Knowing China - The China Studies Blog

Beijing easing its one-child policy

2011-04-01T11:28:00.001+08:00

Some couples won't be fined for having a second child The policy is also blamed for the country's skewed sex ratio, given Chinese families' preference for sons. The male-female ratio at birth is about 119 males to 100 females. BEIJING: Married couples in Beijing will be allowed to have a second child without having to pay a huge fine under new population guidelines.In a move seen as a small first step towards a gradual easing of China's strict family planning policy, couples who come from one- child families will be fined only if:

The mother is under 28 years old when she has the second child;

and The child is born before the older sibling turns four.

Previously, a Beijing couple flouting any one of the two conditions would have had to pay a sum amounting to 20 per cent of their annual income.Not all couples, however, will be exempted. For example, in cases where one spouse or both spouses do not come from one- child families, the couple will be discouraged from having a second child.

China's family planning policy limits urban couples to one child and rural couples to two, and officials have said there are no plans to relax the policy nationwide.The policy has been credited with curbing the country's population growth in the past 30 years. However, it has also created new problems such as gender imbalance and a rapidly growing proportion of elderly Chinese.The policy is also blamed for the country's skewed sex ratio, given Chinese families' preference for sons. The male-female ratio at birth is about 119 males to 100 females.

Of particular concern are low birth rates in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where couples are deterred by the high cost of raising a child.Despite growing calls for China to loosen its one-child policy, the official position is that there are no plans to change it any time soon. But some people such as Professor Mu Guanzong do not think that the more relaxed guidelines go far enough.

Prof Mu, an expert in population research at Peking University, said the new rules for Beijing were an improvement but were not enough to correct China's population imbalances or raise fertility rates.Prof Mu called instead for a relaxation of the family planning policy throughout China and for every couple to be allowed to have two children.The country's current average fertility rate is between 1.4 and 1.8, but its replacement fertility rate - which is the number of children a woman needs to bear for a population to sustain itself - is 2.1, according to Prof Mu. Former university professor Yang Zhizhu, who was fired from his post last year because he and his wife had a second child and refused to pay a fine of more than 240,000 yuan (S$46,200), saw little reason to praise the latest changes.

Making couples pay huge fines for having a second child is in itself legally unjust, he told China Daily on Wednesday.Meanwhile, other cities are considering relaxing the policy.Guangzhou Daily reported early last month that the southern Chinese province of Guangdong would be seeking the central government's approval to allow couples to have a second child.

Mr Wang Yuqing, deputy director of the Committee for Population, Resources and Environment under the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said China may adjust its family planning policy in the next few years.He noted that birth rates in major Chinese cities have been falling over the years and that the number of working adults has begun to decrease since 2009. A gradual relaxation of the policy, allowing couples to have a second child, will not lead to a sudden jump in population, Mr Wang said.

CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Questions for thought:

1) would this rectification to the one child policy be effective?

J2 Home Based Learning Exercise

2011-03-18T10:36:00.002+08:00

Source A Over the three decades of reform and opening-up, China has evolved its own growth mode that aims to achieve development through scientific approaches based upon China's national conditions and the international situation, analysts said. The essence of such a growth mode is to seek a balance between development, stability, equity and clean environment. China has greatly enhanced its overall national strength and "turned out to be an economic giant" through three decades of development, said Prof. Arnold van Zyl, vice president of SouthAfrica's Stellenbosch University. The fact that China has maintained an annual GDP growth of over 9 percent over the last 20 years proves that the nation has found a way of sustainable development, the Colombian ambassador to China, Guillermo Ricardo Velez said. Meanwhile, the country has also managed to create a friendly international environment for its swift development, he added. While sparing no efforts in advancing economic growth, China has also attached great importance to the sustainability of its development and is striving to achieve harmony between man and nature. China's endeavor to enhance environmental protection, energy-saving and gas emission-cut and build a resource-conserving society is of great significance to the world, said Klaus Toepfer, former chief of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore also said at the 2008 Poznanclimate summit that China has mobilized a national effort to introduce CO2 reduction initiatives, and has already begun the largest treeplanting programme the world has ever seen. China's rapid development is attributed to its stable social and political environment, whereas its national stability stems from the Chinese government's efforts to establish a harmonious society.

Adapted from “Commentary : China’s Scientific Development Works to Counter Economic Downturn” in Xinhua on March 8, 2009 Source B As Davis and Henderson (2003) observed, “(u)rbanisation and economic development go hand in-hand as a country moves from a rural-agricultural base to an urban-industrial base”. As a result, infrastructure development has become a fundamental driving force in China’s recent growth.

However, the large scale rural-urban migration also poses enormous challenges for the government. Many small cities and towns are now emerging, sprawling over previously arable land and reducing the amount of this scarce resource available (at 0.095 hectares per capita, China’s level of arable land is already less than half the world average). The absolute decline in the quantity of arable land, coupled with lower growth rates among township and village enterprises (TVEs) since the 1990s, has put further pressure on rural employment and thereby strengthened the ‘push’ forces for urbanization. The growing number of jobless and landless peasants presents a major concern for social stability, demanding firm measures to protect peasants’ rights effectively in economic transition. Those who do migrate into urban areas are often poorly paid and cannot enjoy the privileges that urban residents enjoy, such as state-subsidised unemployment and retirement benefits, schooling and medical care. This is largely because urban governments often view migrant workers as ‘belonging’ to their place of origin. This attitude and the lack of institutional support pose various social and political problems for migrant workers in urban areas, such as general discrimination, constraints on jobs, legal vulnerabilities (lack of social protection) , lack of access to services, and vulnerability to crimes.

Adapted from “Rapid Urbanisation and Implications for Growth” by Ligang Song and ShengYu http://epress.anu.edu.au/cb/pdf/ch07.pdf Answer all the following questions. (a) With reference to Source A, explain the advantages of the China’s development model.

(b) To what extent are Sources B and A useful in showing that “China’s economic rise is too rapid for the country to cope”?

Please Email answer to my Email Address

The Dating Surplus for Chinese Women

2011-01-20T09:10:00.001+08:00

Marina Adshade on December 31, 2010, 10:00 AM
http://bigthink.com/ideas/26367

A while back, we talked about why it is that so many educated women in urban centers can’t find a man (Sexless in The City). In countries like China, where there is a huge surplus of men, finding a partner shouldn’t be difficult for women. I thought I would post a letter I received this week from Niko Bell who tells me that for Chinese women finding a man is not as easy as we might think:

Hi Marina,
I liked your article. I hope we really do see the movement on the ground that you give the policy credit for. Given that men outnumber women in China by a reasonable margin, you would think that women would have an easy time picking out mates. Not always the case, many of my friends tell me.
According to projections by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this year will see 23 million more Chinese men of marriageable age than women. The fault mostly lies with gender-specific abortions in a culture that still values male babies over female. This era should be a great time to be a Chinese woman, with lots of potential partners to choose from. As it turns out, however, some women are still ending up lonely. To understand why, there are a few things that you need to know about finding a mate in China.
First, wealth matters. Many Chinese women place high value on a husband with money and stability. In a now famous moment from a Chinese dating show, a female contestant rejected a suitor with the iconic line, "I would rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle."
Second, men have to marry downwards. It is humiliating for a Chinese man to be married to a woman with a higher or even equal income. Instead, men prefer to marry women slightly below them on the social ladder.

Third, the Chinese social strata are distinct and significant. For the first time this year, words like "Jia man" and "Yi woman" became officially recognized words in the Chinese lexicon. Jia men and women are rich businesspeople and professionals. Yi's are middle class people with stable jobs. Then come Bing's, lower class city folk and relatively well off country folk. Then come Ding's, poor country folk or factory workers - the lowest of the low. As we learned above, Jia men prefer Yi women, Yi men prefer Bing women, and Bing men prefer Ding women.
Life is good for Ding women. If they are attractive enough, they have a good chance of marrying upwards into Bing families in the city. The poor Ding men, especially in the country where the gender divide is most evident, are left in a bind. Their own women are disappearing, and marrying upwards would be a humiliation. Even if a Ding man got over his pride, it would be hard for him to find a Bing woman who would take him over all the available Bing and Yi men. Of those 23 million bachelors, most of them will be found here, among poor men in the countryside.
There is one other group, however, that finds itself left out of this game of social musical chairs: Jia women. Jia men are usually rich enough to afford a stay at home wife, which is preferable, so they take their pick of Yi women. Yi men may need money a little more, but not enough to suffer the humiliation of a wife with a higher income. Thus, the poor Jia woman finds herself unable to find a mate by virtue of her high income.

There is little chance of convincing any of these left over men and women to get together. If, however, you are a successful man looking for a career oriented woman, or a woman looking for an old fashioned life in the rice fields, you know where to go.

Cheers,
Niko

Niko Bell studies Journalism at the University of King's College. He first travelled to China on a whim in 2006, and has since gone back three times to teach, travel, study, and enter reality TV shows. He is now taking a year away from Halifax to study Mandarin at the University of Nanjing. Niko also writes for the Dalhousie Gazette.

The MASSIVE ANNUAL HUMAN Migration

2011-01-19T15:04:00.002+08:00

Hi guys,

A follow up on what we were discussing during our 8 minutes in China.

"China's massive annual migration begins "

Straits Times Singapore Jan 19, 2011

SHANGHAI - THE world's biggest annual migration of people began in China on Wednesday as millions of travellers boarded trains and buses across the country to journey home for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

The Ministry of Transport said the number of separate passenger trips on the country's trains, planes, boats and buses is expected to reach 2.556 billion - 11.6 per cent more than last year, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Although the week-long holiday, also known as the Spring Festival, officially begins on Feb 3, demand for tickets is so high many travel weeks in advance. The festival travel season is expected to end on Feb 27.Most of the passengers are migrant workers who travel home to see their families only once a year for the country's most important holiday. The number of passenger trips has risen steeply from 1.66 billion a decade ago, Xinhua said.

'Sound economic growth is the reason for the increase. Higher incomes and better transport facilities make it easier for people to travel,' Mr Xu Guangjian, deputy dean of Renmin University's School of Public Administration in Beijing, was quoted as saying.

An average of 2,265 trains per day will carry holiday travellers over the period, deputy railway minister Wang Zhiguo said, adding nearly 300 additional trains were enlisted to carry a record 230 million passengers expected over the peak period, state media reported. -- AFP

Some questions that came to mind:

Since it's still 2 weeks before CNY, with so many people going home, who is going to work?
Can the Chinese Economy afford the shut down??if so why?

MOONCAKES and CORRUPTION wow!

2010-09-22T11:11:00.003+08:00

Bribery? It's a piece of mooncake
'Tis the season of giving in China, and the fancy boxes may contain more than delectable treats
By Grace Ng, China Correspondent

A Beijing department store is selling mooncakes made of gold ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival. They are as big as the real thing and come in 30 designs. -- PHOTO: CHINA FOTO PRESS

BEIJING: Families in China celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival today even as the government continues its struggle to contain the unsavoury side of the industry.

The multibillion-dollar sector has been infused with extravagance, scams and corruption in the past decade.

As mooncake sales this year jumped 50 per cent from last year to hit 14 billion yuan (S$2.8 billion), the authorities are worried that the festival has become just an excuse for bribery.

The fancy boxes have been known to contain more than just pastry. Gold bars, designer watches, fine wine and even gold Buddha statuettes have all been found packed next to the mooncakes.

In July, Beijing issued rules to improve pricing and quality and to force mooncake makers to cut down on packaging.

The government has been trying to control the industry since 2004, when it arrested officials who took advantage of the festival to accept and offer bribes.

But excessive mooncake-giving persists, with shops taking their businesses to the less-policed cyberworld. They thrive as mooncakes are no longer just for consumption.

This is especially the case for corporate bodies, both local and foreign, which see the festival as the most important season of giving in China.

Mr Sheng Tao, 46, a Beijing-based manager, said his firm spent 16,000 yuan on 160 boxes of mooncakes for clients.

'We need to do this every year to build business guanxi (connections),' he said. 'It's hard to say whether giving mooncakes amounts to corruption or wastage. But, right now, it's difficult to find any better way of expressing goodwill than through mooncakes.'

The problem goes beyond corruption. Since last week, Beijing's traffic jams have dragged on for hours as companies rushed to make the deliveries.

And 'fake' mooncakes have appeared: pastries purportedly made by top chefs were actually baked by others, and mooncakes boasting expensive ingredients such as ginseng, bird's nest and foie gras were just flavoured artificially.

But things are not likely to get better as younger Chinese are enthusiastic about splurging on this tradition.

Some 55 per cent of 5,000 executives surveyed by recruitment agency zhaopin.com said they will spend 200 yuan to 1,000 yuan on mooncakes this year.

Ms Li Cuiping, 22, said: 'Mid-Autumn Festival is sort of like China's Christmas. Without the nice wrapping paper and goodies, it wouldn't feel the same.'

graceng@sph.com.sg

Additional reporting by Lina Miao

QUESTIONS:

Why is the practise of giving mooncake so important in China?
How does this article show that "guanxi" is still a very relevant concept in Chinese society today?

Yet Another Article on PLA

2010-07-01T09:52:00.001+08:00

Loveless Chinese troops banned from online dating
By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Writer Anita Chang, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jun 30, 4:54 am ET

BEIJING – What will the lonely hearts of the People's Liberation Army do now?

Rigid restrictions on Internet usage imposed this month on the 2.3 million-strong Chinese armed services are sure to cramp the already lackluster social lives of the predominantly young, male force. Online dating was given the boot, along with blogs, personal websites and visits to Internet cafes.

It may seem harsh and out of touch, particularly for troops posted in remote regions of China who have little contact with the civilian world. But military experts said restraints are necessary to avoid comprising security for a Chinese military that prizes secrecy.

"Some soldiers leaked military secrets when chatting online, for instance, giving away troop locations. Certainly a large amount of secrets were revealed this way and the regulation has just blocked the hole," said Ni Lexiong, a military expert at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.

Plus, Ni said, "matchmaking for soldiers can be conducted in more serious ways, such as through introductions from families, friends, or their work units."

China is just the latest country to wrestle with the sticky issue of Internet freedoms for its military, trying to find a balance between the demands of Web-savvy troops, who as civilians were used to sharing personal details online, and the need to maintain security.

After years of back and forth, the U.S. Department of Defense now promotes use of social media by everyone from privates on the front line to generals at the Pentagon as a way of spreading its message. For example, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has 20,000 followers on Twitter.

Most other countries fall somewhere in between.

"Cyberspace has been a gray area. This is a tricky issue because it straddles both personal and professional space," said Ho Shu Huang, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

"The military is a reflection of society and how it responds will be a result of that. So in more closed societies, it's easier for the military to say, 'Don't do anything. Don't talk online. That's that,'" he said.

Countries such as Britain and Israel allow troops to post personal information online, as long as it does not compromise military operations. The open approach has not always worked for Israel.
The Israeli military scrapped a raid on a West Bank village earlier this year after a soldier revealed the time and location of the operation on his Facebook page. In 2008, a soldier attached to an elite Israeli intelligence unit was sentenced to 19 days in jail after uploading a photograph taken on his base to Facebook.

The Chinese Internet prohibitions are a brief part of lengthy internal affairs regulations issued by the Communist Party's Central Military Affairs Commission.

"Seeking marriage partners, jobs or making friends through the public media is not permitted. Going online in local Internet cafes is not permitted," the regulation states. "Opening websites, home pages, blogs and message forums on the Internet is not permitted."

It was not clear if troops would be completely cut off from social networking sites. The regulations do not apply to civilians serving in military research and training academies.
It's also not known how authorities in China plan to enforce the restrictions. The regulations, posted on the Ministry of National Defense's website, did not say how troops would be punished for transgressions. Phones rang unanswered at the ministry's information office and questions submitted by fax were not answered.

Yet the prohibitions seem out of step in a wired society with 400 million overwhelmingly young Internet users in a country hurtling toward prosperity and global power.

"(The policy) is regressive in its understanding of technology, regressive in generational attitudes and regressive in transparency and attitudes we have of leading powers in the 21st century," said Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Chinese social networking sites and instant messaging programs are wildly popular. Young Chinese office workers chat online with friends throughout the work day. Internet cafes in small towns are packed with youngsters playing games. Ni, the Chinese military affairs expert, said in the past soldiers had been allowed to visit Internet cafes in plainclothes and some had become addicted to the pastime.

The stipulation that troops cannot "make friends through the public media" is likely to be unpopular. In recent decades, rank-and-file soldiers often drawn from poorer rural families and until recent years paid miserably have found it hard to find spouses.

A blog apparently written by a paramilitary soldier which has not been updated since the new rules took effect on June 15 features a poem titled "We Are Still Single."

The Internet has been a boon, with a proliferation of unregulated online dating sites targeting military men.

The Chinese military now plans to attack that problem the way it did decades ago, when it arranged socials between military units and civilian work outfits with heavily female work forces such as textile factories. A report on a military news website said the Xigaze Military District in central Tibet is working with the local government and women's federation to help troops find partners.

Ho, the researcher in Singapore, said the restrictions are meant to prevent people from getting an inside look at the military. He said security lapses don't usually involve highly classified information, but rather small details that intelligence agents can use to piece together a larger picture about an operation or a unit.

"Most intelligence is based on really, really mundane stuff. History is replete with examples: the color of the sand, the types of uniforms they're wearing, the kinds of vehicles being deployed, the number of people and what they're wearing, whether they have facial hair, stuff like that," he said. "That's what militaries are concerned about, people piecing bits and pieces together."
___
Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed to this report.

War games show PLA navy's strength

2010-04-19T08:52:00.004+08:00

The Straits Times Singapore

Apr 19, 2010
Impressive exercises send clear message to region that China unafraid to test its reach

HONG KONG: Chinese navy warships have been conducting war games unprecedented in their reach and scope, South China Morning Post said yesterday.

Over the weekend, the East Sea Fleet - with its crack Sovremenny class destroyers, frigates and submarines - was exercising south-east of Japan's strategic offshore islands, the Hong Kong-based newspaper reported, citing various sources.

The fleet steamed through the so-called First Island Chain - the United States-dominated stronghold that links Japan to Taiwan and the Philippines - and is practising anti-submarine warfare manoeuvres.

The ships moved out through the Miyako Strait just days after a North Sea Fleet flotilla sailed in the other direction on its return from a 'confrontation exercise' deep in the disputed South China Sea, said the Post.

That flotilla, comprising destroyers, frigates and auxiliary ships and air cover, sailed some 19 days and covered 6,000 nautical miles, including the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan.

They stopped at a Chinese base and early warning radar station at the Spratly Islands' Fiery Cross reef, the site of a past sea battle between Chinese and Vietnamese ships.

Recently, too, the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions have been running extensive long-range exercises with command planes, bombers and attack aircraft. The manoeuvres have featured stealth and night flying, radar-jamming electronic warfare and multiple mid-air refuellings, as well as simulated bombing raids in the South China Sea.

'We've never seen anything on this scale before - they are finally showing us they can put it all together,' said one Asian defence attache monitoring the developments.

'These types of manoeuvres require extensive command and control capabilities, linking various assets in conflict situations - it is all about communication and flexibility.'

Another noted that while People's Liberation Army (PLA) ships had moved through the island chain in the past, the Chinese navy had never mounted such coordinated action involving both ships and submarines.

Likewise, multiple mid-air refuellings of J-10, JH-7 and J-8 fighter planes from long-range tanker planes had not been seen before.

The exercises are of broader strategic and diplomatic importance, the Post said, as they show China is unafraid to assert its rights of free passage to move beyond foreign naval bases that could contain it, such as the American base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. The island sits on the Miyako Strait.

Two submarines and eight vessels were spotted earlier this month about 140 km south-west of Okinawa, the first time Japan has confirmed the presence of Chinese submarines and such a large number of vessels in the area.

Japanese defence officials acknowledged that China had not violated international law with its recent movements; China said its ships were only training.

Mr Gary Li, a PLA specialist at the London-based Institute of International and Strategic Studies, said: 'We've seen annual exercises at this time, but nothing at all like this.

'It must send a very clear message to the region that it should be prepared to see a China unafraid to really test its reach and move into new areas.'

But the PLA navy's operations in the area of the disputed Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea have also alarmed Vietnam.

Vietnam, like China, claims all the islands as its own. Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines claim parts of the Spratlys chain.

Vietnam has been particularly active, exploring a new military relationship with the US while also purchasing six Kilo class submarines from Russia.

And Japan is boosting its intelligence resources devoted to China's growing military, which it considers the top national security concern, the business daily Nikkei reported yesterday.

The defence ministry-affiliated National Institute for Defence Studies has established a task force of six researchers to examine China's national security strategy, the daily said.

It will study the strategic thinking guiding the PLA, the purpose of its recent military buildup and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, the daily added.

Questions to Ponder:
Doesn't this resonate with what we were discussing in class last friday?

How do you think China's neighbours feel about the intensity of the PLA military exercises?

What are the implications of a militarily ready China or a China who is on the verge of engaging in a "limited war"?

What does this say about the diplomacy stance of the Chinese?

Balancing Domestic Politics and International Role

2010-04-16T08:26:00.003+08:00

The Straits Times, Singapore
Apr 16, 2010
CHINA QUAKE TRAGEDY
Chinese leaders cut trips

PRESIDENT Hu Jintao has cut short his visit to Latin America to rush back to China, while Premier Wen Jiabao has postponed a visit to South-east Asia next week.

Describing Wednesday's earthquake that killed more than 610 people in Qinghai province as a 'huge calamity', Mr Hu told reporters in Brazil: 'That is why I decided to bring forward my return to China.'

Mr Hu and the other leaders of the world's top four emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China (Bric) were in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia to discuss global economic issues and trade promotion.

The Bric summit was brought forward by a day so that Mr Hu could leave last night, Brazilian officials said.

The foursome were expected to push their demands that the Bric and other developing countries be given more say in global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Mr Hu also postponed his planned weekend visits to Venezuela and Chile to return to China to deal with the earthquake in north-western Qinghai province.

Mr Wen arrived in Yushu county, the earthquake zone, yesterday to inspect quake relief efforts and visit the earthquake victims. The Premier was scheduled to visit Indonesia, Brunei and Myanmar from April 22 to 25.

REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Questions to Ponder:

Compare China's current role in international politics versus how it used to react in th 1970s-1980s
What is the impact of having top officials rushing back to inspect relief efforts?What are they trying to achive?

Something of Interest, J2s! look what happened to your favourite artist

2010-03-26T11:08:00.002+08:00

I just Stumbled on this going through the internet for articles on Theme 4 . What are your thoughts on this?? Please comment

"Chinese artist blames police beating for brain injury" by CBC news on Sunday, September 20, 2009

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is recovering from surgery in Germany after suffering a brain injury he says was inflicted by police in China.

The artist, who has posted pictures of himself on Twitter, said a surgeon in Munich told him he needed immediate surgery because of bleeding in the intercranial cavity between his brain and skull.The 52-year-old artist had the operation Monday.

The avant-garde Beijing-based artist is in Germany ahead of his October exhibit there. He said he'd suffered dizziness ever since being punched in the head and detained in a hotel in Sichuan province in August.

Twenty uniformed and plainclothes police converged on the hotel where he was staying and threatened to kill him, he said. Ai has been a public critic of the Chinese government's version of events over the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 in which 87,000 people died or were never accounted for. At least 5,000 of them were schoolchildren.

Many blame poorly constructed schools that collapsed during the catastrophe. Ai has been collecting and publicizing the names of all the students who died in the quake. The artist said he was back in Chengdu, Sichuan, to testify as a witness in a case involving fellow quake researcher Tan Zuoren, who is charged with subversion and revealing state secrets.

Ai was also there to continue his research on the names of children who died in the quake.
"The authorities were very nervous and tried to prevent us from doing our research," Ai told German magazine Spiegel last month about his experiences in Sichuan.

Ai's exhibition "So Sorry," at Munich's Haus der Kunst, will open Oct. 12 as planned, according to the museum, which sent out a statement about his injury. His work has been exhibited around the world, including the Venice Biennale.Ai was the original designer of the massive Olympic Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest, but then distanced himself from it and the Games.

Google decides foreign policy in China

2010-03-26T11:05:00.001+08:00

By Kimberly Jorgensen for Baltimore Foreign Policy Examiner
March 24, 1:18 PM

Who makes foreign policy? The textbook answer would of course be that the federal government makes foreign policy. But that answer is only partially true, as Google’s recent announcement regarding its operations in China shows.

The question of cyber privacy has been a big issue in US Chinese foreign policy for the last several years, as US companies such as Google and Yahoo created Chinese search engines. In 2006 and 2007, Yahoo was brought before the US Congress twice with regards to its Chinese operations after the communist party convicted journalist Shi Tao, a leading human rights activist in China, of illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities. Chinese law enforcement officers required Yahoo to turn over certain information used in Shi Tao’s prosecution. While Yahoo did not break any US laws in supplying this information to the Chinese police, it did receive much criticism throughout the US, including from Congress.

Since this event, it appears that the Chinese government is no longer content with merely asking for information. In December 2009, according to the official Google blog, over twenty US companies operating in China have been subject to sophisticated cyber attacks that appear to have emanated from the Chinese government. Google’s investigation determined that the attack was aimed at retrieving access to the gmail accounts of several prominent Chinese human rights activists.

On January 12, 2010 Google announced that it may shut down its China operations. Two days ago, Google announced their final decision: that they were shutting down mainland China operations and allowing uncensored searches in simplified Chinese through its Hong Kong servers.

The US government’s response to Google’s January accusations was to ask the Chinese government for an explanation. The millions of dollars that the US spends in China on human rights and the inter-governmental communication do little to effect the situation in China. The real policy makers appear to be the IT companies in Silicon Valley.

