Shanghai Express

Ian Buruna on China - Le Monde

2012-01-08T22:05:00.003-02:00

"Le modèle chinois ébranle les certitudes américaines"

LE MONDE CULTURE ET IDEES | 07.01.12 | 17h08 • Mis à jour le 08.01.12 | 09h15

par Propos recueillis par Sylvain Cypel

Des employées d'une ligne de production dans l'entreprise de matériel électroniqueSuzhou Etron à Suzhou, en Chine.Reuters/© Aly Song / Reuters

NEW YORK, CORRESPONDANT - Installé depuis 2005 à New York, Ian Buruma est devenu l'un des intellectuels les plus en vue aux Etats-Unis. Il collabore à la New York Review of Books, au New York Times et au New Yorker. Polyglotte (néerlandais, anglais, allemand, chinois, japonais et français, quoi qu'il en dise), il a été l'éditeur des pages culturelles de la Far Eastern Economic Review, à Hongkong, et de The Spectator, à Londres. Aujourd'hui professeur de démocratie, droits de l'homme et journalisme à l'université Bard - "façon de dire que j'enseigne ce que je veux, c'est le charme du système universitaire américain", dit-il en riant -, il est un auteur polyvalent et prolifique. Nous avons interrogé cet intellectuel à focale large, prix Erasmus 2008, sur sa spécialité initiale : la Chine et l'Extrême-Orient.

Votre itinéraire vous place au carrefour de l'Asie, de l'Europe et de l'Amérique. En quoi cela influence-t-il votre regard sur le monde ?

Mon père est néerlandais, ma mère anglaise d'origine juive allemande. L'Asie puis l'Amérique se sont ajoutées un peu par hasard. Très jeune, étudiant en langue et littérature chinoises, j'étais un cinéphile. Un jour, j'ai vu à Paris Domicile conjugal(1970), de François Truffaut. Le personnage d'Antoine Doinel y tombe amoureux de la Japonaise... et moi aussi ! A l'époque, aller en Chine était impossible. Je me suis donc tourné vers le Japon, où j'ai étudié le cinéma et participé à la troupe de danse Dairakudakan. L'Amérique est venue à moi tardivement, quand on m'a proposé d'yenseigner. Je me sens toujours plus européen qu'américain. Un Européen marié à une Japonaise et parfaitement chez lui à New York, la ville de la mixité.

Vous êtes progressiste et un produit typique du multiculturalisme. Pourquoi dénoncez-vous la "courte vue" des progressistes sur l'islam ?

Je ne suis pas "progressiste". C'est ce pays tellement conservateur que sont les Etats-Unis qui m'a beaucoup poussé à gauche ! Je l'étais moins en Europe et en Asie. Je n'ai jamais admis les complaisances de gens de gauche pour toutes sortes de potentats sous le prétexte d'accepter les différences. Et je suis opposé à l'idéologie du multiculturalisme. Lorsque le terme décrit une réalité, il me convient. Sur le plan factuel, je suis multiculturel. Mais l'idée que les gens doivent impérativement préserver toutes leurs racines est absurde. Dans le cas célèbre d'un crime d'honneur commis en Allemagne, où le juge avait estimé que le criminel avait des circonstances atténuantes en raison de sa culture d'origine, je considère qu'il a tort.

Il y a des choses plus importantes que la culture. Je n'admets pas l'argument culturel pour justifier l'excision. En même temps, je suis plus tolérant que la loi française pour l'affichage des symboles religieux. Qu'une policière ou une enseignante soit interdite de porter le niqab dans ses fonctions, oui. Une personne dans la rue, non. Ce type d'interdiction n'est qu'une façon de dissuader des gens impopulaires d'adhérer à une religion impopulaire.

La peur des Japonais était très forte il y a vingt-cinq ans aux Etats-Unis. Comment expliquez-vous qu'un même phénomène soit aujourd'hui dirigé contre la Chine ?

Les deux phénomènes ne sont pas similaires. Ce qui faisait peur aux Américains il y a une génération, c'était la visibilité des Japonais : Mitsubishi rachetait leRockefeller Center, Toyota déboulait, etc. Leurs marques étaient très visibles. De plus, dans l'histoire américaine, les Japonais sont suspects. Aujourd'hui, les Américains se disent que, si les Chinois parviennent à la puissance qu'avaient les Japonais, ils seront bien plus dangereux. Mais, sur le fond, la menace nipponne avait été grandement exagérée et la menace chinoise l'est tout autant. D'abord, l'absence de liberté intellectuelle en Chine reste un obstacle très important pour son développement. Ensuite, l'intérêt des deux parties à préserver des liens l'emportera sur les forces poussant au conflit.

Quelle est la part de réalité et de fantasme dans cette tension montante ?

Par fantasmes, vous entendez peur. Elle est fondée : la montée en puissance de la Chine ne pourra que réduire le pouvoir et l'influence américaine dans le monde. Après 1945, les Etats-Unis sont devenus le gendarme de l'Asie. Ce n'est plus le cas. Des peurs populistes sont également fondées sur des motifs socio-économiques. Mais je ne pense pas qu'elles atteignent le niveau des peurs antinippones de la fin des années 1980. Et les craintes de l'influence économique chinoise sont surtout concentrées dans les Etats de la vieille économie, où l'industrie lourde est en déclin.

Un sondage de l'Institut Pew a montré que les Américains croient que la Chine est devenue la première puissance économique mondiale. Or elle reste loin des Etats-Unis. C'est un fantasme typique...

C'est une combinaison d'ignorance et de peurs, exploitées par des chroniqueurs de radios dans le but de blâmer Barack Obama. Mais je le répète : le déclin des Etats-Unis est un fait, comme la montée en puissance économique de l'Asie. Ce déclin génère un choc, dont il ne faut pas s'alarmer inconsidérément. Au début du XX^esiècle, l'invention du personnage de Fu Manchu (sorte de génie du Mal incarnant le "péril jaune") avait provoqué un arrêt de l'immigration sino-nipponne en Amérique qui avait même eu un impact en Europe. A suivi la menace communiste, qui était, pour les Etats-Unis, loin d'être aussi réelle qu'on l'a présentée. Mais même la CIA y a sincèrement cru.

Les Etats-Unis sont un pays qui vit sous la peur constante de puissances extérieures qui menaceraient de faire disparaître son espace sécurisé. Ce pays a bâti et a été bâti par une société d'immigrés mais, dans le même temps, il pourchasse ces immigrés pour se protéger. Comme la France, du reste. Et, comme les Français, les Américains s'estiment porteurs d'une mission civilisatrice universelle. Or le "modèle chinois" ébranle leurs certitudes.

Est-ce parce que les Américains fondent leur économie sur l'idée que la liberté est le meilleur garant du succès, alors que les Chinois ont une croissance très supérieure avec un régime dictatorial ?

C'est exactement ça. Ce mélange chinois réussi de capitalisme et d'Etat fort est plus qu'une remise en cause, il est perçu comme une menace. Je ne vois pourtant pas monter une atmosphère très hostile à la Chine dans l'opinion. Depuis un siècle, les Américains ont toujours été plus prochinois que pronippons. Les missions chrétiennes ont toujours eu plus de succès en Chine qu'au Japon. Pour la droite fondamentaliste, ça compte. Et, dans les années 1980, des députés ont détruit des Toyota devant le Capitole ! On en reste loin.

Et le regard des Chinois sur les Etats-Unis, comment évolue-t-il ?

Tout dépend de quels Chinois on parle, mais, pour résumer, c'est attirance-répulsion. Surtout parmi les classes éduquées qui rêvent d'envoyer leurs enfants dans les universités américaines et en même temps peuvent être emplies de ressentiment à l'égard d'une Amérique qu'elles perçoivent comme hostile, pour beaucoup à cause de la propagande de leur gouvernement. Du communisme comme justificatif du pouvoir il ne reste rien. Le nouveau dogme est un nationalisme fondé sur l'exacerbation d'un sentiment victimaire vis-à-vis du Japon et des Etats-Unis. En Chine, à Singapour, en Corée du Sud, on constate une forte ambivalence typique de certaines élites, par ailleurs fortement occidentalisées, pour qui le XXI^esiècle sera asiatique. Dans les années 1960, au Japon, a émergé une nouvelle droite ultranationaliste, dont les représentants les plus virulents étaient professeurs de littérature allemande ou française. Ils voulaient se sentir acceptés, légitimes en termes occidentaux, et se sentaient rejetés. C'est ce que ressentent aujourd'hui les nationalistes chinois.

En 2010, vous avez écrit que la Chine est restée identique sur un aspect essentiel : elle est menée par une conception religieuse de la politique. Serait-elle politiquement soumise à l'influence du confucianisme, comme l'espace musulman le serait par le Coran ?

Dans le cas chinois, il ne s'agit pas que de confucianisme ; le maoïsme était identique. Il n'y a aucune raison pour que les musulmans ne puissent accéder à la démocratie tout en préservant leur religion. La Turquie, l'Indonésie l'ont fait. La Chine le pourrait tout autant. Des sociétés de culture sinisante comme Taïwan ou la Corée du Sud ont montré qu'un changement est possible. L'obstacle àsurmonter, en Chine, est que le confucianisme rejette la légitimité du conflit. L'harmonie est caractérisée par un ordre social ou règne l'unanimité. Donc la plus petite remise en cause apparaît instantanément menaçante.

Qu'est-ce qui pourrait déclencher un processus démocratique en Chine ?

Le plus grand obstacle est l'alliance entre les élites urbaines et le Parti communiste. Les deux ont peur de l'énorme masse paysanne ignorante. Ces élites ont une telle histoire récente de violence et une telle peur d'un retour du chaos qu'elles préfèrent un ordre qui leur assure la croissance, au risque d'avancer vers la démocratie. Pour le pouvoir, la grande faiblesse de ce système est que, le jour où l'économie cesse de croître et que l'enrichissement des élites urbaines s'arrête, l'édifice s'écroule. Dans ce cas, tout pourrait advenir, d'une alliance entre démocrates, ressortissants des nouvelles élites, et une fraction du parti, jusqu'à un coup d'Etat militaire.

China's booming cities: lessos for Europe? - NYTimes

2012-01-08T21:22:00.000-02:00

OPINION

What China Can Teach Europe

China Photos/Getty Images

Farmers cover vegetable plants with plastic film in the Chongqing municipality in China in April 2008.

By DANIEL A. BELL

The New York Times, January 7, 2012

REPRINTS

Shanghai

Times Topic: China

The New York Times

FROM the outside, China often appears to be a highly centralized monolith. Unlike Europe’s cities, which have been able to preserve a certain identity and cultural distinctiveness despite the homogenizing forces of globalization, most Chinese cities suffer from a drab uniformity.

But China is more like Europe than it seems. Indeed, when it comes to economics, China is more a thin political union composed of semiautonomous cities — some with as many inhabitants as a European country — than an all-powerful centralized government that uniformly imposes its will on the whole country.

And competition among these huge cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism. The similar look of China’s megacities masks a rivalry as fierce as that among European countries.

