Archive for the ‘China’ Category

Upload: final three FEER articles

January 20, 2010

There have been various requests for me to upload some journalism and book-related work, so here is a (small) start. The following links connect to the last three articles I wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review. We know they are the last articles, because in December the Wall Street Journal (now controlled by Rupert Murdoch), the owner of the FEER, closed that venerable magazine down. I was fortunate to be asked to contribute to the final issue, and wrote a piece contextualising China’s development in terms of what we have seen, historically, elsewhere in east Asia.  From the autumn of 2009 there is a piece about how China developed its iron and steel industry, again with lots of developing country perspective, which also explains why iron ore producers in Australia, Brazil, India and elswhere are making so much money out of China. Finally, in true Chinese spirit, there is a self-criticism of my 2002 book The China Dream, written in late 2008.

Your money or your freedom

January 15, 2010

 

Another rumbling of perhaps not-so-distant thunder. Google’s threat to pull out of China is a significant development in increasingly confrontational relations between China and ‘the West’ (which in my definition is not really west because it includes Japan, as well as Europe and the US). Google’s move ratchets up another notch the political pressure that has been rising over market access for foreign firms, the question of the Renminbi exchange rate, negotiations over China’s vast iron ore imports and the arrest (initially on espionage charges) of Rio Tinto employees, and the handling of Chinese political dissidents, not least ones involved in the new-ish Charter ’08 movement.

 

Note that most of these are commercial and economic disputes. A simple metric has been at work in relations between China and the West since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. It can be summed up as a Western bottom line of: ‘Your money or your freedom’. In the early 90s, in the first months of Bill Clinton’s first term, there was a momentary clamour for China to mollify the West by becoming freer. This did not last very long, mainly because China offered the West a different prize: money (or at least the strong smell of profit via Chinese market opening). Everyone has their price, and in the golden years between the 2002 start of the last Chinese credit cycle and the 2008 global financial crisis, the West was paid in money.

 

The situation — or at least perception of it — began to change in the past two to three years as China recycled vast amounts of foreign exchange earnings into (mostly) foreign government bonds. The main result was to maintain an artificially depressed exchange rate which helps China-based exports. Everybody else in Asia has done this over the years but, as China’s currency management continued against a backdrop of global economic recession, and as more and more multinational companies started to complain that China is finding new ways to block their market access, Western governments have gotten increasingly miffed. Throw in the arrests of Rio Tinto employees, initially on charges of espionage, and you have the beginnings of a Western consensus that China is no longer paying enough for us to overlook its unpleasant human rights record. At least, I think, this is a useful way of viewing the situation.

 

Google’s threat to quit, interestingly, is more a human rights/morality position than a commercial one. It has, it says, been the subject of orchestrated attacks (using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the point of access) seeking to obtain information about human rights activists and campaigners dealing with China. Lots of other human rights lobbyists, lawyers, journalists and so on have had their Gmail accounts hacked, not via assaults on Google itself but through direct attacks on email users themselves. Google has not pointed the finger directly, but it is hard to imagine who would attempt to do these things on a regular basis beyond agents – at whatever degree removed – of the state. There have been various attempts in media coverage to spin the story such that Google, which has about a 30% share of the China search market compared with more like 60% for Baidu, is really willing to walk away because it is not the market leader. This is crude and unfair. The reality, surely, is that Google is putting up (morally) with way too much in return for what it is getting out (financially) from China. Everyone has their price, and Google’s is too high for China. That does not mean Google is bad, it means it is far better than most. The firm was willing to run censorship (albeit a bit less than Baidu) on its Chinese search engine in order to get a .cn presence, but having its systems attacked in a quest for information on political dissidents is too much. Compare that with Yahoo! which in 2004 voluntarily provided information to Chinese authorities which led to the jailing of a journalist for 10 years.

 

It will be interesting to see how the commercial fortunes of Baidu and Google are affected, long-term, if Google does quit China. Baidu’s share price has shot up around 15% since Google publicly stated its position, presumably on the assumption that it can now get a virtual monopoly position in search. Google’s share price is unaffected. I am making a note to check where they are at in five and ten years.

 

Meanwhile, for your delectation, here are some of my favourite word search terms that Baidu uses to censor and block web pages in China. These are my own (doubtless flawed) translations from documents leaked by a Baidu employee in 2009.