Questions to Ponder:

How important is the view of enterprise and companies in China's Foreign policy??

On Asia-Pacific trip, Hillary Clinton downplays U.S.-China friction

2010-01-22T08:43:00.003+08:00

The Washington Post
By John Pomfret

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, CALIF. -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday played down friction between the United States and China, saying she thinks the countries have a "mature" enough relationship to be able to handle differences of opinion.

Speaking on the first day of her first trip of the new year -- a nine-day, three-nation Asia-Pacific journey -- Clinton said that China's rise in the region has made U.S. engagement all the more crucial.

"Everyone's aware that China is a rising power of the 21st century," she said on her plane. "But people want to see the United States fully engaged in Asia, so that as China rises the United States is there as a force for peace."

China has reacted strongly to a U.S. decision last week to sell almost $1 billion in anti-missile batteries and missiles to Taiwan. So far, six senior Chinese officials have publicly criticized the deal. China claims Taiwan as its territory and has said the United States is interfering in its internal affairs by selling arms to the island of 20 million. The U.S. government is mandated under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide for Taiwan's defense.

"What I'm expecting is that we actually are having a mature relationship," Clinton said when asked about China. "That means that it doesn't go off the rails when we have differences of opinion."
Clinton acknowledged that more friction is likely when President Obama meets with the Dalai Lama. In an effort to get off to a good start with China, Obama last year postponed a meeting with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader until after a summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama is expected to take place soon.

While Clinton said the United States recognizes China's sovereignty over Tibet, she said U.S. officials differ with China over the region. "We support the legitimate desire for cultural, religious respect and autonomy," she said.

Questions to Ponder:

How does the change of US policy to one which engages "hot spots" in China (e.g: Tibet & Taiwan) affect China's partnership with US?
From the US perspective, what are the advantages of the alliances with Taiwan and support for Tiber? What are the odds of of US isolating China through their actions?
.

Shanghai sets expo apart from Beijing Games

2010-01-19T08:19:00.004+08:00

By Grace Ng, China Correspondent, The Straits Times (Singapore)

A key attraction at the expo will be more than 50 eye-catching pavilions, including this one from China, which towers over those from other countries. -- PHOTO: REUTERS

BEIJING: With just about 100 days to the World Expo 2010, host city Shanghai is looking to pull off a bigger, better and longer show than the 2008 Olympics hosted by arch-rival Beijing.
Shanghai Vice-Mayor Yang Xiong yesterday emphasised that the expo's opening ceremony on April 30 would be different from the Olympics' awe-inspiring opener.

The long-standing rivalry and competition between Shanghai, China's cosmopolitan financial centre, and Beijing, the country's political capital, is well known. But the past two years have seen Shanghai waiting in the wings while Beijing basked in the glow of international media attention, first with the Olympics, and then with last year's spectacular 60th National Day parade.

The expo offers Shanghai a chance to get back into the limelight. Indeed, statistics offered by the municipality are all about beating the Beijing Games.

Nearly US$4.2 billion (S$5.8 billion) will be pumped into the six-month-long expo, almost double the US$2.3 billion the Chinese government spent on the 16-day Olympics. Expo visitors are expected to hit some 70 million, vastly more than the 1.3 million who went to Beijing for the Games.

The event will also out-green the 'Green Olympics' with an all-out effort to create a low-carbon, energy-saving and water-conserving event. The expo will offset up to 70 per cent of its carbon emissions, said Mr Yang.

The issue of toilet cubicles underscore the extent of the inter-city rivalry. Shanghai is building some 8,000 new cubicles, more than the 3,000 public toilet cubicles Beijing built ahead of the Olympics.

And unlike the Games which showcased China as a whole, the expo promises to focus attention on the special features of China's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions on the mainland, giving visitors a rich experience of the country, promised Mr Yang. A key attraction will be the more than 50 eye-catching pavilions designed by world-renowned architects such as the late Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, who won the 1997 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The pavilions will showcase the achievements of more than 220 territories and international organisations in commercial, cultural, artistic and other spheres.

Corporate participants showing off their products at the expo will seek business and trade deals, while families and tourists will get to see the food, fashion and musical offerings from 180 countries.

But as much as Shanghai likes to differentiate itself from Beijing, the expo will be employing some of the same measures that the capital used to handle the huge inflow of visitors and traffic.
Mr Yang said that by the time of the expo, the city's subway lines would have doubled to about 420km, and 1,000 new buses will be added to ferry visitors. Shanghai is also said to be considering limiting motorists to drive on alternate days to cut pollution and ease jams.
Expo highlights

THE Shanghai World Expo, which will run from May 1 to Oct 31, is expected to attract 70 million visitors, the largest turnout since the event was first held in London in 1851. China is the first developing country to host the event, which will showcase the cultural, economic, social, technological and artistic achievements by some 240 nations, territories and international organisations.

There will be more than 50 pavilions of various designs, including a basket-like one by Spain and a music-box shaped one by Singapore. China has pulled out all stops for its national pavilion. Its 'space pavilion' is built by its aerospace companies and looks like a huge cube suspended in mid-air to showcase developments in outer space.

Painted in a special red called Forbidden City red, the 'Crown of the East' pavilion will tower at 63m, triple the height of any other pavilion. It will feature distinctive elements of Chinese architecture, including interlocking wooden brackets called 'dougong', which will be used to line the pavilion roof.

Shanghai has also flown in 10 giant pandas for the event.

Question to ponder:

How would Shanghai's World Expo contribute to China's role in the global economy?
What is the main purpose Shanghai "out-green" efforts during the expo?

Article- Chinese Trial Reveals Vast Web of Corruption

2010-01-11T13:27:00.006+08:00

By Andrew Jacobs

CHONGQING, China — Wen Qiang had a fondness for Louis Vuitton belts, fossilized dinosaur eggs and B-list pop stars. For a public employee in charge of the local judiciary, he also had a lot of money: nearly $3 million that investigators found buried beneath a fish pond.

But Mr. Wen’s lavish tastes were nothing compared with the carnal appetites of his sister-in-law, Xie Caiping, known as “the godmother of the Chongqing underworld.” Prosecutors say she ran 30 illegal casinos, including one across the street from the courthouse. She also employed 16 young men who, according to the state-run press, were exceedingly handsome and obliging.

In recent weeks, Ms. Xie, Mr. Wen and a cavalcade of ranking officials and lowbrow thugs have been players in a mass public trial that has exposed the unseemly relationships among gangsters, police officers and the sticky-fingered bureaucrats. The spectacle involves more than 9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice. But like all big corruption cases in China, this one is as much about politics as graft.

The political machine in Chongqing, a province-size mega-city of 31 million people in the southwest, has been broken up by a new Communist Party boss, Bo Xilai who is the son of a revolutionary party veteran and has his eye on higher office. Mr. Bo, a former trade minister sent to Chongqing to burnish his managerial credentials, has conducted the crackdown in a way that appears devised to maximize national attention.

The drawn-out nature of the trial and the release of lurid details of the criminal syndicate have given him a reputation as a leading corruption fighter, though the inquiry has yet to implicate any really high-ranking party officials. So far six people have been sentenced to death. Ms. Xie got off relatively lightly, receiving an 18-year prison term on Tuesday.

How Mr. Bo’s performance is regarded by the party elite is a matter of speculation. There are some suggestions that his swagger, including boastful comments to the news media, strikes some fellow officials as excessive.

Anticorruption campaigns by China’s one-party state are generally calibrated to show resolution in tackling venality, but also to reassure the public that whatever problems are uncovered are localized and effectively contained.

“These guys are all for fighting corruption, but they are a little alarmed by the way Bo Xilai has been going about it and building up his personality,” said Sidney Rittenberg, one of the few American citizens to join the Communist Party here and a confidant of Chinese leaders since 1944.

“People I talk to say he’s getting too big for his britches.” A so-called princeling whose father, Bo Yibo, was an economic planner and a onetime ally of the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Mr. Bo, 60, is already a member of the Communist Party’s powerful Politburo. He is often talked about as a future top leader in Beijing, although in the party’s rigid hierarchy the No. 1 posts in the party and the government have already been assigned to other younger officials

Recent statements by Mr. Bo suggest he understands the perils of drawing too much attention. Two weeks ago, he defended the crackdown, saying he was forced to act by the rampant violence and brazen criminality that had given this perpetually foggy city a reputation for lawlessness.

“The public gathered outside government offices and held up pictures of bloodshed,” he said. “The gangsters slashed people with knives just like butchers killing animals.”

In the three weeks since trials began, the crowds have continued to come, and their stories of bloodshed are indeed horrifying. They press outside the gates of the Fifth Intermediate Court, hoping to glimpse the orange-vested defendants who are paraded through the hearings. Others desperately seek out reporters willing to hear tales of crimes unpunished.

“The bandits used to live in the mountains; now they live in the Public Security Bureau,” said Zheng Yi, a vegetable wholesaler.

Unlike past sweeps that brought down crime bosses and their henchmen, the crackdown in Chongqing has yielded a number of wealthy businessmen and Communist Party officials, exposing the depth of corruption that has resulted from the mixing of state control and free-market economics in China.

Ko-lin Chin, who studies the intermingling of organized crime and government in China, said the line between legitimate business and illegal conduct had become increasingly blurred, although most official corruption involved bribery, not violence.

“As these gangs have become more powerful, their existence depends entirely on the cooperation and tolerance of the Communist Party,” said Mr. Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers. “But when things get out of hand, as they did in Chongqing, the party can really go after these groups with a vengeance.”

Among those on trial this week is a local legislator and billionaire who the authorities say owned a fleet of 1,000 cabs and 100 bus routes. So great was his power, they say, that he orchestrated a taxi strike last year that brought the city to a standstill. On trial with him are three government officials suspected of acting as his “protection umbrellas” in exchange for payments of about $100,000 each.

While Mr. Li stood in the dock, more than 200 people gathered outside in the rain, including women who said they were roughed up in October last year when they refused to vacate their homes for a redevelopment project. One of them, Wu Pinghui, 67, said 40 people were herded into a government-owned bus and dumped in the countryside.

By the time they made it back, their homes were gone. “We called 110,” she said, referring to the Chinese emergency number, “but the police said they couldn’t get involved in a government affair.”

Hong Guibi also came to the courthouse. She said the Communist Party chief of her village, enraged when she and her husband refused to give him part of their orchard, watched as thugs attacked the couple with cleavers. Ms. Hong, 47, was critically wounded, and her husband was killed.

“The neighbors heard our screams, but they were afraid to do anything,” she said. Although heartened that so many are being prosecuted, Ms. Hong is still waiting for someone to come after the village chief. “If I could just kneel down in front of Bo Xilai,” she said, “I’m sure he would solve my problem.”

Questions to Ponder :

How does the increased in corruption affect CCP's image?
In you opinion will the harsh penalties serve to further worsen corruption or will it help to curb it?

Hello 2010

2010-01-11T13:20:00.005+08:00

Hi Guys!

Welcome back to JJ! This is going to be a really busy year for you. Hope you guys are prepared. It is going to be another exciting year in CSE.

Although we could not accomplish our Shanghai Field Trip, some of you may be keen to know that Shanghai will be holding the World Expo in 2010 and it will be one of the areas which we will be looking at in class.

See you in class on friday!

ARticle - Singapore’s Lee Says China, India to Rival U.S. in This Century

2009-11-02T18:51:00.002+08:00

By Peter S. Green (Bloomberg.com)

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. may have less than a half- century left as the dominant global economic power before it will share top billing with China and India, former Singaporean Prime Minister

“The first half of the 21st century, a large part of it, will still be the American,” Lee, 86, said in an interview with the Charlie Rose television show on the PBS network. “But I believe the second half you’ll have to share top places with China and also with India. Make space for them, too.”

Lee was the founder of modern Singapore and the country’s prime minister from 1959 until 1990. He now holds the title of minister mentor in Singapore’s government, whose current prime minister is his son Lee Hsien Loong. He spoke with Rose in the show’s New York studio. The interview was scheduled to air again on Bloomberg Television at 8 p.m. New York time on Oct. 23.

“In 30 years they’ll have an economy, not per capita but in total terms, bigger than the U.S.A.,” and China is now building political and strategic influence to protect its economic growth, Lee said.

“People already treat her differently, because they know that this is going to be a big fellow around the b

“On the American side, there’s been some vacillation: first China is a strategic adversary, then China is a strategic partner, then China is a stakeholder, and then China is not carrying its weight.”

China’s Role

He said that’s made it difficult for China to understand the role it’s expected to play as its economic clout grows.

India will take longer to challenge the U.S. position because it is more ethnically diverse than China, Lee said.

“If India were as well-organized as China, it will go at a different speed, but it’s going at the speed it is because it is India,” Lee said. “It’s not one nation, it’s many nations.”

“No prime minister in Delhi can at any one time speak in a language and be understood throughout the country,” said Lee. “You can do that in Beijing.”

Lee also said the wars that have bogged down U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are distracting it from focusing on its future place in the global economy.

The major changes that are taking place is the recovery of China and to a lesser extent, India,” Lee said. He said that three centuries ago, the two countries accounted for 60 percent of the world’s economy.

The U.S. should strive instead to be “a benign stabilizer” in the world, he said.

“The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific because that’s where the growth will be,” Lee said. U.S. President

Barack Obama, he said, must understand this.

“If you do not hold your ground in the Pacific you cannot be a world leader,” Lee said, “That’s number one.”

“Number two, to hold ground in the Pacific, you must not let your fiscal deficits and dollar come to grief,” he said.

Article - A wary respect: A special report on China and America

2009-10-27T23:13:00.003+08:00

Oct 22nd 2009

From The Economist print edition

America and China need each other, but they are a long way from trusting each other, says James Miles

“OUR future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe,” said the American president as he contemplated the extraordinary commercial opportunities that were opening up in Asia. More than a hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt made this prediction, American leaders are again looking across the Pacific to determine their own country’s future, and that of the rest of the world. Rather later than Roosevelt expected, China has become an inescapable part of it.

Back in 1905, America was the rising power. Britain, then ruler of the waves, was worrying about losing its supremacy to the upstart. Now it is America that looks uneasily on the rise of a potential challenger. A shared cultural and political heritage helped America to eclipse British power without bloodshed, but the rise of Germany and Japan precipitated global wars. President Barack Obama faces a China that is growing richer and stronger while remaining tenaciously authoritarian. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.

Choose your weapons

With America’s economy in tatters and China’s still growing fast (albeit not as fast as before last year’s financial crisis), many politicians and intellectuals in both China and America feel that the balance of power is shifting more rapidly in China’s favour. Few expect the turning point to be as imminent as it was for America in 1905. But recent talk of a “G2” hints at a remarkable shift in the two countries’ relative strengths: they are now seen as near-equals whose co-operation is vital to solving the world’s problems, from finance to climate change and nuclear proliferation.

Next month Mr Obama will make his first ever visit to China. He and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao (pictured above) stress the need for co-operation and avoid playing up their simmering trade disputes, fearful of what failure to co-operate could mean. On October 1st China offered a stunning display of the hard edge of its rising power as it paraded its fast-growing military arsenal through Beijing.

The financial crisis has sharpened fears of what Americans often see as another potential threat. China has become the world’s biggest lender to America through its purchase of American Treasury securities, which in theory would allow it to wreck the American economy. These fears ignore the value-destroying (and, for China’s leaders, politically hugely embarrassing) effect that a sell-off of American debt would have on China’s dollar reserves. This special report will explain why China will continue to lend to America, and why the yuan is unlikely to become a reserve currency soon.

When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard University (he is now Mr Obama’s chief economic adviser), he once referred to a “balance of financial terror” between America and its foreign creditors, principally China and Japan. That was in 2004, when Japan’s holdings were more than four times the size of China’s. By September 2008 China had taken the lead. China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, said in July that China’s massive holdings of US Treasuries meant it could break the dollar’s reserve-currency status any time. But it also noted that in effect this was a “foreign-exchange version of the cold-war stalemate based on ‘mutually assured destruction’”.

China is exploring the rubble of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise. Some Chinese commentators point to the example of the Soviet Union, which exploited Western economic disarray during the Depression to acquire industrial technology from desperate Western sellers. China has long chafed at controls imposed by America on high-technology exports that could be used for military purposes. It sees America’s plight as a cue to push for the lifting of such barriers and for Chinese companies to look actively for buying opportunities among America’s high-technology industries.

The economic crisis briefly slowed the rapid growth, from a small base, of China’s outbound direct investment. Stephen Green of Standard Chartered predicts that this year it could reach about the same level as in 2008 (nearly $56 billion, which was more than twice as much as the year before). Some Americans worry about China’s FDI, just as they once mistakenly did about Japan’s buying sprees, but many will welcome the stability and employment that it provides.

China may have growing financial muscle, but it still lags far behind as a technological innovator and creator of global brands. This special report will argue that the United States may have to get used to a bigger Chinese presence on its own soil, including some of its most hallowed turf, such as the car industry. A Chinese man may even get to the moon before another American. But talk of a G2 is highly misleading. By any measure, China’s power is still dwarfed by America’s.

Authoritarian though China remains, the two countries’ economic philosophies are much closer than they used to be. As Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University puts it, socialism with Chinese characteristics (as the Chinese call their brand of communism) is looking increasingly like capitalism with American characteristics. In Mr Yan’s view, China’s and America’s common interest in dealing with the financial crisis will draw them closer together strategically too. Global economic integration, he argues with a hint of resentment, has made China “more willing than before to accept America’s dominance”.

The China that many American business and political leaders see is one that appears to support the status quo and is keen to engage peacefully with the outside world. But there is another side to the country. Nationalism is a powerful, growing and potentially disruptive force. Many Chinese—even among those who were educated in America—are suspicious of American intentions and resentful of American power. They are easily persuaded that the West, led by the United States, wants to block China’s rise.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic ties between America and China, which proved a dramatic turning point in the cold war. Between the communist victory in 1949 and President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 there had been as little contact between the two countries as there is between America and North Korea today. But the eventual disappearance of the two countries’ common enemy, the Soviet Union, raised new questions in both countries about why these two ideological rivals should be friends. Mutual economic benefit emerged as a winning answer. More recently, both sides have been trying to reinforce the relationship by stressing that they have a host of new common enemies, from global epidemics to terrorism.

But it is a relationship fraught with contradictions. A senior American official says that some of his country’s dealings with China are like those with the European Union; others resemble those with the old Soviet Union, “depending on what part of the bureaucracy you are dealing with”.

Cold-war parallels are most obvious in the military arena. China’s military build-up in the past decade has been as spectacular as its economic growth, catalysed by the ever problematic issue of Taiwan, the biggest thorn in the Sino-American relationship. There are growing worries in Washington, DC, that China’s military power could challenge America’s wider military dominance in the region. China insists there is nothing to worry about. But even if its leadership has no plans to displace American power in Asia, this special report will say that America is right to fret that this could change.

Politically, China is heading for a particularly unsettled period as preparations gather pace for sweeping leadership changes in 2012 and 2013. Mr Hu and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, will be among many senior politicians due to retire. As America moves towards its own presidential elections in 2012, its domestic politics will complicate matters. Taiwan too will hold presidential polls in 2012 in which China-sceptic politicians will fight to regain power.

Triple hazard

This political uncertainty in all three countries simultaneously will be a big challenge for the relationship between China and America. All three will still be grappling with the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Urban Chinese may be feeling relaxed right now, but there could be trouble ahead. Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China’s central bank, says wasteful spending on things like unnecessary infrastructure projects (which is not uncommon in China) could eventually drain the country’s fiscal strength and leave it with “no more drivers for growth”. In recent weeks even Chinese leaders have begun to sound the occasional note of caution about the stability of China’s recovery.

This special report will argue that the next few years could be troubled ones for the bilateral relationship. China, far more than an economically challenged America, is roiled by social tensions. Protests are on the rise, corruption is rampant, crime is surging. The leadership is fearful of its own citizens. Mr Obama is dealing with a China that is at risk of overestimating its strength relative to America’s. Its frailties—social, political and economic—could eventually imperil both its own stability and its dealings with the outside world.

Article - Jiang Zemin's Unexpected Resurgence (60th Anniversary of PRC)

2009-10-05T18:55:00.005+08:00

by Asia Sentinel - Willy Lam

Portraits of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin (L) and current President Hu Jintao (R) hang in the People's Republic Of China 60th Anniversary Exhibition at the Beijing Exhibition Center on September 23, 2009 in Beijing, China. The grand celebrations to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China included a military parade and mass pageant consisting of about 200,000 citizens in Tian'anmen Square on October 1.

Ex-President Jiang's unexpected reappearance spells trouble for Hu Jintao – and for political stability in China

As the Chinese sayings go, a sky cannot hold two suns, nor can a mountain contain two tigers. Throughout last week's lavish celebrations of the PRC's 60th birthday, however, President Hu Jintao was forced to share the limelight with his predecessor, 83-year-old Jiang Zemin, who does not have even a single official position.
Many among China's 76 million Chinese Communist Party members were astounded to see that during CCTV's coverage of the much-heralded military parade, Jiang was on the TV screen no less than 22 times.

Moreover, as the "party and state leaders" appeared on the haloed rostrum of Tiananmen Square, the former president and chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission was second in the pecking order, behind Hu but ahead of all eight other members of the supreme Politburo Standing Committee.

Hu evidently felt being upstaged: the 67-year-old head of the party, state and army wore the sternest of expressions throughout the day's festivities. That there can be no mistaking Jiang's comeback was confirmed the day after: two photos of exactly the same size – Hu side-by-side with Jiang – graced the front page of the October 2 edition of People's Daily.

Jiang's sudden prominence has injected a discordant note into the carefully choreographed extravaganza that is supposed to highlight China's prowess and prosperity – and its readiness to embrace the world as a responsible stakeholder. While China is not noted for punctilious observation of legalities, the CCP propaganda machinery would be hard put to explain why an ordinary party member like Jiang can be classified as the nation's No 2 "party and state leader"?

Much more important, however, is the fact that the coexistence of two "leadership cores" will bedevil Chinese politics at least until the 18th CCP Congress scheduled for October 2012, when the "Fifth-Generation collective leadership" will be picked.

A party source in Beijing said while Jiang, who had yielded his CCP general secretary's slot to Hu in late 2002, was forced to vacate his military commission chairmanship two years later, the wily head of the Shanghai Faction still keeps a luxurious office at August 1 Building, the military commission headquarters in Beijing's western suburb. He has continued to read top-secret military documents and to hold tete-a-tetes with members of the top brass.

"Jiang's activities began to pick up in March last year, when Tibetans began to run wild in Tibet and four neighboring provinces," the source said. "The octogenarian began offering advice on how PLA and People's Armed Police generals should handle Tibet, and later, how the military should participate in reconstruction efforts in earthquake-ravaged Sichuan Province."

The Beijing source disclosed that the main reason why, after the July 5 bloodbath in Urumqi, Hu had to scurry back to China on the eve of the Group of Eight summit in Italy was to prevent Jiang from "trouble-making." For example, Jiang had all along told a few Politburo Standing Committee members that Hu's scorched-earth policies in Xijiang and Tibet would fail.

It is understood that Jiang has retained formidable clout within the top brass because most of the 10 generals sitting on the military commission owed their promotion to the Shanghai Faction honcho. Equally importantly, Jiang has evidently amassed a thick pile of "black materials" – or harmful dossiers – against Hu and his Communist Youth League clique.

Apart from the Hu clique's massive failures in maintaining "harmony" in Tibet and Xinjiang, Jiang and his Shanghai Faction cronies have decried how Hu has displayed favoritism while elevating scores of Youth League alumni to top party and government posts. Then there is innuendo about the possibly corrupt business activities of the children of several top Youth League clique affiliates. On foreign policy, Jiang is said to have been unhappy about Hu's apparent failure to score points through taking advantage of the early missteps of the Barack Obama Administration.

An unexpected victim of the clash of the two titans is Vice-President Xi Jinping. While as head of the so-called Gang of Princelings Xi is deemed closer to the Shanghai Faction than to the Youth League clique, the 56-year-old "crown prince" has been gravitating toward Hu to ensure the latter's blessings at the 18th Congress.

Xi's failure to be inducted into the military commission at the Fourth CCP Central Committee Plenum last month, however, shows that while the former Shanghai Party boss will succeed Hu as party general secretary in late 2012 – and state president soon afterwards – Hu will pull out all the stops to retain the military commission chairmanship for up to a full five-year term. After all, Jiang has shown too clearly that in China, there is nothing more crucial that securing control over the generals.

Chinese Nationalism on the Internet

2009-08-31T20:54:00.004+08:00

Questions to ponder on:

What do these two videos tell you about the sense of a common identity among the Chinese in China today?
To what extent is nationalism a challenge to China’s rise and the rest of the world?

Article - Lead Pollution From Smelter Poisons More Than 1,300 Children in China

2009-08-24T23:30:00.001+08:00

Michael Wines (NY Times - 20 August 2009)

BEIJING — Lead pollution from a newly opened and unlicensed manganese smelter has poisoned more than 1,300 children in southeastern China’s Hunan Province, state-run media said on Thursday, the second case of mass lead poisoning in the past month.
Officials in Wenping, 970 miles south of Beijing, shut down the smelter, the Wugang Fine-Processed Manganese Smelting Factory, last week and detained two of its owners after about 1,000 local residents protested the poisoning, the English-language state newspaper China Daily reported.

The plant’s general manager remained at large.

Tests subsequently found elevated levels of lead in the blood of 1,354 children, or about 7 in 10 children who were examined, the official news agency, Xinhua, reported. The severity of the poisoning cannot be measured without further testing; 17 of the 83 children who received the advanced tests were hospitalized.

