jean Charles de Menezes was that he really did die. Oh...and they were right about where he died. Everything else, they all got so wrong we may as well be talking about two utterly different events.
Joffe-Walt needs to learn from this experience. But his account of the situation was just as accurate as most reports we read about anything. Despite his mistakes, the people who should be blamed and held to account are the people who committed the violence - and those who sanctioned it.
One final comment on the extent of Lu Banglie's visible injuries. On one occasion, I was repeatedly kicked in the head with steel toe-capped boots and there were very few marks to be seen afterwards because I don't visibly bruise. That didn't stop the pain.
Well put Cat. I pretty much agree, although I suspect that Mr Joffe-Walt quite consciously added embellishments to sensationalise - the eye hanging out of its socket being the most obvious and vivid of these.
I guess what we should be focussing on is the bigger picture though. Many observers blame the violence and the lack of both accountability and law enforcement on "the" CCP, as if the CCP is some kind of monolithic totalitarian form of governance. It isn't. The policies and behaviours of those officials from local village-township, city district and provincial levels of government are not always supported all the way to the top at all. Those who think so obviously do not understand how China is governed - China is a decentralised federalism, and more often than not, you will find that the central government itself is locked in power struggles with the various other, more local levels of government. Local-level governments operate with huge amounts of autonomy, and this is a problem. They often subvert national laws, and prevent reliable and accurate information from filtering up the chain.
How can the central government enforce its progressive labour laws, village election laws and governance laws, etc., at the local level? This is the real problem, and until that's solved, there will be many more Taishis to come.
The magnificent ESWN has has translated an article about the "centrifugal" and "centripetal" pressures now tearing China apart, and suggests that local authorities are now in a position to defy the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. After years of jockeying and alliance-building by the power-hungry Jiang Zemin, the local authorities hold considerable positions of influence, and the new boys are still dealing, among other things, with entrenched Jiang supporters in both Shanghai and Guangdong.
Meanwhile, another website, erm, particularly dear to my heart notes that the leadership are increasingly reluctant to throw their full force against the various protection rackets that pass for local governments these days, lest the entire edifice of power come crashing down. These are parlous moments for the Party.
Guangdong police have formally arrested a rights activist after holding him in custody for three weeks for advising Taishi villagers during their fight to oust the village chief, according to a lawyer who visited him recently...Mr Yang was detained for "disturbing social stability by mass gathering" on September 13 - a day after more than 1,000 armed police stormed the Taishi government office and took away dozens of villagers. The villagers were demanding the removal of village head Chen Jinshen after alleging that he had misused village funds.
Villagers in Taishi have also lost their freedom since the riot on September 12. They are not allowed to talk with outsiders and the number of villagers still detained by the police remains unclear.
Meanwhile a social call by a professor and a lawyer on a noted activist finished up with knuckle sandwiches. Again the SCMP:
A Beijing law lecturer and a lawyer paying a social visit to a blind activist under house arrest in Shandong were escorted back to the capital after being beaten by thugs on Tuesday and interrogated until early yesterday. But Xu Zhiyong , 32, from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Li Fangping , 30, a lawyer in a private practice, said they would not be deterred by the attack, which came as they attempted to visit Chen Guangcheng , an opponent of violent, government-backed birth-control measures in Linyi city.
"It was a government-planned action, but the barbarous act will not intimidate us," Mr Xu said from Beijing yesterday...On Tuesday morning, the pair - along with dozens of villagers - arrived outside Mr Chen's home but were denied access. Mr Chen hurried from his house and suffered injuries to his mouth and legs when he clashed with guards. He met the pair for a minute before being pushed back into his house.
Mr Xu and Mr Li were invited to lunch on Tuesday by county officials. They told the officials Mr Chen would "talk less" about local abuses if he was released, but they refused to listen. A few hours later, when the pair were on the way back to Mr Chen's home, they were attacked by up to 30 thugs.
The men tried to report the assault to nearby policemen, who turned their backs on them. Mr Xu and Mr Li were kicked and pushed into a gutter before police arrived and took them - but not the attackers - to a police station, where they were accused of "attacking people". They were interrogated until 3am and escorted back to Beijing by three county policemen yesterday afternoon, after they again tried to visit Mr Chen in the morning.
Mr Chen, who has helped several villagers fighting forced abortion and sterilisation take their cases to court, was "kidnapped" by Shandong police in Beijing last month and put under house arrest.
Linyi city made international headlines in July when Mr Chen helped Washington Post journalists report on the local birth-control programme. Last month, National Population and Family Planning Commission spokesman Yu Xuejun told Xinhua it would investigate the "reported illegal family planning practices" in Shandong.
But the final sucker punch is the most subtle. I am a great believer that consistent, open and honest rule of law is a key to freedom. Rule of law has three important aspects: legislation (by a parliament with elected representatives), enforcement (by police that are not corrupt and closely monitored) and the justice system (again sans corruption, with timely and fair decisions and clear checks and balances). However China's court system is buckling under the strain of an explosion in lawsuits, increased workloads and a falling number of lowly paid judges. We can prattle on about freedom and democracy all we like, but the details matter as much as the broad brushstrokes. The SCMP on China's rickety court system:
Beijing's Chaoyang District Court is one of the busiest lower-level courts in the capital. Last year it took on a record 46,000 lawsuits, but that record looks certain to be overtaken this year, with the court having accepted about 31,000 cases in the first half of the year alone.
The court has 177 judges who each preside over an average of seven hearings a day, according to the People's Court Daily, which quoted one of the court's judges as saying that she still had more than 100 cases to assess and her court roster was fully booked for the coming month.
Chaoyang judges routinely work overtime and their caseload is climbing year by year, according to Mao Li , director of the court's research office.
A People's Court Daily reporter says the load on the legal system is obvious inside the court. "You can immediately feel the tense atmosphere when you step inside the court building," the reporter said. "There are always long queues in the registration hall. Parties in the suits have to wait outside the courtrooms for a long time for their turn because each courtroom has about five different cases every day on average."
Further south, in Guangzhou, the situation has become so acute that the city has had to "borrow" judges from other areas to cope with the "crazy" caseload, the Guangzhou Daily reports. In the past decade and a half, the number of lawsuits accepted by the city's system has risen from about 23,400 in 1990 to more than 160,000 last year.
But the number of judges has declined slightly over the past few years. "The mad increase in lawsuit cases and decline in the number of judges has led to a severe deficiency in judicial power," a Guangzhou judge said. "Working overtime is a common practice for Guangzhou judges."
In the relatively prosperous city of Shenzhen, the intermediate court has sought to counter the increase in cases by implementing a collective overtime plan for its arbitrators since 2000, a move that could be defined as illegal under national law.
From last month, city judges have had to work overtime every Tuesday and Thursday night, and should work every Saturday. According to the "Shenzhen 2004 Court Work Report", the workload of Shenzhen judges has doubled in the past five years.
The report also said 75 judges had asked to quit during that period because of the "extraordinary work pressure". At the national level, the number of cases accepted has risen steadily every year while the country's judicial ranks have thinned. Mainland courts accepted 7.87 million lawsuits last year, compared with 5.68 million in 2003 and 5.35 million in 2000.
Supreme People's Court president Xiao Yang told a meeting of the National People's Congress Standing Committee that the number of judges had declined by 13 per cent between 2000 and last year.
The state does not release data on the number of judges, but there were thought to be about 280,000 in early 2000.
Wang Xuetang , a judge and researcher from Shandong , has been studying China's court system for more than 10 years and says economic development and social change have been the critical factors behind the shortage. Judge Wang said there had been an explosion in the number of disputes because respect for social institutions was not well established in Chinese society. He said members of the public were also more aware of their legal rights - and therefore more willing to file cases - and judges were now expected to meet higher standard.
In the past, China's judges were mainly either retired army personnel or court cadres who had worked their way up to judicial positions. But for the past three years, the mainland has had unified judicial exams which all judges, prosecutors and lawyers have to pass in order to practice.
"The unified examination became a barrier for judge recruitment in underdeveloped areas where the quality of judicial personnel is relatively low," Judge Wang said, while admitting the exams were a significant step forward in terms of national reform.
For example, about 340 judicial staff from Qinghai sat the exams in 2002 when the system was implemented, but only eight passed. Poor pay had also made work on the bench less attractive. Judge Wang said his annual income was only about 30,000 yuan, which is about the same as an ordinary government worker and much less than a lawyer. "Judges should be better paid because they engage in creative work and face heavy workloads and great pressure," he said.
But Peking University Law School professor He Weifang disputed the claims that China did not have enough judges, saying the "shortage" was an illusion created by defects in the judicial system. "The proportion of judges in terms of population numbers in China is much higher than in many western countries," Professor He said.
He said one of the main problems was that many judges were doing work that should be outside their range of responsibilities. "Many basic-level courts are required by the local government to oversee investment invitations, family planning, tax collection and so on," Professor He said. Professor He said an ambiguous division of labour inside the courts forced judges to waste time on paperwork that would be done by assistants in other countries.
"Only about two-thirds of existing judges are really doing judges' work," he said. "The judges also have to spend much energy and time balancing different interest groups who can exert pressure on justice. It is useless to increase the number of judges in this case."
Professor He said corruption had dragged down the reputation of the country's judges and turned people away from the profession. "Prestige and independence are more important than salary for a judge," he said, adding that it would be a more popular career choice if judges' authority and reputation could be guaranteed.
The Economist writes about the growing number of "mass incidents" in China (no sub. req'd.). The article charts the explosion (pardon the pun) in riots and unrest in recent times on the back of growing wealth. It supports the thesis that as people have more personal possessions to defend, they will demand a greater say in how their lives are governed. The article is so good (dare I use the words must read? Yes, I dare) I've reproduce the whole thing below the jump, with some key parts highlighted:
THE Chinese government is getting increasingly twitchy about what officials say is a rapid growth in the number and scale of public protests. In its latest bid to quash them, this week it announced a sweeping ban on internet material that incites “illegal demonstrations”. Does China face serious instability? Probably not, for now at least. But in the longer term there are reasons to worry.
Quashing unrest has ever been a priority for the Communist Party. But over the past year or so it has put even more emphasis on tackling “mass incidents” as it calls the protests. These include a wide range of activity, from quiet sit-ins by a handful of people to all-in riots involving thousands. Almost always, they are sparked by local grievances, rather than antipathy to the party's rule. Yet China's most senior police official, Zhou Yongkang, has said that “actively preventing and properly handling” mass incidents was the main task for his Ministry of Public Security this year.
According to Mr Zhou, there were some 74,000 protests last year, involving more than 3.7m people; up from 10,000 in 1994 and 58,000 in 2003. Sun Liping, a Chinese academic, has calculated that demonstrations involving more than 100 people occurred in 337 cities and 1,955 counties in the first 10 months of last year. This amounted to between 120 and 250 such protests daily in urban areas, and 90 to 160 in villages. These figures are likely to be conservative. Chinese officials often try to cover up disturbances in their areas to avoid trouble with their superiors.
Under Mr Zhou's orders, police forces around the country this year have been merging existing anti-riot and counter-terrorist units into new “special police” tasked with responding rapidly to any mass protests that turn “highly confrontational”. Police officials say the existing units were too sluggish, too poorly trained and ill-coordinated to handle the upsurge in disturbances. The special police are to form small “assault squads” to tackle incidents involving violence or terrorism.
Only a few years ago, news of specific incidents seldom filtered out to foreign journalists. Now, thanks partly to a freer flow of information helped by the internet, by mobile telephony and, more rarely, by a slightly less constrained domestic press, hardly a week goes by without some protest coming to light. In June, thousands of people rioted in the town of Chizhou, in the eastern province of Anhui, after an altercation between a wealthy businessman and a cyclist over a minor traffic accident. In August, hundreds clashed with police in a land-related dispute that still simmers in the village of Taishi, in the southern province of Guangdong. Last month, the police in Shanghai detained dozens of people protesting against being evicted from their homes.
In some ways, this unrest makes China look a lot more like a normal developing country than the rigidly controlled system it was until the early 1990s. It is becoming increasingly common to encounter small-scale protests in Chinese cities that only a few years ago would have horrified order-obsessed cadres. An apartment block near your correspondent's home in Beijing has for weeks been scrawled with slogans protesting against the adjacent construction of a petrol station. “We want human rights,” says one. Residents say the police have not interfered, save to warn them not to protest during a big political gathering in the city.
Chinese officials often say that greater social unrest is normal in developing countries with a per capita GDP between $1,000 and $3,000. China's GDP per head surpassed $1,000 in 2003. But this appears to be little consolation. In August last year, President Hu Jintao appointed a high-level team, headed by Mr Zhou, to supervise the handling of protests and petitions. Official sources say Mr Hu dwelt on protests in a speech to party leaders in September 2004 and at the party's annual economic planning meeting in December. Late last year the party issued a document to senior officials telling them how to deal with unrest.
According to these sources, Mr Zhou's speeches are laced with warnings that political dissidents might try to manipulate local protests to put pressure on the party itself. This fear explains why the party has further squeezed non-governmental groups and dissidents in recent months. China Development Brief, a newsletter on Chinese civil society developments, reported that in recent weeks China's secret police had been interviewing staff of Chinese NGOs that receive foreign funding, as well as Chinese staff of foreign NGOs in China, about the purpose of their work. The government has suspended the registration of new international NGOs pending the outcome of these inquiries.
The party's dilemma is that much of the unrest is a product of the rapid economic growth that it is so keen to maintain. The outlook of many urban Chinese has changed profoundly since the 1990s as a result of the privatisation of hitherto heavily state-subsidised housing. Anxious to protect their new assets, property owners have increasingly clashed with developers, and their government backers, who have been trying to cash in on the resulting boom by erecting shopping malls and luxury housing. The expansion of cities has fuelled clashes with peasants whose land is needed for construction.
Some argue that these mostly isolated protests, if handled sensitively, could help China maintain overall stability by providing people with a way of venting frustrations. But Mao Shoulong, at Renmin University of China in Beijing, says the unrest is a sign that China lacks channels for people to air discontent in a more orderly fashion. Widespread corruption and an increasingly conspicuous wealth gap fuel a contempt for officialdom that can easily erupt into the kind of class-based rioting that occurred in Anhui in June.
And should the economy falter, urban China could be faced with the twin dangers of an angry middle class saddled with big mortgage commitments and declining property prices (a problem China has not yet had to face), as well as a big increase in the number of unemployed, who, along with unpaid pensioners, are the main participants in protests in those parts of the country left behind by the current boom. Widespread middle-class discontent, combined with blue-collar dissatisfaction, would be a much bigger threat to stability than China now faces.
It's an interesting theory, this "unrest threshold" but I doubt that it holds much water. I think they've got two choices: develop a legal system capable of adjudicating disputes with some modicum of fairness or; reinstigate an ideology of community and harmony, probably under the guise of foreign war. I don't like the odds on that one, come to think of it...
To get around the block put on Blog-City by Chinese censors, which has made Angry Chinese Blogger inaccessible in China without the use of a proxy, I am happy to announce that an unblocked mirror sites http://www.20six.co.uk/angrychineseblogger is now up and running, spreading the news that Beijing doesn’t want you to hear.
Angry Chinese Blogger’s entire back archive, along with all new articles will still be available at http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/
I would be grateful if you would add a link to the mirror alongside the master link to Angry Chinese Blogger.
It's a happy 50th birthday to the Xinjiang Urgur Autonomous Region (motto: the autonomy you have when you're not really autonomous).
To celebrate the People's Daily discusses Prosperous, stable Xinjiang - a pleasant surprise to foreigners. It appears progress and happiness, in the words of fluent Chinese speaker and American student Pam Ariand, is a warm bun: "Hamburgers were never seen here several years ago, but now you can easily find outlets of Kentucky fried chicken, pizza and many other western foods in Xinjiang."
Martyn at TPD has an excellent potted history in just four paragaphs - Xinjiang 50th anniversary: occupation or liberation? Make sure you read the comments at that link as well to hear the opinion of those who have lived there.
While on anniversaries, a very happy 56th birthday to the New China. Follow the link to read the pain of a 7 year old girl's history lessons, numerous counts of foreign aggression and surprisingly little mention of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and other weird political movements.
That's because any post my friend and fellow mu.nu hosted blog My Pet Jawa links to gets indexed by Google News, but it appears under his blog's name. It's a quirk in Google News and that's why we love Rusty's linkage.