 

communist party

brainwashing

dictatorship

don’t love the party 

network blocked

the current government

China human rights

princeling [refers to children of political leaders]

the party now

one-party rule 

freedom of speech

common bandit

today’s police

defend legal rights

severance

requisition land

meditate

the masses

government official drives the people to revolt

bandit officials

suppress students

Zhao Ziyang

political crisis

evedropping device

sell blood

wife swap

oral sex

vagina

bestiality

mother and son incest

a night of passion

cheating in examinations
the sale of the answer
fake diploma

More links

Rebecca Mackinnon, who knows far more about this stuff than me, writes a spirited op-ed in the WSJ and seems to have a similar opinion.

 

Chinese soft power

January 5, 2010

The Chinese government decides to remind us that, whereas Italy is an institutionally weak state, China is the authentic institutional Third World, the real McCoy (or real Mackay if you prefer the likely Scottish origin of this term) of arbitrary, unprofessional and gratuitously nasty behaviour. I refer to the execution of a mentally-ill Briton, and an 11-year jail sentence for one of China’s best-known pro-democracy campaigners, which occurred in the same week.

 Akmal Shaikh, 53, a former London minicab manager, was executed in Urumqi for arriving in China with a suitcase containing 4kg of heroin. He had a long history of psychiatric problems. It appears that drug traffickers duped him into carrying the drugs and sent him to China saying it was part of a plan for him to fulfil his ambition of becoming a ‘pop star’. Arrested on arrival, Shaikh was given a 30 minute trial. During a statement he made during his also brief appeal, judges laughed at Shaikh’s nonsensical discourse and confirmed the death penalty, as this China law blog relates.

The 11-year jail sentence was handed down to writer Liu Xiaobo for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Liu is one of the main drafters of Charter ’08, the Chinese pro-democracy manifesto published two years ago and modelled on Charter ’77, which was launched by dissidents in Czechoslovakia in the midst of the Cold War. Liu was also given a very brief trial at which his lawyers were allowed almost no time to present a defence (the obvious defence is that Liu has done nothing other than exercise rights guaranteed by China’s constitution). The court condemned him at Christmas, presumably in the hope that foreigners were thinking about other things.

If this was the hope, it may have been misplaced, since the cases of both Liu Xiaobo and Akmal Shaikh have received worldwide media coverage. Not for a long time has China faced so much negative press in such a short period.

The Chinese government and its running dogs have shot back with what philosophers call ‘moral equivalence’, or the argument that ‘you’re just the same as we are, only from a different culture’. This might involve reference to the fact that the death penalty is used in the United States, or that all countries have to defend against attacks on state power. 

But these attempts at obfuscation  do not cloud what is stark reality. In the Shaikh case, the court refused to allow either an independent local doctor or a psychiatrist sent from Britain to meet or assess the defendant. China’s 1997 Criminal Code states that a person who is unable to recognize or control his own misconduct does not bear criminal responsibility. However there is no clear requirement for a court to order a psychiatric evaluation. The main justice-related role of psychiatric institutions in China continues to be as places in which to lock up sane people who have criticised the state.  

The Liu case is a reminder that China’s courts are subject to direction by the Communist Party’s  Central Political-Legal Committee, currently headed by former Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, which determines the outcome of many ‘special’ cases and makes sure that others – such as challenges to the Party – are never admitted to trial. Liu’s 11-year sentence was not really a judicial decision at all. 

A selction of British press comment on the execution of Akmal Shaikh:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-execution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/29/amnesty-akmal-shaikh-execution-reaction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-death-penalty

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6904175/Execution-of-Briton-Akmal-Shaikh-China-defiant-in-the-face-of-criticism.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/china-defiant-after-britons-execution-1852307.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6970154.ece

More information about Liu Xiaobo:

http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3029/prmID/172

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/21/china-liu-xiaobo-s-trial-travesty-justice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo

Deja vu all over again: the letter which Vaclev Havel and others connected with Charter ’77 tried to deliver to the Chinese embassy in Prague (as reprinted in the Washington Post) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803376.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

Lost in translation

November 17, 2009

A four-state research trip begins at Fiumincino in Rome, where on a Sunday afternoon the worst chaos I have seen in the Italian capital’s airport reigns. Hundreds of people are crammed into the main security area, a single incoherent mass that takes an hour to pass through the security check. Amid the crush, a British genius yells ‘You need to open more channels’ as if he is the only person in the room that this has occurred to. One guesses the airport cannot find enough people to work on a Sunday afternoon, despite an economy shrinking five percent this year. A couple of Italians lose control completely, screaming like lunatics at the security staff; one of them continues in the same vein at a policeman who appears on the scene.