Lead poisoning damages the nervous and reproductive systems and can permanently cripple children’s growth and intellectual development.

The report of poisoning in Wugang followed a similar case in Shaanxi Province, in north-central China, where state news reports say 851 children living near the nation’s fourth-largest smelter have tested positive for lead poisoning since early August. More than 170 have since been hospitalized.

Angry residents of two Shaanxi villages were reported on Monday to have marched to the smelter, tearing down fences and attacking trucks before police officers restored order.
Local officials have promised that the smelter, which produces lead and zinc, will not reopen until it meets pollution standards.

On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that the Shaanxi smelter, which is in the town of Changqing, was under heavy guard by police and plainclothes officers. The officers sought to interrupt journalists’ interviews with local residents.

Pollution is a serious problem across China, where breakneck industrial development has fouled both air and water to sometimes extraordinary degrees.

Although the national government has committed to clean-up measures, the World Bank says 59 percent of the water in China’s seven major rivers is unfit to drink, and the government says the air in about a quarter of cities is unhealthy.

The Wugang manganese smelter is in one of China’s major iron and steel centers. Manganese is often added to steel to increase its tensile strength. According to Xinhua, seven other smelters also operate in Wugang City, an area of about 700,000 residents that includes Wenping town.

Wugang City’s deputy environment chief, Huang Wenbin, was quoted by Xinhua as saying the smelter opened in May 2008 without required environmental permits. Other news reports said it began producing manganese about a year ago.

A kindergarten and a primary and middle school are within 1,700 feet of the smelter, Xinhua said.

Residents were reported to have raised questions about the smelter in July after their children began falling ill and refusing to eat.

On Aug. 8, about 1,000 residents blocked a road to the plant, leading to a confrontation with 200 officials and police officers.

The protesters overturned a police car before calm was restored, China Daily reported.

The plant was ordered closed on Aug. 13.

Article - China cracks down on graft

2009-08-08T10:39:00.002+08:00

BEIJING - CHINA'S nuclear chief is the latest in a string of high-level officials snared in a crackdown on graft which on Friday saw the execution of the former head of the firm that owns Beijing airport.

Kang Rixin (right) is being investigated for allegedly squandering public funds and accepting bribes and Li Peiying (left), former chairman and general manager of Capital Airports Holding Company (CAH), was put to death in the eastern city of Jinan for accepting bribes. --PHOTOS: XINHUA, FINANCE.SINA.COM.CN

Aviation head executed
CHINA'S President Hu Jintao has repeatedly warned that corruption is one of the greatest threats to the legitimacy of Communist Party rule and courts often hand down harsh sentences to make an example of offenders.

In the latest demonstration that the Party takes the problem seriously, the former head of the company that owns Beijing Capital International Airport was executed on Friday, after being convicted of bribery and embezzlement totalling nearly US$16 million (S$23 million).

Kang Rixin is being investigated for allegedly squandering public funds and accepting bribes valued at up to 1.8 billion yuan (S$378 million), the Chongqing Times reported.

Authorities are probing the possibility that Kang took bribes from French nuclear power giant Areva to win a contract for a project in China's southern Guangdong province, said the report, which was posted on numerous government websites.

Kang also allegedly traded on the stock market large amounts of public funds earmarked for the construction of three nuclear power plants, suffering huge losses when the market crashed last year, the report said.

'Recently, the state has greatly expanded the scope of developing nuclear power, a lot of major projects are being started that involve huge investment,' the paper said, citing unnamed sources close to the case. 'This is where corruption may have occurred.'

The report did not detail how much of the 1.8 billion yuan was lost in the illegal stock transactions or how much was linked to the alleged bribery.

Kang, party secretary and general manager of China National Nuclear Corporation, was being probed for possible involvement in 'grave violations of discipline,' Xinhua news agency said last week when announcing the investigation.

Chinese authorities often use the term 'discipline violations' to mean acts of corruption.

In November 2007, Areva announced an agreement to supply China with two third-generation nuclear reactors in a deal worth eight billion euros. -- AFP

Related: No. 1 Chinese fugitive Lai Changxing missing home, may come back

Article: The Six Why’s (六个为什么) - Is there still room for ideology today?

2009-08-04T23:52:00.000+08:00

China Media Project translates a new initiative by the Hu Jintao administration to answer everyone’s nagging questions about China’s political system:

We introduce to you . . . the “Six Why’s.” That’s right, Hu Jintao and his army of CCP theorists have worked out a simple political primer for us all, a kind of FAQ of market-Leninism.

The “Six Why’s,” which could be read as an indirect response to the 20th anniversary of the 1989 student movement, and perhaps the CCP’s answer to Charter 08 and the published journals of former premier Zhao Ziyang, seek to answer basic political questions like, “Why should Marxism be our guiding ideology?”

Launched with great party media fanfare back on June 5, they have gotten precious little attention in the Western media. Why? Most likely because the “Six Why’s” formula, for all of its cozy paternalism, is still mostly an impenetrable mess of dogma.

Article - Corruption: "Princelings" rule China's corporate world

2009-08-04T23:08:00.009+08:00

Jul 25, 2009 (Straits Times)

[By China bureau chief Peh Shing Huei: "China's Corporate World Ruled by Princes - About 90 Percent of China's Billionaires Are the Children of High-Ranking Officials"]

Related websites: Anti-corruption measures by the government

BEIJING: It has been days since news first broke of a graft probe in Namibia into a firm formerly run by the son of Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Yet, in China, hardly anyone knows of the case. Nuctech -which makes security scanners and was headed by the 38-year-old Mr Hu Haifeng until last year -is being investigated over a lucrative contract it had won to deliver equipment to Namibia.

It is not known if the case, which happened last year, took place while Hu junior was still in charge.

There has been nothing to suggest that he is involved in any way in the probe, but Namibia's Anti-Corruption Commission has requested an interview with him and senior Nuctech management.

In China, discussions about the business dealings of the 'princelings' or taizidang -offspring of political leaders -are considered taboo. People might whisper about them over dinner tables, but will never discuss them in public.

Some princelings, such as Vice-President Xi Jinping, become public figures after being drawn into politics, but their counterparts in the corporate world shy away from the limelight. Nevertheless, they are a force to be reckoned with.

A 2006 study by several Chinese research institutions showed that almost 90 percent of the country's top leaders in sectors encompassing finance, foreign trade, property development, construction, and stock trading were princelings.

And about 90 percent of China's billionaires are the children of high-ranking officials.

Princelings have fared far better in business than in politics, observed analyst Zhang Hua, who commented on the phenomenon in Hong Kong's Apple Daily in 2007. 'Not a single (princeling) family has been left behind,' he said sardonically.

The various families have carved out territories in various industries.

The family of former premier Li Peng, for example, controls the country's energy sector. His daughter Li Xiaolin is chairman of China Power International Development, an electricity monopoly. His son Li Xiaopeng used to head Huaneng Power, another energy heavyweight.

The family of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin has moved into telecommunications, while the offspring of former premier Zhu Rongji are strong figures in banking. His son Levin Zhu is the chief executive of China International Capital Corp.

The princelings began staking out their dominions in the business world in the 1980s when China was opening up its economy.

Armed with their fathers' connections, they were able to exploit the opportunities thrown up by China's economic transformation. By the 1980s, this economic revolution had led to much public disquiet, and when students staged protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989, much of their anger was initially directed at what they saw as rampant corruption by senior officials and their families.

The bloody crackdown that followed left deep scars in the political psyches of most Chinese. For the princelings, Tiananmen provided further incentive to move away from politics into business.

'After 1989, princelings in politics suffered. They were very unpopular within the Chinese Communist Party,' explained analyst Bo Zhiyue, an expert on China's elite politics at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute.

'It was very hard for them to get into the Central Committee. They were not chosen at internal elections because of their family names, so many left politics and jumped into the corporate world.'

After Tiananmen, their business dealings became even more politically sensitive. A bad slip could see their fathers stepping on that proverbial banana skin and tumbling from power.

For President Hu -who has repeatedly pointed out that the battle against graft is 'a matter of life and death' -the timing of the Nuctech case could prove awkward. In just three months, on Oct 1, the nation will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China -at which glorious occasion he is expected to be conferred the rare honour of a military review on Tiananmen Square.

Unsavoury rumours about the princelings' business activities do damage the image of the leaders concerned, said Hong Kong-based analyst Joseph Cheng. Still, he feels that any fallout from the Nuctech case will be extremely limited and that Mr Hu's political rivals are unlikely to use it against him because almost all the top leaders have family members with substantial stake in the corporate world.

Source: The Straits Times website, Singapore, in English 25 Jul 09

Related: Video: Netizens Fight Corruption in China

From Al Jazeera: China has long had a reputation for relatively high levels of graft. Almost everyone, including police, local officials, doctors and businessmen, expects and receives bribes. But netizens are now challenging the way business is done as Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan reports from Beijing.

Related: AFP reports: China blackout on graft case linked to premier’s son:

China’s Internet censors blocked news Thursday about a graft probe in Namibia involving a firm linked to the son of President Hu Jintao, as the state-run media ignored the sensitive issue. Two Namibians and a Chinese national were arrested last week in Namibia as part of a probe into bribery allegations involving Nuctech, a company headed until last year by Hu’s 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng. Searches for information on the case and Hu Haifeng’s connection to it on Chinese Web portals turned up error messages such as: “The search results may contain content not in line with relevant laws, regulations and policies.”

Such results on China’s heavily-censored Internet are typically returned when a Web user seeks banned information. China has a history of blocking access to sensitive data on the Internet, especially concerning politics and the lives of top leaders.

Related:
Prostitutes are considered more trustworthy in China than government officials and scientists, a recent survey done in June & July 2009 of more than 3,000 respondents showed.[read more]

Comic book a reminder for Chinese cadres to avoid graft (Xinhua 8 Jan 2008)

Article: Xinjiang Unrest - Catalyst for New Grand Vision for China?

2009-08-04T22:27:00.002+08:00

Li Mingjiang
21 July 2009

The 5 July Xinjiang incident has its roots in the loopholes of China’s developmental approach. It is obsessed with growth at the expense of social justice and governance, especially at the local levels. The incident should serve as a catalyst for China to seriously contemplate a new grand vision for the country’s future.

THE 5 JULY riots in China’s Xinjiang region marked the most violent ethnic conflict for decades in China. Three stories have emerged as to why an incident of such a scale had taken place. The official Chinese story is that the unrest was fanned and incited by various Uighur groups in exile. The view popular in the West is that the riots occurred largely because of the Chinese government’s disregard for the human rights, culture, traditions and political freedom of local ethnic minority groups. A noticeable voice coming from the Muslim world is that China’s government has badly treated and discriminated against the Muslim communities in the social and economic arenas, inviting revenge from some radical Uighurs. The Turkish government has even used the term ‘genocide’ to characterize the handling of tensions in Xinjiang. All the three stories are partially true. But there is a fourth story, perhaps an even more important one that needs to be told and taken into account. That is, the Xinjiang incident has its deep roots in the loopholes of the Chinese developmental approach: The approach has been too obsessed with growth rates at the expense of social justice and governance, especially at the local levels. The riots should serve as a catalyst for China to seriously contemplate a new grand vision for the country’s future.

Symptom of China’s Problems in Transition

Three questions warrant careful thought before we fully understand the fourth story about the limits of China’s developmental approach. Firstly, why did this tragic unrest happen at a time when China has made so much socio-economic progress after 30 years of reform and opening up? Secondly, why have hundreds and thousands of Han Chinese switched or attempted to switch to minority identities since the late 1980s, if there are institutionalised discriminations against ethnic minorities? What is often glossed over in the aftermath of the incident is the fact that there are many affirmative action programmes in favour of the ethnic minorities. Thirdly, with regard to the official explanation, the question is why these groups in exile were so effective in inciting the unrest as alleged? The deep cause of the riots has to be found in the flaws of China’s developmental strategy. Over the decades, nearly double digit annual growth rates have brought China much wealth.

However, many notable socio-economic problems have also emerged and seem to have intensified in recent years. These negative aspects include the urban-rural divide, widening income gap, scanty social welfare and services, rampant corruption, abuse of power by local governments, and favoritism in the allocation of public resources. Ethnic Uighur minority people, the vast majority of whom live in the rural areas and have far fewer connections (guanxi) to public offices became the victims of the downsides of China’s developmental approach. They face the same experience that millions of the downtrodden Han Chinese have been going through. The negative aspects of China’s development have inflicted so much pain and stress to the numerous people at the social bottom that many of them chose to vent their anger through violence.

According to official figures, there were as many as over 80,000 instances of mass incidents annually in China in the past few years, notable examples being the mass unrest at Weng’an in Guizhou and Shishou in Hubei province. What differentiates the Xinjiang incident from numerous other incidents of mass unrest is the fact that the sufferings of many ethnic minority people are unfortunately linked to ethnic relations. This significantly exacerbated the ethnic tensions that had existed for quite a long time in Xinjiang.

Beijing Should Boldly Tell the Story

The Xinjiang incident has become a rare event that simultaneously pits China against both the developed and much of the developing world. To mitigate external criticisms, China needs to courageously explain to the outside world that this is not purely an ethnic problem, but a problem rooted in China’s socio-economic transition. Telling the story may not completely dispel the misgivings in the West and in the Muslim world. But not doing so will likely put China and its ethnic issues constantly in the spotlight and damage China’s international image and national interests. China faces the risk of its ethnic policy and ethnic relations being completely framed by the West and the opinion leaders in the Muslim world. Many people in China may feel such explanation tarnishes the reputation of the ruling elite and negate the great achievements that China has made. This worry is unnecessary. After all, the economic miracle in China has been acknowledged worldwide. Candour will only win respect from the rest of the world.

Catalyst for a New Grand Vision?

No doubt, China will undertake a comprehensive review of this incident. It would be fortunate if such a review is done in relation to mounting social tensions throughout China in the larger context of China’s development trajectory rather than on the Xinjiang incident alone. The Chinese government’s pro-people policy measures in recent years definitely have helped in mitigating grievances at the grassroots level. But numerous signs show that these programmes are far from sufficient. Popular resentment over abusive governance at the local levels seems to be on the rise. The numbers and destructiveness of social unrests have not decreased in recent years. The sociopolitical structure that disadvantages the social bottom seems to have been further consolidated. The Xinjiang incident should be a wake up call for China. It is time for China’s leaders to courageously develop a new grand vision or China’s future, but what should it be? Many elements in the late leader Deng Xiaoping’s old grand vision seem to have been fulfilled or are now incompatible with the social-economic reality in China. A new grand vision will have to tackle three major issues: social equity, social welfare, and government accountability and responsiveness. These goals may seem too conservative in the eyes of liberal advocates. But hopefully, success in meeting these challenges will lay a good foundation for China’s search for a more sustainable political, social, and economic development model for the future.

Article - Ethnic Minority Uyghur Unrest in Urumqi

2009-07-07T22:04:00.013+08:00

Han Chinese fight back

Related: Clashes in China Shed Light on Ethnic Divide (July 7 2009)

Related: Han Chinese protesters seek Muslim Uighur targets (Reuters 7 July 2009)

See how the PLA and Armed Police step in to restore peace

Another Media Tour Goes Very, Very Badly for Chinese Authorities (by Robert Mackey from NY Times)

Related link:

Watch a video report on The Guardian’s Web site, showing a powerful image of an elderly Uighur woman on crutches confronting riot police in Urumqi, China on Tuesday.

As my colleague Edward Wong reports from Urumqi, China, where rioting and ethnic clashes have led to more than 150 deaths, a government-organized tour for foreign and Chinese journalists went badly awry on Tuesday when hundreds of Uighur protesters made an unscheduled appearance:

A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue Tuesday with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after Sunday’s violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.

Dan Chung and Tania Branigan of The Guardian were also on the media tour and they filed a video report and a slide show showing images of the Uighur protests witnessed by the foreign and Chinese press.

As if to underscore how very badly this attempt at media management by the Chinese government failed, the screen shot at the top of this post from The Guardian’s video report — like a similar photograph, also shot by Mr. Chung for The Guardian — is strangely evocative of the iconic image from the Tiananmen Square protests, of a man confronting a row of Chinese tanks.

In today’s New York Times, Michael Wines reports that Chinese officials arranged the tour as part of a broad effort to manage media perceptions of the unrest. Apparently hoping to do more than just shut off the flow of unwelcome images of protests from appearing on the Web, as Iranian authorities did recently, China invited foreign journalists to take part in the official trip to Urumqi, the site of the unrest, “to know better about the riots.” But China’s ethnic minorities have a habit of not remaining placidly in the background during these sorts of state-managed photo-ops.

Today’s events bring to mind a similarly botched effort just over a year ago, as The Times reported: “Buddhist monks interrupted a government-managed news media tour in western China by waving a Tibetan flag and protesting that the authorities were depriving them of their human rights.” Here is video of those Tibetan monks veering as far off-script during that media tour in April, 2008 as the Uighurs did today in Urumqi:

Article - Beijing Adds Curbs on Access to Internet

2009-07-01T10:21:00.002+08:00

By Keith Bradsher NY Times June 25, 2009

HONG KONG — The Chinese Health Ministry on Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on Internet access to medical research papers on sexual subjects. It is the latest move in what the ministry calls an antipornography campaign that many China experts see as a harbinger of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.

In the past month, central government officials have cited a need to control pornography in ordering that filtering software be preinstalled on all new computers sold in China starting July 1.

They have also forced Google to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms and on Wednesday night even briefly blocked access nationwide to Google’s main search engine and other services like Gmail. Some users were still having problems accessing Google sites on Thursday night.

In addition, Chinese bloggers say they have detected evidence of a concerted effort to stain Google’s image. They say that someone in Beijing manipulated Google’s software to make it more likely to suggest a pornographic search term during a state television broadcast.

At the same time, the government seems to have stepped up harassment of human rights advocates.

Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s best-known dissidents, was formally arrested Tuesday on suspicion of subversion, six months after he was detained for joining other intellectuals in signing a document calling for democracy. This month, the authorities refused to renew the licenses of more than a dozen lawyers after they agreed to represent clients in human rights cases.

The same public security agencies charged with fighting pornography are responsible for suppressing illegal political activity, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. The government’s statistics for seizures of illegal publications tend to include both pornographic and political documents, he noted.

“The two are closely associated,” Mr. Bequelin said. “These campaigns work hand in hand.”

The emphasis on pornography echoes a similar crackdown in late 2005 and early 2006, rights advocates say.

At the time, seeking to allay official Chinese concerns about pornography, Google designed a new search engine for Google.cn, its Chinese service, that would not pull up references to politically delicate subjects like Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, or the 1989 killings in and around Tiananmen Square.

While denouncing pornography, propaganda officials reined in publications that were challenging government policies. This included the closing of Freezing Point, a popular journal of news and opinion, and the replacement of top editors at three other publications.

The Health Ministry posted regulations this week requiring medical information providers to restrict access to articles on sexual subjects. The penalty for violations is up to $4,400, with the potential for criminal prosecution for a pattern of uncorrected offenses.

At a news conference on Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, was quick to criticize Google for allowing too many links to unseemly sites, saying, “It is every government’s responsibility to protect their teenagers from porn and vulgar information on the Internet.”

On Wednesday, the American commerce secretary, Gary F. Locke, and Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, sent a letter to Chinese officials protesting the country’s proposal that all computers sold in the country be equipped with filtering software.

“China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to preinstall software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues,” Mr. Locke said in a statement. The United States government did not release the text of the letter.

Asked about the complaint on Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said only that he had previously defended the decision to require the software.

Google said Thursday that it was trying to limit access to pornography.

“Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there,” the company said.

“This has been a major engineering effort,” the company said, “and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the government.”

The government began stepping up pressure on Google last week. CCTV, the state-owned television monopoly, broadcast an interview in which the announcer typed the word “son” into a Google search engine and was dismayed that one of the search terms suggested in Chinese was an “abnormal relationship between son and mother.”

Google’s software makes it possible to analyze the frequency and source of search terms. In a check on Thursday, Google’s Web site showed that no one had entered the phrase “abnormal relationship between son and mother” in Chinese for months until it suddenly became a popular phrase entered only in Beijing in the days before the show, making it more likely that it would pop up as a suggested search term.

The same CCTV show included an interview with a young man, identified as a college student, who expressed horror at pornography on the Internet. Chinese bloggers have since identified the man as an intern for CCTV.

Many Chinese regulations ostensibly aimed at controlling illicit sexual activity could also be used to restrict political activity unacceptable to the authorities.

For example, Chinese law requires that karaoke bars, nightclubs and Internet cafes be monitored 24 hours a day by closed-circuit television cameras on the grounds that prostitutes may try to find clients at such locations. But according to security industry executives, China’s anti-prostitution surveillance regulations are stricter on the Internet cafes.

While nightclubs and karaoke bars are required to store their video records on their premises, Internet cafes must be wired to the nearest police station and provide a continuous, instantaneous record of who is using which computer. If an e-mail message from a cafe’s computer later catches the attention of investigators, the police can review the video records to see who was using the computer.

The last major crackdown on pornography and political expression lasted several months and began to ebb in February 2006, after a dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars issued a public letter denouncing the closing of a prominent news journal.

But by then, the government had won some major concessions. Not only had Google agreed to remove considerable political content from its Chinese service, but Microsoft had disabled some blogging activity critical of China, and Yahoo had handed over the identity of an e-mail user who had shared a propaganda directive; the user was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing. Zhang Jing and Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing, and Hilda Wang from Hong Kong.

Related: U.S. Objects to China’s Web Filtering (June 25, 2009)

Article - May the good China preserve us

2009-06-20T01:44:00.003+08:00

May 21st 2009 (From The Economist print edition)

China is enjoying its new prestige as a global economic helmsman, but it still has problems at home

THE sense that someone else’s loss is your gain, leading even to rejoicing at their disaster—xing zai le huo—is as hard-wired into the Chinese psyche as anywhere.

Honed by American policymakers’ past fondness for hectoring China about the need for better risk-management and exchange-rate flexibility, this emotion has come to the fore since the United States was overtaken by financial calamity. China’s leaders are at pains to show their increasing sophistication, so public dancing around the corpse of the American financier is frowned upon. But many Chinese think their country is having a rather good crisis.

The realisation first reached a wider Chinese audience in early April, at the time of the G20 summit in London. There, President Hu Jintao was seated in the front row of the official photograph, next to Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. Among the country’s elites, triumphalism found its clearest expression later in April at an ebullient Bo’ao forum, China’s annual answer to Davos. There, one high official dismissed the G20, dominated by Western powers, as all hat and no cattle. Talk of a “new world order” was in the air, with China at its heart.

So much for Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that China should keep a low profile and “never take the lead”. The international financial crisis has become a kind of induction ceremony for China as a world power, which will go through another ritual when Timothy Geithner, America’s treasury secretary, pays tribute in Beijing next month. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, has proposed a new “G2”, where America and China get together to tackle the financial crisis, climate change and more. China has plenty of reasons not to want such a condominium, but is chuffed that Americans are talking about it. Nor does it mind if others believe it is happening anyway. Late last year China pulled out of its annual summit with the European Union because France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was to meet the Dalai Lama. It agreed to renew high-level relations with the EU only after France grovelled. So this week China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, travelled to Prague for a reconvened EU summit, with an agenda gutted of anything that might embarrass China. Just before it, David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, spoke to the Guardian, a British daily, with something of the fervour of a miracle-watcher. China was an “indispensable power”. At the G20 in April, “what was striking was that when China spoke, everybody listened.” And he quoted a joke: “After 1989 capitalism saved China. After 2009 China saved capitalism.”

China has been doing its bit to act the part. It has blessed the IMF with a promise of $40 billion of its money. It has been signing up “swap” agreements with central banks from Indonesia’s to Argentina’s giving them access to billions of dollars-worth of Chinese yuan in a crisis. It has encouraged experiments with an inchoate offshore market in yuan in Hong Kong. And its central-bank governor has talked loftily of the need to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with something like the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

So far, however, all this smacks of political posturing. Since most Chinese exporters invoice in dollars it is hard to see who would want all those yuan anyway. China seems in no hurry to move towards full convertibility of the yuan and greater exchange-rate flexibility. And the talk of ditching the dollar comes oddly from a country that has done little to diversify its own massive holdings of foreign exchange. Raising the issue when it did seemed more designed to make a splash and change the subject at the G20 away from anything that might embarrass China.

In public, most Chinese leaders scoff at the idea that their own policies might have contributed to the crisis. They blame over-indebted American consumers going on an unsustainable binge, leading to a gaping American trade deficit. Yet the counterpart is an unsustainable Chinese export drive, to America above all, that was built on a cheap currency. The dollars earned from the drive went flooding back to America, pushing down interest rates there, raising house prices and encouraging Americans to borrow even more to buy Chinese stuff. As Nicholas Lardy, an American economist specialising in China, has put it, the two countries were as co-dependent as a dope-dealer and an addict.

Restoking the old fires

Now, with the American consumer laid up indefinitely, the world has turned to China to take up the slack. A country with so many factories geared to exports has its own reasons for wanting to boost domestic demand. So the government acted swiftly late last year to unveil a $586 billion spending package. A notable economist says it sets the fiscal-stimulus “gold standard”.

It does, however, bring some problems. For one thing, some of the money is being spent subsidising Chinese exports. This worsens the overproduction at the heart of the crisis. And much of the rest is going on state-driven projects, reinforcing the state’s rent-seeking or megalomaniac proclivities. By contrast, household demand is not getting any real long-term boost, despite a few notable initiatives, including better health care. Indeed, demand is depressed precisely because household savings are being funnelled by the state banks, paying measly rates of return on deposits, to big companies. Loans to small businesses have actually fallen.