Everything old is new again. Confucius is quickly regaining his place amongst China's pantheon of heroes. Yesterday in Shandong there was a major celebration of Confucius's birthday in Qufu. The China Daily waxes lyrically, saying Confucius soundbites offer wisdom and laughter and stating Confucius probably ties with Shakespeare for the title of most quoted human ever and noting he scooped a guy called Matthew: Most Confucius aphorisms can easily cross boundaries of age, culture and religion. Actually parallels exist: "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you." This echoes the Golden Rule from Matthew 7:12: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
For a long time the Communists had trouble with Confucius. The China Daily puts it delicately:
However, not every citation from the sage sounds palatable to the modern ear. Confucian overemphasis on filial piety and respect for authority was criticized during the May 4 Movement in 1919 as hampering social progress. In the early 1970s, Confucius became the target of character assassination as part of a weird political movement.
"Weird political movement" - what a great phase. I wonder if that will become part of the Party's official history.
...The world today is not in peace, this is mainly because of hegemony and terrorism...Confucius said, "A gentleman gets along with others, but does not necessarily agree with them; a base man agrees with others, but does not coexist with them harmoniously".
In case it's too subtle for you, I'll help you: U.S.A.
...Fifty years ago, the Chinese government, together with India and Burma (Myanmar), initiated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence for handling international relations, and thus made major contribution to world peace.
The "one country, two systems" principle advanced by Deng Xiaoping has successfully solved the problem of the return of Hong Kong and Macao to the embrace of the motherland and it embodies China's traditional spirit of "harmony without uniformity", thus providing the world with a typical example for solving similar problems.
In case it's too subtle for you, I'll help you: Taiwan
Confucianism advocates benevolence: "One who, destining to develop himself, develops others and in destining to sustain himself, sustains others", "Don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you", and one should get along well with all peace-loving people. Refraining from seeking hegemony is a fine tradition of Confucianism.
U.S.A.
China's present peaceful rise is precisely an inheritance of the fine tradition. China's peaceful development will not constitute a threat to the surrounding countries. As Chinese President Hu Jintao said in his speech delivered at the summit marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations on September 15: We should "adhere to the spirit of tolerance, jointly build a harmonious world. Difference in history, culture, social system and development pattern should not become obstacle to exchanges among various countries, still less should it be a reason for mutual antagonism". This actually is an emphasis on "harmony without uniformity".
That last paragraph is for everyone, with an emphasis on the U.S.A.
So the why is simple: Confucius hasn't changed, but the Communist Party has. "Harmony without uniformity" is the antithesis of the CCP's history.
Election of secretary of village committee of the CPC will no longer an internal affair of the Communist Party of China (CPC), as non-Party people have been allowed to attend CPC's grassroots election...In past decades, secretaries of all levels of CPC committees were elected merely by Party members and they were the top leaders of their administrative regions. But normally in one village, there were only dozens of Party members out of over 10,000 non-Party people. How could guarantee that the secretary elected by dozens of Party members could reflect the common will of all villagers?
That's an excellent question. Indeed extending that logic has profound consequences. How can you guarantee the provincial or national secretaries and officials elected by thousands of Party members reflect the common will of all?
There's an answer of sorts in the same article.
"...allowing non-Party people to participate in CPC's grassroots election will consolidate CPC's ruling foundation," said Ding Junping, head of the public administrative college under the Wuhan University...
...more than 20 provinces have admitted non-Party people to CPC's grassroots election on trial.
The professor is saying that these non-Party elected officials are de facto Party members, because they've been elected to their posts. Co-opting these officials is the only way the Party will be able to maintain its grip on power. Villagers will quickly realise the discrepency between being able to vote for their village leaders but not for their county or provincial or even national leaders. While village government is the one with most immediate impact on their lives, the likelihood of growing frustration with the ever-growing income gap with their urban cousins will one day spill over to frustration with Government at higher levels.
Another reason the CCP's primary focus is on rural development and closing the income gap.
Plenty of debate China focusses on the Communist Party (CCP) and its (mis)-rule. The question is not if the CCP will fall, but when. But that question implies another which is seldom addressed by the China punditry - what next? Should the CCP fall, what kind of Government will emerge? While most hope for a democracy, is that likely? Is that even desirable? What kind of support will a post-CCP China need and will it get it?
One clear lesson from the Iraq war, regardless of its merits, is the need to look beyond the change you desire to what comes after. That is the debate we need to start today. I welcome your thougts on the topic. Naturally I have mine...
The key to the answer is how the transition happens. What comes next depends on what happened before. If the CCP implodes under the weight of its own contradictions the evolution to a new system of government will differ significantly from that which comes about through a popular uprising. If a popular uprising is violent or peaceful is another key difference. China's changes of government have tended to come about through violent overthrow. A peaceful transition will be a novelty. The influence of other countries, in particular China's significant neighbours (Japan, Korea) and America, will be crucial in the transition. It is impossible to say how each country would re-act, but here's hoping they have each at least considered the possibilities.
Can democracy work for China? It has been often cited that China (excluding Taiwan) has never had universal suffrage. On the other hand India provides an example of a massive and diverse country that successfully runs election after election. Yet many argue that India's democracy has hampered it in its race for growth compared to China. To some extent that must be true, because totalitarian governments can make decisions without heed to the short term interests of the voters (although that assumes such dictatorships are enlightened enough to have their population's longer term interests at heart).
A lack of democratic tradition can mean a country that rapidly changes to a market liberal democracy can just as quickly slide back into a more murky and bastardised version of the same. To wit, Russia. The countries of Eastern Europe have more successfully made the transition. But Russia is the closest, albeit imperfect, forerunner of China's past and future. A vast country nominally ruled from a dominating centre but with strong regions, Russia and China have both historically been "top-down" rather than "bottom-up" countries.
How do you ensure a democratic China emerges? There has to be external support for the crucial elements such as rule of law and universal suffrage. But far more importantly there has to be popular legitimacy. The people of China have to want a democratic system. It is not clear to me that that is the case. A crucial part of the longer term planning for a democratic China needs to be direct communication with the Chinese people to explain and re-enforce the democratic ideal.
But the planning cannot stop there. The reality is any successor democracy in China will be an imperfect one. The key becomes prioritising. Which parts of a liberal democracy are more important to get right? Should it be getting the economy in order? Installing a government elected by universal suffrage? Implementing and consistently enforcing laws and regulations? Eliminating corruption and graft? In an ideal world all of these and more would be addressed simultaneously. But that's not going to happen in practice. Who decides the priorities and how?
This is the dilemma of the Bush Doctrine of bringing democracy to the world. What happens when democracies elect your enemies, such as in Iran? Such a scenario isn't difficult to imagine for China. Should the CCP be toppled, a nationalist party would be expected to dominate any successor government (and I'm not talking about the KMT marching trimuphantly back across the straits...necessarily). The result could be a more nationalist, insular and beligerent China rather than a more benign one most expect. In short, democracy is a double edged sword.
Turning to another issue: if not democracy, then what are the alternatives? Unfortunately the most likely is the CCP gets replaced with a similar entity. Perhaps not the same ideology (although what does ideology matter to today's CCP), but the same format: central government that is nominally kow-towed to by the regions but in reality is largely subservient to them. Much of China's history has been one of pledging alliegence to a distant emperor, paying the usual tributes but otherwise running the place how you like. Without significant action the same is likely to be true in the future.
My conclusion is simple: as much as the China punditry wishes for it, an eventual Chinese democracy is no sure thing. Far from it. It is one thing to document the evils of the CCP and hope for its demise. It is quite another to plan for a post-CCP future. But it is an urgent task that needs to begin now.
Any ideas?
Other reading
Naturally Joe Katzman (if you're not reading Winds of Change, what's wrong with you?) has several important additional links and thoughts. His final question:
Once the problem is framed in terms of requisite variety, could it be possible to have a non-Democratic China Post-CPC, that nonetheless takes steps in the right direction and so sets the stage for coping now and positive change later? What could that look like?
An interesting "what if" would be to ask what if the KMT survived the civil war and war against Japan and was still ruling the Mainland? Would something along the lines of modern Taiwan have evolved across the entire country, not to mention the 70-odd million lives that would have been spared Mao's meglomania? Joe's question suggests a kind of Pinochet Chile writ large. David's comments also makes sense to me: that China will require "a corporatist authoritarian structure rather than a pluralistic democracy".
To repeat my main theme: most China pundits hope for a fall of the CCP and a liberal democracy for China. My question is whether that is realilstic or even feasible? And most importantly, how do we make it realistic and feasible?
Pundita replies
Pundita replies with What China can learn from India. She discusses the grassroots attempts at democracy already going on in Chinese villages and expects China to modernise via democracy. The problem with the village democracy experiment is it is largely meaningless - most local village chiefs hold next to no real power, answering to township or county cadres. The experiment smacks of token-ism. However her point on a Chinese style democracy is a telling one. There's no monopoly on a democratic model. I'm just not sure China will get to that point.
Daily Demarche
Dr. Demarche takes the idea one step further, asking how would the US and the world react should the CCP be overthrown.
That's an oft-made point, but I'm not convinced by it. Why are 800 million Indians able to cope with 50 years of it with no obvious ill-effects, yet China be considered unready? Again it circles back to my point in the main post, that perhaps it is the historical and cultural legacy that matters more. In which case the Indians owe the Brits a mighty big thank you.
Enjoyed your post very much. Democracy has been bandied about for many years now in reference to China, and I'd agree with you, the country is not yet ready. Back in my grad school days, when I was studying comparative politics, the most convincing theory about democracy I'd read and when and how it takes hold was modernization theory (Larry Diamond is its greatest active exponent). Bascially, economic progress brings about the creation of a middle class, which then in turn creates a clamor for democracy from below. This leads to popular unrest which then in turn generally leads to democracy.
Sounds easy no? The reason it rarely happens is the economic development bit. There is an excellent book called "The Future of Freedom" by Fareed Zakaria (editor of Newsweek and Foreign Affairs), that makes the point that democracies need a certain minimum level of development (GDP per capita as a rough proxy) for the likelihood of democratic change to be successful. (The exceptions are the oil rich countries, which have achieved their developed through wealth in natural resources, rather than the creation of a pluralistic middle class). There is an extremely high level of correlation between economic development and successful democracy.
Given current conditions in China, it does not seem that the country is there yet. Shanghai may be there, but most of the rest of the country is not. It is definitely not clear to me that China has a large and vociferous middle class that is clamoring for democracy from below. So it's likely going to have to wait. Your point is well taken that democracy imposed from outside generally fails - you are right, empirical evidence entirely backs that up. Any look at the last half century of decolonization without the proper economics in place makes it obvious.
A point relating to a previous debate on this page about inequality - if democracy is what you are aiming for, then indeed it is important that there not be such urban/rural income inequality, because then you'll have cities that are ready for democracy whereas the countryside is not. But that seems to be putting the cart before the horse, as per your Russian example, instead of proceeding with economic growth and well-being first.
Overall, democracy to me is simply a necessary tool that legitimizes regime change. Legimitacy is what is needed to rule. In a democratic country, you simply vote out the bums and get in a new crew. In authoritarian regimes that is a lot tougher. But as long as China's economy continues to tick along at a rapid rate of growth, it's hard to see desire for change or democracy emerge. And as Hong Kong has shown us in recent history, legitimacy can be restored without democracy. Simply look at the paltry numbers that will march tomorrow - simply put, Donald Tsang's emplacement by China has restored legitimacy to the government (the ICAC did the same thing for the colonial government in the 1970s). The big test will be when China hits its first crisis...but I don't see a middle class in China seizing control effectively for another two decades.
I'll add that book to my ever-growing Amazon wishlist immediately. Good point about the income inequality gap also being a key tension to resolve before democracy can take root.
I completely agree with David's conclusion. You could argue that June 1989 was the CCP's first exogenous crisis, and we all saw how they handled that. It gives credence to the lack of middle class and its ability to carry the early momentum of those events into a toppling of the CCP. Even today I don't think the outcome would be too different. Nevertheless to ensure democracy can take root (rather than other paths to legitimacy) the process needs to start now.
"Nevertheless to ensure democracy can take root (rather than other paths to legitimacy) the process needs to start now."
Great point Simon, I feel the same way, albeit uncomfortably, because I know that for now, as with Taiwan or Korea historically, China may be better off near-term with a corporatist authoritarian structure rather than a pluralistic democracy. And I have to admit it is because China is undeniably becoming a world power, and to think of a country with the future clout and stature of China wielding its power internationally and shaping global international norms of behavior without believing or practicing democracy is disturbing to someone like myself that takes liberty for granted.
Exactly right. What we need is some idea of the road map(s) of how to get from here to there. the examples of Taiwan and South Korea do both represent successful, relatively peaceful transitions to democracies from autocracies without economic penalty. On the flipside, Japan managed a similar or even more successful economic growth path (until the start of the 90s) while remaining relatively democratic throughout. Although now I think about it, the LDP was/is effectively a form of benign elected dictatorship that is only slowly changing after years of economic depression.
One possibility is that international business will take the lead from national politics in the long-term. The move to professionalise the economy would start in developed countries first. This is scenario two in an article from 'The Globalist'; democracy is not a priority.(http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=4429)
"Confronted with tight budgets and growing obligations to care for their aging populations, governments turn to corporations to handle a number of formerly public sector services."
I have two quick thoughts (and I'm sure I'll have more later). To the commenter who said that Sun Yatsen proposed a period of tutelage and military rule, and that China might not be ready for democracy.... look at what Taiwan has accomplished in the last forty years. It took longer than Sun suggested (the civil war didn't help) but the process has come to a remarkably satisfactory point (not a conclusion, never a conclusion), both politically and economically. It's possible (though I'm not sure how wise) to view the last quarter century of mainland China as the military dictatorship period, which would be followed (not without struggle, mind you) by a one-party pseudo-republic tutelage period which would morph into something like democracy.
Second, regarding Simon's "if this happens then this" scenarios: it's entirely possible that it won't be that simple. Take the fall of the Qing: there was an armed uprising, but that wasn't where power passed; there was an organized opposition, but they didn't end up with power, either. The collapse of the CCP, if it comes, is likely to be a slow, not quick process, and it will really be a transformation in the guise of a power struggle rather than an outright collapse. More thoughts later...
(David - thanks for the tip about Zakaria's book David--I've already ordered it)
I consider the possiblity of liberal democracy only one option, and an outside chance at that.
Traditional Chinese authoritarianism goes back several thousands of years of course and China has repeatedly resisted many historical trends in modern world history.
It would be nice to hope that the Chinese might one day clamour for democracy but I can't see it. The unusual cultural quirk in favour of stability above all and fear of chaos will ensure that anyone coming into political power in China and promising only stability will be enough to satisfy the masses.
Whatever follows the CCP will very much depend on how CCP rule ends.
I can't imagine the CCP simply moving aside as this so-called communist party has proved adept at transforming itself into whatever it thinks will prolong its rule.
Therefore, economic collapse or political revolution seem the most likely scenarios for ending CCP rule.
China is presently way overdue an economic downturn, even more so as more of the economy lies in private hands, China is ever more integrated into the global financial system and dependent on imported commodities like oil and iron ore.
Bread riots have been the bane of govts throughout history and an economic collapse and subsequent run on the banks might well threaten CCP rule.
Simon's statement about China collapsing under the weight of it's own contradictions is a great quote and anyone familiar with China will understand exactly what he means. As we've seen with recent riots, it only needs a spark and whole towns light up like a tinderbox. It's entirely possible that one of these incidents could spread and unseat the govt.
My only concern with all of these scenarios is that there is no effective opposition within China. All officals and anyone in authority belong to the CCP. If the entire CCP were overthrown, who on earth could step in and assume power?
The army.
The army are the only alternative power structure within China and it just so happens that they have the means to enforce political power.
If China suddenly collapsed and the CCP lay in discredited ruins, only the army could take the reins of power and prevent China fragmenting. They could also enforce martial law and restore stability.
The PLA is not the CCP so I believe they could rise to power without being too closely connected with any descredited CCP.
While the rest of the world looked on in despair the army could justify its power grab by talking of stability and an ending to chaos and they's nowt the world could do about it.
Simon, very interesting post and debate. Just one thing. You write: "What happens when democracies elect your enemies, such as in Iran?".
Iran is not a democracy (in no way): the whole political and religious power is hold by a group of unelected people. A flawed electoral process is only the fig leaf the regime uses to try to legitimate itself. But none of the carachteristics of a real democracy can be found in Iran.