My Air China flight is delayed a couple of hours because it has been snowing in Beijing, so I can afford to be more patient than some; eventually I get to the gate. Seated in economy I dread a sleepless night travelling east, followed by the jetlag from hell. But soon after take-off I doze off and sleep better and longer than I often do when given a business class seat-bed for a speaking engagement.

The reason for my plane’s delay is snow in Beijing – where I am going first – which closed the airport for half a day. The BBC reports this is due to ‘cloud seeding’, a technique developed in the United States but popularised in China. It involves using airplanes or small rockets to seed clouds with silver idodide that induces rain. You cannot make extra rain like this, as I understand it, but you can make rain fall in places other than where it might fall naturally. The Beijing area is perennially short of water. According to media reports, Chinese meteorologists failed to calculate that wind and temperature conditions on this occasion would cause precipitation in the form of snow. The same thing is said to have occurred in February.

It is a brief, one-night stop in Beijing. On both occasions that I pass through the airport, for landing and for taking off to Tokyo, I have a good look out of the window at the Beijing area. Stories continue to be published in the press that pollution has improved. But all I see looking out of plane windows is a cigarette-smoke yellow haze that sits like an inverted shallow bowl over the city area. A pollution report published by the US embassy in Beijing suggests that the pollution story depends on which pollutants you choose to measure; it focuses on fine particles and tells a less sanguine tale than the official Chinese one.

And so to Japan, where I am ever-more struck by just how little English people speak, even in big cities. I am headed out to the countryside to look at the history of land reform, in what promises to be a supercharged, bucolic version of Lost in Translation, minus Scarlet Johansson.

On the upside, I can read about a quarter of the characters I see in Japan, because they come from Chinese. On the downside, I manage to leave my ‘Survival Japanese’ phrasebook at the friend’s house in Tokyo where I stay the first night.

The car I hire in suburban Tokyo has satellite navigation, but only in Japanese. The one real break I get is that before driving out of Tokyo I manage to enter a marker in the navigation system at the place I am staying. If not, I doubt I would ever have returned.

As much as any place I have been, Tokyo has to be seen to be believed. The vast majority of this vast city is low-rise, clap-board style houses reached by narrow (perhaps six metre wide) lanes which, in my experience, are never cul-de-sacs. These lanes, which are all demarcated with white lines that set aside a little of the precious space on either side for pedestrians and cyclists, go on and on and on.

To prove the point, I leave Tokyo by randomly weaving – following a general north-west trajectory shown on the navigation system – and drive for more than two hours through the lanes until I have had enough and switch to a bigger road. Every so often I come across a market, a school, a group of small one-room restaurants and bars, or a railway line. The more central parts of Tokyo are charming. But the sprawl that connects Tokyo with a series of what claim to be separate towns and cities (you only know it from the names) is ugly and unpleasant. I had not realised before how much Japan has succumbed to the American acceptance of acres of malls, discount stores, fast food restaurants and car showrooms along every significant highway in the country. This has brutalised large swathes of a naturally very beautiful place.

Still, driving into the central mountain range of Honshu island, I eventually reach hills too steep for development. This is where the forest land that covers so much of Japan begins. And it is very attractive forest, comprised of many different tree species, part evergreen and part deciduous. At this time of year the colours are phenomenal. I stay a night in Chichibu, epicentre of a large-scale nineteenth century peasant revolt, and then head across to Niigata on the west coast, an area famed for Japan’s best rice (and hence sake). It is here that a small number of pre-Second World War landlord houses I want to look at are preserved.

Niigata City itself is a reasonably attractive place, easy to navigate, and with excellent food. It comes as a shock that three hours on the expressway through the mountains to get there costs Euro50 in tolls.