China’s urban economic boom began in the late 1970s as an experiment with market reforms in China’s coastal cities. Shenzhen, the first “special economic zone,” has grown from a small fishing village in 1979 into a booming metropolis of 10 million today. Many other cities, from Guangzhou to Tianjin, soon followed the path of market reforms.

Today, cities vie ruthlessly for competitive advantage using tax breaks and other incentives that draw foreign and domestic investors. Smaller cities specialize in particular products, while larger ones flaunt their educational capacity and cultural appeal. It has led to the most rapid urban “economic miracle” in history.

But the “miracle” has had an undesirable side effect: It led to a huge gap between rich and poor, primarily between urban and rural areas. The vast rural population — 54 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people — is equivalent to the whole population of Europe. And most are stuck in destitute conditions. The main reason is the hukou (household registration) system that limits migration into cities, as well as other policies that have long favored urban over rural development.

More competition among cities is essential to eliminate the income gap. Over the past decade the central government has given leeway to different cities to experiment with alternative methods of addressing the urban-rural wealth gap.

The most widely discussed experiment is the “Chongqing model,” headed by Bo Xilai, a party secretary and rising political star. Chongqing, an enormous municipality with a population of 33 million and a land area the size of Austria, is often called China’s biggest city. But in fact 23 million of its inhabitants are registered as farmers. More than 8 million farmers have already migrated to the municipality’s more urban areas to work, with a million per year expected to migrate there over the next decade. Chongqing has responded by embarking on a huge subsidized housing project, designed to eventually house 30 to 40 percent of the city’s population.

Chongqing has also improved the lot of farmers by loosening the hukou system. Today, farmers can choose to register as “urban” and receive equal rights to education, health care and pensions after three years, on the condition that they give up the rural registration and the right to use a small plot of land.

While Chongqing’s model is the most influential, there is an alternative. Chengdu, Sichuan’s largest municipality, with a population of 14 million — half of them rural residents — is less heavy-handed. It is the only city in China to enjoy high economic growth while also reducing the income gap between urban and rural residents over the past decade.

Chengdu has focused on improving the surrounding countryside, rather than encouraging large-scale migration to the city. The government has shifted 30 percent of its resources to its rural areas and encouraged development zones that allow rural residents to earn higher salaries and to reap the educational, cultural and medical benefits of urban life.

I recently visited a development zone composed of small firms that export fiery Sichuan chili sauces. Most farmers rented their land and worked in the development zone, but those who wanted to stay on their plots were allowed to. So far, one-third of the area’s farmland has been converted into larger-scale agricultural operations that have increased efficiency.

Times Topic: China

More than 90 percent of the municipality’s rural residents are now covered by a medical plan, and the government has introduced a more comprehensive pension scheme. Rural schools have been upgraded to the point that their facilities now surpass those in some of Chengdu’s urban schools, and teachers from rural areas are sent to the city for training.

Empowering rural residents by providing more job opportunities and better welfare raises their purchasing power, helping China boost domestic consumption. And in 2012, Chengdu is likely to become the first big Chinese municipality to wipe out the legal distinction between its urban and rural residents, allowing rural people to move to the city if they choose.

Chengdu’s success has been driven by a comprehensive, long-term effort involving consultation and participation from the bottom up, as well as a clear property rights scheme. By contrast, Chongqing has relied on state power and the dislocation of millions to achieve similar results. If Chengdu’s “gentle” model proves to be more effective at reducing the income gap, it can set a model for the rest of the country, just as Shenzhen set a model for market reforms.

There are fundamental differences, of course: Chengdu’s land is more fertile and its weather more temperate, compared to Chongqing’s harsh terrain and sweltering summers. Life is slower in Chengdu; even the chili is milder. What succeeds in one place may fail elsewhere.

Ultimately, the central government will decide what works and what doesn’t. And that’s not a bad thing; it encourages local variation and internal competition.

European leaders ought to take note. Central authorities should have the power not just to punish “losers” as Europe has done in the case of Greece, but to reward “winners” that set a good example for the rest of the union.

Daniel A. Bell is a professor at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University, and co-author of “The Spirit of Cities.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 8, 2012, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: What China Can Teach Europe.

Deng, the man, and his work, in and on China - Ezra F. Vogel

2011-10-23T20:02:00.002-02:00

The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 2011

How Deng Did It

By JONATHAN MIRSKY

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA

By Ezra F. Vogel

Illustrated. 876 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $39.95.

Two mighty rhetorical questions conclude this enormous biography of Deng Xiaoping (1904-97): “Did any other leader in the 20th century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other 20th-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” The answers emerge from this comprehensive, minutely documented book, but not as predictably as Ezra F. Vogel, a Harvard University emeritus professor of social sciences, assumes.

After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng became the champion of the economic reforms that transformed the lives of many, but not most, Chinese. (Vogel observes that Mao’s immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, was the initiator of the reforms.) Deng had long been a central figure in the Communist Party. Vogel rightly says that “for more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution” — 1966-1976 — “no one had greater responsibility for building and administering the old system than Deng Xiaoping.” Yet, most of Deng’s life and career takes up only a quarter of Vogel’s 714 pages of narrative.

By 1978, Deng had become China’s “paramount leader.” It follows, therefore, that apart from his long period of house arrest and banishment during the years 1967-73, and during another year in 1976-77, when Mao again removed him from the political scene, Deng must share the blame for much of the agony Mao inflicted on China and the Chinese. He certainly bears the major responsibility for the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

It is a curiosity of “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” that Deng the man is almost invisible. There is a well-known list of his personal characteristics: he played bridge; liked bread, cheese and coffee; smoked; drank and used spittoons. He was unswervingly self-disciplined. Though Deng left no personal paper trail, Vogel ably relates what is known.

Deng came from a small-landlord family in Sichuan Province, yet his formal education, apart from his time at a local school when he was a child, consisted mainly of a single year, 1926, of ideological indoctrination at Sun Yatsen University in Moscow. For five years before that, he lived in Paris, where he received a practical, and enduring, education inside the infant Chinese Communist Party, serving under the leadership of the young Zhou Enlai.

After Paris and Moscow, Deng went back to China, and before long had ceased being “a cheerful, fun-loving extrovert.” He commanded a small force against warlords, was defeated and may have run away. Eventually, he joined the “Mao faction,” rising and falling with its inner-party fortunes. During the Long March of 1934-35 Deng attended the meeting where Mao took supreme power, and after the Communist triumph in 1949, he served as party commissar for the army that occupied Tibet, although he seems not to have set foot there. In the southwest Deng organized the land reform program of 1949-51 “that would wipe out the landlord class.” Mao praised Deng “for his success . . . killing some of the landlords.” (As part of a national campaign in which two million to three million were killed, “some” seems an inadequate word.) In 1957, Deng oversaw the “anti-rightist campaign,” a “vicious attack on 550,000 intellectual critics” that “destroyed many of China’s best scientific and technical minds.” As for the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, when as many as 45 million people starved to death, Vogel provides no evidence that Deng objected to Mao’s monomaniacal policies. Frank Dikötter’s well-documented book “Mao’s Great Famine,” however, shows that Deng ordered the extraction of grain from starving peasants for the cities and export abroad.

In late 1966, Vogel tells us, Deng was accused of “pursuing the capitalist road.” Under house arrest in Beijing until 1969, he was transferred to Jiangxi Province to work half days in a factory. Red Guards harassed his five children, and the back of one of his sons was broken when he may have jumped from a window after the guards frightened or bullied him. Mao permitted Deng to return to Beijing in 1973.

Vogel contends that during his internal exile Deng concluded that something had gone systemically wrong with China: it was economically backward and isolated from the international scene; its people were poorly educated. China under Deng became an increasingly urban society. And following Deng’s view that corruption crackdowns limit growth, many officials, Vogel writes, “found ways not only to enrich China, but also to enrich themselves.” The result, he says, is that China is more corrupt than ever and its environment more polluted.

While Deng believed that science and technology were important — as have many Chinese reformers since the late 19th century — he feared that the humanities and social sciences could be seedbeds of heterodoxy; he never hesitated in punishing intellectuals, whose divergent views could “lead to demonstrations that disrupt public order.” It is telling that for Deng perhaps the worst development in the Communist world after Tiananmen was the execution on Dec. 25, 1989, of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. Ceausescu was the only Eastern European leader whose troops had fired on civilians.

Vogel calls Tiananmen a “tragedy,” and quotes Deng brushing aside doubts from colleagues that using troops to smash the uprising would disturb foreigners; “Westerners would forget.” Actually, it is young Chinese for whom the demonstrations in over 300 cities are a dim fact absent from their history lessons. Vogel’s account of the crackdown is largely accurate, although he omits the shooting down on Sunday morning of many parents milling about at the edge of the square, searching for their children. In this, as in other parts of this narrative, Vogel could have spoken with journalists who were there, and not just read their accounts. (I declare an interest; I saw these events.) What is disappointing is Vogel’s comments about why “the tragedy in Tiananmen Square evoked a massive outcry in the West, far greater than previous tragedies in Asia of comparable scale.”

Part of the answer, Vogel correctly says, citing another scholar, was the real-time television in Tiananmen. Then he perplexingly adds that viewers “interpreted” what they saw “as an assault on the American myth that economic, intellectual and political freedom will always triumph. Many foreigners came to see Deng as a villainous enemy of freedom who crushed the heroic students.” Furthermore, Vogel contends, for foreign reporters the Tiananmen uprising “was the most exciting time of their careers.” Such comments are unworthy of a serious scholar. He states flatly that “Deng was not vindictive.” If he means Deng didn’t order his adversaries and critics killed, that is true — as far as individuals are concerned. But Deng never shrank, either in Mao’s time or his own, from causing the murder of large numbers of anonymous people.

The most valuable part of Vogel’s account is his survey of Deng’s economic reforms; they made a substantial portion of Chinese better-off, and propelled China onto the international stage. But the party has obscured the millions of deaths that occurred during the Maoist decades. In the end, what shines out from Vogel’s wide-ranging biography is the true answer to his two questions: for most of his long career Deng Xiaoping did less forChina than he did to it.

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in China.

A version of this review appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: On the Capitalist Road.

The Rape of Nanjing - a (true historical) novel

2011-10-23T19:50:00.000-02:00

Recreating the Horrors of Nanjing

By ISABEL HILTON

The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 2011

REPRINTS

Ha Jin has a talent for first lines. Consider these, from his latest novel, “Nanjing Requiem”: “Finally Ban began to talk. For a whole evening we sat in the dining room listening to the boy.”

Jerry Bauer

Ha Jin

NANJING REQUIEM

By Ha Jin

303 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

We do not know who Ban is, why he should have taken so long to speak or why his story has so compelled his as yet unknown audience. As he tells that story, we plunge abruptly into the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, then the capital of China’s Nationalist government. It is December 1937. Ban is a Chinese teenager, a boy seized while on an errand for his American employer and forced to serve as coolie to a band of Japanese soldiers who are looting, pillaging and murdering their way across the city, with Ban a terrified witness to their atrocities.