As above, I consider that the army would take power in any doomsday scenario of a near-total economic collapse or in a sutuation where the people rose up against the entire CCP power structure.
However, in the event of a partial/regional collapse or partial rejection of the CCP, which is perhaps more likely, I consider that a new faction within the CCP would assert itself.
As we all know, the CCP is a myriad of factions and political and regional power bases. This has consequently led to speculation that the current Hu/Wen faction cannot properly assert its power until it has replaced Jiang Zemin's allies from their positions of power with their own supporters.
Therefore, I'm thinking that any major events that occur under Hu/Wen's watch might well pave the way to an internal power struggle and China being led by a new faction. Perhaps under a new party name even.
Whether the faction that finally asserts control is made of reformers, New Left (!) or a thousand other possible groupings may well depend on the situation of the day as well as the various strengths of the factions/personalities involved.
However, I'll reinterate that the army is the only entity capable of holding such a fracious "country" together. Although that statement is arguably another of China's contradictions.
Any leading faction within the CCP will have to have the support of the army.
I would recommend looking at the biographies of the members of the Central Military Commission:
http://english.people. com .cn/data/organs/militarycommission.html
The only reason that they are there is because they are proven loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party for their whole lives. Many of them are also members of the Central Committee of the Party. There is no local warlordism because the regional commanders are rotated.
You're right eswn and as I said, all those in postitions of power (including the armed forces) are members of the CCP.
What I'm arguing is that the army have the means to grab poitical and restore order and the PLA, despite the rock-solid connections of the officer class to the CCP, could assert that the military PLA is not the political CCP and therefore avoid being tarred with the same brush.
In the event of a total collapse, what would happen?
Would the army just sit back and watch the country descend into chaos? Would the army stay in their barracks if the monks in Lhasa rose up and the Xinjang freedom fighters established an Islamic Republic of East Turkistan?
My conclusion is simple: as much as the China punditry wishes for it, an eventual Chinese democracy is no sure thing. Far from it. It is one thing to document the evils of the CCP and hope for its demise. It is quite another to plan for a post-CCP future. But it is an urgent task that needs to begin now.
I really wonder about this exercise. As pundits (if that's what we bloggers really are), we write about what we see happening and what we see reported in the media. I don't really think most pundits are capable of architecting a model for the post-Communist government, especially since there are so, so many variables involved. If it's an overnight collapse, there's going to be bloodshed and anarchy before order is restored; if it's a slow but steady transition to a more judicious and democratic system, it will be a relative bed of roses. While the exercise of a bunch of expats mapping China's political future might be fun, I see it as a fairly futile effort. You say the time to begin planning is nown and I couldn't agree more. But who should be doing this planning? Certainly not us bloggers, though we can toss some ideas into the ring. The responsibility is on the shoulders of China's leaders, and they're so busy trying to hold the mess together I'm not sure they'll bother with such esoteric fantasies(that's how they would see it.)
All of that said, my quick take is that the only acceptable path is one of steady reform. And for all of Hu's faults, we may actually be on that path now. I see mixed signals, but there is no denying there are elements of reform at work. For all the continuing horrors, things have become much better than they were, at least for most.
For one brief moment I believed, as did so many China pundits, that things were on the right track to real and rapid change. Hopes were highest on the day of that amazing 2002 SARS press conference, where heads rolled, apologies were made and the CCP finally took responsibility for its gross deception.
The heady sense of progress was short lived. Hu rapidly swung back into censorship mode, proving even more ruthless than his predecessor in this regard. Transparency evaporated as more journalists were jailed and more embarrassing stories blacked out.
Still, I believe that Hu and Wen realize they must continue with reforms, including reining in the rampant corruption and showing increased sensitivty to the disenfranchised. Eventually, step by step, and with the help of the Internet and pressure from us wiseass pundits, there will be reform. And that's the key to China becoming more democratic.
That's the best I can do, but as I said, it's a volatile situation and the slightest upset -- a banking crisis, an earthquake, a death in the Party leadership -- could make all of our plans irrelevant. (Or more irrelevant, I should say.) And remember, there's absolouetly no one waiting in the wings. Give the CCP credit for its efficiency in wiping out all meaningful political opposition. It has a true monopoly. I want to see it replaced more than anyone -- but with what? For now, I think they need to stay in power until reform brings about the possibility for more politicl voices to be heard. I am not optimistic.
Firstly my Iran example. I am not saying the election their was perfect. But it does seem to broadly reflect the popular will of the Iranian people, whether we like it or not. It is an instructive example in more ways than one. The key point is what happens when democracies elect those vigorously opposed to other democracies and perhaps even their own? That could very easily happen in a democratic China.
Secondly on Joe's contention the PLA would be the only viable alternative power structure once the CCP falls. My first reaction was the same as ESWN's. The PLA is very much an organ of the CCP, not of the state. It has political commissars, its officers are senior CCP members. As an organisation it is completely and utterly part of the CCP machinery. But Joe's final comment is likely correct - the military would be the ones to fill the gap should the CCP fall, given the lack of any viable opposition or alternative. Except one, which prima facie seems outlandish - that Taiwan's Government could re-assert control over the mainland and introduce its democracy to the whole country.
I do not suppose to speak on or behalf of the Chinese people. From from it. But this debate is necessary to both contemplate likely future scenarios and plan for it. As you would agree, a lack of planning post-invasion in Iraq has significantly hampered efforts there. I'm suggesting the same kind of foresight is necessary for China's future. China's leadership won't be planning for this. There is no doubt in their minds the CCP will rule forever. After all, that is what they spend every waking moment doing - planning the survival of the CCP at all costs. So others need to take the burden. Given the inability of those within China to take that on, as you so accurately said given the CCP's monopoly, it is up to others, including us pundits, to speculate and ponder.
As for Hu and Wen, they do seem to be creepingly move towards "reform". But there is little doubt their idea of reform is to avoid the "mistakes" of Gorbachev and his reforms of the Soviet Union.
Your key point is the last one - that it's a volatile situation, easily triggered and with no viable opposition or alternative. That's exactly why we need to comtemplate alternatives. I don't share your pessimism. As I said previously, the CCP is Communist in name only. It is a party of nationalism and self-preservation. But hoping they stay in power until other political voices can be heard is putting the cart before the horse. It's not going to happen that way around.
Simon, as you surely know much better than I, China is a vast and diverse country. Consequently, IMO, if there's a China, it's likely to be an authoritarian one. Liberal democratic China will be Chinas.
Dave, you could argue that's already the case. Taiwan and the Mainland.
I saw your point on WoC that a breakup of China is also a likely consequence of the fall of the CCP. That's certainly true although I imagine nationalist pressure would mean the majority would not want that to happen. After all, the interior needs the coastal regions to provide economic growth (even if it's via trickle down effects) while the coast needs the vast reservoir of resources, both human and otherwise, the interior provides.
Look, every man and his dog Misti knows that the PLA is an organ of the CCP and the political connections are rock solid between the two. We all agree on that.
Ok, my argument is that you don't hear of any displaced farmers, petitioners travelling to Beijing or disgruntled Chinese people unhappy at the high levels of corruption complaining about the PLA. Those complaints are directed at the CCP.
While the PLA are the military wing of the communist party, THEY DO NOT RULE CHINA.
Therefore, any backlash against the CCP would not necessarily be directed at the armed forces, who, let's not forget, the people are brought up to love and respect.
(1) The army is the only alternative power structure within China.
(2) The army could still assert itself even after a huge backlash against the CCP because they have never held the strings of political power.
While I agree that the PLA represents *an* alternative power structure, it is quite incorrect to say people are not protesting against the PLA. In fact, protests outside PLA HQ in Beijing are becoming more common because disgruntled ex-servicepersons and their families find they get no justice elsewhere in the system. They rail against the high levels of corruption in the PLA hierarchy, and all the other problems common in the PLA as elsewhere in the party-state.
Maybe more likely than the PLA per se taking over is a move by an officer (or officers) to take power and not in the name of the PLA but reconstituting those parts of the PLA loyal to him as a new army.
Regarding the point, what if the KMT had survived the Civil War? I think its an interesting question. Some things to consider though are that the KMT did not really learn its lesson on how to guide economic development until they were so badly defeated on the mainland and forced to reevaluate for survival, specifically how hyperinflation seriously compromised their ability to rule. Yergin's excellent Commanding Heights does a good job detailing how the KMT on Taiwan made the right choices re: economic development by exploiting exports and leaving policy to actual economist rather then economic "geniuses" like H.H. Kung. Furthermore how much foreign capital would have been available. In a lot of ways it was the cutting off of aid payments by the US that forced the KMT to move away from nationalized industries. Just some thoughts.
Many cited Taiwan and Korea as examples of a peaceful transition. My thought on this is that size does matter. The relatively small population and area makes it more manageable for opposition ideas to spread, germinate, and acted. In addition, transition happened when per capita GNP at the time was near or above 10,000 USD. With thousands of social unrests last year, CCP is still fairly effective in blocking the news, though technology will make it harder in time.
China has not always been a unified country in its long history. Each province has traditional suspicion toward outsiders. The more prospered area, like Guandong and Shanghai, would probably not want to be tied up with less developed part of China given the chance. In the last two decades, Guandong has always taken the most liberal interpretation of any economic national policy until Beijing comes down hard. Southern China is exposed to outside ideas the earliest, and therefore has a slightly different worldview. Difference between individual provinces or regions does exist. The tie will be weakened during crisis. Even Mao wanted to establish an independent nation of Hunan in his early days. The idea of a unified China can certainly face challenge in chaos.
I quite agree with Joe that PLA will be a principle/central actor when China descents into a political power vacuum. What I am not sure is that will PLA carry the mandate of upholding a unified China. Ming and Qing courts also rotate officials to prevent corruption and favoritism. The result is definitely questionable. I don’t know how PLA structure is distributed in term of locality. But remember in 89, CCP had to go through a few different brigades to find the right one to carry out the killing. Given the tendency of Chinese brokering deals behind the scene, I am sure a compromise can be made between local powers and PLA.
So I think a fragmented China is likely to emerge. Will it take form of a collection of independent nations? May be, but not necessarily. A weak, barely-stitched-together central government may take CCP’s place. Will it be democratic? It would please me if it is. Would it matter to 800 million peasants? Probably not as long as the CCP replacement can deliver a minimum standard of living.
Simon,
1)About Iran. You wrote: "I am not saying the election their was perfect. But it does seem to broadly reflect the popular will of the Iranian people, whether we like it or not".
Again I have to fully disagree. The problem isn't that their election wasn't "perfect". The problem is that it was a fiction. Real power doesn't reside in "elected" people. "Elected" people are those the Guardian of the Revolution decide can be "elected": of 1.000 candidates only 7, the loyalists, were admitted. To say that this "broadly reflect the popular will of the Iranian people" is completely wrong. There are many doubts about real participation, there are many explanations about the reasons of people who decide to vote. But don't confuse that fiction with an electoral process and, above all, don't confuse iranian theocracy with some sort of democracy.
2)About China. I already posted my two cents on the subject (more or less).
http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/077779.php
I completely agree with you here: no real reform with CCP, no CCP with real reform. To hope CCP will allow its demise is, to say the least, a naivety.
I am new to your blog. Although it's really hard to remember the name of this blog,the contents are exceptional! (actually last time when I wanted to come back here, I had to go to Pekingduck, then got the link. why is the domain name so strange?)
Simon,
Great post and wonderful discussion but might I urge caution in any planning. Military people love the quote that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Your enemy here is history. Planning for a post-CCP China is going to be near impossible because there are so many influences which will come into play as the CCP collapses. This is not to say we should not prepare, but planning requires predictions that cannot be made with the data at hand.
Where is the correct balance between a too rigid plan that will fail unless all its assumptions are correct and a too flexible one that is meaningless because it has no assumptions at all? I don't know and without that balance this will all be pure speculation.
As I expected my piece on China's new left (deliberately not capitalised) provoked mixed reactions. I hope to compose a rebuttal of the comments made both here and at Richard's either today or tomorrow. My full response is below the fold.
I recommend this collection of other reading on the same topic:
Your thoughts and comments are welcome. Now read on for my response...
The first part of my response is to cover the ground the vast majority share. None of us are fans of the CCP in its totality. We all want to see a successful and vibrant China will the spoils widely shared. Today's China is a far from perfect place, economically and politically. On that we can all agree.
Amongst all the critiques I've still yet to have anyone spell out precisely what new left thinking actually is. Richard agrees with Martyn on this:
The ideas of the New Left are a natural and welcome consequence of, and progression from today's system where the political and economic elite pillage the nation's wealth, while tightly controlling society with an iron grip, fire rockets up into the air and allow anti-Japan riots in the name of patriotism and social stability.
That implies the new left is a guise for socialism as a successor to the current system. It is just a touch ironic that the successor to the failure of central planning and Communism is socialism. Marx would be turning in his grave at this inversion in the progression of revolutionary change. If my characterization of the new left is wrong, please direct me to a clear and lucid exposition of their philosophy. Until then it very much seems the new left is the old left reheated, like those supermarket products proclaiming themselves "new and improved".
Let's be honest. No country or economic system truly afford equality. Richard compares me to Ayn Rand when I say that people are different. Guilty as charged. Again if anyone can point me to research showing we are all exactly the same, I'd be much obliged. Until clones walk the Earth, we are blessed in our vast diversity. As an aside, it is ironic that those most devoted to the concept of diversity and celebrating differences also work so actively to minimize those differences. Equality is a chimera, an impossible dream that is dangerous to pursue. Why dangerous? Because the sacrifices made in its name do not justify the result. The ends do not justify the means. Very simply, unequal does not mean unfair.
Some took exception to my pie analogy. Martyn laments China's share of world GDP has gone from 1% to 5% in the last 30 years. During a period of unprecedented global economic prosperity, China outpaced the world to such an extent it has increased its share of world GDP by 5 times! I'm not a shill for the CCP but whether it was because or in spite of them (more on that soon), since Deng took the helm the country and its people have been the beneficiaries of what can only be described as a miracle. Martyn, forgive me but I'm popping the bubbly and thankfully there's several hundred million people just over the border able to afford the same. Martyn also falls into a common trap:
According to the IMF figures 2003, out of 179 countries, China's annual GDP was US$1,087 per person or 110th in the world. That's less than half the average per capita global GDP.
In economics there is a concept called purchasing power parity. In English it means a dollar in one country is not the same as a dollar in another. Quite simply you get more bang for your buck in China than you do in the United States. The latest estimate is China's PPP per capita GDP is US$5,600 (from the CIA's China factbook). I've written extensively about this and other China's economic issues elsewhere on the site.
Richard's turn. Let me quote from his comment:
If you think this [his agreement with the new left] makes me a communist sympathizer, what can I say? Their argument resonates with me, meaning I agree that many of the impoverished and exploited Chinese deserve better and need help.
I always suspected, but now we have proof! Richard is, at least in this case, a Commie! Even worse, he compares me to Ayn Rand and then agrees with my sentiment! Richard, you're one confused fellow.
More seriously, Richard's original post was honest is seeing through the empty rhetoric of the new left. If I did not make that clear in my original post, I will do so now. But it doesn't wash. In the very same comment Richard excerpts Martyn's thoughts that the new left are the natural progression and great white hope. For a group that don't stand for anything, that's quite a statement.
Who's responsible for the China economic boom? I will read the book Richard recommends. But even if you say that all Deng did was undo the excesses of Maoism (and he did far more than that), it was a crucial and massive step for the country at that time. Deng's famous Southern tour is the second biggest travel event in modern Chinese history. I don't have the time or energy to devote to this topic, but either by providence or good planning (or both) the CCP have been the stewards of China's economic miracle. I highly recommend a read of ZenPundit's short piece on this topic:
the " correct line" on China's economy was decided in the contest for power between Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping after the fall of the Gang of Four. Then subsequently reaffirmed in the adoption of Deng's " Four Modernizations" and the aftermath of Tiannamen in 1989 when elderly Maoist senior statesmen limited their crackdown to political dissent and did not try to reverse economic liberalization.
I will look into this more in a future post.
Naturally there are valid points being made. China's current system is not perfect. There is plenty of corruption, nepotism, guanxi, onerous government officials and more. Richard hits the nail on the head:
in China there needs to be protection against corrupt and venal officials who know that the poor and disenfranchised are easy targets for highway robbery. And in this regard, I believe the New Leftists are correct. Sometimes people with no representation need help.