The lack of English thing isn’t getting any better. There are shops I go into where the staff appears to have not a single word of English among it. I wander out again, empty-handed. I stay in quite a reasonable hotel, but the English there is up to very little. Eventually I find a woman in the back office who speaks enough English to help me programme the navigation system to find the farms I want to see. I don’t think I have ever felt so cut off from people around me in a place I have visited. They are very friendly and polite. We just cannot communicate.

After a couple of days it is time to head back to Tokyo. Getting to the capital is easy enough. Getting across the capital to my friend’s house is where the navigation system marker turns out to be critical. On a Sunday evening I am led by the machine through a maze of flyovers, tunnels, and complex intersections that would have seen me make a dozen mistakes or more trying to follow a map. Even with the satellite system, I get back after five or six hours in the car remembering why I have come to loathe driving: it is all wasted time; you can’t do anything while you are controlling a car.

Next day I fly to Taipei, stay in a grotty airport hotel, and go back to the airport for an early connection to Manila. There I switch to a local flight to Bacolod, the capital Negros Occidental, a place that has been dubbed ‘Sugarlandia’. In the 19th century it was turned into a sugar estate monoculture by European and American families and has remained pretty much that.

As the plane descends, you can already see multiple fires where farmers are burning off the residue in fields where sugar cane has been cut. There is sugar everywhere, even around the airport. November is part of the cutting season and every road seems to have one or more big trucks piled high with brown cane heading towards the nearest Central, as the sugar refineries are known.

I spend three days trying to understand why the land reform programme introduced after the 1986 flight of Ferdinand Marcos has failed to change the lives of most farmers here. Many landlords have found ways to hang on to their estates – the biggest local player is Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuangco, perhaps Marcos’s number one crony, who has never been brought to book – while farmers who have obtained plots have often ended up selling them because of debts to usurers. They then become estate workers again earning, at current exchange rates, about US$2 a day. With the help of some well-informed contacts, I manage to visit land reform cooperatives that are being somewhat more successful. We travel into deep countryside that is as stunningly beautiful as it is poor.

Then it is time for a stopover in Manila so that I can obtain a difficult-to-come-by book, a recent biography of Danding Cojuangco. Reading this on the plane home, I am pleased to note a striking parallel between the late Filipino fantasist duce Ferdinand Marcos and current Italian fantasist duce Silvio Berlusconi.

It seems that not only was the latter embarrassed by secret recordings of his pillow talk. Back in 1972, just before Ferdy plunged the Philippines into more than a decade of martial law, recordings of his bedroom exchanges with a B-movie actress called Dovie Beams (who had been making a movie in the Philippines) began to circulate in Manila. The tape, recorded by the actress before she fled the country, featured Ferdy moaning, singing his favourite folk songs, and begging for oral sex. The University of the Philippines radio station took to playing the recordings over and over. Ferdy, as was his standard refrain, said the whole thing was a communist conspiracy and sought to have various journalists jailed. Now where else have we heard and seen that?

A Great Wall

September 6, 2009

If you are wondering where I have been, the answer is China, stuck behind what is called the Great Firewall of China. In all the time I have been involved with the country, I don’t think the government has ever blocked so many web sites or web searches. As one example, using Baidu, the most popular domestic search engine, it is currently not possible to do blog searches based on the names of 19 of 25 current members of the Politburo, including the president and prime minister (no idea why you can search the other six). The whole of WordPress, which hosts this blog, is blocked in China. As are thousands and thousands of news outlets, service providers and often seemingly innocuous sites which hardly seem capable of upsetting anybody. The censorship is always severe, but it is particularly severe at present because of the riots in Xinjiang in the west of China earlier this year, the passing on June 4 of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, and the still to come 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic in October.

It is possible to go around, or over, the Great Firewall, using a ‘proxy’ server. If I have understood correctly, this routes all your traffic via an additional server which makes Chinese censors think your destination is one place when in fact it is really somewhere else, the true destination being hidden behind the proxy server. I tried one free proxy for a while and it worked only patchily. People who follow these things say that the free proxies are under constant electronic attack from China’s cyber-police; I have no idea how they conduct their electronic warfare, but I do know they have very substantial resources. So before I left I shelled out US$60 at www.witopia.com for a Virtual Private Network service – a sort of Cadillac proxy – that allowed me to view and access anything. The problem is that this necessarily slows things down, involving as it does both encryption and routing via a proxy. So I found the best way to operate is to surf with the VPN off and when you hit something that is blocked – the message on google is typically that the link was ‘broken’, on Chinese search engines you are told you may have infringed some unspecifed law – you turn on the VPN (which boots up in half a minute) and revisit the page. George Orwell would have loved it.