Equally abruptly, the novel then takes us back to the previous month, to the frantic preparations for an evacuation of the government to Chongqing, following the retreating forces of Chiang Kai-shek. For the civilians who will be left behind, a safety zone is hastily organized. Madame Chiang’s piano is loaded into a truck and left for safekeeping in the institution at the heart of Ha Jin’s narrative, Jinling Women’s College.

This is fiction, but fiction that draws heavily on the historical record and in which many of the characters actually lived the events described. The narrator, Anling, a middle-aged Chinese woman, may be Ha Jin’s invention, but she serves as assistant to a well-documented real-life character, Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary from Illinois who served as acting head of Jinling College. Vautrin also figures in Iris Chang’s best-selling account, “The Rape of Nanking,” one of the inspirations for Ha Jin’s portrait of the doomed city.

When Chiang Kai-shek abandoned Nanjing to the Japanese, a few Western nationals chose to remain. The Americans who stayed were mostly missionaries, among them the formidable Minnie Vautrin. Also present was John Rabe, the German representative of Siemens in Nanjing, a member of the Nazi party who led the extraordinary effort to set up the safety zone in which Jinling College and similar institutions became refugee camps, tenuously protected by the presence and personal courage of a tiny group of foreigners. It is to them that we largely owe the documentation of the rape, pillage, arson and murder that followed.

As a novelist, Ha Jin brings a cool, spare documentary approach to this rich trove of material. His narrative centers on Jinling, an attractively landscaped campus in the heart of the city. The college itself becomes a character, the early hope of its founders that it would be a premier seat of learning as much despoiled by the war as are the lives of those who love and labor within it. The college represents humanity and civilization, repeatedly violated and nearly destroyed.

Ha Jin begins with a fast-moving accumulation of horrors as some 10,000 refugees cram into Jinling, which was prepared to receive around 2,500. The safety it offers is fragile: Chinese citizens are dragged off and killed by marauding Japanese troops, and young women are attacked on the campus itself. The occupants of the college struggle to find enough food, fuel and shelter for everyone in need, living in constant fear that the Japanese will overrun the place.

The Nanjing Massacre remains a highly controversial topic. Some in Japan still deny or play it down, and its re-emergence in the 1990s as a prime example of wartime barbarity has been used by the Chinese government as it constructs a highly nationalist version of its history. But Ha Jin is more interested in nuance than polemic. He shows us the Christian Japanese officer who brings supplies for the refugees; the Nazi who saves a quarter of a million Chinese; the Chinese worker who admits that, under torture, he made a false accusation of collaboration against two Americans from the Red Cross; the Chinese doctor, consumed by self-loathing because of his association with the Japanese, who helps Vautrin rescue Chinese prisoners.

Ha Jin also shows us how the family of Anling, the narrator, is torn apart — with a son-in-law fighting in the Nationalist army, a husband who still admires the Japan in which he once studied, an only son drawn into serving in the army of occupation because of his love for a Japanese woman.

Ha Jin also reminds us that heroism carries its own heavy price. Minnie Vautrin was to die by her own hand, burdened with guilt over those she had failed to save. This emotional turmoil is personified in the character of Yulan, a young woman who goes mad after being raped by the Japanese and accuses the missionaries of collaboration. Vautrin’s struggle to rescue Yulan doubles as a struggle for her own sanity.

The novel does contain some awkward phrasing. Ha Jin writes in his second language, English, a remarkable achievement but one that demands editorial vigilance. The reader is surprised at times to find contemporary slang in the mouths of Chinese characters speaking more than 70 years ago. Early on, for example, a Chinese man seeking shelter for his family is offered a job at the college and blurts out, “For real?”

This is the sort of misstep that can provide an unfortunate distraction in the course of an otherwise fine novel, a book that renders a subtle and powerful vision of one of the 20th century’s most monstrous interludes. The closing section, “The Grief Everlasting,” underscores Ha Jin’s message. There will be no happy ending here, and precious little healing.

Isabel Hilton edits the bilingual news, environmental and analysis Web site Chinadialogue.net. Her most recent book is “The Search for the Panchen Lama.”

A version of this review appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In Harm’s Way

Cradle of Confucianism - Shanghai Daily

2011-10-16T18:20:00.003-02:00

Cradle of Confucianism

By Mark Melnicoe | 2011-10-17 | NEWSPAPER EDITION

Shanghai Daily, October 16, 2011

The entrance to the Confucius Temple.

TO begin to understand Confucius, one really should visit Qufu, where the sage was born, died, and taught his philosophy that would shape China. Mark Melnicoe makes the pilgrimage.

Everyone knows Confucius. The philosopher/teacher/sage is pre-eminent among China's ancient thinkers, and his teachings have profoundly impacted the development of Chinese history and left a deep imprint on the national psyche.

To really get to know Confucius, one should make a pilgrimage to Qufu, Shandong Province. For it is here that the master was born, died and spent most of his 73 years, including the decisive period when he preached to his disciples, who then carried forward his ideas.

To honor its former resident, Qufu boasts three main sites - the Confucius Temple, Kong Family Mansion and Confucius Cemetery - which together take most of a day to see. In 1994 they were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites for their outstanding historical, cultural, scientific and artistic value.

Beyond these, vestiges left by Confucius can be found all over Qufu. He was born about 20 kilometers away in Nishan, grew up in the area, preached his philosophies at the Xingtan Pavilion, also known as the Alter of Apricot (part of today's temple), got involved politically and became an official in the ancient state of Lu, and was buried by the Zhu River. Lining the roads in the old city are shops and stalls selling Confucius trinkets and replicas - wooden statues, fans, screens, coins, vases, boxes, canisters, paintings, stones, tablets and more. If you want any kind of souvenir related to Confucius, you will find it here.

Confucius Temple

The temple, the oldest and grandest of more than 2,000 Confucian temples worldwide, is really the heart of Qufu. Lying within the impressive old city wall, it started as a humble establishment two years after Confucius' death in 471 BC. Though the master's ideas were not so grandly received in his day, Confucius' many disciples were committed to his ideals and built the temple not far from where he was buried.

Over the dynasties, it was expanded by succeeding rulers, gradually mushrooming into the second-largest historical building complex in China. Only Beijing's Forbidden City is bigger. In fact, the temple's appearance is not unlike that of the Forbidden City, as its last major revision took place during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) after a fire in 1499. The temple has 466 rooms aligned along a north-south axis that is more than a kilometer long, and contains nine courtyards.

Within are countless trees, beautiful halls containing paintings, tablets and sculptures, and stone bridges crossing tiny waterways and gardens. Historic tablets, numbering some 1,000 of various kinds - small ones, towering ones, oddly shaped ones, some crumbling, some in remarkably good condition - lie throughout the temple complex. These tablets, along with manuscripts, contain much written information about ancient China and are still used by scholars today.

Going through the temple from the entrance, one gets the feeling of going backward in time. That's because the entrance is near the "youngest" part of the temple complex, and as you go further in, you head through the dynasties. Thus you enter through Qing (1644-1911) and Ming dynasty stone gates, find Ming architecture everywhere, come upon Song Dynasty (960-1279) halls such as Tong Wen Gate and Kuiwen Pavilion, then hit the huge Hall of Integration, built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), before coming to the oldest, ancient areas of the complex. Most buildings have been built and rebuilt over the ages because of fires or deterioration.

Investindo em portos, na China e no Brasil: covardia comparar...

2011-10-16T17:46:00.004-02:00

Para mim, a matéria, e mais ainda, o esforço em atrair esses investimentos chineses, são altamente representativos de quão patético é o Brasil no plano do investimento internacional.
Nós somos verdadeiros caipiras.
Sorry folks, mas é verdade.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasil tenta atrair investimentos chineses em portos

Seminário organizado pelo Itamaraty em Xangai apresentou projetos em Pará, Espírito Santo, Bahia e Amazonas

FABIANO MAISONNAVE
ENVIADO ESPECIAL A XANGAI da FSP, 15/10/2011

No porto de Santos, a licença ambiental para o terminal Embraport, ainda em obras, levou oito anos para ficar pronta. Em Xangai, o porto de Yangshan, que movimenta dez vezes mais contêineres do que o congênere brasileiro, foi construído em apenas dois anos e meio.
A comparação desanimadora é de um dos integrantes da comitiva do porto de Santos após visita a Yangshan (28 milhões de contêineres/ano).
Ontem, o grupo participou de um seminário organizado pelo Itamaraty em Xangai para atrair investidores chineses a portos brasileiros.
"O porto aqui fica numa ilha que tinha 2,5 km2. Aumentaram para 15 km2 com aterro e construíram uma ponte de 32 km em dois anos e meio. A licença ambiental ficou pronta em seis meses. Em Santos, foram oito anos de espera para a licença ambiental de apenas um terminal", disse o presidente do Conselho de Autoridade Portuária do Porto de Santos, Sérgio de Aquino.
O diretor-presidente do porto de Santos, José Roberto Serra, disse que uma das explicações para a diferença é que o governo chinês detém todo o poder de decisão na área de infraestrutura. No Brasil, diz, há o fracionamento das autorizações entre diversas instâncias.
"Os investidores perguntam sobre o modelo brasileiro e ficam assustados com o prazo da Lei de Licitações, que é de um ano e meio."
O executivo disse que a China tem uma presença crescente em Santos: desde o ano passado, é o país que mais movimentou cargas no porto. No cais, praticamente todo o maquinário foi comprado da ZPMG. E duas empresas do gigante asiático prestam serviços de dragagem e implosão de pedras.
No seminário de ontem foram apresentados projetos em quatro Estados: Pará, Espírito Santo, Bahia e Amazonas. Realizado num hotel, o seminário reuniu cerca de cem pessoas, com uma presença maior de brasileiros do que de chineses.

The Rise of the Renminbi as International Currency : Historical Precedents - Jeff Frankel

2011-10-10T15:17:00.000-03:00

The Rise of the Renminbi as International Currency : Historical Precedents

Jeff Frankels Weblog

The Rise of the Renminbi as International Currency : Historical Precedents

Oct 6th, 2011 by jfrankel

All of a sudden, the renminbi is being touted as the next big international currency. Just in the last year or two, the Chinese currency has begun to internationalize along a number of dimensions. A RMB bond market has grown rapidly in Hong Kong, and one in RMB bank deposits. Some of Chinas international trade is now invoiced in the currency. Foreign central banks have been able to hold RMB since August 2010, with Malaysia going first.

Some are now claiming that the renminbi could overtake the dollar for the number one slot in the international currency rankings within a decade (especially Subramanian 2011a, p.19; 2011b). The basis of this prediction is, first, the likelihood that the Chinese economy will surpass the US economy in size and, second, the historical precedent when the dollar overtook the pound sterling as the number one international currency during the period after World War I.

It used to be thought that international currency status was subject to much inertia (e.g., Krugman, 1984). There was said to have been a long lag between the date when the US economy had passed the UK economy with respect to size (1872, by the criterion of GNP) and the time when the dollar had passed the pound (1946, by the criterion of shares in central banks holdings of reserves).