If only he had omitted that middle sentence, I'd agree. The problem with China's system is the lack of participation, of redress, of protection of property rights - in sum, a lack of rule of law. This is the point Chris drove at in suggesting the new leftists look to de Soto. But the new leftists don't offer any solution to this.
While on the badness of the corruption of China's system, David's incisive comment bears repeating in spades:
Jean Oi had made some interesting arguments about the kleptocracy, corruption and nepotism in China. She raised the possibility that far from impeding growth in China, the initiative of well-placed cadres sitting astraddle both quasi-state, quasi-private assets appropriating them for their own needs may actually have assisted GDP growth.
The argument is this: corruption, or 'bureaucratic deviance' provided the requisite level of fixed capital formation to create enterprises with economies of scale. Without high levels of fixed capital investment, China would still be a backwards agrarian nation...it seems that the United States in the late 19th century, in the age of the robber Railway barons, corruption, insider trading, nepotism and 'guanxi networks' were also indeed the way America got enough capital together to generate sufficient 'steam' for the economic locomotive of the American economy to really get going.
Obviously, in large developing nations depending largely upon domestic capital investment (i.e. including Korea, Taiwan and Japan but ruling out Singapore and Hong Kong) this perhaps may be a necessary but insufficient condition. Nigeria, Burma ad the Philippines are examples of this. It requires that the government have some limits on the scale of the corruption, enough to maintain a self-sustaining mechanism...
While it is true that China today is seeing a rising inequality between rich and poor, much like America did in the late 19th century (and as your interlocutors say, since the Reagan-Bush era), overall the country is becoming a more prosperous place...that overall the growth that China has undertaken over the past quarter century has benefited the largest number of people and has taken more people out of poverty than any other regime in history, and we should be lauding this achievement rather than denigrating the scale of difference between the village hut and the millionaire's skyscraper.
Smart fellow. Do his tour. Tom notes the growing inequality in America since the Reagan era. A quick reminder: Bill Clinton was President for 8 years between the two Bushes (and I dare say that's not the only time Bill's been between two bushes).
The other Richard suggests the new left is using European social democrats as a model. He's right which is why the new left are wrong. The formerly great social democratic economies of Europe are now laggards. It is no co-incidence that when Eastern Europe was faced with a choice between social democrats or a more Anglo-Saxon model, they chose and have had great success with the latter. I fully agree with his conclusions:
I don't think that China's New Left are in any way insincere about their project of bringing social justice to China. But I think they're misguided and possibly naive about the organization they are members of. Unfortunately I think their efforts only go to provide window dressing for the Party leadership - it enables them to say 'Look! We have open debate inside the Party! No need for dissidents! Don't you see how wrong Wei Jingsheng and all those other foreign agents were? China is marching straight down the road to democracy all by itself and we don't need any advice or criticism from outside!'
The new left are fig-leaves for more sinister forces who seek to reverse the gains made by China's market based economy in the past 25 years. They represent a dangerous combination of nostalgia and social engineering. Think that's overly dramatic? Any system that strives for equality must forcibly take from some to give to others. It is one thing to provide support for the poor and destitute (a point Hayek makes). It is quite another to go from a safety net to a blanket. ZenPundit notes the political dimension:
But these inchoate anticapitalist forces may try to outflank Party centrists on issues of nationalism, particularly on Taiwan and Sino-American relations and thus acquire a larger constituency for their economic policies while driving the centrists toward a harder line. They bear watching.
So the new left are both empty and dangerous. The last word goes to Adam Morris in commenting on Imagethief's important additional point:
I appreciated Simon's point that (paraphrasing) "it doesn't matter who has the bigger pie as long as it's getting bigger" but thought that there was something missing in that equation. I'm glad you pointed out it was unequal opportunity.
That is a telling point that was missing from my original post. I'm glad it was made. The same point applies in America and elsewhere. A governments' role is in creating and giving access to opportunity and then letting people get on with it on their own.
Let me conclude on a positive note. The path for continued economic success for China is based on two simple truths:
1. Strengthening of rule of law and property rights.
2. The expansion of and increased access to opportunities.
Simon, I tend to agree with you with some specifications.
It's pretty obvious that some sort of capitalist development is the best thing happened in China in the last 20-25 years. China is the umpteenth - and in this case still living - proof of the failure of communism: it grows and creates hopes when and where abandons ideology, it is bent and produces fear and oppression where keeps it.
At the same time what we're seeing in China is not a free-market economy western style. It's more a State-capitalism, an economic "boom" run by the State, driven by the State. A power so worried about mantaining and tightening control can't allow a real free economy. This is the point. And this is also the irremediable contradiction of chinese system and the greatest challenge to CCP rule: one day we're (likely) going to see a break-point, a final challenge between capitalist development and political despotism. It's all about politics, once again.
Simon is right because he gets the big picture. Some of his critics are right because they underline distorsions. But the problem is not capitalism. The problem is the regime.
I guess one of the things one has to watch out for is that words like "left or right" (political), "liberal or conservative" can have vastly different meanings from one country to the next and across different cultures.
A general economic history of China, titled "From Stone Age to Mao's Age", by Dr. Edward H. Kaplan, was on the www not long ago. He, I believe has just passed away, taught at Western Washington university at Bellingham. His history is excellent, well worth reading. These were his lecture notes for a class in Chinese economic history.
Well said. I'll happily call myself a New Rightist. 'Classical liberal' just confuses the yanks, while 'libertarian' makes people think I live in a log cabin, smoking pot and shooting at tax collectors (hmmm, actually that doesn't sound too bad as a retirement option).
The other day Richard had a post titled China's New Left seeks to rein in market reforms. It links to an article called China's inequities energize New Left, which is a more balanced view of this group. I've posted a comment on his thread (reproduced below the fold) which has some additional ideas not mentioned in this main post. Let's look at this in greater depth and please feel free to join in.
When looking at an issue, it's important to look at what the terms mean. So what does New Left mean?
...a loose coalition of academics who challenge China's market reforms with a simple message: China's failed 20th century experiment with communism cannot be undone in the 21st century by embracing 19th century-style laissez-faire capitalism....the New Left's adherents don't offer a coherent set of alternate policies.
The group is defined by what they oppose rather than what they stand for, the death knell of any political group.
The 'New Left' are worried about China's growing income gap but without any solutions. Is the income gap worth worrying about? No, with a but. If you think of an economy as a pie, it doesn't matter if the allocation of the pie is uneven, so long as the pie itself is growing. Is that true in China's case? Clearly the answer is yes. Witness the massive rise in living standards for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. It is the most rapid poverty allieviation in history. Yes, there is still plenty of crushing poverty in China. But it is decreasing at a rapid rate, not thanks to trendy pop concerts or dollops of foreign aid, but thanks to a quasi-capitalist economic system.
China's system is far from perfect. Cronyism and nepotism are rife. Government interference and direction in enterprise is rampant. Rule of law (in both enforcement and courts) is patchy at best. Unsurprisingly this has been China's economic way for much of its history (by the way, has there been any definitive economic history of China - if so can someone point me to it). But in terms of results, the current one is working, and working in spades. The 'New Left' alternative isn't even an alternative:
critics of the New Left, such as Professor Shi Yinhong, director of the Center for American Studies at the People's University in Beijing, say the group has no real alternative to the current global economic system.
Richard cannot help but have a go at America's economic system while he's citing this article.
What the New Left is saying resonates with me. Jiang is most responsible for today's wasteland of corruption that fouls so much of the country, resulting in a nation of obscenely rich cowboys riding roughshod over the people. Now, we have this situation in America, too, especially under our current regime, where might (i.e., money) makes right. But we do have controls for reining it in, as we saw when some of the more repellent aspects of the "Patriot Act" were rejected last week. And we're sending the Tyco robber barons to jail where they belong. I think wherever you have capitalism, you're going to have this situation to some extent; the owner-worker model lies at the heart of capitalism, making it, as they say, the world's worst economic system except for every other system.
America is the world's largest, richest and most successful economy of all time. There are plenty of Chinese citizens who would gladly have American style income equality in return for something like American living standards. Richard's right in one respect: inequality is a key part of the capitalist system. That's because people are all different. Shocking, I know. Just like we cannot all be gold medal hurdlers, we cannot all be wealthy tycoons.
To Richard's credit he notes the vacuousness of the 'New Left':
If the New Left's strategy and tactics were a bit less amorphous I'd be more optimistic. Right now, it sounds like a lot of ideas without much of an action plan.
Let's do a simple comparison. China's swing from Communism to its current quasi-capitalism has seen several hundred million people lifted out of poverty in the space of a few decades, the fastest rise in history and far more effective than any number of trendy pop concerts. The current system is being compared to "19th century laissez-faire economics" but with no basis in fact. A consequence of capitalism is some do better than others. Here's a newsflash for you: that's because some people ARE better than others...some in art, some in music, some in tennis, some in commerce. It's called being human. The problem with Communism is it doesn't work because we are not all the same. Likewise efforts at artificially dealing with income inequality. If you force equality you simply drag 50% of the population down to the average in order to drag the other 50% up to it. Is that fair? I suppose it depends which side of average you fancy yourself. And if forcing equality sounds like a good idea, I suggest you read Hayek's Road to Serfdom and come back to me.
What are we talking about here? The article Richard sites says:
the New Left's adherents don't offer a coherent set of alternate policies. Some are hard-liners, who say they rue the violence of the Maoist years, but remain enchanted with the sociopolitical initiatives of that period, such as collectivization.
This is what you're all praising and lionising? A slogan in search of an ideology? A yearning for collectivization, the system that lead to massive famine?
If someone can define New Left for me, we can start a proper debate. In the meantime let's call these people what they really are: reheated nostalgic Communists. Or from the article:
The degree to which the New Left's rhetoric meshes with that of the government's indicates that President Hu Jintao and his team are tacitly supporting the New Left.
I posted an article on the same subject, mostly focussing on the New Left in relation to the Party. I think you and I probably disagree quite a lot in relation to China and the rest of the world!
I think it's interesting that Hu Jintao and especially Wen Jiabao are in some ways keen to be associated with this kind of thinking. It's a credibility exercise for them, I think; and it's flattering for the leadership if people, especially abroad, think that they are part of a common project which has as its goal Social Justice. But ultimately what this comes down to is theory, and not what the Party does and stands for in practice. Maybe a few scattered projects will spring up around the country, but what's on offer is not fundamental change.
Ultimately I think this agenda is so unfocussed and watered down; all that may result is a rebranding exercise for the CCP, whatever about the sincerity and good intentions of a lot of people interviewed as representatives of the 'New Left'.
And let's not forget, as people pointed out at the time of 'New' Labour in the UK, that 'New' is the oldest word in politics!
Okay, Simon, so you don't like the bleeding heart equality sentiments of Richards - but he brings up an important point - that democracy is, to an important extent, based upon the perception of equality, and that while we make sacrifices in equality to push a capitalist economy, if the split got too obscene and the perception of second-class citizenship of the poor too obvious, there would probably be a push for more socialist reforms within any democracy.
I don't disagree with what you are saying: that people in China basically feel that the "Pie getting bigger" is better than anything else. However, it should be noted that although China is not a democracy, perceived equality is still a tremendous issue, and the "????“?doesn't alleviate the issue, any. china needs desperately to reach rule of law and sort the rest out from there.
You think China's current road is a good one because the 'pie is getting bigger' and millions of people are being lifted out of poverty?
30 years ago the entire country was below the standard poverty level and, as Richard has said many times on Peking Duck, the government haven't acutally 'done' anything at all, apart from dismantle the worst excesses of Maoist insane economic theories and 'allow' the people to crack on by allowing basic freedoms of choosing where they work and what they do for a living.
The opening up of foreign investment, prohibited under Mao with his almost paranoid ideal of self-sufficency also contributed hugely to China's recent quantum leap in modernizing the country.
The 'pie' to which you refer, is divided up amongst the political elite and the crumbs that remain mean that the majority of people living in China are existing on 1,000 yuan or less in the cities and less in the country and that's a fact.
The ideas of the New Left are a natural and welcome consequence of, and progression from today's system where the political and economic elite pillage the nation's wealth, while tightly controlling society with an iron grip, fire rockets up into the air and allow anti-Japan riots in the name of patriotism and social stability.
The next time I hear someone here in China complaining about having to work damn hard for subsistence wages, facing a crap present and a crap future, I'll be sure and say to them "We cannot all be gold medal hurdlers, we cannot all be wealthy tycoons." A guy I know know who lives in Hong Kong told me so.
What Martyn said, and everyone else (especially Martyn).
This is one heck of a post Simon. I am immensely surprised to see you give the CCP so much credit for the economic boom. It happened on their watch, so we do need to give them some credit, certainly. But I urge you to read Joe Studwell's China Dream to understand how the boom started -- despite, rather than because of, the CCP. The launchpad for the boom was simple: the industrious workers simply ignored CCP edicts and did things their own way. When they were successful beyond anyone's dreams, the CCP simply stole all the credit (no surprises there).
You quote a sentence from the article indicating some of the New Leftists believe in collectivazation, and you write, "This is what you're all praising and lionising? A slogan in search of an ideology? A yearning for collectivization, the system that lead to massive famine?" This is bullshit. Simon, if you read my post carefully and truly concluded that I am in support of collectivization, then something is seriously wrong. Do you really see any "lionising" whatever? If so, where do I lionise and what do I lionize? Look me in the eye look into your heart and tell me, do you think my post is about lionising collectivization, one of the most atrocious experiments ever conducted?
Where do I once say I support anything the New Leftists advocate? I wrote:
What the New Left is saying resonates with me. Jiang is most responsible for today's wasteland of corruption that fouls so much of the country, resulting in a nation of obscenely rich cowboys riding roughshod over the people.
If you think this makes me a communist sympathizer, what can I say? Their argument resonates with me, meaning I agree that many of the impoverished and expolited Chinese deserve better and need help. It's not blanket agreement - and I think you know it. This single phrase is the only positive thing I said about them, and then I said they had no plan or strategy and were basically hot air.
About my throwing in criticism of America: No matter how great and successful America is, it is not beyond criticism. Especially now, when obscene tax cuts are being lavished on the super-duper-ultra rich whilst working people are being deprived of even the traditional right to declare bankruptcy. Especially now, when our leaders are virtually at one with super-big business, with a revolving door leading from the White House to either K Street or the corporate board room. It's the best system in the world, but it can be better. I would be unpatriotic not to demand the best, and right now we are seeing the very worst. To imply that because poor Chinese still want to come to America we should therefore leave it alone and not strive to bring the corrupt to justice and hold our own officials to acount -- well, I just don't get it.
Just to make sure no one forgets, let me quote from Martyn's superb coment above, which is infinitely more articulate than my own:
The ideas of the New Left are a natural and welcome consequence of, and progression from today's system where the political and economic elite pillage the nation's wealth, while tightly controlling society with an iron grip, fire rockets up into the air and allow anti-Japan riots in the name of patriotism and social stability.
The next time I hear someone here in China complaining about having to work damn hard for subsistence wages, facing a crap present and a crap future, I'll be sure and say to them "We cannot all be gold medal hurdlers, we cannot all be wealthy tycoons." A guy I know know who lives in Hong Kong told me so.
Amen to that. Last point I want to address is from your comment above:
Here's a newsflash for you: that's because some people ARE better than others...some in art, some in music, some in tennis, some in commerce. It's called being human. The problem with Communism is it doesn't work because we are not all the same.
Thank you, Ayn Rand. I don't disagree. But this is implying that those who have made it to the top in China did so on the basis of rugged individualism and talent and hard work. As opposed to buckets of guanxi, stolen tax dollars from the working poor, dirty deals, under-the-table payments in plain brown envelopes and, in some instances, outright violence. Many have made it the old fashioned way, true enough. But go through my site or Conrad's old site and see the number of times the CCP took everything away from its people on a whim. My favorite example was the loving old man who created an orphanage for AIDS children. He had a vision and a dream and he made it happen, giving these children a better life. A charity in the West found out and made a large donation to the orphanage. What did our ingenious local leaders do? They immediately closed the orphanage, seized all the money and sent the terrified children off to state-run orphanages, where I'm sure they'll get state-of-the-art treatment for their disease. This is to make the simple point that in China there needs to be protection against corrupt and venal officials who know that the poor and disenfranchised are easy targets for highway robbery. And in this regard, I believe the New Leftists are correct. Sometimes people with no repreentation need help. I know that seems an odd concept to some, but I believe it with all my heart and it's the main reason I run my own blog, to shed light on the plight of those who are torn apart by the cruel version of capitalism that is both rescuing and damning China.