 Witopia means I could have blogged from China, but by the time I was sorted out I had lost the habit and was charging round trying to finish the work I had to finish before we left. So here is a very brief review.

 This was the longest period I have spent in China for about seven years. You wonder what has changed. Well, apart from the 24-hour construction and the unbelievable pollution, both of which have been constants since I first went to China in 1991, I think there are four fundamental differences between the start and end of this decade:

1.  Almost everyone has a small dog. Pekinese%20%20KushanThis may seem like an eccentric observation in ‘the world’s fastest-growing economy’, but it knocked me backwards. The small dog population of Beijing surely now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, if not a million-plus. Ten years ago, dogs were exceptional things. In the traditional Communist view, they are bourgeois pests. Even today, there is a rule in Beijing that dogs inside the fifth ringroad cannot exceed 30 centimetres at the shoulder, hence the plague of Pekinese, miniature poodles, the ones that look like anorexic foxes, and other assorted rug-rats. Even my friends have got these little dogs. But being liberal ne’er do-well types, they have rescue dogs and runts and so they provided few insights into the thinking of the owners of the standard pure-bred micro-pooch. I developed three theories, but had no time to test any of them through interviews with the general dog-owning public. The theories about the dog phenomenon: a) it is a foreign-funded act of counter-revolution, and will be crushed by a Tiananmen dog massacre that drives back the forces of splittist canine adventurism b) it is not counter-revolutionary, but instead the populist leading edge of Chinese market socialist civilisation and Chinese leaders including the president will soon appear an international meetings with a rug-rat under each arm; in turn, Obama’s purchase of a small dog for his children reflects his acknowledgement of the superiority of Chinese socialism c) Chinese society remains so whacked-out after the depravities of the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc, that talking to small dogs about how you flayed your primary-school teacher is now an important form of national healing/therapy. Whichever of these theories has more merit, I can report that thankfully – unlike Paris – there is very little dog shit on the street.

2. Lots of people wear fou zhu. This translates as ‘buddhist pearls’ and refers to bracelets of (I believe usually 12) small balls worn around the wristbuddhist beads, which one fiddles with in the manner of Roman Catholics with their rosary beads. The number of these in Beijing is perhaps less than the number of small dogs, but whereas the latter are preferred by vacuous young women and garrulous grannies, the former are also very popular with men. I was impressed by the degree to which the Buddist pearl thing has invaded society’s deeper recesses after a meeting with an official at the National Development Reform Commission – the country’s central planning agency – where the gentleman concerned couldn’t leave his little balls alone. I immediately went out and got some for myself. The possible explanations for the rise of the Buddist pearl fashion, I suspect, are variants of a) through c), above.  

3. In some respects the economy is now genuinely quite big. China is still a poor country, with an annual GDP-per capita in 2008 of US$3,300. But the sheer force of numbers – specifically, the 1.3 billion population number – means that some markets are very large. China has 2,600 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurantsKFC, it will likely be the world’s biggest car market this year, it is set to install 200 gigawatts of wind turbines by 2020 (the total installed electricity generating capacity of the UK is 80 gigawatts). Of course the usual caveats apply: even KFC, with a product poor-ish people can afford, is finding it hard to shift more drumsticks as it pushes into the poorest part of the hinterland; the cars made by domestic Chinese firms could not be sold elsewhere in the world because they cannot not pass the safety tests; and the Chinese-made wind turbines are noisy, inefficient and occasionally catch fire. Nonetheless, unlike the 1990s when we lived in Beijing, some things are being done at serious scale. I wrote an article for the September issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review (sorry, subscription only) about goings-on in the steel industry, which is one business that is definitely done at scale (36  percent of global output last year).

4. The place is significantly more cosmopolitan. You still don’t get much change out of China if you do not speak the language. But people are trying to speak English, and the number of returnees who have lived, worked and studied overseas is giving a different feel to the biggest cities. They (try to) run interesting companies and do interesting things. I reckon their future is, if not the future of China, then at least its key barometer. More of this anon.