The new view, represented in particular by Eichengreen (2011)and Eichengreen and Flandreau (2010), is that the lag was in fact rather short. It took until World War I for the dollar to fulfill the criteria of an international currency. Furthermore, the date when the dollar is said to have come to rival the pound in importance has now been moved up to the mid-1920s. The first point is right. If trade is the measure of size, the US first caught up with the UK during World War I. The US did not even have a permanent central bank until 1913. The other important criteriacame soon thereafter: creditor status for the country; the perceived prospects for the currency to remain strong in value; and deep, liquid, open financial markets. (I have discussed the criteria in earlier papers. Chinn and Frankel, 2007, evaluate them econometrically and give further references.) The second point seems a matter of whether or not one wants to distinguish between the concept of coming to rival / catching up with the pound (1920s) versus the phenomenon of definitively pulling ahead / displacing the pound (1945). Under either interpretation, the dollars initial rise as an international currency was indeed rapid, once the conditions were in place.

The dollar is one of three national currencies to have attained international status during the 20th century. The other two were the yen and the mark, which became major international currencies after the breakup of the Bretton Woods system in 1971-73. (The euro, of course, did so after 1999.) In the early 1990s, both were spoken of as potential rivals of the dollar for the number one slot. It is easy to forget it now, because Japans relative role has diminished since then and the mark has been superseded. In retrospect, the two currencies shares in central bank reserves peaked as the 1990s began.

The current RMB phenomenon differs in an interesting way from the historical circumstances of the rise of the three earlier currencies. The Chinese government is actively promoting the international use of its currency. Neither Germany nor Japan, nor even the US, did that, at least not at first. In all three cases, export interests, who stood to lose competitiveness if international demand for the currency were to rise, were much stronger than the financial sector, which might have supported internationalization. One would expect the same fears of a stronger currency and its effects on manufacturing exports to dominate the calculations in China.

In the case of the mark and yen after 1973, internationalization came despite the reluctance of the German and Japanese governments. In the case of the United States after 1914, a tiny elite promoted internationalization of the dollar despite the indifference or hostility to such a project in the nation at large. These individuals, led by Benjamin Strong, the first president of the New York Fed, were the same ones who had conspired in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve in the first place.

It is not yet clear that Chinas new enthusiasm for internationalizing its currency includes a willingness to end financial repression in the domestic financial system, remove cross-border capital controls, and allow the RMB to appreciate, thus helping to shift the economy away from its export-dependence. Perhaps a small elite will be able to accomplish these things, in the way that Strong did a century earlier. But so far the government is only promoting international use of the RMB offshore, walled off from the domestic financial system. That will not be enough to do it.

[This perspective note summarizes the argument in "Historical Precedents for the Internationalization of the RMB," a paper that I have written for a workshop directed by Sebastian Mallaby, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and the China Development Research Foundation.]

References

Chinn, Menzie, and Jeffrey Frankel , 2007, Will the Euro Eventually Surpass the Dollar as Leading International Reserve Currency? in G7 Current Account Imbalances: Sustainability and Adjustment, edited by Richard Clarida (University of Chicago Press).

Eichengreen, Barry, 2011, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (Oxford University Press).

Eichengreen, Barry, and Marc Flandreau, 2010, The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Rise of the Dollar as an International Currency, 1914-39, BIS WP no. 328, Nov.

Eichengreen, Barry, and Jeffrey Frankel, 1996, The SDR, Reserve Currencies, and the Future of the International Monetary System in The Future of the SDR in Light of Changes in the International Financial System, edited by M.Mussa, J.Boughton, and P.Isard (International Monetary Fund).

Krugman, Paul, 1984, The International Role of the Dollar: Theory and Prospect, in Exchange Rate Theory and Practice, edited by J.Bilson and R.Marston (University of Chicago Press), 261-78.

Subramanian, Arvind, 2011a, Renminbi Rules: The Conditional Imminence of the Reserve Currency Transition, (Petersen Institute for International Economics), September.

Subramanian, Arvind, 2011b , Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of Chinas Economic Dominance (Petersen Institute for International Economics), September.

China's Economic Dominance (3) - Arvind Subramanian

2011-09-10T18:23:00.002-03:00

Economist Arvind Subramanian has a new book EclipseLiving in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance

Next Big Futre, AUGUST 26, 2011

Peterson Institute for International Economics scholar ArvindSubramanian hasrecently put out analysis that China's economy has already surpassed theeconomy of the United States on a purchasing power parity GDP basis. Arvind has a new book “Eclipse: Living in the Shadow ofChina’s Economic Dominance”.

1. He sees the probability of U.S. needing an IMF loan as a10% or 20% possibility by say 2021.

PPP is an important concept, but it has a small weight in my overall formula ofeconomic power. Arvind believe that the resources a country brings to the powertable includes resources that are internationally traded and resources thatinvolve people. If the U.S. were to fight against China and 100 Chinesesoldiers faced 100 US soldiers, would you say that because the 100 Chinesesoldiers earn one 20th of what an American soldier earns that the value of aChinese soldier is 1/20th the value of American?

2. The way economic convergence between the U.S. and China isevolving, the fact that China will catch up is inevitable. At end of 20 years,China will have a GDP per capita of only 40-50% of the U.S. But China has fourtimes the population of the U.S., so the Chinese economy will be much largeroverall. The arithmetic is undeniable.

China will have an economic crisis over the next 20 years, no doubt. But itwill recover and return to some decent level of growth.

If China has a big economic shock, it has the policy space [including theability to broadly stimulate the economy] to prevent one or two years ofnegative growth from translating into many years of slow growth.

3. China has the ability to exercise its power in slightly unbenign ways. Lookat what’s happening today on exchange rate. [By keeping its currencyundervalued] China is pursuing a beggar–they- neighbor policy and nobody canstop them. That’s sign of dominance.

The U.S. is totally powerless to stop China because U.S. companies have so muchat stake in China that China can call the shots. Asia won’t do it because Asianeconomies are part of a value-added chain with China. Africa won’t do itbecause China has made so much investment there..

Imagine what happens when the numbers [denoting the size of the economy]diverge even more between China and the U.S.

4. There are different kinds of dominance. There is dominance of the U.S. – aleader that’s democratic and pursues international values and which inspiresfollowship. Maybe China won’t have that. But it could exercise a negative form ofdominance, either through its exchange rate policy or by buying up commodities[to corner markets].

5. What’s the biggest threat to China’s rise to economic dominance? A politicalshock to system. Then all bets are off.

6. All countries must work together to negotiate and bind China to amultilateral system. If every country tries to make its own deal with China, noone will have any leverage.

There is an eight page paper - Foreign Affairs - The Inevitable Superpower - Why China’s Dominance Is a SureThing (also by Arvind Subramanian)

http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/FA-subramanian201108.pdf

Broadly speaking, economic dominance is the ability of astate to use economic means to get other countries to do what it wants or toprevent them from forcing it to do what it does not want. Such means includethe size of a country's economy, its trade, the health of its external andinternal finances, its military prowess, its technological dynamism, and theinternational status that its currency enjoys. My forthcoming book develops anindex of dominance combining just three key factors: a country's GDP, its trade(measured as the sum of its exports and imports of goods), and the extent towhich it is a net creditor to the rest of the world. GDP matters because itdetermines the overall resources that a country can muster to project poweragainst potential rivals or otherwise have its way. Trade, and especiallyimports, determines how much leverage a country can get from offering ordenying other countries access to its markets. And being a leading financierconfers extraordinary influence over other countries that need funds,especially in times of crisis. No other gauge of dominance is as instructive asthese three: the others are largely derivative (military strength, for example,depends on the overall health and size of an economy in the long run), marginal(currency dominance), or difficult to measure consistently across countries(fiscal strength).

I computed this index going back to 1870 (focusing on the United Kingdom's andthe United States' economic positions then) and projected it to 2030 (focusingon the United States' and China's positions then).The projections are based onfairly conservative assumptions about China's future growth, acknowledging thatChina faces several major challenges going forward. History suggests thatplenty of economies -- Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan --grew at the pace I project for China after they reached China's current levelof development. Meanwhile, I assume that the U.S. economy will grow at about2.5 percent per year, as it has over the last 30 years.

The upshot of my analysis is that by 2030, relative U.S. decline will haveyielded not a multipolar world but a nearunipolar one dominated by China. Chinawill account for close to 20 percent of global GDP (measured half in dollarsand half in terms of real purchasing power), compared with just under 15percent for the United States. At that point, China's per capita GDP will beabout $33,000, or about half of U.S. GDP. In other words, China will not bedirt poor, as is commonly believed. Moreover, it will generate 15 percent ofworld trade -- twice as much as will the United States. By 2030, China will bedominant whether one thinks GDP is more important than trade or the other wayaround; it will be ahead on both counts.

What is more, the gap between China and the United States will be far greaterthan expected. In 2010, the U.S. National Intelligence Council assessed that in2025, "the U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that Americandominance will be much diminished." This is unduly optimistic. Myprojections suggest that the gap between China and the United States in 2030will be similar to that between the United States and its rivals in themid-1970s, the heyday of U.S. hegemony, and greater than that between theUnited Kingdom and its rivals during the halcyon days of the British Empire, in1870. In short, China's future economic dominance is more imminent and will beboth greater and more varied than is currently supposed.

A resurgent United States might be able to slow down that process, but it willnot be able to prevent it. Growing by 3.5 percent, rather than 2.5 percent,over the next 20 years might boost the United States' economic performance,social stability, and national mood. But it would not make a significantdifference in its position relative to China in the face of, say, a sevenpercent growth rate there.

China's incentives might be very different in the future. Ten years on, Chinamight be less wedded to keeping the yuan weak. If it continues to slowlyinternationalize its currency, both its ability to maintain a weak yuan and itsinterest in doing so may soon disappear. And when they do, China's power overthe United States will become considerable. In 1956, the United Kingdom'sfinanciers were dispersed across the public and private sectors. But theChinese government is the largest net supplier of capital to the United States:it holds many U.S Treasury bonds and finances the U.S. deficit. Leverage overthe United States is concentrated in Beijing's hands.

China's Economic Dominance (2) - Wall Street Journal

2011-09-10T18:15:00.000-03:00

Chinareal Time Report, Wall Street Journal, AUGUST 25,2011, 8:05 PM HKT

Eight Questions: Living in China’s Shadow

In his new book,“Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance,” scheduled to bepublished in September, Peterson Institute for International Economics scholarArvind Subramanian starts with a nightmare scenario: It’s 2021 and the U.S. presidentheads across own to the International Monetary Fund to sign a rescue loanpackage negotiated by the IMF’s Chinese managing director. “The handover ofworld dominance is complete,” Mr. Subramanian, a former IMF researcher, writes.China is now the world’s leading economic power.

Parts of “Eclipse”read like a wonky version of “Rising Sun,” Michael Crichton’s 1992 novel ofJapanese dominance over the U.S. when Tokyo was seen as speeding toward numberone. But Mr. Subramanian is a first-class economist who uses his book todiscuss provocatively U.S.-Chinese relations and the nature of economic power.He was interviewed in Washington DC by the Wall Street Journal’s Bob Davis.Below is an edited transcript

Do youreally think the U.S. eventually will have to turn, hat-in-hand to the IMF foraid?