I would also add, that with the dismantling of the "Iron Rice Bowl," as inefficient as that state-owned system was, many Chinese people now lack access to medical care, to education and to any kind of support in their old age.
That's okay Lisa. The tough will rise to the top and thrive, stepping on the backs of the weak and the miserable, who will fall to the bottom and drown.
Look, I'm all for progress and competition. I just happen to believe that the vulnerable need some protections, lest you end up with a slave-master society, with your status determined at birth.
Richard's right when he talks about the CCP taking all the credit. Taking all the credit for what exactly?
China's GDP in 1949 (as a percentage of global economic output) was 1%. Fair play, civil war, Japan's invasion and WW2 etc.
Nearly 30 years later, in 1978, China's global GDP share was STILL 1%. (In the late 1700's China share was approximately 40%).
Since the 'pie has been increasing in size' for the last few decades, it's present share is approximately 5%. Not quite time to pop open the Champagne and blow up the balloons just yet.
Consequently, people's lives haven't improved as much as you seem to think.
The last figure I read suggested that 45% of the nations farmers had not seen their incomes significantly rise since 1990. As a consequence, millions of kids around the country, particularly girls, do not go to school as their parents simply can't afford it.
Even though elementary school is supposed to be free and compulsory, the average school charges Rmb2-300 per year. Average annual income for farmers is around Rmb4-500 per year---before local taxes of course.
That pie is certainly getting bigger.
Effectively, huge amounts of the population remain only partially-educated and therefore fit to do nothing except either toil in the fields or hit the jackpot and become an unskilled migrant worker for Rmb4-500 per month.
Should a child be lucky enough to receive a full high-school education, university fees are approximately Rmb3,000-5,000 per year which effectively prohibits the majority of the population from even dreaming of going to university.
Love that big pie.
According to the IMF figures 2003, out of 179 countries, China's annual GDP was US$1,087 per person or 110th in the world. That's less than half the average per capita global GDP.
Next time I travel to the poorer areas of Guangzhou City or anywhere in the Chinese countryside, I'll be sure and tell the good folks there about that pie of yours that just keeps getting bigger. They could do with some real good news.
For a scholarly look at China's actual progress in poverty reduction do a google search on China's (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen of the World Bank. Some of their key conclusions:
1. China has made huge progress against poverty, but it has been uneven progress. Half of the decline in poverty achieved since reform and opening up came in the first few years of the 1980s. Poverty reduction stalled in the 1990s.
2. Inequality has been rising. In marked contrast to most developing countries, relative inequality is higher in China's rural areas than in urban areas. Absolute inequality has increased appreciably over time between and within both rural and urban areas.
3. The pattern of growth matters. Growth in the primary sector (mainly agriculture) did more to reduce poverty and inequality than either the manufacturing or service sectors. Rural economic growth reduced inequality in both the urban and rural areas, as well as between them.
4. Inequality is a concern both for economic growth and poverty reduction. With the same historical economic growth rates and no rise in inequality in rural areas alone, the number of poor in China would have been less than 1/4 of its actual value today. Rising inequality is not a "price" of high growth: statistics show that the periods of more rapid growth did not bring more rapid increases in inequality. The statistics suggest that more uneual provinces will face a double handicap in future poverty reduction: they will have lower growth and poverty will respond less to that growth.
I know a lot of farmers and children of farmers who'd be happy to tell you that, if not fabulously wealthy, they can afford to send their kids to college now. I know a lot of non party members who've raised their standard of living immensely in the last ten years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the average person lives on 1000 kuai a month, but that's a hefty jump from the 200 of five years ago. and when you consider that housing costs as little as 100 kuai a month outside the big cities, with usually more than one working individual per household, that thousand kuai starts looking a little more comfortable.
of course, a lot of cadres are getting filthy rich. but it's not only them who is seeing some benefit.
I think there are a lot of extremes in the above conversation. simon looks at the inherent inequality (true) while others focus on the ideal of equality (lovely idea). the reality should perhaps lie in the middle. the chance to rise as far as you can should exist, but those working two jobs should at least be able to affford basic standards of living. it shouldn't be about making everyone the same, but about making sure even those who might not be 'qualified' don't fall through the cracks.
nepotism, etc, can't last in a fully free market system. if the genes are good it really doesn't matter, but when unqualified people lead businesses the business fails. if/when china stops bailing out companies I think it's possible that the 'making money' portion of the equation might outdo the 'but he's my nephew' argument.
I've always suspected that Simon was really a closet neo-mercantilist.
Long live the tycoons! Long live connections over competition! Long live cronyism!
As long as the pie gets bigger, the British East India Company should be allowed to keep its monopoly on trade!
As for the US economy, Simon fails to take in to account the MASSIVE income inequality the economic policies of the Reagan/Bush administrations have put in to place. But it's nice to note that Simon prefers arguments put forth by the likes of HindRocket, who argue economics via anecdotes, over Krugman, who argues using actual data and facts.
When I was a graduate student some years ago, a professor of mine called Jean Oi had made some interesting arguments about the kleptocracy, corruption and nepotism in China. She raised the possibility that far from impeding growth in China, the initiative of well-placed cadres sitting astraddle both quasi-state, quasi-private assets appropriating them for their own needs may actually have assisted GDP growth.
The argument is this: corruption, or 'bureaucratic deviance' provided the requisite level of fixed capital formation to create enterprises with economies of scale. Without high levels of fixed capital investment, China would still be a backwards agrarian nation.
As you know, I love history. To tie two strands of your debate together, it seems that the United States in the late 19th century, in the age of the robber Railway barons, corruption, insider trading, nepotism and 'guanxi networks' were also indeed the way America got enough capital together to generate sufficient 'steam' for the economic locomotive of the American economy to really get going.
Obviously, in large developing nations depending largely upon domestic capital investment (i.e. including Korea, Taiwan and Japan but ruling out Singapore and Hong Kong) this perhaps may be a necessary but insufficient condition. Nigeria, Burma ad the Philippines are examples of this (hope you had a good trip by the way). It requires that the government have some limits on the scale of the corruption, enough to maintain a self-sustaining mechanism.
What does all this have to do with your debate? A lot, I feel. While it is true that China today is seeing a rising inequality between rich and poor, much like America did in the late 19th century (and as your interlocutors say, since the Reagan-Bush era), overall the country is becoming a more prosperous place. It seems you have tried to say, and I certainly agree with this, that overall the growth that China has undertaken over the past quarter century has benefited the largest number of people and has taken more people out of poverty than any other regime in history, and we should be lauding this achievement rather than denigrating the scale of difference between the village hut and the millionaire's skyscraper.
I am not entirely sure about the corruption being beneficial to growth, certainly it is not true in more mature economies as it leads to dangerous misallocations of resources. But I do think that it may have had actually an early beneficial effect to growth in the first two decades of Deng's reforms. While the CCP is not to be commended for this corruption or the individual initiative that brought it about, they have kept enough of a lid on it to prevent the Chinese economy from spiralling out of control as a result.
Best of luck for your rebuttal! I do sympathize with some aspects of the other side's views, but ultimately find your argument more compelling.
Income inequality is a dangerous idea. As Simon notes, as long as the pie is growing and large numbers of people are getting ahead in life, what does it matter if some are gettign ahead faster. If GDP were 1% in the past and is now 5% that is a 500% advance. An astronomical leap for the masses.
When are people going to realize that we did a 100 year experiment and every time capitalism allevaited poverty better and faster than other systems. Whether it was Marxist Socialism, Fascist Socialism, National Socialism, or the socialism du jour Democratic Socialism, they did all fail (the jury is still out on the last but with 10% plus unemployment Euroland is about to confirm the trend as they have ate their rich already).
Have any of you excoriating Simon actually read Hayek's Road to Serfdom. If so, I would like to hear your critique of where Hayek is wrong. Every one of his predictions has been proven true in the real world. Every faux New Left experiment since Marx wrote his idiotic book has failed.
btw China is now a classic Fascist state, not capitalist. But stepping back from totalitarianism to mere fascism, allowing private property plus the CCP's increasing difficulty in maintaining control has led to the latest gains. Imagine if they would let go and really try capitalism instead of allowing it to floursih in pockets because they can no longer maintain control...
Most people profess a love of freedom and modern history has given us many countries that have been made "free", from those of Eastern Europe to Ukraine. The implicit assumption is that capitalist democracy is the ultimate aim. Through a Darwinian survival of the fittest process, capitalist democracy has become the sole surviving (and most successful) political economic system. Note an important distinction here - all the talk of "clash of civilisations" between the West (read capitalist democracies) and Islam is a discussion of values, not political economy. While Islam has some economic impact and principles even Iran and Saudi Arabia do not have Islam-onomics. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the last true battle between different political economic systems ended in a decisive win for capitalist democracy.
The proof is in the counter-examples. Look at North Korea or Cuba - both are still clinging to classic Communist principles. On the other hand China has borrowed the capitalist element while doggedly resisting the democracy side - an experiment in capitalist dictatorship, as did Chile under Pinochet.
It seems clear to me that capitalist democracy has won the ideology evolution race - it is the distillation of thousands of years of human thought and history. It's not perfect but it's far better than any of the alternatives. Indeed it is hard to postulate what the realistic alternatives might be.
I agree, with the distinction that "liberty" would be a more important indicator of a regime's survivability than "democracy." Singapore is not a democracy but it allows enough personal and economic liberties to make the lack of democracy tolerable for most people. Hong Kong has long had liberty without democracy. Economically, both of the latter are more liberal than most western democracies. Urban coastal China is trying to follow the same path.
Point well taken, Chris. I suppose that's what I meant by democracy. I'm just wondering if this is the end of the road in terms of the development of a political economic system?
Hmm ... I've got no argument about the capitalism bit, but aren't you calling a win for democracy a bit early (especially given where you live)? I've got no doubt it's the best system, but my opinion doesn't seem to hold much weight with Hu Jintao. Also, there do seem to be several countries that are going in the 'wrong direction' (e.g. Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Venezuela).
As for further development: what about the development of international systems. Plenty of 'growing pains' around the UN & EU nowadays ... definitely a work in progress.
I started writing a comment about how you should read Francis Fukuyama because this sounds like something he wrote, but it got long so I blogged it instead. Not sure if the trackback worked, so:
David: to be confusing, I'm using the term democracy liberally. To some extent the CCP are being challenged to continue their legitimacy to hold on to rule, so in that sense they are responding to popular opinion (and far more often than is realised e.g. on Taiwan). China's far from perfect given its lax rule of law, dodgy courts and lack of voting to name but a few. But they are not immune to public opinion, especially given they only claim to rule in the name of the people.
Dave 2: good post. I do vaguely remember the fuss over Fukuyama's work although I never read it. Guess it goes to show there's no such thing as an original idea. I couldn't agree more that constant vigilence is needed to protect what we have. My Darwin analogy holds - it might have outlasted others, but predators still exist that will be happy to take it down should its guard be relaxed.
Francis Fukuyama came to a similar conclusion some years back (see his book "The End of History"): democracy and capitalism are the winners of the race, the only really successful countries, the "last men standing."
Of course, absolutist monarchies could have said the same a few hundred years ago. The winning idea is only winning as long as no one figures out something better.
It is true that no one, not even the Chinese Communist leadership, has confidence in any system except capitalist democracy. But it's also true that many people, from Islamic terrorists to the CCP leaders, are avidly *looking* for something better suited to their aims.
I don't know that they'll find a better answer than capitalism or democracy. Neither Islamic terrorists nor Communist leaders have a very good track record at political innovation. But it's conceivable that someone, somewhere, will find a "better answer." Democracy and capitalism have obvious vulnerabilities, even if every known alternative has even worse ones.
Consdier how awkward modern capitalist democracies are at handling global warming, budget balancing, health care reform, pension reform, certain types of education, trade secrets and copyrights, and crime prevention. In all these issues our current governments mostly do much worse than "best practice". And consider how bad most politicians are -- it's a strange thing to say that a system whose leaders' skills are often held in contempt is the best possible system.
So it's not as though democracy and capitalism leave no room for improvement. We should be humble and honest about the flaws in our system, even though we know it's the best system so far. Someday a superior approach could emerge.
But no, I don't expect any "new system" to come in time to preserve the Communist autocrats, let alone the Islamic terrorists.
My Darwin analogy holds - it might have outlasted others, but predators still exist that will be happy to take it down should its guard be relaxed.
As Fukuyama points out in Our Posthuman Future, it's not just predators from outside that can affect LD, but also evolution from within (as in biotech changing what people are, and that changes what society needs to be or can be). Where are the limits of personal autonomy, economic or otherwise, how will they change, and how will that recreate LD? Perhaps an opposition will form not from outside LD, but from within.
Indeed you could argue such groups already exist, Dave, such as the anti-globalisation movement. But they're not proposing alternatives in any real sense, either.
Daniel: I agree with the thrust of your argument but take issue with some of the details. To wit:
Consdier how awkward modern capitalist democracies are at handling global warming, budget balancing, health care reform, pension reform, certain types of education, trade secrets and copyrights, and crime prevention. In all these issues our current governments mostly do much worse than "best practice". And consider how bad most politicians are -- it's a strange thing to say that a system whose leaders' skills are often held in contempt is the best possible system.
There are very valid arguements that LD are best in each of these areas. A cap-and-trade market system is the basis of the Kyoto agreement for example. Australia has run budget surpluses for years; the current US deficit is the choice of that electorate, given Bush's clear mandate. I don't have numbers offhand but I can't imagine dictatorships or Communist countries are paragons of fiscal policy virtue. Even when it comes to crime there are trade offs between crime and its policing. If it is over-policed at a cost of liberties that is a trade-off many (if they had the choice) would not make.
That said the point about absolute monarchies being the best for a certain time rings true. But I'm (and Mr Fukuyama, it seems) asking if this is the most "superior" system we are likely to see. The system can do with improvement, but the basics of the system itself have proved durable for a couple of hundred years so far.
If we're to really stretch the discussion, what would such a superior system potentially look like? What flaws in the current one would it address and how?
While I generally agree that liberty and democracy are the "end of history" (as Fukuyama calls it), I also think there's huge possibility of backsliding driven by religion. This is most obvious in the Mideast, but IMO it's also showing up in the US. It's been a growing force for the last 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The CCP would obviously prefer it if Falun Dafa disappeared. (Which, now that I think about it, it practically has disappeared, or at least we never hear about it here in the US).
Of course, religion can be thought of as just another ideology, but the difference is that adherents are as focused on the unknowable afterlife as on the present, which is enough for some fanatics to justify such madness as committing suicide by flying a plane into a building.
Since the afterlife is scientifically unprovable, I fear that there will never be any reasoning with religious zealots. Our best hope IMO is to let them have their countries. In other words, the US should stop propping up Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc. and force the mullahs to confront modernity. The fervor tends to burn out when there's no dictator to rail against e.g. Iran. Of course, we still need to keep nuclear weapons out of their hands...
Derek you could easily argue that religion is playing a very big part in American politics, too. It's a slippery slope comparing religion with ideology. For mine, they're not the same thing. That's why I don't see the "clash of civilisations".
As for Falun Dafa, they are still around. Any visit to the Star Ferry terminal at TST here in Hong Kong will give you all the info you'll ever need.
Simon, we agree. While you can argue that religion is just ideology, the afterlife that many religions promise makes it qualitatively different. IMO it's more dangerous, but then again many explicitly atheistic movements have been unspeakably horrific, too. The common thread is that the perpetrators believe they are doing good. If someone believes what he is doing is for the greater good, he can be coached to do great evil. Someone who has doubts about the goodness of master will balk. Religion promises goodness. But so, apparently, do some secular ideologies and nationalist movements: Shining Path, Khmer Rouge etc.
Re: clash of civilizations, well, I've only read reviews & summaries of Huntingdon in magazines, so my knowledge is not that deep. But the recent brouhaha over alleged Koran desecration seems pretty clash-like to me. In the West, while many people revere the Bible, very few would argue that its physical manifestation as a book is anything more than, well, a book.
But my understanding (as of this morning) is that most Muslims view the Koran as a holy manifestation, at least according to http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05/koran_abuse.html
If two civilizations, one dominantly Christian, the other dominantly Muslim, can disagree on something as fundamental as this, what other conflicts should we expect? Terrorism, er, "martyrdom."
After Nanjing, the PRC government continues to put the brakes on anti-Japanese demonstrations, arresting 42 protesters for acts of violence in the 16 April Shanghai rally.