If domestic demand is to grow, then finance has to be liberalised to allow savers to earn an honest return and deserving companies to get finance. But this would be to challenge the state’s chief powers, which is why it will happen only slowly, if at all. In the short run, the government may either tolerate the speculative fires the stimulus is igniting, or douse them by tightening credit. Either way, China’s leaders will be too busy saving China to bother about running the world.

Article - The art of Chinese massage

2009-06-20T01:40:00.003+08:00

May 21st 2009 (From The Economist print edition)

Is China overstating its true rate of growth?

PART of the recent optimism in world markets rests on the belief that China’s fiscal-stimulus package is boosting its economy and that GDP growth could come close to the government’s target of 8% this year. Some economists, however, suspect that the figures overstate the economy’s true growth rate and that Beijing would report 8% regardless of the truth. Is China cheating?

Economists have long doubted the credibility of Chinese data and it is widely accepted that GDP growth was overstated during the previous two downturns. In 1998-99, during the Asian financial crisis, China’s GDP grew by an average of 7.7%, according to official figures. However, using alternative measures of activity, such as energy production, air travel and imports, Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh calculated that the growth rate was at best 2%. Other economists reckon that Mr Rawski was too pessimistic. Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing, estimates GDP growth was around 5% in 1998-99, for example. The top chart, plotting the official growth rate against estimates by Dragonomics, clearly suggests that some massaging of the government statistics may have gone on. The biggest adjustment seems to have been made in 1989, the year of political protests in Tiananmen Square. Officially, GDP grew by over 4%; Dragonomics reckons it actually declined by 1.5%.

China’s growth in the first quarter of this year has led some to conclude that the government is up to the same old tricks. According to official figures, GDP was 6.1% higher than a year earlier. Yet electricity production in the first quarter was 4% lower than it had been a year earlier; in comparison, production grew by 16% in the year to the first quarter of 2008. In the past, GDP and electricity output have moved broadly together, although it is not a one-to-one relationship (see bottom chart). But the gap between the two lines is now wider than it has ever been. Given that power statistics are less likely to have been tampered with than politically sensitive GDP figures, is this evidence that the latter have been fiddled?

Probably not. Paul Cavey, an economist at Macquarie Securities, argues that the discrepancy is explained by the fact that energy-guzzling heavy industries, such as steel and aluminium, bore the brunt of the slowdown last year. Mr Cavey calculates that the metals industry accounted for 40% of the growth in electricity consumption in 2001-07, but only 16% of the increase in industrial production. Steel output fell by more than 10% in the year to the fourth quarter, so it is hardly surprising that energy use dropped.

Distrust of the GDP numbers has prompted Capital Economics, a research firm based in London, to create its own proxy of economic activity, which includes electricity output, domestic freight volumes, cargo traffic at ports, passenger transport and floor area under construction. It suggests that GDP growth slowed to only 4% in the year to the first quarter. However, it tracks mostly industrial activity, and thus excludes two-fifths of the economy, most notably services, which are growing faster.

Then there are government tax revenues. These have fallen by 10% over the past year, compared with a surge of 35% in early 2008, suggesting that incomes and output have tumbled. But Stephen Green, an economist at Standard Chartered, says that revenues were inflated in early 2008 by a sharp rise in taxes from the boom in land sales, which has since subsided.

Another possible distortion is that local officials may be hiding tax revenue to make their finances appear worse, in order to get more money from Beijing to finance infrastructure projects.

Overall, Dragonomics’s Mr Kroeber thinks that GDP growth in the year to the first quarter of 2009 was not significantly overstated. One reason why others are more suspicious is the fact that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) does not publish quarterly GDP figures as developed economies do; its year-on-year changes give it more scope to smooth growth rates (for example, output probably did stall over the past two quarters).

To be fair, many developing countries do this as well. One reason is that seasonal adjustment is tricky in such countries where the shift from agriculture to industry changes the pattern of seasonality over time, says Mr Kroeber.

Cutting the fudge

And for all today’s misgivings, Beijing’s growth estimates consistently proved to be too low until recently. One of the quirks of Chinese data has long been that the provinces reported higher numbers than the central government did—a phenomenon that was put down to the fact that local officials inflated growth rates in order to get promoted. Yet the NBS GDP figures have almost always been revised upwards. For example, growth in 2007 was first reported as 11.4%, but in January it was marked up to 13%.

The NBS has improved its data-gathering methods in recent years, by extending its coverage of services, for example. This month Beijing also introduced new penalties for officials who falsify statistics. But the real test is whether the government itself is prepared to publish politically embarrassing bad news. There are encouraging signs that it is becoming more open. On May 14th an essay on the NBS website by Xu Xianchun, the bureau’s deputy director, was surprisingly frank about some of the flaws in Chinese statistics. Mr Xu admitted, for example, that the retail-sales numbers include some purchases by companies and the government, which should not be counted as consumption. He estimated that consumer spending in the first quarter grew by 9%, compared with the 15% increase reported for retail sales.

Andy Rothman, an economist at CLSA, a regional broker, believes that Chinese statistics are much more trustworthy than they used to be. This is partly because there are alternative numbers to go on; CLSA, for example, produces its own purchasing-managers’ index. There are also more private-sector economists keeping tabs on China than there were a decade ago. The more eyes there are on China, and the more crucial its economic performance becomes for the rest of the world, the harder it is for officials to tamper with the speedometer.

Article - Tiananmen Now Seems Distant to China’s Students

2009-06-20T01:34:00.005+08:00

Today’s Chinese students seem uninterested in protest or ideology. “You know where the line is drawn,” one student said.

May 22, 2009 (The New York Times by SHARON LaFRANIERE)

BEIJING — On April 30, the cellphones of the 32,630 students at Peking University, a genteel institution widely regarded as one of China’s top universities, buzzed with a text message from the school administration. It warned students to “pay attention to your speech and behavior” on Youth Day because of a “particularly complex” situation.

Few students had to puzzle over the meaning. Youth Day, on May 4, commemorates a 1919 student protest against foreign imperialism and China’s weakness in resisting it. Seventy years later, in 1989, students from Peking University were again massing in the center of Beijing, demanding democracy. The student movement shook the ruling Communist Party to its core and ended with a military crackdown and hundreds of deaths.

And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?

“People would think he was insane,” said one Peking University history major in a recent interview. “You know where the line is drawn. You can think, maybe talk, think about the events of 1989. You just cannot do something that will have any public influence. Everybody knows that.”

Most students also appear to accept it. For 20 years, China’s government has made it abundantly clear that students and professors should stick to the books and stay out of the streets. Students today describe 1989 as almost a historical blip, a moment too extreme and traumatic ever to repeat.

But whether democracy still inspires them is a more complex question.

Interviews with students and teachers at Peking University, as with experts on China here and abroad, draw a layered portrait of today’s students: disinclined to protest, but also lacking the economic grievances that helped ignite protests in 1989; proud of China’s achievements and flocking to the Communist Party, but seldom driven by ideology.

They are disturbed by government corruption and censorship and are eager to study in the West, especially the United States. And despite the government’s attempts to wipe the 1989 protests from Chinese history, some have learned what happened. All but one of eight Peking University students interviewed for this article, for instance, said they had managed to download an acclaimed — and banned — documentary on the Tiananmen protests and view it in their dorm rooms.

“There is a stereotypical view that students are not interested in democracy. I don’t buy it,” Cheng Li, research director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. “At the very least, they have a mixed opinion of the Communist Party.”

Xia Yeliang, a Peking University professor, said many students supported democracy in theory but did not want to risk their futures to fight for it. Students joke that they will get involved once pro-democracy forces gather steam, he said. “A rather high percentage of students are not interested in politics,” he said. “They say, ‘We know this is a good thing, but what relation does it have to us?’ They think about their personal affairs, how to get a job, how to go abroad.”

Even the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, People’s Daily, laments a general lack of idealism on campus. “Many university students are clearly very utilitarian in their thinking,” People’s Forum, a magazine published by People’s Daily, complained this month after a conducting a student survey. “Everything is based on ‘whether or not it is useful to me,’ ” the magazine said.

In fact, today’s students have more to lose than did protesters 20 years ago. Then, university students believed that their futures were endangered by a soaring inflation rate of 28 percent, rampant government corruption and shrinking job prospects, according to a 2001 book on the Tiananmen movement by Dingxin Zhao, a University of Chicago sociology professor. Many had lost hope in the government’s economic reforms.

Today, even students who criticize Communist rule are gratified by China’s great strides. “Sometimes we don’t like the policies of our government,” said Wang Yongli, a fourth-year physics major. “But on the other hand, nowadays we are proud of the country and the government because they have moved so many people to a better life.”

The Communist Party is careful to cultivate this image, while seeking to defuse longings for democracy by vowing to govern “democratically.”

Officials say they oppose Western-style multiparty democracy as wrong for China, but embrace the idea of consultation, public review and balloting under party rule. China will open up the political system, step by step, as the country becomes wealthier and more stable, officials promise.

Some China analysts suggest that student discontent could rise if the current economic crisis clouds their futures. China sends nine times as many students to institutions of higher education now as it did in 1989, and competition for good jobs is fierce. Nearly one in four graduates last year could not find work, Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported.

But since 1989, Communist Party leaders have realized that they ignore youth at their peril. The government is now trying to ease job anxieties with training programs and incentives for graduates to work in rural areas. “If you are worried, then I am more worried than you,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told one student group in December.

The party has also ratcheted up recruitment and political education, making college students the party’s fastest-growing segment, said Susan L. Shirk, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. More than 8 percent of all students were party members in 2007, compared with fewer than 1 percent in 1989. At elite institutions like Peking University, percentages are much higher.

Some of those students echo the party’s line that Western-style democracy does not suit China. “China has a large population, and education has a long way to go,” said Song Chao, a Peking University ecology major. “Considering that, we need to put some regulations on people. The major task for China now is development.”

Others hope to nudge the party toward reform. “Of course, if we could become a democratic society, we would like that,” said another history major and party aspirant. “But this is not something you can achieve by radical means. What if there is chaos?”

But a majority of students seek party membership not as an ideological statement but rather as a means to a better job, the survey published by People’s Forum concluded. At Peking University, many students say they nap through the university’s much mocked, though mandatory, political thought classes. “Even the teachers know they are teaching rubbish,” one senior said.

Most students will make such statements only anonymously because government control of campus speech remains tight. Professors say some students are assigned to report to administrators if they hear teachers adopting anti-government lines. Most students interviewed for this article did not want to be identified, saying their comments might be negatively noted in their files.

Five years ago, the university shut down a computer bulletin board — a vibrant hub of information for 300,000 users — after the central government’s education minister complained that it did not always reflect “the right view.” Students say they are careful about what they write on the new, restricted and monitored board because their identities can be traced.

Surveys show that four of five university students still rely on China’s heavily censored media for their news. But in a digital age when nearly 70,000 Chinese students are studying in the United States and roughly 163,000 foreign students study at Chinese universities, walls against information are porous.

One senior recalled an excruciating roundtable discussion with foreign journalists who visited Peking University in 2007 and asked about the government crackdown on student demonstrators in 1989. “They always ask about this June 4 incident, and we just keep silent,” she said. “It is not because we don’t want to talk. It is because we have no idea what exactly happened!

“I felt a little bit humiliated because we don’t know our own history,” she said. “So I went to the library and I read about June 4. Basically, everything was written by foreign journalists.”

The curbs on public debate can reduce even political controversies on campus to the status of rumors. Two Peking University professors were among the first to sign Charter 08, an online pro-democracy manifesto released in December and backed by many intellectuals.

After signing, Professor Xia, the economist, said he was forced to resign from positions at two research institutes. His fellow signer, He Weifang, a celebrated law professor, was transferred to an obscure college in China’s far west. Professor He’s exile was news overseas. But much like the coming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, it drew little notice from students.

One student defended the professor with an anonymous post on the campus’s computer bulletin board. “The day will come,” he wrote, “when Professor He can go where he wants.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Article - China cracks down on activists, journalists on Tiananmen anniversary

2009-06-05T22:33:00.002+08:00

Police stop journalists from reporting near Tiananmen gate, opposite Tiananmen square in Beijing on Thursday. Foreign journalists were barred from the square as uniformed and plainclothes police stood guard on the vast plaza that was the epicenter of the student-led movement crushed by the military on June 4, 1989. Elizabeth Dalzie/AP

Beijing also lashed out at the US after Secretary of State Clinton said China should examine the "dark events" of its past.

By Jonathan Adams

posted June 04, 2009 at 8:34 am EST

China on Thursday sent hundreds of police to Beijing's vast Tiananmen Square to prevent disturbances, on the 20th anniversary of a military crackdown that killed hundreds – possibly thousands – of protesters.

Beijing also lashed out at the US after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged China to "examine openly" the events of June 3 and 4, 1989. Her appeal was echoed by the president of Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its own.

Ms. Clinton and others have used the anniversary to criticize China for neglecting political reforms – a key demand of the 1989 protesters – even while steaming ahead with economic reforms. (See a cartoon on the subject here.)

Agence France-Presse reports that the heart of Beijing was in virtual lockdown as hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police officers enforced order.

Police officers searched bags and even the pockets of thousands of Chinese and foreign tourists streaming through checkpoints to visit the giant plaza, and foreign journalists were barred from entering.

"There are far more police than normal days," said a 35-year-old Chinese man who said he frequently visits the square. "It's because of June 4. It's pretty scary having so much police. There are a lot of plainclothes officers too."

The Associated Press reports that police barred foreign journalists from the square, and threatened some with violence.

Security officials checking passports also blocked foreign TV camera operators and photographers from entering to cover the raising of China's national flag, which happens at dawn every day. Plainclothed officers aggressively confronted journalists on the streets surrounding the square, cursing and threatening violence against them.

The BBC reports that China issued a strong rebuke to Clinton's remarks.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Mrs Clinton said Beijing needed to "provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal".

China expressed its "strong dissatisfaction" with her comments.

"The US remarks are groundless accusations against the Chinese government and in contravention of the fundamental norms governing international relations, as well as a gross interference in China's internal affairs," said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

"We urge the US to put aside its political prejudices and correct its mistakes so as to refrain from undermining bilateral relations. "On the political incident that took place in the 1980s, the party and the government have already reached a conclusion," he said.

Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou also criticized Beijing in a statement, which the Associated Press cited:

'This painful chapter in history must be faced. Pretending it never happened is not an option,' Mr Ma said in a statement. ...

... As the Chinese leaders have in recent years shown more concern for human rights, Mr Ma said, they should also 'let the facts of past tragic episodes speak for themselves.'

Ties between China and Taiwan have warmed considerably since Ma was elected a year ago, but his comments fulfilled a promise to continue to speak out every year on the massacre's anniversary.

Chinese veterans of the 1989 protests also spoke out. Xiong Yan returned to Hong Kong for the first time to join events marking the anniversary, according to CNN; he's still barred from entering mainland China.

Wang Dan, the most prominent student leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations, spoke recently at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and pinned his hopes for political change in China on the Internet, the foundation's blog The Foundry reports.

"There are two China's now. One China is reality-which is totally controlled by the Communist Party. But there's another China, a China based on the internet. That area I don't see the government being able to control. That's the base of the new social forces," he said. "That's the hope for the civil society and the civil society is the hope for democracy."

China partially or fully blocked many Internet services in the lead-up to the anniversary – including Flickr, Hotmail, and Twitter, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Article - Secret Memoir Offers Look Inside China’s Politics

2009-05-26T02:20:00.004+08:00

Zhao Ziyang, with bullhorn, made his final appearance in Tiananmen Square with student protesters on May 19, 1989. Mr. Zhao's aide, Wen Jiabao, second from right, is now China's prime minister.

May 15, 2009 By ERIK ECKHOLM (NY Times)

In May 1989, as he feuded with hard-line party rivals over how to handle the students occupying Tiananmen Square, China’s Communist Party chief requested a personal audience with Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch behind the scenes.

The party chief, Zhao Ziyang, was told to go to Mr. Deng’s home on the afternoon of May 17 for what he thought would be a private talk. To his dismay, he arrived to find that Mr. Deng had assembled several key members of the Politburo, including Mr. Zhao’s bitter foes.

“I realized that things had already taken a bad turn,” Mr. Zhao recalls in a secretly recorded memoir only now coming to light — a rare first-person account of crisis politics at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.

From Mr. Deng’s impatient body language and the scathing attacks he received from his rivals, Mr. Zhao says in the memoir, which is now being published in book form, it was obvious that Mr. Deng had already decided to overrule Mr. Zhao’s proposal for dialogue with the students and impose martial law.

“It seems my mission in history has already ended,” Mr. Zhao recalls telling a party elder later that day. “I told myself that no matter what, I would not be the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students.”

As Mr. Zhao anticipated, he was immediately sidelined and soon vilified for “splitting the party.” He was purged and placed under house arrest until his death in 2005.

But in this long, enforced retirement, it turns out, Mr. Zhao secretly recorded his own account, on 30 musical cassette tapes that were spirited out of the country by former aides and supporters, of his rise to national power in the 1980s, his battles with the old guard, and his alliance and tussles with Mr. Deng as he loosened Soviet-style controls and helped put China on a path to the dynamic economic power it has become today.

Mr. Zhao also tells how he was outmaneuvered during the lengthy student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in the spring of 1989, setting up his ouster shortly before the military crackdown on June 4 of that year.

One striking claim in the memoir, scholars who have seen it said, is that Mr. Zhao presses the case that he pioneered the opening of China’s economy to the world and the initial introduction of market forces in agriculture and industry — steps he says were fiercely opposed by hard-liners and not always fully supported by Mr. Deng, the paramount leader, who is often credited with championing market-oriented policies.

In the late 1970s, as the party chief in Sichuan Province, Mr. Zhao had started dismantling Maoist-style collective farms. Mr. Deng, who had just consolidated power after Mao’s death, brought him to Beijing in 1980 as prime minister with a mandate for change. Mr. Zhao, who like other Chinese leaders had little training in or experience of market economics, describes his political battles and missteps as he tried to give more rein to free enterprise.

Roderick MacFarquhar, a China expert at Harvard who wrote an introduction to the new book, said it had given him a new appreciation of Mr. Zhao’s central role in devising economic strategies, including some, like promoting foreign trade in coastal provinces, that he had urged on Mr. Deng, rather than the other way around.

“Deng Xiaoping was the godfather, but on a day-to-day basis Zhao was the actual architect of the reforms,” Mr. MacFarquhar said in an interview.

Recording over children’s songs and Beijing Opera performances on the cassettes in his guarded compound just north of Tiananmen Square, Mr. Zhao describes in generally modest terms his tenure as prime minister and then party secretary.

Mr. Zhao had initially written notes and then around 2000, encouraged by three sympathetic former officials who were allowed to visit him, decided to tape his memoirs, which he did partly in the presence of those supporters, said Bao Tong, a former close adviser to Mr. Zhao who remains under tight surveillance in Beijing.

Two of the former officials have since died, but one of them, Du Dao-zheng, a former senior official who oversaw press and publications, arranged for a copy of the tapes to be smuggled to Hong Kong. Mr. Du, who lives in China, decided in recent weeks to openly acknowledge his role in a statement that is quoted in the forthcoming Chinese edition of the memoir but not available in time for the English edition.

Mr. Bao, in an interview this week, called the memoir “very rare historical material” that “belongs to all the people of China and to the world.” He said that the voice was unmistakably that of Mr. Zhao and that the memoir’s authenticity was not in doubt.

Nearly 20 years after the crackdown and Mr. Zhao’s fall, the edited transcripts are being published by Simon and Schuster in a book, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” that will be formally released in the United States on May 19. A Chinese-language edition is being published in Hong Kong.

“This is the first time that such a high Chinese leader has been in a position to tell the truth,” said Bao Pu, a son of Bao Tong who is an editor of the book and a translator of the English-language edition. “At that point, the truth is all he had.”

Also credited as translators and editors are Renee Chiang, a publisher in Hong Kong, and Adi Ignatius, an American journalist who covered China in the 1980s.

Although the tumult of 1989 is distant for many Chinese, it remains a forbidden subject, heavily censored on the Internet and rarely if ever mentioned in the state-run media. Beijing authorities are likely to be unhappy with Mr. Zhao’s airing of inside conflicts as well as his conclusion, arrived at in isolation after he left power, that China must turn toward parliamentary democracy if it is to tackle corruption.

In a sharp break with Chinese Communist tradition, even for dismissed officials, Mr. Zhao provides personal details of tense party sessions. He attacks several officials, especially his archrival, the conservative former prime minister Li Peng, who fiercely opposed or, in his view, betrayed him. He describes how they schemed to turn Mr. Deng against him.

Mr. Zhao said that in 1989 he argued that most of the demonstrating students “were only asking us to correct our flaws, not attempting to overthrow our political system.”

These efforts to defuse tensions were “blocked, resisted, and sabotaged by Li Peng and his associates,” Mr. Zhao said.

Perry Link, emeritus professor of Chinese studies at Princeton who was in Beijing in 1989, said: “Laying bare the personal animosities from such a high position is something new here. It’s certainly the element that will send officials in Beijing through the roof.”

The debate over how to respond to protesting students was part of a continuing struggle over economic and political change. “What becomes clear in these tapes is that in the minds of Chinese leaders, Tiananmen was a continuation of their battles through the 1980s,” said Bao Pu, who is also a rights advocate and an editor in Hong Kong.

By forcing out Mr. Zhao and restoring a political grip that remains largely in place today, the conservatives squelched hopes that China’s economic reforms would be accompanied by systematic political change. But they were also surprised by the popular revulsion over the crackdown.

With the society in turmoil and especially after seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Deng began pressing even harder, in his waning years, for market-style changes, or what he renamed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Despite his economic triumphs, Mr. Zhao may be remembered most for his futile effort to head off violence in 1989. In the tapes, he describes how he learned that the army had started its bloody march to the square at the heart of Beijing.

“On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire,” Mr. Zhao said.

Question
How far do Zhao Ziyang's revelations confirm your current understanding and perceptions of the workings of the CCP?

Article - Exuberance in Taiwan as Ties With China Warm

2009-05-26T02:12:00.002+08:00

A woman looked at monitors displaying securities information at a brokerage in Taipei, at the end of April, as Taiwan's stock index rose the most since 1991 and the currency rallied after the island allowed Chinese investments for the first time since a civil war ended six decades ago.

May 14, 2009 By JONATHAN ADAMS (NY times)

TAIPEI — The bulls are running hard in Taiwan as the island prepares to open its doors to mainland Chinese investment for the first time since breaking from Beijing in 1949.

After the two sides announced plans late last month to sign accords on banking, insurance and access to financial markets, mainland fever has set in on the island: its benchmark stock index, the Taiex, climbed 13 percent in the two weeks to Friday, and some analysts are predicting an additional gain of 25 percent to 50 percent by year-end. The Taiwan dollar has strengthened 2.5 percent.

Optimists see decades of bitter rivalry across the Taiwan Strait fading. The British bank Standard Chartered has dubbed the opening a “great leap across the strait,” and Goldman Sachs has called it a “paradigm shift.”

But others here are cautioning that the opening to mainland money could take longer than expected — and that in the near future at least, mainland investors will face a daunting maze of regulatory approvals and political concerns.

“People are overoptimistic,” said Norman Yin, a finance expert and informal economic adviser to Taiwan’s president. “They don’t understand that there are many constraints in the first stage. And in sensitive sectors, such as high-tech, military-related or mobile phones, there will be even more restrictions.”

Beijing officials have viewed Taiwan as a renegade province ever since the Nationalists retreated to the island when they lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists 60 years ago. Though not formally independent, the island has had its own government, economy and currency. For most of this decade, Taiwan was led by a pro-independence government that increased some cross-strait ties, although not nearly as quickly or broadly as business interests and investors would have liked.

But since Ma Ying-jeou was inaugurated as president nearly a year ago, Taiwan has moved rapidly to forge closer commercial links with China to lift its sagging economy. In the past year, it signed deals with China on tourism, airline flights and shipping.

Investment, however, has remained a one-way street, flowing from the island to the mainland. Taiwan has invested $150 billion in the mainland since the 1980s, according to one Taiwan government estimate. Mainland China has until now been barred from directly investing in Taiwan.

Now, analysts are heralding the long-term financial implications of Taiwan’s opening to the mainland. The anticipation began on April 26, when officials from Taipei and Beijing met in the mainland city of Nanjing and signed a statement on financial cooperation.

Three days later, Taiwan said it would allow mainland investment in nearly 100 sectors. Taipei also said it would permit mainland investment in construction projects that are part of Mr. Ma’s economic stimulus package. The same day, the first possible deal was announced. China Mobile, which has the most subscribers of any mobile phone carrier, said it had agreed to take a 12 percent stake in Far EasTone Telecommunications of Taiwan.

On May 1, China formally approved Taiwan-bound investment by qualified domestic institutional investors. Four days later, it announced a plan to step up development of a cross-strait economic zone in Fujian Province. Taiwanese auto, banking and other companies added to the euphoria by announcing investment tie-up plans with mainland companies.

The response to all this has been a stock market frenzy, especially by foreign institutional investors. JPMorgan Chase announced a target of 8,000 for the Taiex by year-end (the Taiex closed at 6,485 on Wednesday).

Goldman Sachs upgraded Taiwan shares in general to “overweight” this month. “The rapidity and scope of recent cross-strait initiatives,” it said in a note, “are welcome signals that Taiwan may finally reap the economic benefits from a warmer relationship with China.”