I wrote it that waypartly to shock and make people pay attention. But there is a real possibilityof the U.S. being in such a dire economic situation that it might have to turnto the IMF.

How could ithappen? The combination of a credible rising power in China, with which we haveto cooperate and also be wary of. And broad economic weakness in the U.S.,including slow growth, fiscal weakness, political paralysis and a middle classwith diminishing prospects.

The probability ofU.S. needing an IMF loan isn’t 80% but it’s not 2% or 5% either. It’s a 10% or20% possibility.

By someof the measures you use, China already is a larger economy than the U.S. Buthaven’t you picked economic statistics that play to China’s advantage? Forexample relying on purchasing power parity to measure GDP. (Purchasing powerparity, or PPP, is a statistical device that tries to take account of thedifferent prices of goods and services in different countries.)

PPP is an importantconcept, but it has a small weight in my overall formula of economic power.

I believe that theresources a country brings to the power table includes resources that areinternationally traded and resources that involve people. If the U.S. were tofight against China and 100 Chinese soldiers faced 100 US soldiers, would yousay that because the 100 Chinese soldiers earn/20th of what an American soldierearns that the value of a Chinese soldier is 1/20th the value of American? Idon’t think so. (PPP tries to account for such anomalies.)

Youalso say that China will be a far larger economic power than the U.S. by 2020or certainly 2030, even if China’s growth rate falls significantly or the U.S’srises significantly. Why is that?

The way economicconvergence between the U.S. and China is evolving, the fact that China willcatch up is inevitable. At end of 20 years, China will have a GDP per capita ofonly 40-50% of the U.S. But China has four times the population of the U.S., sothe Chinese economy will be much larger overall. The arithmetic is undeniable.

China will have aneconomic crisis over the next 20 years, no doubt. But it will recover andreturn to some decent level of growth.

If China has a bigeconomic shock, it has the policy space [including the ability to broadlystimulate the economy] to prevent one or two years of negative growth fromtranslating into many years of slow growth.

What’sthe significance of China as number one?

Potentially, Chinahas the ability to exercise its power in slightly unbenign ways. Look at what’shappening today on exchange rate. [By keeping its currency undervalued] Chinais pursuing a beggar–they- neighbor policy and nobody can stop them. That’ssign of dominance.

The U.S. is totallypowerless to stop China because U.S. companies have so much at stake in Chinathat China can call the shots. Asia won’t do it because Asian economies arepart of a value-added chain with China. Africa won’t do it because China hasmade so much investment there..

Imagine whathappens when the numbers [denoting the size of the economy] diverge even morebetween China and the U.S.

Still,China would be a relatively poor country compared to the U.S. How can a poorcountry exercise power internationally?

Very poor countriescan’t dominate. There’s now no way to project power abroad because the problemsat home are so deep. But so-called middle income countries like China may bedifferent.

There are differentkinds of dominance. There is dominance of the U.S. – a leader that’s democraticand pursues international values and which inspires followship. Maybe Chinawon’t have that. But it could exercise a negative form of dominance, eitherthrough its exchange rate policy or by buying up commodities [to corner markets].

WSJ:What’s the biggest threat to China’s rise to economic dominance?

A political shockto system. Then all bets are off.

A politicaltransition [to a more democratic system] hasn’t occurred. It’s a cloud thathangs over everything. There’s class divide, geographic divide, lack ofpolitical freedom. If they wind up in conflagration, things could go reallybad.

In yourbook, you talk about the importance of tethering China to a multilateralsystem. Why should China be interested if it’s inevitably number one?

We need to bindChina today to the multilateral system so a kind of habit and incentive buildsup. Then repudiation of the system would be more difficult. We need to do thisbefore China becomes a hegemon

Everyone has tocome together to do this well. If every country tries to make its own deal withChina, no one will have any leverage.

Think aboutexchange rates. If the world came together now and said let’s do a deal onexchange rates, China would be more likely to participate. It doesn’t want tobe seen as deviant from international system. The opprobrium of the world isthe biggest carrot and stick to use with China.

One ofyour main policy recommendations is to start a China round of tradenegotiations. What could that accomplish?

When China joinedWorld Trade Organization in 2001, people said we tied China to the globaleconomic system (because of the commitments it made to open its markets andfollow international rules). But through its exchange rate policy, China hasunraveled parts of its commitments. What that signifies is that Chinese leadersat the time were overreaching in terms of domestic political support.Evidently, WTO accession wasn’t politically sustainable internally.

Over time, Chinawill move away from mercantilism. They would then have an incentive to make adeal. A deal could involve government procurement – other countries openingtheir bidding for China—as well as commitments by China involving control ofnatural resources and the exchange rate.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/08/25/eight-questions-living-in-chinas-shadow/

China's Economic Dominance (1) - The Economist

2011-09-10T18:13:00.000-03:00

Charts, maps and infographics

Daily chart

Global economicdominance

Spheres of influence

Sep 9th 2011, 15:14 by The Economist online

By 2030 China's economy could loom aslarge as America's in the 1970s

A NEW book, discussed in thisweek's Economics focus, by Arvind Subramanian of the PetersonInstitute for International Economics argues that China’s economic might willovershadow America’s sooner than people think. Mr Subramanian combines eachcountry’s share of world GDP, trade and foreign investment into an index ofeconomic “dominance”. By 2030 China’s share of global economic power will matchAmerica’s in the 1970s and Britain’s a century before. Three forces willdictate China’s rise, Mr Subramanian argues: demography, convergence and “gravity”.Since China has over four times America’s population, it only has to produce aquarter of America’s output per head to exceed America’s total output. Indeed,Mr Subramanian thinks China is already the world’s biggest economy, when dueaccount is taken of the low prices charged for many local Chinese goods andservices outside its cities. China will be equally dominant in trade,accounting for twice America’s share of imports and exports. That projectionrelies on the “gravity” model of trade, which assumes that commerce betweencountries depends on their economic weight and the distance between them.

Economics focus

The celestial economy

By 2030 China’seconomy could loom as large as Britain’s in the 1870s or America’s in the 1970s

Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition

Economic Dominance: Top Three countries by economic dominance % share of global economic power (weighted by world GDG, trade and net capitals)
1870	1973	2010	2030
UK: 16,4	USA: 18,6	USA: 13,3	China: 18,0
Germany: 9,3	Japan: 8,0	China: 12,3	USA: 10,1
France: 8,3	Germany: 8,0	Japan: 6,9	India: 6,3
Source: Arvind Subramanian, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, Peterson Institute for International Economics

IT IS perhaps a measure of America’sresilience as an economic power that its demise is so often foretold. In 1956the Russians politely informed Westerners that “history is on our side. We willbury you.” In the 1980s history seemed to side instead with Japan. Now itappears to be taking China’s part

These prophesies are “self-denying”,according to Larry Summers, a former economic adviser to President BarackObama. They fail to come to pass partly because America buys into them, thenrouses itself to defy them. “As long as we’re worried about the future, thefuture will be better,” he said, shortly before leaving the White House. Hisspeech is quoted in “Eclipse”, a new book by Arvind Subramanian of the PetersonInstitute for International Economics. Mr Subramanian argues that China’seconomic might will overshadow America’s sooner than people think. He deniesthat his prophecy is self-denying. Even if America heeds its warning, there isprecious little it can do about it.

Three forces will dictate China’s rise,Mr Subramanian argues: demography, convergence and “gravity”. Since China hasover four times America’s population, it only has to produce a quarter ofAmerica’s output per head to exceed America’s total output. Indeed, MrSubramanian thinks China is already the world’s biggest economy, when due accountis taken of the low prices charged for many local Chinese goods and servicesoutside its cities. Big though it is, China’s economy is also somewhat“backward”. That gives it plenty of scope to enjoy catch-up growth, unlikeJapan’s economy, which was still far smaller than America’s when it reached thetechnological frontier.

Buoyed by these two forces, China willaccount for over 23% of world GDP by 2030, measured at PPP, Mr Subramaniancalculates. America will account for less than 12%. China will be equallydominant in trade, accounting for twice America’s share of imports and exports.That projection relies on the “gravity” model of trade, which assumes thatcommerce between countries depends on their economic weight and the distancebetween them. China’s trade will outpace America’s both because its own economywill expand faster and also because its neighbours will grow faster than thosein America’s backyard.

Mr Subramanian combines each country’sshare of world GDP, trade and foreign investment into an index of economic“dominance”. By 2030 China’s share of global economic power will matchAmerica’s in the 1970s and Britain’s a century before (see chart). Thoseprudent American strategists preparing their countrymen for a “multipolar”world are wrong. The global economy will remain unipolar, dominated by a “G1”,Mr Subramanian argues. It’s just that the one will be China not America.

Mr Subramanian’s conclusion iscontroversial. The assumptions, however, are conservative. He does not rule outa “major financial crisis”. He projects that China’s per-person income willgrow by 5.5% a year over the next two decades, 3.3 percentage points slowerthan it grew over the past two decades or so. You might almost say that MrSubramanian is a “China bear”. He lists several countries (Japan, Hong Kong,Germany, Spain, Taiwan, Greece, South Korea) that reached a comparable stage ofdevelopment—a living standard equivalent to 25% of America’s at the time—andthen grew faster than 5.5% per head over the subsequent 20 years. He could findonly one, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, which reached that threshold and thensuffered a worse slowdown than the one he envisages for China.

He is overly sanguine only on theproblems posed by China’s ageing population. In the next few years, the ratioof Chinese workers to dependants will stop rising and start falling. Hedismisses this demographic turnaround in a footnote, arguing that it will notweigh heavily on China’s growth until after 2030.

Both China and America could surprisepeople, of course. If China’s political regime implodes, “all bets will beoff”, Mr Subramanian admits. Indonesia’s economy, by way of comparison, tookover four years to right itself after the financial crisis that ended PresidentSuharto’s 32-year reign. But even that upheaval only interrupted Indonesia’sprogress without halting it. America might also rediscover the vim of the 1990sboom, growing by 2.7% per head, rather than the 1.7% Mr Subramanian otherwiseassumes. But even that stirring comeback would not stop it falling behind aChinese economy growing at twice that pace. So Americans are wrong to thinktheir “pre-eminence is America’s to lose”.

Bratty or benign?

If China does usurp America, what kindof hegemon will it be? Some argue that it will be a “premature” superpower.Because it will be big before it is rich, it will dwell on its domestic needsto the neglect of its global duties. If so, the world may resemble the headlessglobal economy of the inter-war years, when Britain was unable, and Americaunwilling, to lead. But Mr Subramanian prefers to describe China as aprecocious superpower. It will not be among the richest economies, but it willnot be poor either. Its standard of living will be about half America’s in2030, and a little higher than the European Union’s today.

With luck China will combine itsprecocity in economic development with a plodding conservatism in economicdiplomacy. It should remain committed to preserving an open world economy.Indeed, its commitment may run deeper than America’s, because its ratio oftrade to GDP is far higher.