In fact, the state media in Shanghai has been acting in curious ways, leading up to today's operation. Whether what the police is doing complements or conflicts with what the newspapers are doing is anyone's guess.
See the extended entry for translations of the news articles.
AFTER THE PASSION OF ANTI-JAPANESE PROTESTS, CHINA ARRESTS 42 IN SHANGHAI FOR VIOLENCE IN DEMONSTRATIONS
TUESDAY, 26 APRIL, LAST UPDATED 18:18
Reuters (Shanghai): Chinese state media reported on Tuesday that police have arrested 42 participants of the anti-Japanese demonstration in Shanghai [on 16 April], and will charge 16 for damage of property.
The arrest operation shows that China is trying to restrain re-enactments of violent resistance, as previous anti-Japanese protests have sent Sino-Japanese relations to their lowest point in decades.
According to the Shanghai Morning News, the 16 “violators of the law” are charged with “taking advantage of the situation to throw rocks and damage shop.” Behaviour of damaging shops and looting seriously disrupt social order, and harm the image of Shanghai city.
The newspaper also reports that Shanghai police is encouraging those who acted illegally during the protests to give themselves up, and others who know of such activities should provide information to the authorities.
State media reported on Monday that police arrested a netizen for attempting to organize an anti-Japanese demonstration for May Day. The Communist Party has already began a widespread campaign to encourage citizens not to “hate Japan,” and has now followed up with the arrest operation.
Media reported on Tuesday that Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing will participate in next week's Asia-Europe conference, but it is not clear whether he will privately meet with Japanese officials.
CFDD CANCELS MAY FOURTH RALLY
TUESDAY, 26 APRIL, LAST UPDATED 05:05
Ming Pao: Tong Zhen, head of the China Federation for Defending Diaoyutai Islands, informed Ming Pao yesterday that when President Hu Jintao gave “five propositions” on Sino-Japanese relations in his meeting yesterday with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi, it was “our first showing of the cards in years, and established national pride.” In light of the big picture, and to “give the Koizumi government of Japan a chance,” the CFDD and he will postpone plans to apply for a demonstration on the 86th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement.
When we interviewed Tong on Friday (22 April), he said that to reflect Chinese popular opinion, the CFDD and he plan to, either in the name of a group or individually, apply legally for a rally on 4 May. However, when we interviewed Tong again yesterday by phone, he says that he has decided to postpone plans for applyng for the rally, because when Hu gave five propositions when meeting Koizumi, he “considered the big picture, and defended the Chinese position and principles, representing the feelings of the Chinese people, including Diaoyutai-defending patriots.”
Tong says that the CFDD and he will postpone the application also to give the Koizumi government a chance to rectify their mistakes. “The members of the CFDD are well aware of the big picture, and we can express our patriotic hopes in many ways. We will all work well at our jobs, and give much energy to vitalize China.”
Zhong Guohua, Ming Pao Beijing correspondent
Personal spam: please visit my website at http://www.plum-blossom.net/, if you're not offended by my shameless self-promotion.
While we should have the right to protest what we may not like, but this sort of behavior any where in the world may not accomplish much. There are better ways (e.g. diplomacy) to get things done.
Enzo posted earlier on how Hu Jintao is anything but a reformer. But how did the leader of China become so seemingly out of sync with the global trend towards openness and liberalization? History gives an answer. For example, Philip Pan reports on how Hu uses his words:
The party's reformist wing has been especially alarmed by Hu's penchant for using hard-line rhetoric from the Cultural Revolution, the devastating political movement that rocked China in the decade before Mao's death in 1976. Hu joined the party as a college student shortly before the movement began and spent much of it as a low-level official in one of the country's poorest provinces.
Wikipedia has this to say about the “Fourth Generation” in the CCP leadership:
fourth generation - Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Zeng Qinghong. These were promoted to top leadership at the 16th Party Congress and are expected to remain in power until the 18th party congress in 2012. Most of them were engineers whose educations were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and unlike both their predecessors and successors have spent very little time overseas.
In such context, a lot of perplexing questions find their answers. Growing in the shadow of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution would certainly make someone very aware of the possible calamity of the loss of state control. For someone like Hu, political liberalization can very well lead down the path back to the Red Guards. While Enzo is correct in pointing out that Communist regimes don't do reform well (if at all), context is important in figuring out why exactly didn't the “Third Generation” oppress with such ferocity.
And yet, in an ironic twist, hints are showing that the atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution that Hu et al. fear so much is re-appearing. While the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations have nowhere near the insanity of the Red Guards, there is an eerie resemblance. And there's no debating that the CCP has done its part in promoting said demonstrations. The apparent lack of diplomatic dexterity that the 3Gs had mastered so well in recent months are also the direct results of the lack of international experience amongst the 4Gs. A lack of understanding in international relations was also a notable characteristic of the Cultural Revolution, although the results were somewhat different (self-withdrawal in the 1960s-70s, clumsy attempts at aggrandization in the 2000s).
Mao's long shadow extends further than anyone can imagine.
Personal spam: please visit my website at http://www.plum-blossom.net/, if you're not offended by my shameless self-promotion.
- Yesterday Philip Pan explained very well which kind of reformer Hu Jintao is.
More than two years after taking office amid uncertainty about his political views, Chinese President Hu Jintao is emerging as an unyielding leader determined to preserve the Communist Party's monopoly on power and willing to impose new limits on speech and other civil liberties to do it, according to party officials, journalists and analysts.
Hu sealed his reputation after taking control of the military at a meeting of the party's ruling elite in September, a final step in his long climb to power. On the last day of the conclave, in his first major address to the 300-plus member Central Committee as the nation's undisputed new leader, Hu warned that "hostile forces" were trying to undermine the party by "using the banner of political reform to promote Western bourgeois parliamentary democracy, human rights and freedom of the press," according to a person given excerpts of the speech.
Hu said China's enemies had not abandoned their "strategic plot to Westernize and split China." He blamed the fall of the Soviet Union on policies of "openness and pluralism" and on the efforts of "international monopoly capital with the United States as its leader." And in blunt language that party veterans said recalled Mao Zedong's destructive Cultural Revolution, he urged the leadership to be alert to the danger of subversive thinking.
No surprise here. As history teaches, communist regimes are not reformable: where Party in power, no real changes; where real changes, no Party in power. A comment in TPD blog pointed out: As the saying in communist circles go. It is better to be an Andropov than a Gorbachev. Right. In communist perspective, Gorbachev's performance was a failure: he wanted to keep USSR alive, he was USSR gravedigger. Hu - like his predecessors - knows that lesson. But... there's a but. You can call it the paradox of authoritarian rulers: if you open, you lose; if you don't... you lose as well. The point is that dictatorial regimes are not only against people but also against the course of history: you can try to delay the moment but - sooner or later - events will prevail. 1989 Tiananmen was a powerful reminder: only a massacre stopped the change in China as in Eastern Europe communism broke up.
To be clear: I'm not among those who think that chinese regime is now on the verge of collapse. Pragmatism in economy, if anything, has given CCP a breath of air (still, it's a double-edge sword). But I also believe that it's only a matter of time: it could be a financial shock, the birth of an underground but organized opposition movement, a thoughtless mistake in foreign policy... I don't know what's more likely to happen but certainly one day we'll see the fall of Beijing wall.
- Racism in China? Andrés Gentry reports. Racism and nationalism often walk together.
Note: This is expanding on previous coverage. The original post and earlier updates are below the fold, in chronological order. The Japan/China riots are covered in another post.
Update April 18th
* ACB retells the story of Hankantou. Comprehensive coverage of the causes of these riots.
*****************************************************************
Yesterday's Daily Linklets mentioned a 30,000 person riot near Dongyang with a report by The Guardian. Today the SCMP has a full report on the village of Huaxi where the riots took place. The villagers are proudly displaying their spoils of war:
I've reproduced the full SCMP article below the fold or you can read another account in The Times. The end result is the same: the villagers are running Huaxi and have kicked the Government out. Rebellion against the rapid pace of development? A fight back by peasants against corruption and greed? Displaced farmers fighting against unjust land grabs and inadequate compensation?
Or the thin edge of a very, very big wedge?
The current Japan/China tensions may in part be orchestrated by the government. But these spontaneous outbursts are a different beast. Interestingly at the moment the Chinese Government doesn't seem sure how to handle either.
* Publius Pundit summarises the thoughts of Thomas Lifson and Luis Ramirez on growing unrest in China. It re-iterates my point that this riot is far more significant that the anti-Japan ones. The timing may be more than co-incidental. Richard isn't impressed by the post and notes there's no sign of a crack in the CCP's rule. That said for a "member of the reality based community" his criticism of The China Project (mentioned below) doesn't wash. Geroge W. Bush's attitude to Taiwan is the key factor in cross-strait relations. You might not like the man, but his attitude is crucial. That said would have applied if John Kerry was Prez.
* Daily Demarche is also summarising various recent events in China as part of the China project, orginally explained here.
* Praktike summed it nicely: Too much China, not enough time. There's always a lot going on with China, but at the moment it seems a particularly "eventful" time.
In riot village, the government is on the run
Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Huaxi is a village in mutiny. Instead of going to work or school on Monday morning, thousands of people milled around its broad, paved streets and - despite the steady rain - the atmosphere was upbeat, even jubilant.
Huaxi has the government on the run.
More than 1,000 police and officials, who arrived before dawn on Sunday to tear down road blocks erected by villagers, instead found themselves involved in a pitched battle.
The police fled.
As I walk towards the middle school at the edge of town, the crowd thickens. Broken bricks and sticks litter the ground.
Inside the school compound, 14 cars lie upside down, windows smashed, interiors ripped up, number plates bent.
A police uniform is draped over one car - a trophy.
On the other side of the large school yard lie dozens of buses. Their tyres have been slashed, and windows smashed. Some have been heaved on their sides.
The trouble in this verdant, hilly part of Zhejiang province , two hours south of the provincial capital of Hangzhou , started in 2001 when local officials handed 66 hectares of land to 13 private and state-owned chemical plants. Wang Weikang , 58, who still farms 933 square metres of land, said villagers didn't know what was happening when they suddenly discovered the land they farmed belonged to someone else.
Villagers say the village committee signed a contract with nearby Dongyang city behind their backs. Dongyang government spokesman Chen Qixian said the deal was lawful, since the village committee had the right to represent villagers.
Mainland farmers do not own their land, instead farming it on 30-year contracts from the government, so no-one had to ask the farmers individually.
The plants were built in 2002 and then, said Mr Wang and other villagers, the sicknesses started.
"Lots of people started falling ill. Some days our eyes would sting ... from the gas from the plants. Babies were born dead or malformed. Nine in the past year alone," he said.
Villagers said the chemical plants polluted the village's water supply. "It had become the colour of soy sauce," said one.
Huaxi's river, the Huashui, runs a strange caramel colour, though the main eyesore are the heaps of plastic bags that cling to its edges.
"We want our land back. We don't want compensation. We want vegetables to grow again and the water to run clean," said Mr Wang.
Opposition to the plants grew.
Unable to get the attention of local officials, villagers went to Beijing to petition the central government - also without success.
Then in March, Dongyang Mayor Tan Yong barred them from a meet-the-public forum.
To stop shipments from the plants, villagers threw up road blocks on March 24 and built straw shelters.
One leader, Wang Zhongfa, was arrested for allegedly inciting the overthrow of the government. That inflamed tempers further. Many of those manning the shelters were members of the Huaxi old people's association, one of the main groups opposed to the chemical plant.
On Monday, many of them sat in one remaining shelter, which they had decorated with trophies from Sunday's battle: police uniforms, riot shields, an ID card, empty tear gas canisters and machetes.
Villagers say when the police - numbering 3,000, they say - arrived, they also brought cattle prods. Wang Xiaomei , 70, said: "Those police. They were worse than the Japanese".
Early on Sunday, rumours started spreading that two elderly women had died when police tried to storm the village and angry villagers poured out of their homes, driving police into the school yard. The police barricaded the gate, but villagers bashed down the brick school wall.
They stoned police. Hand-to-hand combat ensued.
Mr Chen, the Dongyang official who was at the scene, said 36 people, 33 of them police or officials, had been admitted to hospital. "Five of the injured are in serious condition," he said.
But Mr Chen denied anyone had died, and villagers were unable to provide any details of the deaths. "Please believe me. There's no way the government could be covering it up," said Mr Chen.
Yet the government is spooked.
On the way out of town, a siren started up behind us and a tannoy barked: "Pull over!"
I was detained by police, my notes destroyed and pictures wiped from my camera. I have to sign a confession - I broke the relevant reporting regulations of the People's Republic of China by going to Huaxi without asking for permission.
Officials say they generally get a month or two's notice from foreign journalists. Enough time to miss the story, they agree.
Mr Chen said local officials might have stolen money intended for villagers.
He said the situation turned nasty after an influential member of the village committee was unable to persuade a hard-nosed plant boss to pay more for the land.
"Also we are unable to control the factories 24 hours a day. It may be that sometimes they discharge pollutants illegally," he said.
Mr Chen said the government would arrest corrupt local officials if any wrongdoing was confirmed.
But for now, the villagers are in charge of Huaxi and the government is on the run.
April 15th reading
* Echoes has links to several reports on the riot, and notes the WaPo reports the chemical factories that sparked the riots have been closed.
Didi Tatlow's SCMP article on her detention
Normally, when journalists sit down to write their stories, they look at their notes. But I did not have any. They were confiscated by officials on Monday in Dongyang city , Zhejiang province , when I was detained on the way back from reporting a mass riot in nearby Huaxi village.
"Please understand that we have to do this," said Zhang Fahao, director of the local foreign affairs office, my chief captor for six hours that evening. "I'm very sorry. But you broke the law."
Today, an uneasy calm has settled over Huaxi, after up to 30,000 villagers rioted last Sunday against police and cadres who came to tear down roadblocks stopping business at 13 hated chemical plants. Villagers say the plants are making them sick and poisoning the environment.
The riot was big, even by mainland standards. In recent years localised uprisings, especially in rural areas, have become a major issue. Thousands occur each year, and at least a dozen major ones broke out in the last three months of last year alone.
The reasons are almost always the same: government corruption, police abuse and a lack of access to justice.
By the end of the week, the situation had calmed. "Things are quiet now," said one villager by telephone.
Worried for his safety, he did not want his full name to be used. "But I'm not optimistic that this is going to be settled to the villagers' advantage," he said.
"The plants make too much money for the local government. Maybe we need to start demanding they move the village, and leave the plants here."
It would be an innovative solution to what appears an intractable problem in this green corner of Zhejiang. Villagers say the plants, built in 2002 - after local officials handed their farmland over to Dongyang officials without consultation - were constructed illegally.
A development of that scale must be approved by the State Council. But, citing documents from Dongyang's land commission, villagers say the application was not made. The State Council could not be reached for comment.
Dongyang officials are adamant that despite the violent conflict, the plants will not be moved. "That is impossible now," said Chen Qixian , a Dongyang government spokesman.
A week ago, I was driving out of Huaxi on my way back to Hangzhou , the provincial capital, with the story - literally - in the bag. Villagers had been happy to tell their tale, though their accents were hard to follow.
Huaxi was in an uproar, villagers proudly showing off trashed police and officials' cars, buses, ripped police uniforms and red armbands. It had been a melee of epic proportions.
"We got them on the run," they said. "We are like the heroes in The Water Margin", China's famous 14th century novel in which the righteous and downtrodden fight corrupt officials of all kinds.
But I knew that I could not stay long without attracting attention - someone was bound to call the Dongyang police.
Towards the end of my two-hour stay in the village, a couple of black cars pulled up and several young men got out and stared hard at me. Their sour expressions contrasted sharply with the villagers' joy; it was time to leave. I hurried back to the car and we left town.
About 10 minutes down the road, my driver checked his side-view mirror. "We're being followed," he said. A police siren whined and, over a loudspeaker, we were ordered to pull over.
A policeman stuck his head into the window and gave us a giant grin, setting the tone for what was to become a surreal detention where we were handled with kid gloves - although threat was never far from the surface.
"Please come with me," he said to the driver. They conferred in the police car for 10 minutes. Then the driver came back. "We have to go to Dongyang city," he said.
At Dongyang's best hotel, the Splendid Plaza, a cohort of officials was waiting for me and my three companions, two other foreign journalists I had asked along - knowing there was safety in numbers - and a Chinese assistant.
"Please have dinner with us," they said, smiling and smiling. "We would prefer to continue our journey to Hangzhou," we said. "That won't be possible," said Mr Zhang, the foreign affairs director.