But many investors seem to have glossed over or willfully ignored the fact that many essential details remain unresolved or undisclosed. For one, the details of which specific sectors will be open to mainland money have not been completed. Taiwan will most likely allow mainland investment in 98 industries during the first phase, including automobiles, textiles, rubber and retailing, with detailed rules probably coming at month-end, the Taiwan minister of economic affairs, Yiin Chii-ming told reporters this week. But flat-panel and contract-chip manufacturing will still be shut to mainland investors for now.

Then, the two sides will have to sign a memorandum of understanding, probably in June or July for stock investments, as well as separate agreements for banking and insurance.

“On the Taiwan side, the government is still keeping their cards close to their chest,” said Tony Phoo, an economist with Standard Chartered. “We still don’t have details on everything we’re hearing and reading about, so there’s a lot of market speculation.”

Kevin Yang, chief investment officer at Paradigm Asset Management, added that for now, Beijing was capping Taiwan-bound investment at about 7.2 billion Taiwan dollars, or about $219 million.

“That’s very little,” he said. “I think the market’s overreacting.”

Phil Chu of Grand Cathay Securities and other analysts say foreign investors are betting that Taiwan will be another Hong Kong, where the stock market boomed following its opening to mainland investment. “I think it’s possible Taiwan’s stock market could double by 2012,” Mr. Chu said. “But it won’t go up as much as Hong Kong’s did.”

Still, analysts see Taiwan’s opening to the mainland as helping the island’s economic recovery in the short-term, and providing a structural boost in the long-run. China has already played a part in lifting some sectors. Its rural stimulus plan has increased mainland demand for televisions and other appliances, which has increased orders for Taiwan’s high technology companies.

Investors in Taiwan’s market have been burned before on inflated mainland hopes. Last year, for example, the market rocketed in the two months before Mr. Ma’s inauguration, only to plunge steadily afterward as the reality of the global downturn set in. Still, analysts insist that the long-term picture is bright.

“For eight years, Taiwan kept limits on exchanges and investments,” Mr. Chu said. “But since last year, Ma Ying-jeou has steadily adopted opening policies.”

Question
Using this article and your own knowledge, to what extent will economic factors contribute to Sino-Taiwan ties?

A Study of the Social Unrests in China

2009-05-11T11:57:00.002+08:00

China has witnessed a visible increase over the past ten years in the number of protests, demonstrations, and riots over a variety of issues. Areas of social problems that have stimulated collective protests include factory conditions, non-payment of wages, factory closures, environmental problems (both large and small), and land and property takeovers by developers and the state.

It isn't surprising that social conditions in China have given rise to causes of protest. Rapid growth has stimulated large movements of people and migrant workers, development has created massive environmental problems for localities, and opportunities for development have created conflicts between developers and local people over land and property rights. Following the terrible earthquake in Sichuan and the collapse of many buildings and schools with tragic loss of life, there was a wave of angry protests by parents against corrupt building practices. So there are plenty of possible causes for protest in China today.

What is more surprising, though, is that the state has not been successful so far in muzzling protest, or in keeping news of local protests from reaching the international public.

We might say that the presence of protest in a society is actually a sign of rough and ready democracy as well: it indicates that public opinion is important and can be mobilized, it suggests that the state is unwilling to use the most repressive means available to crush protest, and it suggests that the state can be affected by public protest. So the rising frequency of protest in China might be seen as evidence of a growing importance of the sphere of civil society within Chinese politics.

YouTube provides a surprisingly wide window on protests in China today. It's worth viewing a sampling of clips from YouTube that surface when one searches for Chinese protests:

Unemployment for Chinese migrant workers

Labor protest in Shanghai

Shoe factory protest for back wages

Environmental protest in Xiamen

Protest about water pollution in Xiamen

Parents protesting children's death in Sichuan

Carrefour protest in Beijing

Article - Mongols' 'subsumed' culture

2009-05-04T03:03:00.003+08:00

ST 4 May 2009

A bleak future BAIYUNKUANGQU (China) - BAYAR has spent most of his 48 years roaming the great Mongolian steppe in northern China, grazing his sheep flocks as his ethnic Mongol ancestors did for centuries.

But he was forced to settle down three years ago in a small brick house on a windswept plain here due to grazing restrictions which Mongols call the latest harsh blow to their age-old pastoral culture under Chinese rule.

The restrictions, first introduced a decade ago and now being stepped up, are aimed at protecting grasslands from desertification due to excessive farming, the overgrazing of expanding livestock herds and drought.

For centuries, Mongols have grazed sheep, cattle and horses and hunted on the open steppe, camping in circular white tents known as yurts in a rugged, nomadic lifestyle that gave rise to the mobile cavalry of legendary conqueror Genghis Khan.

But those days are over for Bayar. He now ekes out a living renting out fake 'yurts' to vacationing Chinese tourists eager to play nomad for a night.

The government 'encouraged' this, he said, saying no more under the watchful eye of local officials who followed AFP reporters to his remote home in a sign of the issue's sensitivity.

In private, others are less guarded about the grazing restrictions. Bayar now must pen his herds three months of the year. Unable to afford feed for such a long period, he had to sell half his 300 sheep, taking a loss amid plunging mutton prices.

Critics say government compensation is inadequate or non-existent and allege that many of the 'protected' lands were later taken over by Chinese mining and energy firms.

According to China's forestry ministry, expanding deserts threaten up to 400 million people and recently were growing by nearly 3,500 square kilometres a year to now cover a third of the country.

While China is widely accused of cultural repression in Tibet and its Muslim northwest, Mongols say their way of life also is being subsumed by Chinese culture and insensitive policies, as well as the impacts of climate change. -- AFP

Theme 2: Governance: Mao Era - Some videos

2009-05-02T00:30:00.005+08:00

Great Leap Forward

Cultural Revolution

Article - The great patriotic push is on in China

2009-04-28T21:32:00.002+08:00

Straits Times 28 April 2009

BEIJING: China's Communist Party will launch a patriotic propaganda offensive celebrating 60 years of its rule, hoping the campaign will ward off economic pessimism and public discontent that could loosen its grip on power.

The 'mass patriotic education' campaign was announced on the front page of the People's Daily - the Communist Party's mouthpiece - and other official newspapers yesterday.

It underscores how even as China expands as a global economic power, officials still need to apply propaganda tools - honed over decades of one-party rule - at home to counter social strains from the financial crisis.

The 'mass patriotic campaign', which will involve a five-month blitz of pro-government propaganda on television and at concerts, cultural events and public meetings, would 'bolster confidence in vanquishing hardship', said the People's Daily, citing a directive from the party's department of propaganda.

The document described 2009 as an important year in which China would have to deal with 'complicated changes' in the global economic arena and at the same time maintain stable and relatively fast economic development.

The activities planned should 'guide people to love the party' and highlight the great achievements China has accomplished in the past 60 years.

'Guide people to profoundly grasp the incomparable superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics,' said the directive. 'Correctly understand the new changes in the international economic environment and in our country's economic development.'

After a decade of 10 per cent-plus annual economic growth, China's leaders are contending with rising unemployment following a sharp downturn in demand from the United States and Europe for the exports which have helped drive the Chinese economic miracle.

The government is drawing up a fresh economic stimulus aimed at boosting consumption, on top of a previous four trillion yuan (S$887 billion) stimulus package to combat the global downturn by spending on new infrastructure projects around the country.

Chinese leaders appear determined that the common people should be made aware that, in these difficult times, their government is working overtime for their benefit, British newspaper the Telegraph reported yesterday.

The aim of the campaign, the People's Daily said, was to encourage the public to 'see fine prospects for our country's economic and social development' and 'even more firmly defend social stability'.

A notice issued earlier by the Ministry of Education also urges schools of all levels to launch educational activities highlighting the theme of patriotism.

It specifies that such activities should emphasise on 'improving the ideological and political education of undergraduates, as well as the shaping of the ideology and morals of non-adults'.

Vice-Party Secretary of Beijing, Mr Wang Anshun, indicated in a speech two week ago that the Chinese capital would carry through this theme of patriotism when it holds the National Day celebrations at the Tiananmen Square.

The campaign will culminate with a grand military parade through Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Oct 1 to mark the 60th anniversary of Mao Zedong's announcement of the founding of a People's Republic of China in 1949.

REUTERS

Question
To what extent will the propaganda campaigns like this be successful in today's China?

Article - China won't seek hegemony

2009-04-23T08:10:00.000+08:00

Chinese Navy ships moored at Sanya, in southern China's Hainan province. China's navy will move faster to build large combat warships, next-generation aircraft and sophisticated torpedoes in a modernizing overhaul for fighting in an era of information technology, its commander in chief said Thursday, April 16, 2009.

BEIJING - CHINESE President Hu Jintao has assured the world that his country will never seek hegemony and that its military will forever be a protector of peace.

Speaking on Thursday as China put on an unprecedented display of its warships and latest nuclear submarines, Mr Hu also pledged that his country would not spark an arms race.

He did not mention a possible first aircraft carrier for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, despite earlier speculation that he may make an announcement to celebrate the navy's 60th anniversary on Thursday.

'Both now and in the future, no matter to what extent we develop, China will never seek hegemony,' he told foreign navy commanders who gathered in Qingdao to mark the occasion.

The Chinese leader stressed that China wants to cooperate with other countries to ensure maritime safety.

'Strengthening exchanges between the navies of all countries and embarking on international maritime safety cooperation contributes substantially to the building of harmonious oceans and seas,' he was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.

The assurances from Mr Hu, who also heads the country's top military body, came as China showcased its ambition to become a world sea power.

Mr Hu, wearing white gloves, saluted the Chinese sailors as he reviewed an impressive fleet of 25 vessels and 31 aircraft aboard the destroyer Shijiazhuang. Two Chinese nuclear submarines made their first public appearance off the northern port city yesterday.

Accompanied by Chinese naval commander Wu Shengli, Defence Minister Liang Guanglie and other top military brass, Mr Hu also reviewed 21 vessels from 14 countries, including Singapore and the United States.

Related story: The Chinese Navy: How Big a Threat to the U.S.? (Time 21 April 2009)

Article - Meet-the-People sessions in China

2009-04-18T23:06:00.001+08:00

Officials must meet residents to hear grievances to maintain social stability

By Peh Shing Huei- ST April 18, 2009

“They hope that people will reason that, with things projected to get better, they should not bother to rebel.”

June Teufel Dreyer, professor of political science and a leading China scholar, on regular Meet-the-People sessions in which city leaders in China will now meet residents to hear their grievances. The meetings, some analysts say, are meant to defuse tensions ahead of sensitive anniversaries like the Tiananmen Square incident on June 4 and the 60th national day of the People’s Republic of China on October 1.

BEIJING: They may not be held in a void deck setting, but China will soon have its own regular Meet-the-People sessions too.

Just like Singapore politicians, Chinese officials will now have to meet their residents and hear their grievances.

In a ruling announced this week, the State Council - China's Cabinet - ordered city leaders to meet their residents once a quarter and county officials to do likewise once a month.

While Chinese officials have been known to hold such meetings on a wildly ad hoc manner in the past decade, this is believed to be the first time the central government has decreed them to be a regular affair.

The move, said analysts, is to defuse tensions ahead of sensitive anniversaries like the Tiananmen incident on June 4 and the 60th national day of the People's Republic of China on Oct 1.

'They hope that people will reason that, with things projected to get better, they should not bother to rebel,' said veteran China scholar June Teufel Dreyer of the University of Miami.

The Meet-the-People sessions here are referred to as 'jie fang', or 'to receive petitioners', a reference to ordinary people who seek out authorities to raise formal grievances.

Local officials were told by the State Council to 'warmly receive the people, patiently listen to their appeals with compassion and responsibility and make greater effort to solve their problems'.

The aim is for lower officials to solve the problems so that the petitioners would not need to follow a centuries-old system of seeking justice with provincial or even national leaders.

The petitioning system dates back to imperial times, when people travelled for thousands of kilometres to the capital, in the hope that the ultimate arbiter, the emperor, will rule in their favour.

The practice has not changed much. Many ordinary Chinese still travel to Beijing in the hope that the central government can rescue them from the injustices of local authorities.

Madam Zhong Yafang, 42, for example, had come to Beijing from eastern Hangzhou city before the start of the Chinese parliamentary sessions last month, hoping to petition the country's top leaders on the wrong medical treatment she received.

She had told The Straits Times: 'I have confidence in the central government. As long as (Premier) Wen Jiabao or (President) Hu Jintao learn about it, they will not leave it unsolved.'

But petitioners like her were portrayed negatively lately when Peking University professor Sun Dongdong commented last month that 99 per cent of these people were mentally ill.

State media quickly lambasted his comments, calling them reckless and irresponsible. Hundreds of petitioners protested outside the university despite his subsequent apology.

'Notwithstanding the views of one Beida (Beijing University) academic, the government realises that petitioning is key to maintaining social stability during a period of heightened economic stress,' said political analyst Lawrence Reardon from the University of New Hamsphire, who called the practice a unique form of Chinese 'democracy'.

Having a dedicated human face to meet these petitioners personally would be useful, said observers.

But as Prof Dreyer said, it is only effective if those officials are able to solve the problems. Otherwise, their hopefulness can quickly turn into anger.

Now, officials are known better for blocking petitioners from complaining to the higher authorities, expending significant resources to track them down in Beijing and abduct them back to their hometowns.

Some even go as far as sending petitioners to mental hospitals, forcing them to put in writing that they will never again approach the higher authorities, before they are released.

Such abuses in the petitioning system have led some scholars to want it terminated, and calls for greater effort to establish a just and independent legal system.

But such a move is unlikely in the short term, meaning that the government will try to further refine, and improve, the petitioning system.

'The leadership's problem here is how to modulate the petition system, so that it doesn't encourage overwhelming numbers of people to present petitions but does satisfy enough people with grievances that the party and government are serious about trying to solve their problems,' said Prof Dreyer.

Theme 2: Family - Women's changing status in China

2009-04-15T22:01:00.003+08:00

Gu Xiulian, chairwoman of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), presides over the opening ceremony of the 10th National Women's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Oct. 28, 2008. (Xinhua Photo)

by Xinhua writer Zhan Yan (7 March 2009)

BEIJING, March 7 (Xinhua) -- Li Guanyao felt honored when the bridegroom's family asked him, father of the bride, to give a speech at the marriage ceremony in Beijing.

The father knew that the bride's families would not be present at the marriage ceremony as a tradition. "Though the customs have changed, usually only the bridegroom's father can speak at a marriage ceremony. It shows the great respect they hold for myself and my daughter."

Li Lily, the daughter, earned much more than her husband and financed the apartment for their after-marriage living, though the two families are equally well-off. "My husband can accept the fact that I earn more than him. It makes me feel comfortable, because not every man can do that," she said.

Women are enjoying more important roles in China. From the age of foot binding through to today, the role and rights of women have undergone drastic transformation.

The country held the Tenth National Women's Congress in October last year, setting targets in the coming five years to boost women's involvement in social and economic development and their participation in state affairs.

"Chinese women's ability should be further improved so that they could play a bigger role in building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way," said Huang Qingyi, All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) Deputy Chairwoman.

"Currently, women account for 45.4 percent of China's total employed population," said Huang, "Female officials account for more than 40 percent of all officials."
In political sector, Chinese women played a larger role.

Female deputies comprised 21.33 percent of the National People's Congress (NPC), up 1.09 percentage points from the previous congress, and women make up 17.7 percent of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), up one percentage point. The proportion of female deputies to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was up two percentage points. There are more than 230 female ministerial or provincial officials, Huang said.

China's maternal mortality rate has reduced to 36.6 per 100,000from 51.3 per 100,000 in 2003 and the infant mortality rate has dropped to 15.3 per 1,000 from 25.5 per 1,000 in 2003, Huang said.

"More women buy social security and their life expectancy has reached 75.25 years," Huang said. Statistics show China has about 27,000 women and children's rights protection agencies.

Women from ethnic minority groups and religious believers were also greatly motivated to contribute to the social development, Huang said.

These changes have been achieved against the background that women had been stereotyped to be inferior to men. For centuries before the early 1900s, there was a prominent male domination in China. Women were deprived of all rights and were present mainly to serve men. Women served as slaves, concubines and prostitutes. Marriages were arranged, sometimes preparing a female from infancy to serve her future husband.

This can be seen most effectively in the practice of foot binding. Beginning around the 11th century, foot binding became a tradition. When a girl became three or four, her mother would tightly wrap her daughter's feet in bandages with her toes tucked under the soles. On top of this excruciating pain, the bandages would be tightened each day. If a woman's feet weren't bound she was considered unsuitable for marriage.

Other customs prevailed such as housewives had to eat in the kitchen or at separate tables in formal family dinners, even if the visitors were their own relatives or friends.

Though enjoying improved status, some women complained the society adopts double standards to appraise men and women.

"I don't think women and men are equal. Living in a social circle dominated by men, I can feel the intangible pressure. It's not they don't respect us. My husband cooked for me and did everything right, but I can smell the male chauvinism in their bones. One man told me, he can't discuss anything serious with a woman. They just don't take women as intellectual equals," said Cao Chenhong, a white-collar woman in a foreign-invested company in Beijing.

For example, when it comes to social drinking, men get drunk at the dinner table and will be praised for their honesty and integrity, but when women get drunk, they will be criticized lacking self-discipline, she says.

By law, women have equality in education, marriage, rights and freedom, but the ingrained stereotype is hard to fight: boys are the ones to pass down family lines. The most worrying fact is China has an unnatural boy-girl birth ratio of about 118 males to 100 females due to sex-specific abortions every year.

Related article - Congress: China to boost women's status (China.com)

Question:
With reference to specific examples, discuss whether the status of women in China has changed over time.

Article - PLA shoots down talk of loyalty shift

2009-04-13T22:53:00.000+08:00

STATE BEFORE PARTY?

By Peh Shing Huei, China Bureau Chief ST April 13, 2009

BEIJING: - More than a week before its most spectacular naval display, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is already making waves in the newspapers, magazines and even cyberspace.

While the PLA Navy prepares for a grand maritime parade next Thursday to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding, a separate ideological battle has been waged on land. Two articles have been published recently by the military, stressing that the PLA must remain loyal first to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than the state.

'The Chinese Communist Party is the leadership core of the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and maintaining the party's absolute leadership is our military's political priority,' wrote General Li Jinai, director of the PLA General Political Department, in the April issue of the CCP journal Seeking Truth.

'Resolutely resist 'de-Partyising or de-politicising the military' or 'nationalising the military' and other mistaken thoughts and influences,' added Gen Li, a member of the Central Military Commission, the top decision-making body of the Chinese military.

Last Tuesday, the PLA Daily's front page was almost entirely devoted to the same argument, with two long articles extolling the importance, and virtues, of the military following the command of the party.

One of the articles wrote that the modern Chinese soldier belongs to a military that 'is different from any other armed forces in the world', adding that since the birth of the people's army, it has 'resolutely stood under the banner of the party'.

At the heart of the debate is the peculiar nature of the PLA, one of the world's largest military forces. While other major armed forces pledge, at least on paper, their loyalty to the state, the PLA's allegiance is primarily to the CCP. This is because the PLA was born out of the Red Army, a peasant force built by the CCP in 1927, leading the communists to victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949.

'The PLA is fundamentally the armed forces of the CCP, which is why the PLA could never be truly modernised in its truest sense unless it answers to a democratically elected civilian authority,' said Professor Yu Maochun of the United States Naval Academy. That also explains why the PLA will inevitably become more of 'an internal security forces' often asked to perform missions such as the Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protesters and curbing unrest in Tibet or Xinjiang, Prof Yu added.

For years, this 'party controls the gun' phenomenon has been a target of those pushing for political reforms in China. It resurfaced in the last few months with Charter 08, an online petition issued last December to push for democratisation. Besides calling for free elections, the Charter, which has since been signed by some 8,000 signatories online, also advocated the removal of CCP control of the military.

It is unclear why the PLA waited until now to respond, but it could be timed to quell any dissenting voices ahead of next week's naval display - a prestigious event with more than 40 foreign navy ships from 15 countries, including the United States.

There is also the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4. The 1989 incident remains the biggest stain on the PLA's reputation, marking the first instance it opened fire on its own people.

The PLA Daily response last week could also be a result of two threads over the weekend on the online forum of state news agency Xinhua. They argued that the military should belong to the state and not any political group; and also that the 'nationalisation' of the military is an indicator of a major power as that is the norm for big powers.

Singapore-based international relations expert Li Mingjiang said that while it is understandable for the PLA to be controlled in the past by the CCP because of the historical relationship, communist China has changed so much since its founding in 1949. 'It's been almost 60 years since the founding of the PRC. Now China is so different. And this is so egregious compared to all other major countries in the world,' said Assistant Professor Li of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University.

But while the recent articles by the PLA suggest that this issue is of significant concern to its top leaders, there is little chance that the force could be 'nationalised' in the short term.

In the PLA Daily, the military reiterated the 'Three Ensures' called for by Chinese President Hu Jintao. It is to ensure party control over military, ensure the use of science and technology to build up national defence and ensure that the military carries out its mission in the 21st century.

Prof Li agreed that there is 'no chance' of the PLA switching its allegiance to the state any time soon. 'Party controlling the gun is an integral part of the political system. Since the CCP is not willing to push for substantive political reforms, this proposal will continue to be suppressed. Nationalisation of the military will significantly weaken the CCP political ruling position.'

Added Prof Yu: 'The demand for such within the PLA has always been more subterranean than explicit because it is an absolute heresy to even contemplate.'

Theme 1 - One Child Policy

2009-04-10T00:44:00.001+08:00

Background
China's one child policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit communist China's population growth. Although designated a "temporary measure," it continues a quarter-century after its establishment. The policy limits couples to one child. Fines, pressures to abort a pregnancy, and even forced sterilization accompanied second or subsequent pregnancies.

It is not an all-encompassing rule because it has always been restricted to ethnic Han Chinese living in urban areas. Citizens living in rural areas and minorities living in China are not subject to the law. However, the rule has been estimated to have reduced population growth in the country of 1.3 billion by as much as 300 million people over its first twenty years.

This rule has caused a disdain for female infants; abortion, neglect, abandonment, and even infanticide have been known to occur to female infants. The result of such Draconian family planning has resulted in the disparate ratio of 114 males for every 100 females among babies from birth through children four years of age. Normally, 105 males are naturally born for every 100 females.

Recent Effects of the One Child Law
Now that millions of sibling-less people in China are now young adults in or nearing their child-bearing years, a special provision allows millions of couples to have two children legally. If a couple is composed of two people without siblings, then they may have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a population decrease.

Although IUDs, sterilization, and abortion (legal in China) are China's most popular forms of birth control, over the past few years, China has provided more education and support for alternative birth control methods.

Statistically, China's total fertility rate (the number of births per woman) is 1.7, much higher than slowly-declining Germany at 1.4 but lower than the U.S. at 2.1 (2.1 births per woman is the replacement level of fertility, representing a stable population, exclusive of migration).

In 2007, there were reports that in the southwestern Guangxi Autonomous Region of China, officials were forcing pregnant women without permission to give birth to have abortions and levying steep fines on families violating the law. As a result, riots broke out and some may have been killed, including population control officials.

The Future of China's One Child Law
China's eleventh Five-Year Plan Period is from 2006 to 2010. Minister of the State Commission of Population and Family Planning Zhang Weiqing confirmed in early 2006 that China's one child policy is consistent with the nation's plan for population growth and would continue indefinitely. He denied rumors that the policy become less stringent to permit a second child.

Article - An Unsure China Steps Onto the Global Stage

2009-04-09T08:28:00.006+08:00

April 2, 2009 (NY Times, by Michael Wines and Edward Wong)

BEIJING — Let the rest of the world dither over whether this week’s economic summit meeting in London will save the planet from economic collapse.

China arrives at the meeting with a sense of momentum, riding a wave of nationalism and boasting an economy that, more than any other, is surfing the trough of a crippling recession. While other major economies shrink this year, China’s is expected by some economists to pass Japan’s as the world’s second largest, if it has not already.

The most talked-about new book here, “China is Unhappy,” combines hypernationalism with biting criticism of Western mismanagement and of China’s reluctance to grasp its place in history.

China’s normally faceless vice president, Xi Jinping, achieved cult status in late February after cameras caught him in an unguarded moment in Mexico, attacking “foreigners who had eaten their fill and had nothing better to do, pointing their fingers at our affairs.”

Xi Jinping: “There are some foreigners who had eaten their fill and had nothing better to do, pointing their fingers at our affairs. China does not, first, export revolution; second, export poverty and hunger; or third, cause unnecessary trouble for you. What else is there to say?”

“有些吃饱了没事干的外国人，对我们的事情指手画脚。中国一不输出革命，二不输出饥饿和贫困，三不去折腾你们，还有什么好说的.”

It has not dampened this spirit that China — and its $2 trillion in exchange reserves — are viewed around the world as the solution to a host of problems, whether by shoring up the capital base of the International Monetary Fund or by becoming a bigger engine of growth for Asian economies long dependent on the United States market.

Yet even as Presidents Hu Jintao and Obama had their first meeting on Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit proceedings, the Chinese appeared torn between seizing their moment in the geopolitical spotlight and shying from it.

Government censors quickly deleted Mr. Xi’s remarks from Chinese news reports last month. On Wednesday, the front page of China Daily, the English-language newspaper that telegraphs government positions to the outside world, warned that China “is not as strong an economy as some people think.”

“Bailing out China is our most important contribution to bail out the world,” Tang Min, an economist at the state-financed China Development Research Foundation, was quoted as saying.

Such is the quandary of a nation whose rise to power appears both inevitable and, in the view of many experts, still a bit premature.

“China is a major global economy now. That is a fundamental reality,” Chu Shulong, who directs the Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in an interview. “What China says and does has an effect on international finance, international economics and other economies.”