China’s dominance will also have limits,as Mr Subramanian points out. Unlike America in the 1940s, it will not inherita blank institutional slate, wiped clean by war. The economic order will notyield easily to bold new designs, and China is unlikely to offer any. Why useits dominant position to undermine the very system that helped secure thatposition in the first place? In a white paper published this week, China’sState Council insisted that “China does not seek regional hegemony or a sphereof influence.” Whether it is precocious or premature, China is still atentative superpower. As long as it remains worried about the future, itsrivals need not worry too much.

from the print edition | Finance andeconomics

Why is China afraid of the Dalai Lama? - Fred Hiatt (WP)

2011-07-14T23:47:00.000-03:00

Why is China afraid of the Dalai Lama?
By Fred Hiatt
The Washington Post, Thursday, July 14, 9:14 PM

“If China overnight adopted a democratic system, I might have some reservations.. . . If central authority collapsed, there could be a chaotic situation, and that’s in no one’s interest.”

The words of caution might have come from a Communist Party leader, once again lecturing the West not to push too hard on human rights. But, no; this was the party’s nemesis, the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet, explaining in an interview Thursday why he favors “gradual change.”

Listening to his moderate, sensible advocacy of step-by-step democratization, it was impossible not to marvel at the fear that leads Beijing to view this 76-year-old Buddhist leader as such a mortal threat — not to mention the confusion he seems to cause within the Obama administration, which once again was declining to answer the seemingly simple question of whether the president and the Dalai Lama would meet during the Dalai Lama’s 10-day visit to Washington.

We talked in a room in the bowels of Verizon Center. Above us, thousands of Buddhists from around the world were making their way into the stands for a religious teaching. But before the day’s lesson would begin, their spiritual leader, alternately serious and jolly, had some political thoughts to impart.

He chortled as he pointed to Lobsang Sangay, 43, the former Harvard Law School researcher who was recently elected prime minister by Tibetans in exile. “This young man,” the Dalai Lama said gleefully, “he took my power.”

Unlike the Dalai Lama in his monk’s robes, the prime minister-elect was dressed in a politician’s sober dark suit, a symbol of the serious point beneath the Dalai Lama’s ribbing: After four centuries, Tibet has separated spiritual from political authority. The Tibetan government is democratizing. The Chinese Communist Party, the Dalai Lama is too polite to say explicitly, might do well to follow suit.

Born in 1935, and having fled Communist China in 1959, the Dalai Lama takes a long view. Initially, he said, he believed that the Communists, who took power in 1949, had principles — that they were “dedicated to the people.” But Mao Zedong’s emphasis on ideology proved “unrealistic” — a tactful understatement of policies that led to the starvation of tens of millions — and Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, realized that China had to embrace capitalism and allow people to improve their living standards.

So today’s China, he continued, is entirely different from Mao’s. The economy is thriving and connected with the world. Thousands of Chinese have studied abroad.

But capitalism without an independent judiciary or a free press, the Dalai Lama said, brings a “very bad side effect: corruption.” And rising power without transparency breeds fear and suspicion among China’s neighbors.

“They always say, ‘We have no intention to expand,’ ” he said. “I tell my Chinese friends, if everything is transparent and policy is open, there is no need to keep saying that. And if everything is a state secret, then you can 1,000 times deny such intentions, and still no one will believe you.”

The upshot: The United States and other free countries were right to open trade with China and help bring it into the mainstream of global commerce. “Now the free world has a responsibility to bring China into the mainstream of world democracy.”

But, he said, it makes sense to start by urging gradual progress: legal reform, and an end to internal censorship.

You might think President Obama would be interested in discussing these matters with his fellow Nobel peace laureate (the Dalai Lama was awarded his in 1989), but it’s not so simple. Obama declined to meet with him in October 2009, then welcomed him to the White House four months later; this week, administration officials have declined to say whether another meeting will take place. The absence of clarity only encourages Beijing’s bullying and discourages other world leaders from engaging with the Tibetan leader.

Meanwhile, a half-century of exile has not tempered his optimism. Noting that even Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has talked about the need for political reform, the Dalai Lama said that intellectuals and party members understand the contradictions in the current state of affairs. “Things will change,” he said.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

Dissident Chinese Writer Flees to Germany - Liao Yiwu (NYT)

2011-07-13T19:39:00.000-03:00

Dissident Chinese Writer Flees to Germany
By ANDREW JACOBS
The New York Times, July 12, 2011

BEIJING — After being denied an exit visa 17 times, yanked off planes and trains by the police and threatened with yet more prison time, one of China’s most persecuted writers, Liao Yiwu, slipped across the border into Vietnam last week and then made his way, via Poland, to Germany, where he promptly declared himself an exile.

“I’m ecstatic, I’m finally free,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin on Monday morning before plunging into a day of interviews and photo shoots. “I feel like I’m walking through a dream.”

Of course, his escape — arranged by friends whom he declined to name — has not brought unadulterated joy. By fleeing his homeland, Mr. Liao, 52, made the difficult decision to abandon the wellspring of his work, much of it journalistic explorations of China’s downtrodden: the political outcasts, impoverished farmers, death row inmates and others who have been traumatized by famine and Communist-inspired zealotry, then cast aside during the nation’s manic embrace of material wealth and collective amnesia.

He also leaves behind his family in southwestern Sichuan Province, including his mother, his son, two siblings and a girlfriend. “I’m trying to convince myself that I won’t be away from China very long, that things will change sooner than later,” he said.

In the West, Mr. Liao is best known for “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up,” which was banned in China soon after it was published in Taiwan in 2001. The book, a collection of interviews with people he encountered in prison and during wanderings in the southwest, tells the unadorned stories of 27 people, among them a public toilet attendant, a persecuted landlord, and the men, known as corpse walkers, whose job it is to transport the dead back to their hometowns for burial.

After it was published, his already strained relationship with the authorities worsened. He was barred from traveling to literary festivals in Germany, Australia and the United States, and was forced last spring to sign a vow to cease publishing outside China. Breaking the pledge, he was warned cryptically, would bring even greater torment.

Given the predicament of his friend Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and writer who is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion, Mr. Liao knew what might await him. The threat gained greater urgency with the impending publication in the United States of “God Is Red,” a book by Mr. Liao about Chinese Christians, and a memoir about his time in jail, “The Witness of the 4th of June.” The memoir, whose title refers to the military suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, has been delayed several times by skittish publishers in Germany and Taiwan.

His most recent travails are part of a wholesale stifling of creative expression and dissent by the ruling Communist Party. Rattled by turmoil in the Arab world, the government began cracking down on scores of activists and rights lawyers in February. The most prominent victim has been Ai Weiwei, the caustic artist and social critic.

“I think Liao Yiwu’s decision to leave really reflects the extreme unease that writers in China are facing right now,” said Larry Siems, the director of international programs at the PEN American Center, an advocacy group. “It’s a shame, because he is one of China’s most interesting writers, and he has his eyes on some of the great human dramas that accompany China’s emergence as an economic power. China should be unleashing the imagination of its writers instead of trying to restrain and control them.”

The Chinese government has yet to respond to news of his escape. The public security bureau in his hometown would not discuss his case; calls and e-mails to the Chinese Embassy in Berlin were not returned.

Like many of his generation, Mr. Liao has endured a numbing cascade of hardships. He nearly starved to death as an infant during Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, when famine killed more than 20 million people. When he was a child, he and his classmates were forced out of school by the Cultural Revolution, the decade in which education was maligned as a bourgeois indulgence. Much of what he learned came from his father, a teacher of Chinese literature, and his mother, a music instructor.

“As a boy, my dad would make me stand high up on a table and not allow me to come down until I finished reciting the classics,” he said.

As early as 1987, he drew the ire of cultural bureaucrats for poetry, printed in official journals, that was condemned as too pessimistic and anti-establishment. After the Tiananmen crackdown, he experienced the stinging limits on free expression. Inspired by Allen Ginsberg and by Dante’s “Inferno,” he and five friends circulated poems recited on video that lamented the bloodshed in Beijing. Mr. Liao called the piece “Massacre.”

Not long afterward, in 1990, he and the others were jailed as “counterrevolutionaries.” His four years of confinement were characterized by torture and the terror of watching 20 inmates be dragged out for execution. Twice, he said, he tried to kill himself.

But it was in jail that Mr. Liao met many of the characters who would fill “The Corpse Walker.” It was also where he learned to play the xiao, an ancient flutelike instrument that sustained him as a street musician during long bouts of joblessness after his release. Those were bitter years, he said, when friends and even his wife found him politically radioactive.

“I never imagined they would distance themselves from me as if I were the plague,” he said. “From this, I concluded that people’s memories can be easily erased.”

Since then, Mr. Liao has devoted himself to collecting the memories of people on the margins of society. For “God Is Red,” he sought out Christians in rural Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces who had endured years of official persecution.

Mickey Maudlin, the executive editor of HarperOne, described it as refreshingly devoid of polemics. “Liao isn’t trying to score ideological points,” Mr. Maudlin said by phone from San Francisco. “He’s just trying to describe how people survived in an environment that is not very friendly.”

Mr. Liao said that since he reached Germany, he has been too overwhelmed and excited to eat or sleep much. Having arrived with no money, he is relying on the generosity of friends, his German publisher and, he hopes, royalties from his forthcoming books. He speaks neither German nor English, and said he was unsure whether to plunge into learning a new language.

“Germany, the U.S. and Australia have all welcomed me,” he said. “But the place I really want to be is China.”

Li Bibo contributed research.

(Non) Democracy in China - The Economist

2011-07-13T19:11:00.000-03:00

Democracy v China
What China challenges
by M.S.
Blog Democracy in America, The Economist, July 11th 2011, 13:54

MY COLLEAGUE at Free exchange made a series of good points in arguing that the rise of China shouldn't really challenge our certainty that in order for countries to become and remain wealthy, they need to be democratic. He's quite right that an overwhelming majority of wealthy countries are democratic, and that China isn't wealthy yet. I think there are two questions here. The first is whether China is in the long run going democratic as it gets rich. The second is whether, if it doesn't, this implies anything broader about the inevitability of democracy in other wealthy modern countries.

My views on this subject are influenced by having lived for many years in the world's other fast-growing capitalist communist confucian country, Vietnam, and watching predictions that rising wealth leads to democratisation fail to bear any but the most modest of fruit. China and Vietnam have structures and cultures of governance that are about as similar as one can expect for cross-country comparisons. And what's striking in both countries is the remarkable absence of any serious challenge to Communist Party domination of every corner of political life. Both countries have dissidents aplenty; but these dissidents have no public organisations, and, at the first hint that organisations are beginning to form, they're quickly dismantled through arrest and intimidation.