We were shown into a large, red-carpeted room. The men were served tea, the women hot water. About eight officials sat around the dining table, though their numbers changed as they came and went, fielding urgent phone calls on their mobiles. Only Mr Zhang and Mr Chen, the government spokesman, were introduced.
The first of a score of excellent dishes arrived. This was a banquet. "We did that for you because you are foreigners," explained Mr Zhang, smiling. "Can you use chopsticks?"
The questioning began, too. Interspersed with commands to toast each other, the officials asked the questions we knew we could not evade: "Where were you? What were you doing in Huaxi? Had you applied for permission to come to Dongyang?"
Dinner dragged on, and at about 8pm - we were picked up at 6pm - Mr Zhang's assistant put the knife in. With a smile. "We must destroy your reporting notes, and you must give us your pictures.
"Also, we will interview you separately and you must sign a confession that you have broken the law."
Chinese regulations governing the activities of reporters are strict. Non-mainland journalists must apply for permission to travel anywhere outside of Beijing.
In practice, many do not, as the system is slow and designed to make reporting virtually impossible.
It is a key mechanism in the government's efforts to stop a clearer picture of the mainland circulating abroad.
We complied, but registered our protest, telling the officials that our notes were actually the property of our employers. We signed a two-page confession that we had violated Chinese reporting regulations.
Memory cards in digital cameras were wiped clean. They insisted on swapping the empty cards for new ones, to make sure the pictures could not be reconstructed.
Finally, at 11.30pm, we insisted on going. "We have co-operated with you," we said. "Now let us return to Hangzhou."
They argued we should stay the night in Dongyang, and, bizarrely, go out tomorrow and "play" in the city.
After much to-ing and fro-ing, we won, and returned to Hangzhou in the early hours of Tuesday.
Our detention had been a golden cage - but a cage nonetheless.
When I first posted on the Huanxi riots I used Didi Tatlow's SCMP article as a reference. She has now followed up with what happened to her in covering the riots: she had her notes confiscated, she was arrested for several hours and even treated to dinner. She considered it a "golden cage - but a cage nonetheless". I've reproduced the full article below. Only last Thursday ACB discussed the suppression of foregin journalists in China.
The number of protests in China is growing fast. Three million people took part in 58,000 demonstrations in 2003, a 15 per cent increase on the previous year, according to Outlook Weekly magazine, a Communist Party mouthpiece.
Virtually none of these was legal - the Communist Party bans virtually all public protest. Nearly all were localised disputes about official corruption, police abuse or conflict over land use, making the anti-Japan protests highly unusual and giving the impression they are officially condoned.
As I said elesewhere, forget about the China/Japan riots. This is where the real action is.
* Richard looks at the riot's aftermath and ponders if this is a storm in a teacup or the start of something bigger.
* Here's an old article declaring Huaxi "China's richest village". Bet it won't be featuring again anytime soon.
* ESWN has photos and a translation of a first hand account of the Huaxi riots, China's newest tourism hotspot.
* Lisa notes an interesting comment by Joseph Wang saying this is not the beginning of the end of the CCP: The basic understanding is that the demonstrators can demonstrate provided that they don't cross red lines such as calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party or any fundamental political change...People are pushing the limits, the government is responding. It's a slow, messy process but over time, something like civil society is developing.
I have a very similar story about 3 chemical plants and a similar number of rioters etc, but my source (A Chinese journalist) gave the village name as Huankantou. They also mentioned nothing about hand to hand fighting, only the police retreating and stripping their uniforms off to try and escape.
Could you drop by my blog or send me an email with your thoughts on this.
I don't like the idea that I might have printed a false story or that my source has renamed somebody elses story.
I don't pay for information, but I don't like to think that I'm using ropey information either.
I have a very similar story about 13 chemical plants and a similar number of rioters etc, but my source (A Chinese journalist) gave the village name as Huankantou. They also mentioned nothing about hand to hand fighting, only the police retreating and stripping their uniforms off to try and escape.
Could you drop by my blog or send me an email with your thoughts on this.
I don't like the idea that I might have printed a false story or that my source has renamed somebody elses story.
I don't pay for information, but I don't like to think that I'm using ropey information either.
Does anybody have some really good pictures of the riots in huankantou. Given other concerns, I can't walk in the with a camer without some pretty obvious risks.
Note: I am adding to previous coverage, starting from the Update below. The previous coverage is below the fold, in chronological order. The Huanxi riots are covered in another post.
Update April 20th
* Winston Marshall has a typically thorough look at Asian nationalism - he's optimistic that economic reality will force a reconciliation but not solve the longer term problems.
* Larry Kudlow also examines the China mess, saying America's China policies aren't helping the current tensions (via IP)
* Scott Kirwin says the onus is on China to reign things in.
* Some important upcoming dates to watch in this dispute.
* Thomas Barnett says the lack of US interest in the dispute is a problem and the solution is in Japan's hands. He also says:
Everyone knows the outcome: China will get big, Japan will align its stars increasingly with Beijing in the region, and the US will have to go along with that. But everyone is working against that outcome now in an almost knee-jerk fashion.
My own thoughts: There is a clear disconnect in understanding on both sides. Many Japanese cannot understand the depth of feeling by China. Most Chinese cannot understand why Japan continues to provoke. The way forward is better communication and understanding. The reality of the growing economic ties between the two countries is this understanding will come. As Chinese and Japanese businesses deal together, as Chinese work for Japanese bosses in factories in China, as Chinese provincial and local governments deal with Japanese business, as Chinese tourists travel to Japan and Chinese business venture into the Japanese market. When people start dealing with people, rather than abstract concepts, barriers tend to fall quickly.
The Chinese riots also reflect a major domestic political change. The Chinese Communist Party has long ceased to be a party of Communism. It has instead switched to becoming a party of nationalism. It suits to use such occassions as an outlet to allow people to vent. It would much rather than anger is directed externally than people look inwardly and discuss Government failings, such as the riots in Dongyang (more on them in another post). The problem is China will find it hard to contain the emotions unleashed and that will be to its detriment.
China and Japan are both rising global powers. They are both grappling with China's economic rise but also with their emergence as global rather than only regional players. Sometimes that requires setting aside self-interest for a broader global good. It's an issue the United States constantly grapples with. This time China has a chance to assume the mantle of world statesman and deal with this situation. It makes good sense for Japan to join the UN Security Council. In the longer term it will be to China's benefit to have Japan there. To do that China's Government will have to look far further ahead than they have until now and show a willingness to challenege the Chinese public's perceptions rather than pander to them. At the same time some understanding and political nous for Japan would not go astray. Japan knows the reaction it gets from history texts and shrine visits. It might not understand them but it can deal with them by showing sensitivity.
The major issues here seem insolvable. But what's needed is some hard-headed pragmatism. An agreement to disagree but to work together to avoid such flare-ups would be a start. Actually meaning it would be better. Otherwise everyone in East Asia is a loser.
Other reading 13th April
* Curzon restates his argument why none of the fuss makes sense. Read the whole thing and the excellent comments for an overview of why this is a storm in a teacup from the Japanese side. I don't agree with some of his points but I do agree that it seems unlikely that any form of Japanese contrition will satisfy the Chinese public.
* Foreign Dispatches echoes Curzon's points and notes the intensity of anti-Japanese feeling is increasing with the passage of time.
* China, Japan and South Korea are holding a meeting of senior official on greater regional co-operation. I imagine there is plenty else being discussed. The meeting is slated for April 17th, which Asian Gazette points out is also the anniversary of the end of the first Sino-Japanese war. They also discuss Japan's nuclear potential.
* Joe Jones notes Taiwan is worried about the impact of the riots and the sidestep by China's Foreign Ministry over an apology to Japan over the riots.
* Tanuki Ramble says China is being hypocritical in talking about the past and posts a comparison with Tibet.
* In Korea the dispute with Japan is being played out in the corner of TV screens and in train stations.
* ESWN has a comprehensive post (linked yesterday but it bears relinking) outlining the roots of anti-Japanese feeling in China.
* A chronology of Japan's apologies to Korea.
* Sean has more on Japan's efforts to both inflame and defuse the situation.
* Sometimes the best thing to do is keep your mouth shut: “In Korea, the comfort women are now regularly putting on a performance in front of the Japanese embassy. I’ve heard, however, that they aren’t really comfort women, but North Korean agents." - Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform vice chairman Fujioka Mobukatsu.
* (15:07) ESWN this time looks at the falsification of history in China and translates an article with this conclusion:
Why are the many Chinese historians who are angrily challenging and criticizing the new Japanese history school books not also angrily challenging and openly criticizing the historical lies made up by the Chinese Communists? Worse yet, most of those Chinese historians who are criticizing the Japanese lies had been participants in the vast project of the ideological departments to create these historical lies.
Under these circumstances, you would have to suppose that the Chinese Communists will only lie to fool its own people, while they will respect the historical facts when they speak to the outside world about the Sino-Japanese War. But based upon its consistent record of lying, it is impossible to get anyone to believe that. How can anyone believe that a political regime which lies to its own nationals every day and its official historians will be honest with the outside world?
* China's chatroom warriors have been busy, manipulating a CNN poll on the issue with precise instructions. They must have finished up their work in Zimbabwe early.
* (18:02) Andres puts together an impressive piece that should be read in full, titled 0.3% and the free society. His conclusion:
It does no one any good, least of all China, for any of us to engage in apologetics for an unfree society that exhibits the unhealthy and even dangerous characteristics shown all too vividly these past couple of weeks. Continued indulgence of this lack of freedom is no virtue, criticism of the problems this lack causes is no vice. Unfree societies are dangerous to themselves and to their neighbors. Anti-Japanese riots cannot continue forever: as a social topic this will pass and others will appear. However, the problems associated with an unfree society will still be here and that is the real issue.
Amongst other gems he also notes a point about both these protests and the ones after the Belegrade Embassy bombing in 1999: the students used the protests to test how far they could push the government and if the government proved weak in their response then the topic of the protests would turn domestic. That dovetails with the Huaxi riots, but now it's not just students testing the boundaries and the internet and mobile phones are playing a far bigger role.
* Andres also pointed out a tangentially related piece by Running Dog on being sorry in China.
There's an interesting contrast between East Asia and Europe. Germany was able to face up to and sufficiently atone for its actions in WW2 and in return the rest of Europe and the United States responded by banding together and working for a better future. The past was not forgotten but it was not dwelt on either. The result? A Europe now so united it has created the EU and has the euro. Whatever else you think of the EU (and I'm no fan of much of it) it represents a united Europe, something currently impossible in East Asia. Interestingly China is backing Germany and India's attempts at UNSC seats. Along with Brazil the four countries have a pact to push for a seat together. An impasse seems likely, although there are hints that Germany can provide a knife to cut the Gordian Knot by jointly apologising with Japan, providing a face-saving solution and allowing the reform of the UNSC.
East Asia is instead constantly dwelling on the past at the expense of looking to the future. If you are always looking in the rear view mirror you cannot see the road ahead. The past matters. The future matters more.
Other reading April 15th
* Planned protests (repeated from yesterday): Andrea notes a protest due in Xiamen this weekend; Fons notes the same in Shanghai, and Danwei also has heard of the Shanghai gathering. Jeremy also reports on a planned Shenzhen march. Dan Washburn has the detailed instructions on this weekend's protests in Shanghai including the route, what to throw and how to get there. Interestingly it includes how to disseminate the information and a very interesting "Important" section. There is a protest due in Hong Kong this weekend as well. If China wants to put a lid on this thing, it will need to stop these marches this weekend.
The SCMP notes Shanghai public security authorities have not approved anti-Japan marches for this weekend. Could this be the beginning of the end? Plenty of websites, IMs and SMS messages are spreading the word about this weekend's events. Is China realising the subversive nature of modern communications might not always suit its purpose?
From The Standard, a cartoon that perfectly sums up the situation:
Update April 17th/18th
* China clamped down hard on activists in Beijing, preventing large protests there. But Shanghai saw large protests. Dan Washburn has first hand reports, photos and video. There were reports of protests in around a dozen Chinese cities and the Japanese Foreign Minister's visit to China did little to ease tensions. China refused to apologise to Japan over the "spontaneous" protests. Elton John was right.
* Tom has accounts from Hong Kong and Shenzhen's protests. Fumier estimates more reporters than protesters in Hong Kong, with many of the rest trying to get into Sogo and Japanese restaurants.
* Fons has a comprehensive first hand account of the Shanghai protests. He also notes the continuing silence by the mainland media, following orders from the top. SE Asian Expat has several more first hand photos.
* Photojournalist Philippe Roy has an excellent set of photos from the protests.
* Running Dog is back from holidays just in time. First hand account of the Carnival of Hate and a more reflective piece pointing out that not far below the surface of these protests is a disgusting undercurrent of xenophobia. It was only a month ago it was Condi Rice.
* Chris Myrick was there and recounts his experience and has more than 100 photos of the event. Ian Hamet also has a first hand account of the protests (via IP who also has some photos). He also has thoughts on the implications of the protest. Tom isn't impressed by Ian or his coverage. Updated: Ian responds to Tom's "hissy fit". Powerline links to a couple of wire reports, noting it hasn't been getting much play in the US and stating it's chiefly over Japan's UN Security Council bid. Shouldn't bloggers check out some blogs to get a feel for the issues, especially if it's not getting much coverage by mainstream media in the US?
* Andres Gentry's first person account of the Shanghai protest and he has photos too.
* More reaction (again via IP): Brian Dunn agrees with my view the Communists are becoming nationalists (an irony if ever there was one, especially with the planned visit by the KMT's chairman to sign a "civil war accord" with the CCP). Mudville Gazette notes several other China stories (EU embargo, Japan constitutional changes) and wonders if they are somehow linked to the protest. For mine that's mixing several issues into one giant plot - the EU backed down thanks to US pressure and the anti-secession law.
* Amy takes a look at the actual changes being made in the Japanese texts. ESWN translates a Chinese blogger who has done the same and concludes the best result will be a consensus on this piece of history. He also looks at how history is taught in Hong Kong.
* ESWN notes that even "non-indoctrinated" Hong Kongers have very negative feelings about Japan from this saga. It should be noted that Hong Kong was in fact the start of several anti-Japanese organisations, such as the Diaoyu Islands group. In that sense Hong Kong has been leading the fashion. Reports and coverage of the Hong Kong protests.
* ESWN ponders if the protests are being stage managed or are pontaneous. Given the conflicting signals, ESWN points out the third and most likely explanation: the paranoia theory. Well worth a read because his theory explains far more than just the recent actions and indeed can be seen as a general theory behind much of what the CCP do.
* Jodi notes the contrasting methods of protest between Japan and China.
* Muninn provides a comprehensive listing of Japan's apologies to China.
* Sean wonders what these protests mean for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
* Cicero questions China's claim to moral supremacy over Japan and notes something I pointed out earlier - the use of mobile phones as a key organising and controlling element in these protests. The broader and more interesting points is how far are China's authorities going to allow unauthorised or semi-official protests to go on for? Because the next one might be on a domestic issue rather than a foreign one. Also see the bottom of this post for a pictoral representation of the same idea.
* Joe Jones notes a small protest in Philadelphia's Chinatown.
* Richard wonders if the exercise has been worth it for China.
* Muninn has an excellent essay titled textbook feedback loop and masochistic history which includes this observation: There is NO such thing as apolitical history, NO such thing as doing a history of “just the facts” and completely impossible to exempt oneself from the present when we look at the past. He argues for everyone, including bloggers, to take this opportunity to explore the contradictions of national history itself, rather than fling accusations of hypocrisy at the Chinese or barrages of hateful insult at the growing historical revisionism in Japan. Good advice. Yet again it seems moderation is being drowned out by shrill extremism.
* Quizas has an excellent look at the role of students in the current demonstrations. The conclusion:
It's entirely possible that the students protesting Japan today want to draw upon the lessons of [Dowager Empress] Cixi and encourage the government to be bellicose even at the cost of development. And considering how important Japanese trade and investment is for China, the students are paradoxically calling for their leaders to command a weaker "stronger" China.
It seems to me some of the best analysis and thinking on the current situation is coming from bloggers rather than the op-ed pages of the papers.
* Fons has some practical advice on dealing with the anti-Japan riots for those in business in China.
* Muninn has some translations from Japanese newspapers editorials on the riots.
* Vodkapundit says China has "found its Jews".