But just as real, Mr. Chu and others said, are the factors that hamstring China: widespread poverty, authoritarian rule, a culture shrouded by decades of isolation and poorly understood intentions. China’s global ambitions are unlikely to be realized until it resolves those issues.

Even then, China’s economic fortunes remain deeply entangled with those of the United States, its biggest customer, rival, debtor and still — by far — the world’s biggest economy.

So although Beijing may agitate for changes in the global financial structure, and relish some schadenfreude at Washington’s expense, its interests lie very much in getting America back on its economic feet.

That does not negate China’s newly enhanced status. With most of the world in financial collapse, China’s economy has suddenly become too big — and too healthy, expected to grow by at least 6.5 percent this year — for the rest of the world to ignore.

Evidence of China’s ascension is everywhere. Three years ago, China did not have a single bank among the world's top 20, measured by market capitalization. Today the top three are Chinese. (In 2006, the United States had 7 of the top 20 banks, including the top 2; today it has 3, and the biggest, Morgan Stanley, is rated fifth.)

China’s government-owned enterprises are buying companies, technology and resources worldwide. This year they have spent $13 billion in Europe, and plan new investments in the United States. China has struck long-term oil contracts with Brazil and Russia, and is angling for a more than $20 billion stake in three Australian mining companies.

China holds $1 trillion in United States government debt, and that is but half the foreign reserves generated by its huge trade surplus and investment inflows. The rest of the West owes China money, too.

Just as clearly, China harbors global ambitions. Military spending has grown for years at a double-digit clip, though as a share of gross domestic product, it is half of the United States’ military spending. China is slowly building a blue-water navy, and in December it sent three ships to the waters off Somalia to patrol against pirates, in the first modern active deployment of its warships beyond its home waters.

Foreign analysts uniformly say they are struck by China’s new assertiveness in diplomatic and military affairs, from tart critiques of American fiscal policy to verbal sparring over control of the South China Sea.

Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who oversaw White House Asia policy from 1998 to 2000, said the Chinese traditionally deferred to Washington on major economic and strategic issues, assenting or differing only after Washington made its case.

But “in meetings with the Chinese on several issues in the last two months, I’ve been quite surprised that Chinese are sitting there talking the way you would expect a major power to talk,” he said. “They are beginning to appreciate that when countries emerge from this current economic crisis, China is likely to be either the first to emerge or right after the U.S., and that China will be one of the very few countries at the end of this crisis to emerge without having high levels of government debt.”

“There is a palpable change taking place here,” Mr. Lieberthal added, “with a sense of greater confidence that China has now become an important place and needs to act that way.”

But economic importance does not automatically translate into geopolitical heft. In China’s case, most of the other components of true global power — moral sway, military clout, cultural influence, to name a few — are in the assembly stage, or missing altogether.

Even China’s unquestioned economic clout comes with an asterisk. While Chinese megacities boom and the country’s coast has become the world’s factory, 800 million of the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens remain farmers, many mired in poverty. China remains a developing nation, still vying for first-world status.

“I would be careful calling China a superpower. It is not one,” David Shambaugh, who directs the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington, wrote in an e-mail message. “It has no global military reach, its soft power is limited, and its diplomatic reach, while now global, is still limited in areas such as the Middle East and Latin America.”

Question
To what extent can China today be described as a "global superpower"?

Article - How China sees the world

2009-03-30T00:20:00.001+08:00

Mar 19th 2009: From The Economist print edition

And how the world should see China

IT IS an ill wind that blows no one any good. For many in China even the buffeting by the gale that has hit the global economy has a bracing message. The rise of China over the past three decades has been astonishing. But it has lacked the one feature it needed fully to satisfy the ultranationalist fringe: an accompanying decline of the West. Now capitalism is in a funk in its heartlands. Europe and Japan, embroiled in the deepest post-war recession, are barely worth consideration as rivals. America, the superpower, has passed its peak. Although in public China’s leaders eschew triumphalism, there is a sense in Beijing that the reassertion of the Middle Kingdom’s global ascendancy is at hand (see article).

China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, no longer sticks to the script that China is a humble player in world affairs that wants to focus on its own economic development. He talks of China as a “great power” and worries about America’s profligate spending endangering his $1 trillion nest egg there. Incautious remarks by the new American treasury secretary about China manipulating its currency were dismissed as ridiculous; a duly penitent Hillary Clinton was welcomed in Beijing, but as an equal. This month saw an apparent attempt to engineer a low-level naval confrontation with an American spy ship in the South China Sea. Yet at least the Americans get noticed. Europe, that speck on the horizon, is ignored: an EU summit was cancelled and France is still blacklisted because Nicolas Sarkozy dared to meet the Dalai Lama.

Already a big idea has spread far beyond China: that geopolitics is now a bipolar affair, with America and China the only two that matter. Thus in London next month the real business will not be the G20 meeting but the “G2” summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao. This not only worries the Europeans, who, having got rid of George Bush’s unipolar politics, have no wish to see it replaced by a Pacific duopoly, and the Japanese, who have long been paranoid about their rivals in Asia. It also seems to be having an effect in Washington, where Congress’s fascination with America’s nearest rival risks acquiring a protectionist edge.

Reds under the bed

Before panic spreads, it is worth noting that China’s new assertiveness reflects weakness as well as strength. This remains a poor country facing, in Mr Wen’s words, its most difficult year of the new century. The latest wild guess at how many jobs have already been lost—20m—hints at the scale of the problem. The World Bank has cut its forecast for China’s growth this year to 6.5%. That is robust compared with almost anywhere else, but to many Chinese, used to double-digit rates, it will feel like a recession. Already there are tens of thousands of protests each year: from those robbed of their land for development; from laid-off workers; from those suffering the side-effects of environmental despoliation. Even if China magically achieves its official 8% target, the grievances will worsen.

Far from oozing self-confidence, China is witnessing a fierce debate both about its economic system and the sort of great power it wants to be—and it is a debate the government does not like. This year the regime curtailed even the perfunctory annual meeting of its parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), preferring to confine discussion to back-rooms and obscure internet forums. Liberals calling for greater openness are being dealt with in the time-honoured repressive fashion. But China’s leaders also face rumblings of discontent from leftist nationalists, who see the downturn as a chance to halt market-oriented reforms at home, and for China to assert itself more stridently abroad. An angry China can veer into xenophobia, but not all the nationalist left’s causes are so dangerous: one is for the better public services and social-safety net the country sorely needs.

So China is in a more precarious situation than many Westerners think. The world is not bipolar and may never become so. The EU, for all its faults, is the world’s biggest economy. India’s population will overtake China’s. But that does not obscure the fact that China’s relative power is plainly growing—and both the West and China itself need to adjust to this.

For Mr Obama, this means pulling off a difficult balancing act. In the longer term, if he has not managed to seduce China (and for that matter India and Brazil) more firmly into the liberal multilateral system by the time he leaves office, then historians may judge him a failure. In the short term he needs to hold China to its promises and to scold it for its lapses: Mrs Clinton should have taken it to task over Tibet and human rights when she was there. The Bush administration made much of the idea of welcoming China as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. The G20 is a chance to give China a bigger stake in global decision-making than was available in the small clubs of the G7 and G8. But it is also a chance for China to show it can exercise its new influence responsibly.

The bill for the great Chinese takeaway

China’s record as a citizen of the world is strikingly threadbare. On a host of issues from Iran to Sudan, it has used its main geopolitical asset, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, to obstruct progress, hiding behind the excuse that it does not want to intervene in other countries’ affairs. That, sadly, will take time to change. But on the more immediate issue at hand, the world economy, there is room for action.

Over the past quarter-century no country has gained more from globalisation than China. Hundreds of millions of its people have been dragged out of subsistence into the middle class. China has been a grumpy taker in this process. It helped derail the latest round of world trade talks. The G20 meeting offers it a chance to show a change of heart. In particular, it is being asked to bolster the IMF’s resources so that the fund can rescue crisis-hit countries in places like eastern Europe. Some in Beijing would prefer to ignore the IMF, since it might help ex-communist countries that have developed “an anti-China mentality”. Rising above such cavilling and paying up would be a small step in itself. But it would be a sign that the Middle Kingdom has understood what it is to be a great power.

Article - The faithful come out

2009-03-12T17:47:00.022+08:00

Mark Vernon (Guardian UK, 28 Jan 2009)

China is experiencing a religious resurgence and, remarkably, the government is letting it happen

If you walk down Battery Path in central Hong Kong you are likely to see a silent protest on one side of the pavement. Two or three demonstrators sit, cross-legged on the ground, in meditation. Next to them, on boards, are displayed the hideous images of individuals who have been beaten and presumably tortured. Passing parents shield the eyes of their children.

These are supporters of Falun Gong, the religious movement founded in the 1990s. It is distinguished by being probably the highest profile victim of the Chinese government's fear of organised religion. A clampdown began after a peaceful protest in July 1999 in Tiananmen Square when Falun Gong was outlawed. According to Amnesty International, the government then launched "a long-term campaign of intimidation and persecution, directed by a special organisation called the 610 Office." Protests are allowed in Hong Kong, just yards away from government offices, because of the status of the Special Administrative Region.

It is a clear reminder of the dark side of the Chinese authority's approach to religion. However, it is not the whole story.

Martin Palmer is the secretary-general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC). He runs one of the few organisations that have a license from the Chinese government to work with religious groups in the country. He can hardly stress enough how profound the changes now taking place are. So are they a sign of a more relaxed attitude towards freedom of religious expression?

About three years ago, he was approached to make contact with Taoists. This followed similar suggestions about working with Buddhists, three years before that. These invitations struck Palmer as odd, to say the least. After all, this is a regime that had tried to wipe out Taoism, destroying about 98% of its temples, statues and scriptures.

However, reforms have continued apace. Just last year, in 2008, several public holidays were reformed, again indicative of development. The May Day holiday, symbolic for any socialist, was downgraded and in its place two others were revived. One is the Qing Ming, or Festival of the Dead, on which Chinese people remember their ancestors. A second is the Dragon Boat Festival, which partly commemorates a famous mandarin who warned an emperor against corruption. The significance of that story will not be lost on the Chinese people.

Palmer believes that three factors have come together to make the Chinese government reconsider its attitude towards religion.

The first is the consequences of the one-child policy. "It's the biggest single sociological change in China since what we think of as China was created," he says. "It completely undermines the notion of the family and the clan." In short, it encourages people to disregard the elders and focus all their hopes and aspirations on the one child.

As any parent might realise, single-minded devotion of that sort does not make for ideal child-rearing. In China, people talk of creating a generation of "little emperors and empresses", and they're not using terms of endearment.

The second factor is untramelled consumerism, the free market policies that are creating a generation raised on greed. "Chinese culture has always previously recognised an underpinning ideology," Palmer explains, referring to Confucianism, republicanism and most recently communism. "They may have been honoured in the breach as much as in observance, but now it is recognised that the country has a problem" – namely, how to nurture a sense of society, care and ethics.

That links in with the third issue, which Palmer calls "the almost complete collapse in communism". He reports how officials, wearing communist insignia, have told him to ignore the word: they really work for the "Chinese party" not the "Communist party", they say. This is no bad thing, of course. In relation to religion, it has led to a relaxing of the rules so that it is now possible to be a member of the party and have a registered religious affiliation. To date, about 40% of party members have "come out" as religious as a result.

All in all, the government is clearly turning to the country's traditional religions in order to revive old sources of value.

No doubt it is partly a cynical move. If religion is the "heart of a heartless world", to recall Marx, it can also be used as an opiate for the people.

A little religious commitment might help to mitigate the social unrest that a growing gap between rich and poor can bring. It is this kind of strife that the authorities fear more than anything. Falun Gong's problem is that it is perceived as exacerbating such discord, not calming it. It sounds paranoid, but the received wisdom in China is that every past regime has been weakened by a religious uprising that eventually led to the regime being overthrown. Falun Gong is the unfortunate heir of that myth. It fits the bill because it is, in part, an apocalyptic movement.

But more widely, religion is resurgent in an extraordinary way in modern China. Whether it can turn the tide of carefree morality, characteristic of the new capitalism, is another question entirely.

Related Articles

Religious Revival in China (ZHAO Litao & TAN Soon Heng - EAI Background Brief No. 368, 1 Feb 2008)
Religious revival fills a void in China (ERIC TEO CHU CHEOW, The Japan Times, Dec 27, 2005)
China's prosperity inspires rising spirituality (Christian Science Monitor 9 March 2006)
Chinese cadres pray for spirit intervention (Asia Times Online 1 March 2005)
The Religious Revival in China (Hongyi Harry Lai, 2003)
Religious Revivals in Communist China (by Arthur Waldron - ORBIS Vol.42, No.2 ( Spring 1998 ), pp. 325-334)
A Buddhist Revival in 21st Century China (Chinadaily Forum - 1 July 2005)
Religion in China (Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 2001 : China Now 123)
Meeting Outlines China's Policy on Religion for the New Century (People's Daily 2001)
China battles against religion (BBC News, July 21, 1999)
China's Bid For a Buddhist Revival (Pacific Pulse, 14 March 96)
A Daoist Renaissance (Resurgence magazine)
World Buddhist Forum: A Harmonious World A Synergy of Conditions (in Wuxi and Taiwan)
International Forum on the Daodejing: The Way to Harmony (in Xi'an and Hong Kong)
China backs £10m biopic of Confucius (Telegraph UK 16 Mar 2009)

Related Websites
Thirty years ago, the Chinese government forbid all religious activity. Today, freedom of religion is in China's constitution.

Human rights groups have called for greater freedom in China, including the freedom of religion. The communist country remains officially atheist, and China has been criticized for its treatment of some religious minorities and groups that do not enjoy official sanction. Mike O'Sullivan reports from Beijing, however, that some Chinese see a growing role for religion in the future.

The consensus from the streets is that religion is a positive force in society.

Question: How relevant is religion to China today?

Article - China worries too few foreigners learning Chinese (China's soft power)

2009-03-12T09:31:00.003+08:00

By Ben Blanchard (Reuters 12 March 2009)

BEIJING (Reuters) - There has been a big rise in the number of foreigners learning Chinese, but still too few are studying the language, officials said on Thursday, worried this may affect efforts to soften China's global image.

China began setting up Confucius Institutes (孔子学院) in 2004 to teach Chinese and they are now in 81 countries, but efforts to expand them are being hampered by too few teachers and poor teaching materials.

"At present, the basis for the studying or teaching of Chinese is very weak, unlike for English, French or Spanish, which have been popularized for hundreds of years," said Xu Lin, director of the Confucius Institute Headquarters.

Xu, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of China's annual meeting of parliament, said that in the United States more students studied Latin at middle school than Chinese.

"Though the desire to learn Chinese is very high, there is a lack of teachers and teaching materials," she added, referring specifically to the Confucius Institute.

"Our teachers and teaching materials are not really appropriate for what's demanded of them overseas."

Still, the number of foreigners learning Chinese around the world now stood at about 40 million, Xu said.

China originally planned to have more than 100 Confucius Institutes worldwide by 2008, but by the end of last year already had more than 250, such is the demand.

Ironically, China's ruling Communist Party once condemned the ancient philosopher Confucius after whom the institute is named, and tried to eradicate the principles he taught, such as loyalty to family and tradition, saying they were "reactionary."

But the government has begun reviving some old practices, including promoting certain aspects of Confucianism, as the Party seeks to make traditional virtues an anchor of order and stability during times of social change.

Zhu Chongshi, president of Xiamen University in southeastern China, said promoting Chinese language and culture globally would be good for the country's image.

"What is soft power? The best soft power is to let people know you, understand you, love you." he said. "Less than one percent of U.S. students study Chinese. With a situation like that, it's impossible for China to raise its soft power."

"Setting up Confucius Institutes can have a huge effect on promoting understanding between China and the world. It will help the people of the world objectively, fully and properly know China's people and culture," he said.

"This is the best path to show China's soft power."

Question: Why is China so keen on the learning of the Chinese language by foreigners?

Article - No Western democracy: China

2009-03-10T00:03:00.004+08:00

ST March 9 2009

'We will never exercise multi-party rule... the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers or the bicameral system,' parliament head Wu Bangguo (left) said at the annual session of the National People's Congress. --PHOTO: AP

BEIJING - CHINA will not give up one-party communist rule nor adopt western-style democracy, the nation's parliamentary head said on Monday, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen democracy protests.

'We will never exercise multi-party rule... the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers or the bicameral system,' parliament head Wu Bangguo said at the annual session of the National People's Congress.

We 'can by no means indiscriminately copy the western system,' he added.

Mr Wu is number two in the Chinese Communist Party pecking order following President Hu Jintao, who has also voiced a similar aversion to Western-style democracy. Mr Wu's comments come as the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests approaches in June and after over 300 top political activists issued a plea for democracy in a petition last year.

The petition, called Charter 08, was seen as a daring call for political reform and basic democratic rights, as well as for the end of one party government.

Numerous signatories have been arrested or interrogated by police, likely out of fears of social unrest on the 20th anniversary of the protests, which were seen as the biggest threat to communist rule since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

Over 8,000 people have signed the Charter in its online form.

The release of Charter 08 coincided with the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was modeled on Charter 77, issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia in 1977.

In his speech, Mr Wu called on legislators to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party and to make clear distinctions between China's system of government and that of Western democracies. 'China's system of political parties is a system of multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, not a Western-style multiparty system,' he said.

His comments also appeared to pour cold water on any hopes of discussions on advancing democratic political reform in China at this year's annual session of parliament. -- AFP

Related article - China reinforces rejection of 'Western' democracy (IHT.com, 10 March 2009)

Question:

Based on the extract above and your own knowledge, how far has China's political system progressed since 1978?

NPC and CPPCC Annual Sessions 2009

2009-03-05T14:34:00.010+08:00

Premier Wen delivers the government work report
Premier Wen Jiabao Thursday called on the nation to strengthen conviction for victory while he envisaged "arduous and formidable" tasks in 2009 as the country tried to keep economic growth amid a global downturn. (Click for main website)

• Highlights of Premier Wen's gov't work report
• Key figures in gov't work report by Chinese Premier

==== Key figures for 2009 ===

● GDP to grow by 8%	● CPI to rise around 4%
● Fiscal deficit budget of 950 bln yuan	● To allocate 42 bln yuan to offset unemployment
● Urban unemployment rate under 4.6%	● Urban employment to increase by over 9 million
● 43 bln yuan to build low-rent houses	● 120 bln yuan added to boost agriculture

More figures >>>>

==== On Economy ===

● Real estate sector

China will take measures to stabilize real estate market confidence while promote "orderly development" of the industry. More >>>

● Domestic demand

China would make boosting domestic demand a "long-term" strategy and take further measures to stimulate consumer spending. More >>>

● Agriculture

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged Thursday to add another 120 billion yuan to boost the country's agriculture. More >>>

● Employment

China pledged Thursday it will implement an even more proactive employment policy this year and allocate 42 billion yuan to offset unemployment More >>>

● Fiscal deficit

China announced Thursday a fiscal deficit budget of 950 billion yuan for 2009, a record high in six decades. More >>>

● Economic growth

China will be able to achieve the economic growth target of about 8 percent in 2009, if proper policies and measures are taken, said Premier Wen Jiabao. More >>>

Premier Wen Jiabao admitted that China is facing unprecedented difficulties and challenges, with continuous drop in economic growth rate due to the impact of the global financial crisis becoming a major problem. More >>>

Chinese premier says economic slowdown becoming major problem in China

==== On Politics ===

● Political reform

The development of democracy and the legal system should be strengthened in China. More >>>

● Combat corruption

The Chinese government will strengthen its efforts to promote clean government and combat corruption. More >>>

● Mainland-Taiwan co-op

The Chinese mainland will continue to strengthen cross-Straits economic cooperation with Taiwan to jointly respond to the global financial crisis. More >>>

● Address public complaints

Social stability has become a major concern in China as it will be the most difficult year for China's economic development since the beginning of the century. More >>>

==== Others == =

● Military force

China will transform its military training based on mechanized warfare to that based on informationized warfare. More >>>

● Welfare, medicare

The Chinese government pledged on Thursday to increase spending on social programs including pension and medical reform in 2009. More >>>

●Emission

China will continue its drive of energy saving, emissions reduction, ecosystems preservation, and environment protection in 2009. More >>>

Article - China toughens laws on corruption, insurance

2009-03-01T08:19:00.002+08:00

China has tightened laws to hand out stiffer punishments to officials convicted of bribe-taking and nepotism

The Associated Press
Saturday, February 28, 2009

BEIJING (AFP) — China has tightened laws to hand out stiffer punishments to government officials and their families convicted of bribe-taking and nepotism, state media reported Sunday.

Passage of amendments to the criminal law came as the standing committee of parliament also amended Saturday insurance laws to stop insurers from making risky investments in capital markets, Xinhua news agency said.

The revised criminal law doubles the punishment to 10 years in prison and increases fines for officials who are found in possession of large amounts of money or property that cannot be accounted for, the report said.

The newly amended law also "bans relatives of people who have close relations with government employees from conducting corrupt deals between the employee and bribe-givers," it said.

The new law not only targets family members of government officials, but also their lovers, classmates and other acquaintances, and places detailed curbs on "power-for-money" transactions and financial crimes, it said.

President Hu Jintao has said the fight against corruption is linked to the survival of the ruling Communist Party and has pledged to curb official graft which has become a source of widespread social dissatisfaction.

(The amendments are in keeping with the ambitions of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to create a "harmonious society" without threatening the Communist Party's uncontested hold on power. Corruption is routinely cited as a mortal threat to the regime, although there has been no marked increase in the numbers of annual graft prosecutions.- AFP 28 Feb 2009)

The newly amended law took effect on Saturday at the close of a legislative session of the National People's Congress standing committee and ahead of the annual meeting of the full parliament which opens on Thursday.

The legislative session also passed amendments to insurance laws which give the government's insurance regulatory body the power to halt transactions by insurance companies and their subsidiaries that are deemed too risky, Xinhua said in a separate report.

For insurance companies with inadequate solvency, the new law also authorises the regulatory body to restrict salaries of the company's board members and senior administrators, it added.

The law also expands the investment choices for insurance companies to stocks, securities-investment funds and property, as well as government bonds and financial bills.

Question:
Why is the CCP so concerned about the corruption problem in China?

Article - Japan, China discuss gas reserve development

2009-02-28T08:33:00.002+08:00

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (R) shakes hands with Japanese Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone in Beijing, capital of China, March. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

The Associated Press

Saturday, February 28, 2009

BEIJING: Japan's foreign minister met with his Chinese counterpart Saturday seeking closer cooperation on North Korean disarmament, the global financial crisis and a joint gas reserve project, despite a diplomatic spat over disputed territory in the East China Sea.

Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said the two countries which have the world's second and third largest economies should lead regional initiatives to battle the financial crisis and stimulate trade, Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama said.

"As Japan-China relations are now confronted with some difficulties, I would like to communicate with China on how to advance the ties," Nakasone told Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, according to China's official Xinhua News Agency.

The two sides avoided inflaming tensions in their long-standing dispute over the East China Sea island chain that China calls Diaoyutai but is known as Senkaku in Japan. But they agreed their conflicting claims should not undermine their overall relationship, Kodama said.

They also agreed that Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso will visit China this year, he said.

China lodged a diplomatic protest Thursday after Aso reasserted that the uninhabited island chain between Taiwan and Japan belongs to Tokyo. The islands are controlled by Japan but are claimed by China and Taiwan.

In a statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Web site, spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said China held indisputable sovereignty over the islands. The issue is a perennial bugbear among Chinese nationalists who resent Japan's brutal World War II-era invasion and occupation of much of their country.

But in their meeting Saturday, the foreign ministers instead discussed an agreement struck last summer to jointly develop oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea, Kodama said. The Japanese did not provide details, only saying they hoped talks would continue soon on the project.

The deal would allow Japan to invest in and claim proportional profits from several projects at a site where Chinese companies are already drilling, while the two countries plan to agree on details for joint exploration at a second location.

The two also discussed North Korea's nuclear weapons program and agreed that all parties should continue their efforts on denuclearization, Kodama said. China is the North's key ally and main donor.

China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States are involved in now-stalled negotiations with North Korea over its development of nuclear weapons.

North Korea announced earlier this week that it was preparing to launch a satellite into orbit, but the U.S. and South Korea believe the launch may actually be a missile test.

Nakasone also expressed concern about China's military modernization and said he hoped for more transparency, Kodama said.

Nearly 20 years of annual double-digit percentage increases in China's defense budget have raised concerns from the U.S. and China's neighbors, but Beijing says any worries are unfounded.

Nakasone is to hold talks with Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday, according to China's Foreign Ministry.

Related site: Japan, China to begin teacher exchanges (AFP 1 March 2009) - BEIJING - China and Japan will launch a bilateral exchange program involving about 1,500 teachers over the next three years, said Japanese Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nagasone here Sunday.

China 2008: Nationalism, Internet Culture, and Identity

2009-02-27T17:20:00.001+08:00

Chinese nationalism was a hot topic this year, quite the opposite of the usual criticism directed at China, whether it be her food safety issues, human rights record, environmental policies, or the authoritarian regime’s repressive techniques and censorship. Indeed, China has strived to improve its image, culminating this year with the Beijing Olympics 2008, where nationalism played an integral role in expressing the pride and glory of China’s rise and achievements. However, as in the Belgrade embassy bombing in 1999 and the anti-Japanese protests in 2005, nationalistic citizens have an agenda of their own, sometimes promoting state agenda and ideology, but not always working in favor for the government. CDT has collected these stories over the past year. Here are some of highlight events that have sparked a wave of nationalism:

{read more}

Singapore Indie Doc Fest (Chinese Independent Films)

2009-02-27T09:10:00.004+08:00

DON'T MISS THESE SHOWS!!
BUY TIX IN ADVANCE! AT THE SUBSTATION (near City Hall MRT) Click for more details

SATURDAY 14 MARCH : China Indie Doc Focus

China is rising into world power and is developing at an unprecedented pace in a bid to catch up with the rest of the developed nations. The giant People's Republic of China is changing, from closed-door communism to an open embrace of economic capitalism. Teething problems abound and the disharmonious undercurrents of social change on the ground are hardly the topics of choice to be put up for discussion by the ruling government.