Of course, many autocracies are competent at attacking and dismantling political threats. Fewer repressive autocracies have been able to produce well-founded economic growth for decades in a row, though there, too, there are success stories. But what sets China and Vietnam apart is the ability of their governing institutions to carry out long-term stable political succession. The communist parties of Vietnam and China are very different from the relatively flimsy and short-lived governing parties of most single-party dictatorships, usually constructed around a single personality and his relatives and cronies. Since the late 1970s, they have managed transitions to new generations of leadership every five years with very little disruption. In part this is due to mechanisms and traditions within these parties that provide for some level of internal democracy, or at least of peaceful factional competition. But the ability to recruit new cadres, allow them to rise through the system, assume top leadership positions, and then push them into retirement, without being overwhelmed by nepotism or personality cults, makes this type of autocracy markedly different from the weak family-run shell parties or military fronts that have run or are running autocratic shows in Indonesia, South Korea, Syria, Iraq, Chile, Spain, Burma and so on. And, obviously, China and Vietnam no longer have to worry about the great weakness that doomed single-party rule in most of the ex-communist world, ie pointless and crippling state-socialist economic policies.

The combination of smooth political succession and strong economic growth helps explain why China is more stable than the USSR was at a similar level of development. In 1990, just before its collapse/democratic transition, the USSR had a PPP-adjusted per-capita GDP of just under $7,000 (in 1990 Geary-Khamis international dollars), according to Angus Maddison, whose research everybody seems to use on this. Mr Maddison put China at $4,800 (same units) in 2003; since then its economy has grown by 8-10% a year, suggesting it's now richer than the USSR ever was. Having spent a few months in the USSR in 1990, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case. (Though Chinese PPP conversions are controversial. IMF and World Bank figures put Chinese incomes lower than Mr Maddison's. But others warn the IMF/WB figures are based on 2005 price surveys that were too high, which would mean current Chinese per capita GDP is 21% of America's, and China will become the world's largest economy in 2012, not 2016 as the IMF estimates. This ADB paper suggests China is now as rich as the USSR was even as a percentage of contemporaneous US per-capita income, but it puts that figure at almost 30%, which seems absurdly high.) Anyway, China appears to be hitting income levels where other countries have experienced democratic transitions without any sign of a plausible challenge to CPC rule.

Why would that be? Political scientists looking at the relative stability of different autocracies break the category up into subgroups with varying characteristics. For example, a recent paper by Krister Lundell, delivered at what sounds like a truly awesome panel in February in Sao Paulo (“Bad Guys, Good Governance? Varieties of Capitalism in Autocracies”), runs through a bunch of different categorisation schemes in trying to sort out what characteristics might distinguish autocracies that go democratic (or "hybrid", ie part of the way towards democracy) from those that remain permanent autocracies. He doesn't come up with much. Income levels, interestingly, don't seem to be that important. The oil-exporting factor is important, as my colleague mentions. Islamic countries are more likely to stay autocratic, but that's confounded by the oil-export factor so it's not clear how important it is. Another significant factor is that autocratic countries that are large, especially in terms of land area, are less likely to cease being autocratic than small ones. And military dictatorships are pretty short-lived, while single-party states and monarchies last longer. China, obviously, is a very large one-party state. But I feel the variables on offer here don't do justice to the uniqueness of the Chinese and Vietnamese systems. The combination of successful capitalist economies with monopoly parties that can successfully manage non-fatal non-nepotistic leadership transitions six times in a row is new. It's a big deal.

Now, maybe the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties will fail to manage economic growth to truly developed levels, or will be torn apart by the stresses of increased demand for participation from empowered, educated, wealthy middle classes. Maybe they're too slow and unwieldy for the modern media environment, as James Fallows writes about the silly internet censorship surrounding rumours of Jiang Zemin's death. But then again, maybe not. Maybe this morally troubling type of rule, in which the responsibility and privileges of governance are essentially assigned to a guild or corporation with internal but not external competition and mainly informal, not formal, accountability to the broader population, is a sustainable model of governance for a modern society. Or maybe it's only viable in East Asia, for cultural reasons; anyway, China isn't seeking to export it anymore, and it's hard to see how any other country could start to build such a model in an era when peasant revolutions seem to be a thing of the past.

I confess I can't really imagine what a fully developed wealthy society with a single-party state would look like. But a few years back I visited the then-leader of Singapore's tiny opposition party in his apartment, where he was under house arrest. He was under house arrest because he was unable to pay his debts, and he was in debt because the state had convicted him of slander and fined him hundreds of thousands of dollars for saying, in effect, that Singapore is not a democracy. Which is a nice little manoeuvre. People in Singapore are, in my experience, even more afraid of talking about these kinds of issues than people in Vietnam are. But Singapore is extremely well-governed on most dimensions, and it's not clear when a transition in power is ever going to occur. Singapore is also significantly richer than the United States. All of which is why it's often cited as a model by Vietnamese and Chinese political elites. Many people feel this system of government can't be scaled up from an island city-state like Singapore to a large country like Vietnam or China, which is perhaps why my colleague restricted his survey of wealthy countries to those with populations over 10m. But the thing is, political-science researchers widely conclude that small countries, and especially islands, are more likely to be democracies, not less.

But granting for the sake of argument that China could become as wealthy as Singapore, or at least Spain, without becoming a democracy. So what? Would this say anything about democracy in the modern world overall, or would it just say something about China? Obviously, there is zero risk of a single-party takeover in any developed multiparty democracy in the world. This isn't the 1930s; it's not even the 1970s.

Rather, I'd phrase the risk this way. My broad feeling is that representative democratic institutions are not functioning right now as they did 20 or 30 years ago. When we look at countries trying to make the transition to stable democratic rule, such as Thailand or Russia, we see that they're trying to institutionalise democracy as it exists in the early 21st century, and that it's very hard to do, because the forces enlisted are often too powerful to be contained by institutional restraints. Just like wealthy democracies these days, they have personality-driven political campaigns fueled by wealthy donors who fund or control integrated media empires, candidacies shaped by professional consultants, and internet/flashmob street rallies and self-branded grassroots movements ("colour" movements, tea-party groups and so on). The "Daily Me" phenomenon simultaneously organises and polarises partisan participants into angry camps who can barely understand each others' language. It often seems impossible for contestants for power to win and consolidate legitimacy, because it's easy to build resistance to legitimacy and the rewards are high. It feels to me like there's a relationship between the "birther" phenomenon and the years of Yellow Shirt refusal to accept Shinawatra legitimacy, between the "Not a cent for Greece" brinksmanship of the Party for Freedom and the no-taxes debt-ceiling brinksmanship of the tea-party GOP, between constant filibusters in the Senate, the record-length coalition negotiations in Belgium and the rash of hung parliaments recently in Westminster systems.

I think this has to do with the way democracy functions in the current communications environment. Democracy is supposed to build public legitimacy for governance. I think there's a legitimacy deficit because of the way communications work nowadays. Democracy is also supposed to communicate problems to government so that government can respond. I think the constant crisis-atmosphere contrarianism of the current media and internet environment overwhelms the signal-to-noise ratio there, and preoccupies government with addressing blaring non-issues. And I think this has all weakened the advantage that democracies have generally enjoyed over autocracies in addressing real problems and in generating public support for fixing them. I think the result of that could well be that an increasing number of important policymaking issues are gradually shifted to non-democratic institutions, while political democracy increasingly devolves into a form of reality-TV contest.

Or maybe I'm just contributing to the blaring non-issue alarmism here. Thailand has recently taken a strong turn back towards democracy; maybe the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt years were just growing pains, no worse than what France went through on its way to democracy in the 19th century, and a lot less bloody. The Arab world has just seen a bunch of autocratic regimes fall, and if some of those countries move towards democracy while others don't, that'll be par for the historical course. Here in America, well, if we throw away a perfectly good 200-year-old credit rating, that'll be pretty dumb, but nobody's killing each other yet. And American politics were often mean and stupid in the old days too, long before the internet arrived. But what I would say is that we should not be comfortably sure of anything. We're not in an era when fascism is on the march, but we are in an era when democracy is not generally showing its best governing face. What that means, I think, is that people who believe in democracy on moral grounds should make the case, again, on moral grounds, rather than relying on a comfortable assumption that countries will naturally go democratic as they get richer. And I think the fact that autocracies sometimes enjoy real advantages in policymaking should remind us of the need to behave responsibly in democratic activity and to make sure that our representative institutions are actually capable of governing, and are not paralysed by political brinksmanship.

As for my other colleague's comments, I pretty much agree with everything he says. He's probably right that increasing the role of automatic stabilisers would actually be a move towards enhancing democracy by letting political debate focus on deep public issues of what our society should look like, rather than short-term issues of the interaction between unemployment, inflation, private liquidity preference and government spending that Congress really isn't well equipped to handle agilely.

O modelo chines de desenvolvimento - Rubens Antonio Barbosa

2011-07-13T19:00:00.000-03:00

O modelo chinês de desenvolvimento
Rubens Barbosa
O Estado de S.Paulo, 12 de julho de 2011

O crescimento médio de 9% da China nos últimos 30 anos tem despertado a atenção de todo o mundo, em especial dos países em desenvolvimento. Qual é o fundamento do modelo chinês? O êxito econômico da China não decorre apenas da aplicação de políticas econômicas stricto sensu, mas de alguns princípios inspirados no pragmatismo de Deng Xiaoping, chefe do governo chinês nos anos 70: a importância da inovação, a rejeição a medir o desenvolvimento pelo crescimento do PIB e da renda per capita, a busca de melhoria na qualidade de vida e a crença na autodeterminação e soberania.

Recentemente Stefan Halper, no livro O Consenso de Pequim, procurou mostrar como o modelo chinês, classificado como "autoritarismo de mercado", começa a ganhar adeptos entre países em desenvolvimento. Embora sendo discutível se esse modelo pode ser replicado em outros países com o mesmo êxito, o sistema chinês oferece uma alternativa ao Consenso de Washington, que enfatizava a prevalência do mercado e da austeridade econômica doméstica, mas ficou associado às condicionalidades impostas pelas instituições financeiras internacionais, como o Banco Mundial e o Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI).

Segundo o economista chinês Ping Chen - que esteve há algum tempo na FGV em São Paulo -, o que ocorre na China não configura o aparecimento de um modelo de desenvolvimento econômico porque o país está em constante experimentação e mudança com o objetivo de se ajustar a um mundo em transformação. O Congresso do Povo está permanentemente modernizando leis e regulamentos, úteis no passado, mas obsoletos no presente. Ao contrário do Consenso de Washington, o modelo chinês parte do pressuposto de que cada país enfrenta desafios diferenciados e por isso não pode aceitar soluções padronizadas. Nas últimas três décadas a China descartou as barreiras ideológicas e históricas e testou as mais diferentes ideias, implementando-as e corrigindo os erros cometidos.

Não chega a ser surpresa constatar a forte presença do Estado, uma das características dos regimes comunistas, como o aspecto fundamental do modelo. O capitalismo de Estado é a sua marca registrada, combinado com a abertura a investimentos externos, com transferência de tecnologia e associação compulsória com empresas estatais e com o câmbio congelado.

Dada a natureza controvertida dos comentários apresentados por Chen, pareceu-me útil resumi-los, sem questionar suas premissas, pela limitação de espaço.