* Belgravia Dispatch argues China's current prosperity is a time to face up to its own past to head off potential trouble down the track.
* Oranckay has links to more pictures from the Shanghai protest.
* Todd Crowell dicusses the lessons of history: ...China and Japan have been rivals for the better part of the last thousand years. It should not be surprising that they are still jockeying for primacy in the region. The two countries are still influenced by their common Confucian culture. In Confucian terms, somebody has to be “big brother” and the other “little brother.”
I'm not trying to trivialize the issues that are being protested by the Chinese, but if they are trying to cause change in Japan, maybe some of them can try to talk to their allies in Japan like me instead of trying to force or scare into submission their enemy. A reasonable bridge building effort between activists and experts on both sides to try to address the issues through tactical maneuvers might be useful.
A random off topic comment, but Simon while I was scrolling down I noticed a small mistake on the left menu bar of your blog. Normally I wouldn't have noticed, and I never had before, but a html error caused the text to extend over the colour boundaries. All of this is irrelevant but the attention did lead me to realize that there is a grammatical error in the text. It reads [Praise (Real, Imagined, & Faint). Amusingly enough this is an example of "Engrish" one would normally expect to find in China. Faint is the incorrect word to use in this situation, the proper choice would be feigned. I can see the reason for the error, they are near homonyms and feigned is not generally used often in colloquial English. However the intended definition inferred from the rest of the passage would be of praise that was insincere or facetious. Faint simply does not fit this definition, but the past form of feign does.
It is unfortunate that the Japanese government didn't mention the existing joint study of the Sino-Japanese war going on between a group of historians of China, Japan, and the US (see my notes from one of their meetings muninn.net/blog/2004/02/the-state-of-joint-study-of-the-sino-japanese-war.html)
The program was founded by Ezra Vogel at Harvard and has good funding and has continued for some years. (www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/sino-japanese/)
There is also 2 separate projects: 1) The joint study group between Japanese and Korean historians focusing mostly on disagreements on the details of the 1910 annexation but branching out into issues of textbooks. 2) the transnational history textbook project being worked on by a whole group of East Asian scholars.
As tensions heat up between two of the most powerful Asian nations, with neither willing to 'lose face' by appearing to back down, has Japan just irreversably upped the ante?
In a move certain to further infuriate China, Japan appears to be willing to officially honour those who committed what China believes were 'wartime atrocities'.
There's also a fascinating page of current news articles the rise of China, the collapsing dollar, the
declining U.S. economy, and the New World Order, at http://www.survivalistskills.com/newsitem.htm, which I've been checking daily!
For several weeks, China has been in prey with an effervescence
antijaponaise which becomes extensive. The wave of demonstrations force which, since the beginning of April, extended from Chengdu with Canton then Peijing and Shanghai with the day before of the visit of the Foreign Minister Machimura Nobutoka, had been preceded by a massive campaign on Internet against the candidature of Japan for a
seat of permanent member of the Security Council of UNO, which would come to decrease by as much the privileged position of Peijing on the international scene.
The reason called upon for these demonstrations, very largely
encouraged by the government and an obliging font, would be the incapacity of Japan to recognize the crimes committed during the Second World war, and the authorization of publication granted by the Japanese authorities to a book of history "revisionist". This indeed hard quarrel since the foundation of the People's Republic of China, whose mode sat its legitimacy, to a large extent, on the "large war of liberation against Japan"; but, instead of calming down with the years, whereas Tokyo expressed official excuses via its Murayama Prime Minister in 1995, that the book of history accused is used only per less than 0,1% of the schoolboys, and that Tokyo proposed the constitution of a common historical commission on the model germano-Polish, it tends on the contrary to be radicalized.
It is that for Peijing propaganda hypernationalist, directed
against a scapegoat quiet a long time, constitutes from now on the single source of ideological legitimacy, in particular near an often frustrated youth which does not make any more comparisons between progress of the current period, unequally distributed, and a time Maoist that she did not know and which one hides besides to him tens of million victims. It is indeed frustration, not only of the population, but also of one mode to the power actually limited which this violence directed against Tokyo translates. Whereas Peijing expresses major ambitions on the international scene, asserting the statute of legitimate and natural representative of the Asian pole, multiplying the declarations against inclinations of independence of Taiwan, with the risk to even harm its true interests like showed it
the adoption in full European debate on the lifting of the embargo of the law antisécession registering in the law the legitimacy of the recourse to the force against Taïpeh, the authorities are confronted with the limits of the Chinese power. At the interior, the mode tests enormous difficulties of solving the tensions which increase, in particular in the field of energy and the environment, to meet the fundamental social needs for the population, which it is in terms of teaching, care or retirement. At outside, in spite of the boastings, Peijing knows that its military capacities, in particular naval, remain too limited to enable him to impose its views.
These are these frustrations that also the racist slogans directed
against "the small" Japanese express. The youth of China, worked by the very aggressive historical presentation of its own textbooks, cannot admit that Japan, ex-"tributaire" Empire of China, succeeded, in spite of the defeat of 1945, to rise in the second place of the world economy where it is maintained today with a GDP five times more important than that of the "immense" China. The success of Japan, more still than that of the United States, indeed signs the failure of the Chinese system, which remains centered on itself and last rancours. The success of Japan also repeats humiliations of China when, as of the era Meiji, Tokyo caught up with in a few tens of years the Western
powers, of which it was going to follow with the dramatic consequences that one knows the model of colonial conquests, whereas Empire of China, incompetent to reform itself, was inserted in the rout.
But it is another frustration which also these demonstrations
antijaponaises express, which make fear with the capacity of the
overflows which could reach it directly and which pushed Peijing to prohibit this weekend any demonstration on the place of Tiananmen. At the sides of the attacks against the Japanese "pigs", other signs indeed appeared proclaiming that "patriotism is legal", thus condemning by advance very possible repression. The effective repression of any organized political opposition remains indeed the absolute rule of the Chinese mode since 1989. In this context, the claim of the right to express and to be opposed in the name of "patriotism" is potentially dangerous for a system on the defensive, which faces many dissatisfactions which usually do not find the possibility of being expressed massively.
Last lesson, finally, the violence of the demonstrations
antijaponaises directed against the Japanese goods to China, whereas Peijing is today the second trade partner of the Archipelago, that more than 16 000 Japanese companies are installed there, that 50 billion dollars are invested there, can only make reflect the foreign investors who a long time chose to deny the "China risk" behind the apparent stability of an authoritative mode.
Seizing all the pretexts, sportsmen, energy competitions at sea of Eastern China or territorial disagreements, the tensions between China and Japan could thus be only worsening, quite simply because, far from being justified in the past according to official theses', they have very to actually see with the future and the way in which the Chinese mode tries to ensure its power in Asia vis-a-vis Japan which asserts its "normality today". In this context, only a major systemic upheaval in China would make it possible, as Mao wrote it, to make close-cropped table of the past to set out again on the basis of new
regional co-operation true.
* Director of the Observatory of the strategies Chinese and Asian of the Iris.
Before diving into the meat of this post, I'd like to mention a new blog focussed on China matters: Fabian's Hammer. On the Asian blogroll and interesting posts such as questioning Chinese nationalism and its implications.
Which segues nicely into the thought-provoking post by Joe at Winds of Change on the same question: China's growing nationalist movement. This is a follow up from Joe's post on neo-fascism and China's future and was sparked by the same Globe and Mail article that Fabian discussed above: China Nationalist Fervour Runs Amok. As an aside, kudos to the Globe and Mail for such an extensive and intelligent series of articles on China.
Joe poses a set of questions about the potential for nationalism and fascism to overrun China and what that might mean. I strongly recommend you read the post and follow the interesting set of links Joe has compiled.
Before I add my $0.02 to the pile I'd note it is important to keep China's history and culture in mind, rather than viewing it through a "Western" mindset. China for literally hundreds or even thousands of years was a feudal kingdom but with key differences to what would be viewed as fascist today. For example the national civil service examination system usually prevented wealthy and powerful families from cementing their influence and allowed for a merit based system of promotion, regardless of wealth and station. Also while it may not seem like it, in fact the current rulers of China are similar in format and nature to China's historical political structure. It was the unsettled years at the end of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Nationalist Government that were the aberration in Chinese history, not the current system. Another mitigating factor against the rise of fascism is China's vastness. While reasonably (albeit not totally) homogenous in race, China is a massive country with wide differences between regions. What appears to be strong central rule is actually more like an overall co-ordinating body that the various provinces report and pay tribute to, again like China of old. China's provincial and local governments remain strong and tolerant of central rule only so long as it benefits the regions in turn. The imposition of a structure akin to World War 2 fascist states such as Germany or Italy would simply not work in China.
China is a proud country with a long history. Like many countries with a great deal of homogeniety, racism and nationalism is commonplace. This is because there is little sense of "other". For example Hong Kong recently introduced anti-discrimination laws that are discriminatory. Indeed even that law is progress compared to the blatant and open racism that occurs in mainland China against non-Han Chinese. In fact there have been articles in Chinese papers arguing racism can be legitimate. This naturally leads to a fierce nationalism that explains, for example, why China's population is firmly behind in the leadership in aggressively dealing with Taiwan. The same fierce nationalism true of other Asian countries, for example Japan. Combined with Asia's difficult history (not just modern, either) you can begin to understand the competing forces at play in the region, as shown lately in the Japanese push for a UN Security Council seat. Nationalism is nothing new, especially in China. It is, in fact, a thousand year old force that has been vital in seeing China become a nation despite a turbulent history. Is it growing worse? Not as far as I can tell. So long as the Taiwan issue burns so brightly that will remain the main outlet for Chinese nationalist fervour. If (when?) Taiwan and China reach a settlement under some kind of reunion, then it may be time to worry about China's further nationalist aims. But in such a huge country that is safely content with its existing boundaries, the only extension of further nationalism will be to turn China into another superpower.
The China as superpower debate is often bandied about without reliance on the facts. Jacques Chirac as recently as a few weeks ago was in China, showing French arms and quietly bandying the idea of Europe and China emerging as counterweights to US "hegemony" (I hate that word). It may one day happen that China will rival the USA. But that day is a long way into the future. Militarily and economically China is a long way from catching up to anything near the USA's levels. China's leadership knows it, even if they don't actively talk the idea down. It flatters China's place in the world, but it is an emerging global power, but nothing more. The recent G8 meeting and China's attendance are testimony to that.
There are good reasons to think that China's populace would not put up with damaging nationalism. For example the growing middle class know their future is tied to greater integration and trade with the world, not retreat from it. China's deliberate merchantilism ties China's fate intimiately with the USA's, at least economically. China holds the second highest amount of US dollars as reserves in the world, after Japan: something like US$450 billion. This is invested in US Treasuries and the like; China has no interest in seeing this money being blown away by its own moves. The only issue that has the potential to force China beyond its own economic interests is Taiwan, which can be viewed as an internal Chinese issue. As an extension of nationalism it would come at great economic cost - a price the country might be prepared to pay, but a cost nonetheless.
The difference between Chinese nationalism and those of European countries in the leadup to WW2 is whereas those countries were trying to recapture past political and economic glories, China is attaining this glory in a global sense for the first time. It is coming off a much lower base and has a huge amount to go before it ever rivals Western levels.
China has constraints on its growth that Joe alludes to in his posting. The potential remains for China to become more assertive on the global stage, especially to defend its energy security and economic growth. Already the world is seeing some of the results of China's growth in higher commodity and oil prices. China's environment is a mess and the rapid depletion of water tables, droughts and over-cultivation are all problems the country is dealing with. The rapid migration from country to city and the large and growing gaps in wealth between these two are large factors in China's future. But again all of these are internal domestic issues, not factors that will drive a sense of nationalism. Now that China has adopted a path of market economics (after a fashion) it will continue to grow and catch up to the rest of the world, even though as Joe mentiosn there are no doubt going to be hiccups on the way. But to put the gap into perspective, even if China outgrows America by 6% on average every year, it will take 176 years to catch up in terms of GDP. At the same time America will not stand still, waiting for China to catch up in military and political terms. That will continue to remain a check on any growing Chinese ambitions.
Joe also asks if the CCP is keeping the nationalist movement on a leash to use to its own ends. To me this is muddled thinking (with all due respect). China's Communist Party is a nationalist movement and has been since its founding. Now that to a large extent Communism has been dismantled in China you can argue that it is only a nationalist movement that serves to unify a wide and varying country.
Originally Joe postulated:
...I was asked about threats to the future peace and stability of the world. Islamofascism was #1, of course, but I also spent a bit of time explaining my worries about one possible future for China: a future of state capitalism under dictatorial control, a strong need for external resources to fuel that economy, carefully fostered xenophobia, a legacy of belief in the racial superiority of Chinese peoples, a major demographic problem in an excess of young males, and the meme that China is being cheated of its rightful place in the world. Germany's history in the 20th century teaches us what this combination portends.
Until his final sentence he hits the key issues facing China in the years ahead. Where I disagree is that the lessons of Germany can tell us what is in store for China. China is unlike any Western country and its future will not be an imitation of modern Western history. I for one don't see Chinese nationalism as a dangerous element in the world in the years ahead, with the notable exception of Taiwan. But Joe has posted a set of interesting questions that deserve consideration and debate.
I don't even know where to begin in describing all the things wrong with this article. Let's start with the idea that, as you put, "it will take 176 years to catch up in terms of GDP". This is nonsense. 30 seconds in Excel should disprove it for anyone. If the US grows at 3% annually while China grows 9% annually, using CIA Factbook GDP numbers (By PPP), with the US having roughly $11 trillion and China roughly $6 trillion in GDP for 2004, you will have China outweighing the US in just _11_ YEARS. Perhaps you are referring to GDP per capita? That would be a mistake as well. Germany was far poorer than the US in 1939, but still managed to put together a world-class fighting machine and industrial economy. It doesn't matter what the individual wealth of a Chinese person is, what matters is China's aggregrate wealth used for military/industrial purposes.
China is now the #1 producer of steel and coal in the world, among many other industrial products. It is already one of the largest car markets (from nothing in less than 10 years). The only thing that China lacks is technology, and that is rapidly being siphoned off from Japan, South Korea and the US through deceptive joint partnerships. Constraints on military technology transfer are the only thing that can hamper China's rise to a military superpower, and those constraints are being worn away by countries such as France. Putting your hope in commercial interests to reign in Chinese fascism is also foolhardy. Germany and France conducted a lot of trade before WW1. Wars are often fuelled by emotion, so no amount of reason regarding commercial interests will hold them back, regardless of how many US Treasury notes the Chinese government holds.
I'm not happy about it either, but face facts here. China doesn't have to look like Orange County in order to be a huge threat. It can still be a vastly poor country and yet become the most powerful nation on Earth. If Chinese fascists start a fight with the US in 2020, it will not be a fight the US can win. Mind you, probably neither side could win, given nuclear weapons, but Americans are far more constrained by their morality and political system in the use of weapons than the Chinese.
Pray for a slow democratic revolution like in South Korea, because the numbers are not pretty otherwise.
Posted by Mat Krepicz at October 30, 2004 01:02 AM
Mat:
I wonder if you've ever actually been to China? You are right that total wealth matters more than per capita GDP in terms of military might. China is hugely behind the developed world, even with its current rapid growth. It is coming of an extremely low base. It is also nothing like Germany in the lead up to WW2. Firstly there is no Treaty of Versailles. Secondly the world is a very different places, far more linked both economically and militarily. Thirdly you assume China has expansionary aims. Chinese nationalism, such that it exists, is about keeping the country together. The country has no expressed desire to expand its borders, or for a "greater" China outside of the Taiwan question. Your idea that "Chinese fascists start a fight with the US in 2020" is difficult to fathom. On what basis would China seek to do this? China holds literally hundreds of billions of dollars of US dollars and Treasuries...and when it comes to money Chinese aren't stupid.
China will become a powerful nation by dint of its huge population and economic growth, as will its neighbour India. But the world doesn't stand still waiting for them to catch up. China's military is huge but bloated and lacking massively in military technology. Numerically China will become the biggest market in various products, but it still has 700 million peasants earning barely enough to live. Its leadership is more interested in raising living standards than military adventurism.
Personally I think China's political system will have to evolve given the pressures that growing living standards will exert. I agree that military technology should be controlled when it comes to China, partly to retain the security balance and partly because China has been suspect in proliferation in the past.
What I don't see is any sign of Chinese fascism. I also don't see anything in your comments that actually takes issue with my original post. You can either fear China or engage with it; I don't see anything to fear.
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