Let these indie docs shed some light and show what the man on the street in China is facing as national development intrudes into their lives. Curated by Paul Pickowicz.

SESSION 1: 1:30pm to 3:30pm / The Substation Theatre / 122 mins total / $7 & $5 (conc.) Who Killed Our Children? / China / 2008 / 92 mins / Pan Jianlin & Zhang Lei / NC16 (Some Coarse Language)

SESSION 2: 4pm to 6:30pm / The Substation Theatre / 138 mins total / $7 & $5 (conc.) Care and Love / China / 2008 / 108 mins / Ai Xiaoming / PG (some disturbing scenes)

SESSION 3: 7:15pm to 9:45pm / The Substation Theatre/ 144 mins total / $7 & $5 (conc.) Readymade / China / 2008 / 81 mins / Zhang Bingjian / Chinese with English subtitles / PG ; Starkers, the Naked Life of Qin Yongjian / China / 2007 / 33 mins / Gu Tao / R21 (Nudity)... ummmm.. you're probably underaged for this one...

FRIDAY 13 MARCH :

SESSION 2: 9pm to 10:15pm / The Substation Theatre / 74 mins total / $7 & $5 (conc.) Please Vote for Me / China / 2007 / 58 mins / Chen Weijun / PG - See trailer
In an elementary school in the city of Wuhan in central China, three eight-year-old students campaign for the coveted position of class monitor. This is the first election for a class leader to be held in China. The three candidates hold debates, campaign tirelessly and show their intellectual and artistic skills, until one is voted the winner.

Click for more details

Article - China keeps wary eye on displaced migrant workers

2009-02-27T00:16:00.003+08:00

Tan Tianying, a migrant worker, at home with her grandparents in Tanjia village. Hundreds of employees at her uniform factory in Guangzhou have lost their jobs.

(Du Bin for The New York Times)

By Andrew Jacobs (IHT)
Monday, February 23, 2009

TANJIA, China: Tan Tianying might not look like a troublemaker, but she and millions of other workers like her have government leaders fretting about the country's stability.

A shy, delicately built seamstress who makes aprons and coveralls in Guangzhou, Tan, 24, is part of an army of migrants, 130 million strong, who have flocked to cities for jobs but whose prospects for continued employment are increasingly dim.

As the global economic crisis deepens and the demand for Chinese exports slackens, manufacturing jobs in the Pearl River Delta and all along the once-booming southern coast are disappearing at a stunning pace. Over the last few months, more than 20 million migrant workers have been cast into the ranks of the unemployed, depriving impoverished towns like Tanjia, in Hunan Province, of the much-needed income the workers sent home.

Since December, hundreds of employees at Tan's uniform factory have been fired, and wages for those remaining have been cut by a third as orders from the United States dry up. Last year, 2,400 factories in and around Guangzhou closed.

"I hope I still have a job," Tan said this month, a few hours before leaving Tanjia on a train for the 10-hour ride that in recent years has carried away most of the town's working-age residents. "I don't want to go back to being a poor farmer."

In a nation obsessed with social harmony, the well-being of China's mobile work force has become the top priority for a government that has long seen its fortunes tied to those of the country's 800 million rural residents. Mao's revolution, after all, was fueled by embittered peasants, and it has not gone unnoticed in Beijing that decades of heady growth have fed a widening gap between urban residents and those who live in the rural interior.

Although the government has not released updated information about rural unrest, officials have been strategizing about how best to keep large protests and riots from spreading, should the dispossessed grow unruly.

This week, more than 3,000 public security directors from across the country are gathering in the capital to learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called "mass incidents." At a meeting of the Chinese cabinet last month, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government leaders they should prepare for rough times ahead. "The country's employment situation is extremely grim," he said.

To ameliorate the hardship of idled migrants, the central government has announced a series of initiatives that include vocational training, an expansion of rural health care, and crop subsidies to ensure that those who return to the land can make a living despite a slump in agricultural prices. A $585 billion stimulus package introduced in November, much of it weighted toward labor-intensive construction projects, is also expected to absorb some of the newly unemployed.

But here in Tanjia and the surrounding countryside of Hunan Province, most people say they have yet to see much in the way of government largess. As the Lunar New Year came to an end two weeks ago, many migrants who had come home for the holidays were anxious to return south, hoping to reclaim their old jobs or find new ones.

About 40 percent of the town's 2,000 residents work outside the province, and their remittances have been a lifeline for the children and elderly people who remain behind. Much of that money has been spent on motorcycles, high school educations and new homes, some trimmed with Corinthian columns and ceramic dragons, that are the brick-and-mortar embodiment of this newfound prosperity.

Tan's family home, like those of her neighbors, is a work in progress. Since 2005, her mother, father and brother, all migrant workers, have poured $15,000 into the two-story house, but they still need another $9,000 for appliances, fixtures and a white tiled facade.

"We have no savings," said her father, Tan Liangsheng, 52, a haggard-looking man who recently lost his job as a construction worker. "All our hard work and bitterness is invested in this house."

Just behind him sat the mud-brick structure where the extended Tan clan used to live.

In some ways, Tanjia's residents are luckier than most. Unlike China's drought-stricken north and its chronically arid west, Hunan Province is well-watered and blessed with a temperate climate that allows farmers to grow food much of the year.

Still, with 64 million people squeezed into an area the size of Kansas, most people make do with tiny plots of land; in Tanjia the average size is about 400 square meters, or a tenth of an acre. "Maybe we won't starve to death, but life would become very difficult if everyone came back home," said Long Feng, 29, who works at a car repair shop in Shenzhen, not far from the Hong Kong border.

In Zhuzhou, the nearest city of any consequence, government officials are not overly concerned about a surge in jobless farmers.

Chen Shuxian, director of Zhuzhou's employment center, said he was more worried about the 3.7 million people who live in and around this booming city, people who have become accustomed to relatively comfortable lives. "They have cellphone bills and rent to pay," he said. "The migrants don't have a lot of expectations, and they can always fall back on the land and their family savings."

Such sentiments are common in China, where rural laborers are often viewed as dime-a-dozen workhorses capable of enduring enormous hardship. He Xuefeng, a professor who studies rural life, said many manufacturers believe the most productive workers are spent by 40.

"As workers grow older, they can't work as quickly or accurately, so they are naturally eliminated," said He, who teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei province. "The financial crisis will simply speed up that process by two or three years and force them to return home earlier."

After he lost his job at a glass factory in Guangzhou last year, Wang Liming, 39, returned to his home on the outskirts of Zhuzhou thinking he could find employment nearby. Things turned more dire after his wife lost her job just before the New Year festivities.

He acknowledged that there was work to be had in Zhuzhou, but those jobs generally pay less than $100 a month, about half what a semiskilled assembly-line position pays in Guangzhou.

"I couldn't even afford my daughter's high school tuition on that kind of salary," he said, standing in front of his home, a half-built box that lacks windows and a refrigerator.

A gruff, chain-smoking man, Wang said the decade he spent in the south turned him off to agricultural work. "I hate working the fields," he said as his neighbors nodded in agreement. Even if they wanted to, he and his fellow villagers could not make much money from farming: Some of the best patches of land have been swallowed up by Zhuzhou's rapid development, including the electric generating plant that dominates the view from his front door.

Asked about his plans, Wang shook his head, glanced at his cellphone and said he was waiting for friends in Guangzhou to call him about a job. "I'm just hoping the phone rings," he said.

Question:
Consider the challenge that migrant workers pose to the ruling CCP at this time of the crisis.

Article - China's mounting pink slips (Middle class tensions)

2009-02-26T23:39:00.004+08:00

With an estimated 1.5 million graduates of the class of 2008 still jobless, the government has responded with a plan to create 9 million jobs in 2009, primarily to help build up the country’s infrastructure as well as positions in rural villages

By Christina Larson (IHT)
Sunday, January 4, 2009

Set aside Yao Ming and the furry mascots. The buoyant spirit of the 2008 Beijing Olympics already seems like a lifetime ago. A new icon has recently emerged for today's China: the disgruntled, laid-off factory worker, standing dejected outside a shuttered factory, another victim of the global economic downtown.

As startling as these factory closures have been, the fate of another less-heralded figure may be more significant: the laid-off office worker.

After 30 years of nearly continuous, even momentous, economic growth - which has lifted millions out of poverty and bolstered the ruling Chinese Communist Party - the economy's manufacturing base is slipping. Last month, exports dipped for the first time in seven years.

Mounting factory layoffs this year - around 2 million have been sent packing near the factory city of Dongguan alone - have prompted a string of noisy but isolated protests across the country's southern industrial region. The anxious Chinese government has rushed in with bailout money for companies and some compensation for workers. So far, a thousand sparks haven't become a wildfire. Fretful Chinese workers have yet to channel discontent into unified campaigns, or demands for representation in the political sphere. But whether Beijing can so easily mollify the growing apprehension among the country's middle class could be another story entirely.

That workers haven't linked arms factory to factory and city to city may seem anti-climactic. Then again, consider the realities of China's internal politics. Most linemen were farmers five years ago. They are recent migrants to the cities, on the bottom rung of status and expectations. The combination of fragmented social networks, poor education, and gray legal status (most are "unregistered" urban residents) gives them limited power to organize.

Many have learned to tolerate poor labor conditions, minimal rights, and dubious payroll practices. They are now reacting, loudly, when shunted aside, but what they're demanding is that employers fork over back pay - not any kind of systematic change.

But China's middle class (now some 100 million to 150 million strong) is a different animal. The country's economic and political fabric will face an unheralded challenge if large numbers of pink slips go to white-collar workers in 2009 - the kind of people who have grown accustomed to having more choices and a higher standard of living.

In recent years, they haven't had many complaints. But when roused, they can potentially punch back. Perhaps the most striking example of citizens exerting direct pressure on national policy came in 2004, when a network of middle-class Chinese environmental activists and lawyers, pointing to Beijing's own "environmental impact assessment law," convinced the government to halt planned dams on China's last wild waterway, the Nu River.

The last time China's middle class really got agitated, of course, was on the heels of another financial crisis. That was in 1989, following a year of spiraling inflation, price shocks, and cash-flow woes. One telling, if unsexy, demand of the university students protesting at Tiananmen was to hold accountable those who caused inflation.

Much has changed in two decades. China's financial managers are far more sophisticated. There are new unemployment and Social Security schemes that, in theory, offer more safety nets to soften the blow for laid-off urban workers. But as Pieter Bottelier of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies in Washington points out, those systems, created within the last few years, are still in their nascent stages.

At the same time, there is, on paper, a broader array of options for disgruntled people to blow off steam. In recent years, Beijing has passed regulations that purport to give citizens limited avenues for policy feedback - including posting draft versions of certain "laws closely related to the interests of the people" on government Web sites for public comment. Such channels have so far remained basically dormant (and may well have been created quite cynically), but a prolonged financial slump could raise their profile.

Whether China's middle class will ultimately focus on discreet issues (more unemployment benefits) or broader concerns (more freedom for the media to detail white-collar problems) remains unknown. But the deeper the financial hole, the less likely political complacency.

Related sites:

The new middle class vents its anger with strikes;
An end to the Chinese dream (Newsweek 2009)

Question

From the article, what are some of the more pressing challenges the CCP currently faces?
Discuss the possible measures the government can undertake to reduce the social problems that are likely to result from the financial crisis.

Article - Populists gain seats in election in Hong Kong

2009-02-26T23:12:00.008+08:00

Anson Chan, center, a leading democracy advocate, campaigned for other candidates on Sunday but did not seek re-election.

(Bobby Yip/Reuters)

By Keith Bradsher (IHT)

Monday, September 8, 2008

HONG KONG: Chinese national pride after the Olympics and growing distress over inflation combined to produce a leftward shift in legislative elections here on Sunday. The pro-business Liberal Party lost seats while populists made gains with promises to introduce a minimum wage and reduce pollution.

Most of the pro-democracy legislators kept their seats, despite a low turnout among the middle-class and upper-middle class voters who make up their main support. With most of the votes counted, it appeared that they would retain enough seats to prevent the local government from working with Beijing officials to rewrite the Basic Law, Hong Kong's mini-constitution.

They need to hold at least 21 seats, one-third plus one, in the 60-member Legislature to block such changes. Democracy advocates, particularly those who also addressed economic concerns, won 19 of the 30 seats selected by voting among the general public. They appeared likely to win an additional half-dozen seats among the 30 chosen by business groups, the professions and labor unions.

Political analysts and politicians alike said the results showed a growing sense of Chinese identity among residents of Hong Kong, which was a British colony until its return to China in 1997.

The sense of nationalism that has swept through mainland China this year, during the Olympics and in response to protests in Tibet in the spring, has also been evident here. Flag-waving throngs showed up for the Olympic torch relay here, and the exploits of Chinese athletes at the Games drew rapt attention.

"I do feel a greater sense that Hong Kong is a part of China now, compared to 1997," said Phoenix Yu, a 30-year-old office clerk, before casting her vote in Kowloon.

Three leading figures in the pro-democracy movement Martin Lee, Anson Chan and Sin Chung Kai did not seek re-election. They dropped out to make room for younger politicians, but they also acknowledged how hard it would be for the next Legislature to move any further toward democracy in the coming four-year term in the face of implacable opposition from Beijing and growing support in Hong Kong for close relations with the mainland.

"The national identity in Hong Kong is increasing," Sin said.

The current government of Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief executive, retained the support of a majority of the Legislature, though the composition of that support shifted.

Pro-business lawmakers, a mix of independents and Liberal Party members, suffered heavy losses. The Liberal Party's chairman, James Tien, resigned as its leader shortly before it was announced that he had lost his seat.

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, or DAB, fared better. The most ardently pro-Beijing party, it also favors more government measures to help the poor and to combat pollution.

Accelerating inflation, especially for food and housing, became an acute issue here, as did the widening gap between rich and poor.

Tsang has appointed DAB officials to top government jobs. The party worked closely with mainland officials to expand its grass-roots organization, which helped it draw supporters to polling places even as overall turnout fell, compared with the last legislative election in 2004.

"The DAB is building its strength and is building its organization power in the last few years," said Ivan Choy, a political analyst at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The party's greater organizational strength paid off with voters like Tam Siao Woon, 77, a retired garment worker. "I don't really follow politics, but I just voted for a DAB candidate, since they kept calling and calling me on the telephone, and chasing me to come down to the polling station to vote for their candidate," she said.

Law Yiu, a 60-year-old Chinese herbal doctor, voted for pro-democracy candidates.

"I don't feel Hong Kong is a part of China," he said. "The Chinese government is merely using the same tricks with the Hong Kong people as they use with the people in China, giving out periodic sweets to the Hong Kong people in an effort to keep them calm and docile."

Related site: Hong Kong Instilling 'Chinese' Identity (IHT, Oct 19 1996)

Question

The CCP has always adopted the "one country two systems" principle in its governance of Hong Kong. With reference to the article, discuss the feeling of Hongkongers towards the Beijing government.

Article - Beijing calls for halt to sale of relics

2009-02-26T00:04:00.006+08:00

Feb 25, 2009 (The Straits Times)
The bronze rabbit and rat heads were looted by foreign troops from Beijing's Summer Palace almost 150 years ago. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

BEIJING: - A French court's refusal to halt the auction of two Chinese imperial bronzes yesterday provoked an outpouring of nationalist sentiment among netizens here as the government made a formal call for the scrapping of the sale.

Despite the court's ruling, a group of more than 80 Chinese lawyers pledged to take further measures to block the auction of the Qing dynasty sculptures which are scheduled to be sold in Paris today.

'The State Administration of Cultural Heritage has formally informed the auctioneer of our strong opposition to the auction, and clearly demanded its cancellation,' Mr Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, told a regular press briefing yesterday.

To stop auction house Christie's from putting the two relics under the hammer, the lawyers had filed an application with a Paris court last Thursday under the name of an association representing Chinese cultural interests.

The bronze rabbit and rat heads, looted by foreign troops from Beijing's imperial Summer Palace almost 150 years ago, were part of the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's private estate which is being sold off by his long-time partner Pierre Berge.

The lawyers argued their case before the court on Monday morning in Paris, just hours before the start of the three-day auction. Christie's brought in a seven-member legal team to counter the motion, according to Chinese state media.

In the evening, the judge ruled that the Association for the Protection of Chinese Art in Europe was not entitled to file the injunction as it did not have direct links to the two sculptures, said the official Xinhua news agency. The association was ordered to pay &yen1,000 (S$1,950) in fines each to the auction house and to Mr Berge's firm.

The two relics are expected to fetch up to US$13 million (S$20 million) each.

The judgment yesterday enraged Chinese netizens and prompted stern rebukes in the Chinese media, complicating high-level efforts to mend relations between China and France which have soured in the past year over Tibet.

Mr Berge raised hackles in China when he told French radio last week that he would give them back to China if Beijing would 'observe human rights and give liberty to the Tibetan people and welcome the Dalai Lama'.

Mr Ma of China's Foreign Ministry yesterday dismissed Mr Berge's offer to exchange the sculptures for human rights concessions as 'absurd'.

Chinese Internet users threatened to boycott French goods, demanded the breaking-off of diplomatic ties between China and France, and urged Chinese people who have spent millions buying back pilfered cultural relics not to 'put money into the hands of the French' by bidding for the sculptures.

Wrote one incensed blogger: 'No matter where the sculptures are, they belong to China! Still want to auction them? This proves that the French, starting with their ancestors, are all robbers!'

Speaking to Chinese media after the outcome, Mr Liu Yang, head of the group of lawyers, said: 'Even though we failed, we feel proud in defeat, because in a big court in Paris, the unyielding voices of Chinese people have been heard.'

'Although the result is unfair, in future when they are dealing with similar cases, they will be more prudent, they will not ignore the feelings of Chinese people and insist on doing things their own way,' he added.

The group acknowledges that the late designer acquired the bronzes legally, but insists they should be returned to China or displayed in a museum.

The lawyers said despite the court's decision, they would continue to 'make every effort' to halt the auction at Christie's, including possibly taking legal action against whoever buys the pieces, Xinhua reported.

Legal experts in China, however, have their doubts about the lawsuit.

'There is little chance of them winning the lawsuit,' Professor Wang Yunxia, a cultural relics law expert at Beijing's Renmin University, told Xinhua.

'So far, I haven't seen any international conventions or laws that could be applied to the relics dating back that far (to the Qing Dynasty),' she said.

Question
How does the above news affect what you know or understand about the way some Chinese see themselves, or about the Chinese identity?

Article - New era for Sino-US ties

2009-02-22T22:24:00.007+08:00

New US Secretary of State believes the two countries will lead the world out of crisis
By Peh Shing Huei, China Bureau Chief (ST 22 Feb 2009)

Beijing - Visiting United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday hailed the beginning of a 'new era' for US-China relations, a partnership which she believed would lead the world out of the economic crisis.

Making it clear that saving the economy and slowing climate change take precedence over issues such as human rights and Tibet, she struck a conciliatory tone towards Beijing as she zipped around the Chinese capital on her maiden trip here as America's top diplomat.

China, with foreign exchange reserves of about US$2 trillion (S$3 trillion), is the world's largest holder of US government debt.

'I appreciate greatly the Chinese government's continuing confidence in United States Treasuries. I think that's a well grounded confidence,' Mrs Clinton said. 'We have every reason to believe that the United States and China will recover and that together, we will help to lead the world recovery.'

She added: 'We have to look inward for solutions, but we must also look to each other to take a leadership role in designing and implementing a coordinated global response to stabilise the world's economy and begin recovery.'

Making her final stop in China in a week-long Asian tour that also took her to Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, she stressed repeatedly in her meetings with top Chinese leaders - including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao - that the US and China have to work together to tackle major global challenges.

It was a much softer stance compared to her 1995 speech here in which she strongly criticised China's human rights record.

'As we start the new administration of President Barack Obama, we want to deepen and broaden our relationship,' she said at a joint media conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. 'We believe we have established a solid foundation but there is much work to be done.'

She confirmed that the Obama administration would prefer high-level dialogues with China on two tracks - strategic and economic. It is a departure from the Bush years, when negotiations with China focused largely on the economy. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will take charge of the economic issues, while she will look at the strategic aspects, which cover political, security and global issues.

Mrs Clinton, who ends her three-day trip here today after attending a church service, added that they will be 'fully engaged' in this dialogue which will take fuller shape in the weeks to come.

Mr Hu welcomed the broadening of high-level dialogues, saying that China-US relations are among the most important bilateral ties in the world in the 21st century, reported the official Xinhua news agency.

He added that by making Asia her first stop, Mrs Clinton was signalling the importance of China and Asian countries to the US. He warmly welcomed Mr Obama to visit China as soon as possible.

'It is significant that she said the US and China will lead the world to economic recovery,' said international relations expert Yan Xuetong. 'She didn't say that about Japan when she was there.

'It is clear that the US regards China as the second most important economy. I believe she was speaking her mind and not just trying to curry favour with China.'

Related sites

Demoting human rights (IHT, Feb 24, 2009)

Questions to consider

Why is US so eager to improve ties with China and vice versa?
What are the core concerns of both the US and Chinese leadership?
To what extent do recent developments reflect an improvement in Sino-US ties?
What are some of the long-standing issues that remain unresolved and what is their significance in terms of impact on US-China relations?

Assignment: Who Are The Chinese?

2009-02-21T01:37:00.012+08:00

Central Question: Is there such a thing as a common Chinese identity/ society?

Some Guiding Questions:

What are some criteria for defining identity/society?
How important is a particular factor, e.g. language, in determining the unity or diversity of Chinese society? Why is this so?
Has the significance of the factor increased or decreased over time? What are the reasons for this development?

Resources
CHINA: Portrait of a People

Observe carefully how the faces, culture (dressing, art and festivals), occupations, etc differ among the people from the 22 Provinces (省 shěng) , 5 Autonomous Regions (自治区 zìzhìqū), 4 Municipalities (直辖市 zhíxiáshì) and 2 Special Administrative Regions (SARs - 特别行政区 tèbié xíngzhèngqū) - see map of province-level divisions

Hui Muslim community from China

Consider how the Hui Muslims in China fit (or not fit) into your idea of "Who are the Chinese"?

Extension
A website suggests that, among others, “Chinese” can possibly be defined on the basis of race and blood. Put loosely, all of the descendants of Yan and Yellow Emperors, all of the heirs of the dragon are Chinese. Just like this below song 龙的传人 (Heir of the Dragon) goes, “always an heir of the dragon“ as long as you have "black eyes, black hair and yellow skin"...

Click here for the (US born and raised) Wang Leehom's version of the song (see lyrics in English and Chinese)

If we talk a little more tightly, if your bloodlines are 100% Chinese, then using this definition, you are Chinese, and this will never change. It doesn’t matter what passport you hold, it doesn’t matter what citizenship you hold, even if you grow up or are born in a different country and can’t speak Chinese, you’re still Chinese.

What do you think? How important is bloodline in determining "Who is Chinese"? On the other hand, what about "understanding of China’s language, history, and culture.... of China’s way of life"?

Article - 'Say no to separatism'

2009-02-19T18:51:00.007+08:00

Straits Times Feb 19, 2009

BEIJING - TIBET'S official Buddhist association called on lamas and nuns to reject the Dalai Lama and separatist activities as China braces for possible further unrest ahead of politically sensitive anniversaries.

March marks the first anniversary of protests and deadly riots in the regional capital, Lhasa, and the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

China's Communist Party has ruled Tibet with an iron fist since People's Liberation Army troops marched into the mountainous region in 1950 and brands the exiled Dalai Lama a 'splittist'. The Dalai Lama says he only wants more autonomy for the region.

Tibet's government-sanctioned Buddhist association (as all religious organisations in China are) had 'unanimously endorsed' (notice the quotation marks!) a revision to their constitution calling on local nuns and monks to reject the Dalai Lama and separatist activities at their annual congress this week, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.

Monks and nuns should 'safeguard social stability, the socialist legal system and fundamental interests of the people", and should 'consciously keep themselves away' from separatist activities and illegal demonstrations that impair social order, Xinhua quoted the new constitution as saying.

It urged monks to 'see clearly that the 14th Dalai Lama is the ringleader of the separatist political association which seeks 'Tibet independence', a loyal tool of anti-China Western forces, the very root that causes social unrest in Tibet and the biggest obstacle for Tibetan Buddhism to build up its order', the agency said.

The Tibetan government's religious affairs committee had also awarded 36 monks and nuns and 10 monasteries with the title of 'patriotic and law-abiding' models, Xinhua said.

Nearly a year after the Lhasa riots fanned protest and violence in other ethnic Tibetan areas of China, killing at least 19 people, China has cautiously opened up monasteries to the devout.

But security remains tight and monks must attend patriotic education classes, (Note this second instance of religion being tightly controlled by the state) along with their Buddhist scripture studies.

Analysts outside of Tibet say an extensive crackdown, including fresh arrests, should make a repeat of last year's unrest unlikely, but local officials are not ruling it out.

Authorities detained 24 people for marching and shouting support for the Dalai Lama in Lithang, an ethnic Tibetan region of southwest Sichuan province, an overseas rights group said this week.

Local police denied any knowledge. -- REUTERS

Related sites:

China issues call to crush Tibetan 'separatists'(AFP 19 Feb 2009)
In China, A Different Brand of Buddhism (Washington Post 19 Feb 2009)
China 'beating' Tibet separatism (BBC 12 July 2000)

Related video: March 2008 Tibetan Protest in Lhasa

Questions

Why do some Tibetans pursue "greater autonomy" for Tibet? (Consider the issue of Chinese identity)
In view of the above articles and your own research, what are the challenges faced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its governance of China and what measures have they adopted to deal with the problems?

Article - China pushes 'soft power'

2009-02-17T17:29:00.002+08:00

Hu Jintao - President of the PRC

By Dune Lawrence
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, February 17, 2009

BEIJING: The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has touted her approach to diplomacy as "smart power." That's nothing new for China, which has employed economic, political and cultural persuasion under President Hu Jintao to build its image as a responsible world leader.

Now, China's gains as a regional partner and potential counter to U.S. influence are threatened by a slowdown in growth that may reduce its economic clout. At the same time, President Barack Obama's pledge to reverse Bush-era policies that diminished America's authority creates added competition for China's "soft power" - a phrase coined by the Harvard professor Joseph Nye.

The changes may expose China's Communist government to more scrutiny as the country's leaders launch a reported 45 billion yuan, or $6.6 billion, program to expand the reach and impact of its state-run media.

"If you want to promote something, you have to make sure the thing you're promoting is acceptable to other countries," says Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. "Soft power means other parties accept your values."

While China has clocked nearly 10 percent annual growth for three decades and is now the world's third-largest economy, the influence its money can buy has been offset by distrust among some nations of its political system.

Hu's "peaceful development" strategy - the pillar of foreign policy since he took power in 2003 - reflects an attempt to overcome lingering image problems created by the Tiananmen Square crackdown on student demonstrators in 1989. It's also meant to neutralize perceptions of China as a military threat, spurred by territorial aggression in the South China Sea in the 1990s and defense spending that rose an average of 15.9 percent a year between 1998 and 2007, according to the Chinese government.

In the past six years, China has helped drive multilateral negotiations to reduce nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran; and promoted itself in Africa with a promise in 2006 to provide $5 billion in loans and credits and to double development aid by this year. In Southeast Asia, it is working to create a free-trade zone that would eliminate levies covering 93 percent of its imports from the region.

Hu, 66, has also focused on cultural soft power, telling party leaders in an October 2007 speech that it is "a factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength."

The government has established 295 Confucius Institutes in 78 countries to teach Chinese history and language, and it spent an estimated $70 billion to stage the 2008 Summer Olympics, which attracted a record 4.7 billion television viewers worldwide.

China's new place at the global table is underscored by the appointments of Margaret Chan of Hong Kong as head of the World Health Organization in 2006 and Justin Lin, originally of Taiwan, as chief economist of the World Bank last year: They are the first Chinese to hold top positions in such prominent international organizations.

Still, positive views of China's influence have slipped 6 percentage points in the past year, according to a BBC World Service survey of public opinion in 21 countries released Feb. 6. China's positive rating fell to 39 percent, while its negative rating rose seven points to 40 percent.

Meanwhile, views of the United States as a positive influence increased to 40 percent from 35 percent in the poll, conducted after Obama's election between Nov. 21, 2008, and Feb. 1, 2009. America's negative rating declined to 43 percent from 47 percent. The margin of error varied by country.

Obama, 47, has promised to reverse the decline in America's image with a policy overhaul that includes closing the Guantánamo Bay detainee prison and renewed leadership on climate change.

The new president "has dramatized the basic values in the American dream that were somewhat tarnished over the past eight years," Nye, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, said in an e-mail. "That in itself has done a lot for American soft power, but it will have to be followed up with policies that are successful."

The most pressing problem for both countries now is the global financial crisis, which at first seemed a boon to China by exposing the failures of Western liberal capitalism, according to Nye. Now it weighs on the country's previously unsinkable upward trend.

Growth may fall to 6.7 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, from 13 percent in 2007 and 9 percent last year. More than 20 million people have lost their jobs and represent a threat of unrest as exports contract and prices in the property market slump.

The government's goal of preserving social stability may encourage repression of even legitimate complaints and public gatherings, creating potential human-rights abuses that attract international criticism. Earlier this month, at least 13 people were hurt in a clash of more than 2,000 in southwestern China after officials banned a traditional holiday dance, citing safety concerns.

Beijing casts critics of its human-rights record - which includes reported arrests of dissidents promoting Tibetan independence and persecution of certain religious groups - as ignorant and biased, a situation its latest soft-power initiative seems designed to address.

The government plans to hand out $6.6 billion to Xinhua, the official state news agency, and China Central Television, or CCTV, to expand abroad, The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong reported last month.

CCTV will start Russian and Arabic channels this year to supplement English, Spanish and French programming. Xinhua will add to its more than 100 foreign bureaus, and China will get its second official English-language daily, Agence France-Presse reported Jan. 14.

"Enhancing our communication capacity domestically and internationally is of direct consequence to our nation's international influence and international position," said Li Changchun, a member of the Communist Party's top ruling body, in a December speech.

Cheng Li, research director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is skeptical about the project's success.

"This is part of China's efforts to change its image, but in my view it's really more in terms of format rather than substance," he says. "The real substance is, you change China's own human rights record at a faster pace."

Question
Critically examine the effectiveness of China's strategies to regain its image as a "responsible world leader"

Article - Financial crisis deepening: Hu

2009-02-17T16:59:00.007+08:00

ST Interactive Feb 17, 2009

PORT-LOUIS - THE impact of the economic crisis is deepening and will hit developing nations particularly hard, Chinese President Hu Jintao warned on Monday as he embarked on the final leg of a tour of Africa.

A day after inking deals worth more than US$20 million (S$30 million) in Tanzania, Mr Hu called on rich nations to help African countries cope with the downturn before flying to Mauritius, the last stop on a four-nation trip to the continent.

'The impact of the crisis on economies around the world is still deepening and its grave consequences will be felt more in the days to come,' he said in a speech at a town hall gathering in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam.

'It has put developing countries in a particularly disadvantaged position Many African friends are concerned that in the face of the daunting challenges of the financial crisis, their international developing partners may scale back aid, debt relief and investment in Africa.

'The developed countries should assume their responsibilities and obligations, continue to deliver their aid, debt relief commitments, maintain and increase assistance to developing countries and effectively help them maintain financial stability and economic growth,' he added.

On Sunday, the Chinese president signed deals with his Tanzanian counterpart Jakaya Kikwete totaling US$21.9 million covering agriculture, communications and technical cooperation.

Mr Hu arrived Monday in Mauritius where he is to pen two agreements to finance infrastructure in the Indian Ocean island, home to the biggest Chinese diaspora in Africa, with more than 30,000 nationals of Chinese origin.

He was welcomed by Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam. On Tuesday he will meet a Mauritian government delegation led by Ramgoolam then visit a Chinese cultural centre before winding up his visit later in the day.

'During the Chinese president's visit, two deals will be signed to finance the enlargment of an airport and other infrastructure,' said Suresh Seeballuck, the cabinet secretary. China has funded several projects on the Indian Ocean island since 1972 when Mauritius switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taipei to Beijing.

'Mauritius is intensifying its efforts so that much of the Chinese investment in Africa goes through Mauritius,' Finance Minister Rama Sithanen said.

Head of Mauritius' chamber of commerce Charles Lee said: 'This visit shows a strong friendship between China and Mauritius, a small country without natural resources.' Mauritius' imports from China were worth more than 300 million dollars by September 2008, while Beijing has also invested in the island's textile and communication sectors. -- AFP

Other webs on China's relationship with African Countries:

Experts Discuss China's Growing Influence on African Development (22 Jun 2007)
China's African Policy (January 2006)
China's Foreign Direct Investment in Africa (2005)

Questions

What is the role that China wants to play in the economic and social development of Africa?
The West is suspicious of China's intentions in Africa.With reference to the articles above and any relevant online resources, assess if this suspicion is justified.
Identify developments in China that are making other governments ill at ease and justify strategies that the Chinese government can take to manage their distrust of China.

Article - China's image improves as world economy slumps

2009-02-15T17:52:00.002+08:00

A bridge under construction on the outskirts of Nanjing, China. The U.S. Treasury secretary commended Beijing for its $585 billion stimulus package.(Jeff Xu/Reuters)

By Landon Thomas Jr.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

ROME: As the world lurches ever deeper into economic distress, China's image is changing from that of currency manipulator to a source of badly needed consumer demand.

At the Group of 7 conference here over the weekend, finance ministers extended a friendly hand to the country many have criticized.

Veering sharply from his past testimony before the U.S. Congress, where he used harsh language in criticizing China's reluctance to let its currency, the yuan, appreciate, the new U.S. Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was quick to commend China for its 4 trillion yuan, or $585 billion, stimulus package.

"We very much welcome the steps China has taken to strengthen domestic demand and its commitment to further exchange rate reform," he said during a news conference Saturday.

This view was echoed by the Group of 7's communiqué, which added that the yuan was "expected to appreciate in effective terms."

The quick shift in the G-7's stance toward China underscores how sharply policy positions are changing as the world economy continues to struggle.

It also is further proof of the diminishing stature of this once august group as it has become clear that large growing economies like China, India, Brazil and South Korea, which are part of the Group of 20 but not the G-7, will play defining roles in generating the purchasing power the global economy so desperately needs.

The G-7 session was Geithner's first official trip abroad as Treasury secretary. After the withering reception that his bank rescue plan received in Washington, he could be excused for seeing the event as a well-timed respite.

Geithner, whose previous job was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has spent his academic and professional life studying and implementing international financial policy. So, two days spent in Rome brainstorming with finance ministers from the Group of 7 industrialized nations about fixing the global economy plays to his specialty.

As one might expect in a gathering of diverse economies, there were differences of opinion.

Amid signs that Europe's worsening economic slump has created fissures among G-7 leaders about how to deal with the crisis, Geithner fielded questions from his peers about provisions viewed as protectionist in the stimulus package of the administration of President Barack Obama, as well as the debt needed to pay for it and the lack of detail in his bank rescue plan.

When it came to concrete measures to address the world slump, there was little offered, although the final statement did point to increased steps to inject liquidity and strengthen bank balance sheets.

"There are no quick fixes," said Alistair Darling, the British chancellor of the Exchequer.

As for how Geithner was received, the Treasury secretary said that while participants were happy that the United States was stepping forward, more was expected. "We all understand that the U.S. needs to be an influence for good," he added.

Geithner's trip to Rome - like much of his recent experience following his protracted confirmation process - was a whirlwind, crammed tight with meetings, dinners and, when he could squeeze it in, a trip to the gym.

In theory, there has never been a Treasury secretary more qualified to be America's lead spokesman on international financial affairs. Geithner, unlike virtually all of his predecessors, has an orientation - personal, academic and professional - that is rooted outside his native country's borders.

At one dinner, Geithner, a veteran of untold previous international talking shops, gave an emotional speech outlining his respect for the consultative process.

"It was very heartfelt," said a Treasury official, who added that Geithner relied on notes he had taken minutes before speaking instead of his prepared presentation. "You could tell it was a homecoming."

But when it came to underlining the importance of a coordinated approach to stimulating economies, Geithner was all business. And while most leaders agreed on the need to bolster government spending, the question of how to finance it remained a contentious one here as well as in the United States.

Last week Giulio Tremonti, the Italian finance minister and Geithner's host for the weekend, reviewed the U.S. administration's stimulus in a Milan newspaper.

"If the problem is an excess of debt, the cure is not adding more debt, whether that debt is public or private," he wrote in the newspaper, Corriere della Sera, referring to this approach as the "American way."

Italy is one of the most indebted countries in Europe, with a debt that surpasses its annual gross domestic product.

The national debt of the United States, by contrast, was about 40 percent of GDP at the end of 2008, but Moody's Investor Service said it expected that to rise to 60 percent by 2010 because of the recession and spending tied to the government's bailout and stimulus programs.

There was also much discussion about the "Buy America" provision in the stimulus plan, which covers iron, steel and manufactured goods. The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, said he had emphasized in meetings with ministers how crucial it was to keep the world economy open, not closed and to not repeat the protectionist policy errors of the 1930s.

"The 'Buy American' provision is very dangerous," he said.

Geithner was careful to take on both issues at his closing news conference where he emphasized the administration's commitment to open markets, while taking up as well America's growing debt burden.

"We need to show the world that we can bring our resources and expenditures back into balance," he said. "That is crucially important."

Hit with a barrage of questions regarding his bank plan, he effectively said - stay tuned.

"We are going to move quickly to lay out a broad design," he said. "But we also want to makes sure that they work."

And amid the camera flashes and aggressive questioning, the Treasury secretary seemed to have found a comfort level that was lacking during his earlier public appearance when he announced his bank plan but took no questions. His voice had a deeper quality and his smile was more self-assured.

When there were no more questions, he waited several beats before exiting with a quick wave and headed for the plane waiting to take him and his team back to Washington.

Article - China fights drought

2009-02-09T13:18:00.005+08:00

PHOTO: REUTERS

BEIJING - CHINA fired thousands of artillery shells into the sky to make it rain and prepared to divert water from its two longest rivers to fight the country's worst drought in decades, officials said yesterday.

The drought, which has hit most of the north since November, is also affecting central and southwestern rice-growing provinces. Weather-control officials launched 2,392 shells and 409 rockets packed with cloud-seeding chemicals in operations across the north of China last Saturday, the China Meteorological Administration said. It brought down up to 5mm of rain in northern Hebei province, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Officials announced plans to divert water from the Yangtze River, the country's longest, to areas of eastern Jiangsu Province, Xinhua reported, citing a senior Ministry of Water Resources emergency official. Floodgates will also be opened in Inner Mongolia along the Yellow River to increase water supply for central Henan and eastern Shandong provinces.

Beijing last week raised its drought emergency to the highest level for the first time and sent relief supplies and technical specialists to eight major drought-hit regions. The Ministry of Finance allocated 86.7 billion yuan (S$19 billion) as relief funds for drought-stricken regions last Friday. That will add to the strain on government finances as it carries out a multibillion-dollar stimulus package to boost slowing economic growth.

Premier Wen Jiabao inspected drought relief work in Henan over the weekend and said ensuring a good harvest was critical to the success of the stimulus, the Xinhua News Agency and state television reported.

Wen visited a village where soldiers and police were helping farmers irrigate crops with water from a tank truck. The premier was shown using a hose to water a field and talking to farmers.

"This is an extremely big drought. It is a test of our party committees, government and leaders at all levels," Xinhua quoted Wen as telling local leaders.

Rural hardship is politically sensitive at a time when 20 million migrants have returned home after losing jobs because of the economic slump. The communist government is trying to curb the potential for unrest by pressing companies to avoid more layoffs.

Questions to consider

To what extent is the current drought in China a threat to Chinese governance?
How well has the CCP responded so far?

China’s Land and Coastal Borders

2009-02-09T13:16:00.004+08:00

As China has grown in the last 30 years, so have the often complicated relationships that the country shares with its many varied neighbors.

According to China's white paper on National Defense in 2006, China has signed land border treaties or agreements with 12 of its 14 neighbors, with most of the demarcation disputes settled. It is currently negotiating with India and Bhutan to resolve boundary issues.

View this website for a brief look at the complicated relationships China has with its neighbours and examine how an emerging China is affecting those closest to it... [view]

Related websites - China's Boistrous Borders; From Guns to Greetings: Defrosting China's Borders; China issues white paper on national defense (2006); Full Text: China's National Defense in 2008; China Farming Beyond Its Borders To Feed Economy

Article - Experts in U.S. and China see a chance for cooperation against climate change

2009-02-06T14:02:00.001+08:00

By Edward Wong and Andrew C. Revkin (IHT)

Thursday, February 5, 2009

BEIJING: When Chinese officials and the Obama administration begin serious discussions over issues at the heart of relations between China and the United States, the usual suspects will no doubt emerge: trade, North Korea, human rights, Taiwan.

But an increasing number of officials and scholars from both countries say climate change is likely to become another focal point in the dialogue. American and Chinese leaders recognize the urgency of global warming, the scholars and officials say, and believe that a new international climate treaty is impossible without agreements between their nations, the world's two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

In a sign of this new emphasis, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to stress the importance of new steps on energy and global warming when she visits China, perhaps as soon as this month, an Obama administration official said.

A report to be released Thursday presents a blueprint for President Barack Obama and Chinese leaders to begin addressing together, as a major priority, how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to rising temperatures.

The report, "A Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change," is a joint project of the Asia Society and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, both based in the United States. Scientists and policy advisers from both countries contributed to the report.

The origins of the report indicate that it could carry weight in the White House. It was produced by a committee led by Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics who is now the secretary of energy, and John Thornton, a professor at Tsinghua University who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for United States ambassador to China. John Holdren, Obama's choice for science adviser, is another contributor.

The report recommends that China and the United States convene a presidential summit meeting to create a broad plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, followed by the appointment of senior officials and independent experts to councils and task forces to develop concrete programs. It says the two governments should lay out areas for cooperation, including the deployment of low-emissions coal technologies, the improvement of energy efficiency and conservation, and the promotion of renewable energy.

In China, scholars and policy advisers who support the proposals say talks on energy technology and climate change could foster a cooperative relationship between the Obama administration and China. A central question is whether Chinese leaders and American lawmakers will be too focused on reviving their economies to pay serious attention to curbing emissions.

But at least in public, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and other officials have said recently that the financial crisis actually gives China an opportunity to turn its growth model away from one that was not environmentally sustainable.

"I believe climate change may become a very important issue which will put China-U.S. relations in a new framework in the 21st century because the stakes are high," said Wu Jianmin, a senior adviser to the Foreign Ministry and former ambassador to France. "We all understand we don't have much time left. We've got to work together."

This largely meshes with Obama's hope for helping to revive the American economy by developing non-polluting energy technologies and "green jobs."

Todd Stern, who was appointed Clinton's special envoy for climate change, said the administration hoped to end sparring between the nations over who needs to do what first.

"Secretary Clinton is keenly aware that the United States, as the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, and China, as the largest emitter going forward, need to develop a strong, constructive partnership to build the kind of clean-energy economies that will allow us to put the brakes on global climate change," he said in an e-mail message.

But some American officials and experts on climate and energy say that although Chinese leaders declare they are serious about the issue, it has been hard to pin them down on specific measures.

Wen, in an interview with The Financial Times published Monday, restated China's position that it does not intend to agree to specific limits at a United Nations conference on climate change scheduled for December in Copenhagen.

"It's difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development," he said. "Europe started its industrialization several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years."

Gao Guangsheng, who directs the climate change office at the National Development and Reform Commission, presented a white paper in October that said the world's richest countries should contribute 1 percent of their gross domestic product to helping developing countries combat global warming.

Zhang Haibin, an associate professor at Peking University who specializes in international environmental politics, said in an interview that China and the United States had historically had weak cooperation on the climate change problem, but that Chinese leaders believed that the relationship could change under Obama.

Several American experts on energy, climate and Chinese-American relations said the report built on other recent calls for sustained partnerships on energy efficiency, technology for capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and other initiatives.

But they also said that task forces and summit meetings alone would be ineffective unless they resulted in programs and investments that continued for many years.

"Nearly everything that these two countries have tried to do jointly on climate and energy has been episodic," said David Victor, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies energy and climate. "The financial crisis has created an opportunity for a dialogue, but it also creates a host of new risks as the countries turn inward."

Orville Schell, a veteran journalist who helped supervise the writing of the report as director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, said that in recent meetings Chinese officials were beginning to recognize the need to take action on climate change.

"We have watched as officials in China have become much more receptive to the need to do 'something' about climate change, although they are still unwilling to set caps," Schell said in an e-mail message. "We have also watched our own country molt out of stubborn opposition to a far more open willingness to recognize the scientific basis of the problem and the need to do something about it."

Related article - Report: US, China must cooperate on climate change (6 Feb 2009, AP)

Article - Bullish Chinese ox to save world?

2009-02-06T13:30:00.002+08:00

Peh Shing Huei & Grace Ng
The Straits Times
Publication Date: 06-02-2009

Chinese companies had started the year on a sombre note amid a worsening economic outlook.

But firms like mould maker China Kunda are seeing a brighter side, amid signs that the storm clouds over the Chinese economy are starting to clear.

The Shenzhen-based company - which supplies moulds to industries like the car sector - notes that 'preliminary indications' from its customers show they are upbeat about the future.

"During our discussions with our customers, they have indicated that they remain optimistic about the prospects for products like certain automobile parts, personal computers and notebooks this year," Hau Khee Wee, chief financial officer of China Kunda, told The Straits Times.

Indeed, the Year of the Ox may turn out to be a bullish one for China after all.

After months of doom and gloom, analysts and experts now believe that there is a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel for the world's third-biggest economy.

While they differ on the length of the tunnel that China still needs to claw out of, most agree that the worst seems to be over for this country of 1.3 billion.

It is a sentiment shared by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Last month, Premier Wen Jiabao gave the first signs of a rebound when he told a business audience in China that the latest economic numbers revealed an early recovery from the global financial crisis.

Earlier this week in London, Wen - who was greeted with "I Love Bao Bao" or "I Love Babe" (an affectionate play on his name) placards by Chinese students in the British capital - gave the Chinese people even more reasons for love when he reiterated his words of confidence.

"During the last 10 days of December it started to get better. The goods piled up in port started to decrease and the prices of industrial products started to rise,' he said, adding that 'there is light at the end of the tunnel".

The numbers backed up his words.

China's official manufacturing index - the purchasing managers' index (PMI) - for last month rose to 45.3, up from 41.2 in December and a record low of 38.8 in November.

There was also a surge in bank lending as Chinese banks answered the calls of the government. A record 1.2 trillion yuan (US$176 billion) of new loans were extended last month, reported the China Securities Journal on Wednesday (february 4). This suggests that more companies would now have more money to survive the crisis.

"The worst of the slowdown in the Chinese economy may be behind us now, judging from the latest PMI and lending data," said Credit Suisse economist Tao Dong.

Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu was even more optimistic, saying that the numbers pointed to a 'V-shaped recovery' and 8 per cent gross domestic product growth for this year.

A reason behind this modest turnaround is the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package announced late last year by the Chinese government.

Although only a small portion of that largesse has been spent - largely on rebuilding the earthquake-hit south-western Sichuan province and improving road and rail networks - the effect is already felt.

Even less optimistic analysts agree that China is looking at a recovery this year, albeit only in the second half.

"I don't think there will be a sharp V-shaped recovery - we are expecting more of a U-shaped recovery: slow in the first half of the year and then a pick-up in the second half," said Standard Chartered economist Stephen Green.

HSBC economist Qu Hongbin echoed his reading, calling it 'a year of two halves' for China's economy.

"Weak in the first half with exports and the property market going down, but stronger in the second half as the government's aggressive stimulus package takes effect after winter, which is typically the slow season for the construction sector," he said.

But the Chinese are not grinning just yet.

Wen had acknowledged in London that there is still much more work needed, including a possible dip into China's huge foreign currency reserves for domestic purposes.

"We may take further new, timely and decisive measures. All these measures have to be taken pre-emptively before an economic retreat," he told the Financial Times.

And if the Chinese government needed a sobering number to forestall any premature celebrations, a top rural official provided it just hours after Wen's comments in Britain were published.

Chen Xiwen revealed on Monday morning that some 20 million migrant workers in China have lost their jobs as a result of the crisis - a figure that is two to three times higher than previous official estimates.

It is the clearest indicator that China, while inching its way out of the crisis earlier than any of the major economies, has also suffered a far more painful bite than most had anticipated at the onset of the crunch.

Economist Lu Ding of the University of the Fraser Valley pointed out that China's malaise actually started before the global crash. Reforms and adjustments to the Chinese economy - such as the removal of export tax rebates and the new labour contract law - had already hurt exports.

"The coincidental impact of the US-originated financial tsunami has accelerated the decline of exports to a crash," he told The Straits Times.

There are also experts who believe that whatever recovery China makes in the coming months would be marginal, given how the world is still mired in recession.

"We doubt there will be a V-shaped recovery despite some signs of mild recovery in the past month as we believe China is not able to jump when the global economy is still sinking," said OCBC bank economist Tommy Xie.

Even if China does indeed jump, there is little hope that it would be the global swing factor, the saviour of the world.

"China can save itself but not the world," said Tao, noting that China's recovery is driven by infrastructure investment, which will boost demand for local materials and labour.

Added Dr Green: "China has limited ability to pull the rest of the world economy out (of a slowdown) through its imports. It is a net importer of unfinished components as well as some raw materials such as iron ore and some oil products. It doesn't import much manufacturing goods from Asia or the rest of the world. So it is also unlikely to be a growth engine for Asia."

Xie disagreed, saying that China is still "one of the key engines" for the global recovery.

"Chinese high savings and huge foreign exchange reserves are the important weapons to fight the shrinking global economic activity," he said.

But whatever the impact of China on the world, a Chinese rebound that comes sooner than its rivals' - Japan in particular - would certainly have repercussions that extend beyond the crisis.

"I expect China will surpass Japan as the world's second-largest economy by the middle of next year," said Qu.

Such a switch in 'rankings' would not be as understated as China's rise to third place over Germany last month.

The long-time rivalry, and at times enmity, between China and Japan would surely engender a surge in Chinese nationalism - if and when it overtakes Japan for the world No. 2 position, behind the United States.

Happy New Year? For the Chinese, it could well be.