Refletindo as peculiaridades do sistema político e social chinês, Chen alinhou nove princípios responsáveis pelo êxito da China num mundo de incertezas e complexidades:

Buscar oportunidades para o crescimento da economia e adotar reformas ousadas para aproveitá-las. Nos países em desenvolvimento, os governos têm mais capital e recursos humanos do que o setor privado para ativar um mercado pouco sofisticado. A economia neoliberal tem pouca experiência nos países mais pobres e por isso frequentemente recomenda práticas de mercados desenvolvidos, de forma equivocada, aos mercados emergentes.

Necessidade de manter um sistema dual para a estabilidade e a inovação. A dualidade é representada pela atuação do governo e do setor empresarial. As regulamentações são adotadas por consenso entre a liderança política, empresários e a comunidade.

Clara divisão de trabalho entre o governo central e o local. O governo central é responsável pela segurança nacional e pela coordenação regional. O governo local lidera as experiências institucionais e de desenvolvimento. A experiência de descentralização é o motor das inovações, não a imposição de regras de cima para baixo por conselheiros externos.

Para o desenvolvimento regional a liderança política é mais importante do que o capital, recursos e infraestrutura.

Economias mistas (capitalismo de Estado) oferecem financiamentos públicos para favorecer reformas e desenvolvimento sustentável. Políticas liberais nunca funcionam em países com grande população, poucos recursos e frequentes desastres naturais. O setor estatal e coletivo serve de anteparo para os ciclos de negócios.

A disciplina da economia chinesa é alicerçada na competição em todos os níveis, e não na negociação com grupos de interesse, no estilo ocidental. A democracia na China não é uma competição verbal, mas uma corrida por ações concretas. A legitimidade do governo não deriva do eleitorado, mas dos resultados políticos e econômicos.

A coordenação entre governos, homens de negócios, trabalhadores e setor agrícola tende a gerar uma nova parceria.

Os governos podem criar e orientar o mercado, mas não devem ser conduzidos por ele. A condição fundamental é o fator humano.

As ações do governo devem focalizar o desenvolvimento econômico interno, sem perder de vista as turbulências externas.

Segundo Chen, a alternativa asiática de desenvolvimento é representada por valores compartilhados pelo governo e pelos cidadãos, tendo como pano de fundo crescentes pitadas de ensinamentos de Confúcio. O Consenso de Pequim, baseado no apoio familiar, na edificação da nação e no governo central que interage com a população, é a alternativa ao sistema ocidental, fundado no individualismo, no consumismo e no equilíbrio entre os grupos de interesse.

Para países como o Brasil, não se trata de tentar replicar o capitalismo de Estado, mas de reconhecer a influência da China no processo produtivo global e procurar melhorar a competitividade da economia para poder enfrentar o grande desafio que esse país coloca hoje ao setor produtivo nacional, sobretudo o industrial.

Temos de superar a visão ingênua derivada da percepção equivocada das vantagens que a China oferece e definir nossos próprios interesses.

PRESIDENTE DO CONSELHO DE COMÉRCIO EXTERIOR DA FIESP

American entrepreneur finds US an underdeveloped country, compared to China

2011-07-13T18:24:00.000-03:00

OPINION
China vs. America: Which Is the Developing Country?
By ROBERT J. HERBOLD
The Wall Street Journal, JULY 9, 2011

From new roads to wise leadership, sound financials and five-year plans, Beijing has the winning approach.

Recently I flew from Los Angeles to China to attend a corporate board-of-directors meeting in Shanghai, as well as customer and government visits there and in Beijing. After the trip was over, in thinking about the United States and China, it was not clear to me which is the developed, and which is the developing, country.

Infrastructure: Let's face it, Los Angeles is decaying. Its airport is cramped and dirty, too small for the volume it tries to handle and in a state of disrepair. In contrast, the airports in Beijing and Shanghai are brand new, clean and incredibly spacious, with friendly, courteous staff galore. They are extremely well-designed to handle the large volume of air traffic needed to carry out global business these days.

In traveling the highways around Los Angeles to get to the airport, you are struck by the state of disrepair there, too. Of course, everyone knows California is bankrupt and that is probably the reason why. In contrast, the infrastructure in the major Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing is absolute state-of-the-art and relatively new.

The congestion in the two cities is similar. In China, consumers are buying 18 million cars per year compared to 11 million in the U.S. China is working hard building roads to keep up with the gigantic demand for the automobile.

The just-completed Beijing to Shanghai high-speed rail link, which takes less than five hours for the 800-mile trip, is the crown jewel of China's current 5,000 miles of rail, set to grow to 10,000 miles in 2020. Compare that to decaying Amtrak.

Government Leadership: Here the differences are staggering. In every meeting we attended, with four different customers of our company as well as representatives from four different arms of the Chinese government, our hosts began their presentation with a brief discussion of China's new five-year-plan. This is the 12th five-year plan and it was announced in March 2011. Each of these groups reminded us that the new five-year plan is primarily focused on three things: 1) improving innovation in the country; 2) making significant improvements in the environmental footprint of China; and 3) continuing to create jobs to employ large numbers of people moving from rural to urban areas. Can you imagine the U.S. Congress and president emerging with a unified five-year plan that they actually achieve (like China typically does)?

The specificity of China's goals in each element of the five-year plan is impressive. For example, China plans to cut carbon emissions by 17% by 2016. In the same time frame, China's high-tech industries are to grow to 15% of the economy from 3% today.

Government Finances: This topic is, frankly, embarrassing. China manages its economy with incredible care and is sitting on trillions of dollars of reserves. In contrast, the U.S. government has managed its financials very poorly over the years and is flirting with a Greece-like catastrophe.

Human Rights/Free Speech: In this area, our American view is that China has a ton of work to do. Their view is that we are nuts for not blocking pornography and antigovernment points-of-view from our youth and citizens.

Technology and Innovation: To give you a feel for China's determination to become globally competitive in technology innovation, let me cite some statistics from two facilities we visited. Over the last 10 years, the Institute of Biophysics, an arm of the Chinese Academy of Science, has received very significant investment by the Chinese government. Today it consists of more than 3,000 talented scientists focused on doing world-class research in areas such as protein science, and brain and cognitive sciences.

We also visited the new Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, another arm of the Chinese Academy of Science. This gigantic science and technology park is under construction and today consists of four buildings, but it will grow to over 60 buildings on a large piece of land equivalent to about a third of a square mile. It is being staffed by Ph.D.-caliber researchers. Their goal statement is fairly straightforward: "To be a pioneer in the development of new technologies relevant to business."

All of the various institutes being run by the Chinese Academy of Science are going to be significantly increased in size, and staffing will be aided by a new recruiting program called "Ten Thousand Talents." This is an effort by the Chinese government to reach out to Chinese individuals who have been trained, and currently reside, outside China. They are focusing on those who are world-class in their technical abilities, primarily at the Ph.D. level, at work in various universities and science institutes abroad. In each year of this new five-year plan, the goal is to recruit 2,000 of these individuals to return to China.

Reasons and Cure: Given all of the above, I think you can see why I pose the fundamental question: Which is the developing country and which is the developed country? The next questions are: Why is this occurring and what should the U.S. do?

Let's face it—we are getting beaten because the U.S. government can't seem to make big improvements. Issues quickly get polarized, and then further polarized by the media, which needs extreme viewpoints to draw attention and increase audience size. The autocratic Chinese leadership gets things done fast (currently the autocrats seem to be highly effective).

What is the cure? Washington politicians and American voters need to snap to and realize they are getting beaten—and make big changes that put the U.S. back on track: Fix the budget and the burden of entitlements; implement an aggressive five-year debt-reduction plan, and start approving some winning plans. Wake up, America!

Mr. Herbold, a retired chief operating officer of Microsoft Corporation, is the managing director of The Herbold Group, LLC and author of "What's Holding You Back? Ten Bold Steps That Define Gutsy Leaders" (Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Liu Xiaobo Empty Chair: a book from the New York Review of Books

2011-07-12T12:57:00.000-03:00

A New York Review Books e-book original
July 12, 2011

In Liu Xiaobo's Empty Chair: Chronicling the Reform Movement Beijing Fears Most, Perry Link, China scholar and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, chronicles Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo's story: from his arrest, show-trial, and harsh sentencing, to the suppression of Charter 08, an eloquent pro-democracy manifesto that he helped write. Liu is still serving out an eleven-year prison sentence while the government undertakes one of its worst crackdowns on dissent in decades.

Writing about Beijing's attacks on dissidents in the wake of the Arab Spring, Link draws on leaked government documents to reveal just how nervous the regime has become about prospects for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China. The e-book includes the full text of Charter 08 and other primary documents.

New York Review senior editor Hugh Eakin spoke with Perry Link about the book and the importance of the Charter 08 movement.

Although Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo is little known in China and most of his writings have been read only by a small circle of intellectuals and activists, the Chinese government considers him an enemy of the state and has sentenced him to eleven years in prison. What makes him so threatening?

There is a tremendous amount of popular discontent in Chinese society today. People feel angry about corruption, special privilege, land grabs and forced relocations, air and water pollution, and repression of unapproved religions. Many people feel insecure about their future. The Chinese government is well aware of this discontent and spends much effort and huge sums of money to keep it atomized and disorganized. The authorities repress Liu Xiaobo's writings because they are afraid that his ideas would have broad appeal and could give shape to movements that they could not control.

Among the writings that have most concerned the Chinese government is the document called Charter 08, which Liu Xiaobo helped draft and which you have translated in full in your book. What ideas in it, in particular, make Beijing anxious?

I have no doubt that the idea in Charter 08 that most upsets Beijing is the call for an end to one-Party rule. The charter's other ideas—elections, a free press, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, an apolitical military, to name a few—might be argued as matters of degree, but an end to the Communist Party's monopoly on power stands out as the one idea that is an utter anathema to China's rulers. In addition to the Charter's ideas, its tone likely causes them some distress as well. The writing in the Charter is clear, rational, moderate, broad of vision, responsible, and well organized—in short, not easy to refute, and for that reason a headache for an autocrat.

Following the mass uprisings in the Middle East, many people are wondering whether something similar could happen in China. You suggest that is unlikely for now, despite the "pent up anger" many ordinary Chinese harbor toward their government. Why?

A Jasmine Revolution is unlikely in China because the repressive apparatus there is far more extensive and sophisticated than in many of the Middle Eastern countries. The relatively peaceful abdications by dictators that we saw in Tunisia and Egypt would never happen in China, where the rulers, in their determination to stay in power and their willingness to use violence to do so, are more like the rulers of Libya and Syria. But the Libyan and Syrian regimes are twenty years behind China's in their techniques. They are still using tanks and machine guns. China's rulers, who used those methods in 1989, have in the intervening years worked hard on ways to find and snuff out dissent before it goes anywhere. The budget for internal "stability maintenance" in China this year is about 550 billion yuan—more than the government spends on its military, and more than it spends on health, education, and social welfare combined.

China’s Other Revolution - A forum for debating the question

2011-07-12T11:46:00.001-03:00

Following the precedent post -- China’s Other Revolution - Edward S. Steinfeld (Boston Review) -- here the Forum promoted by Boston Review on China's impressive performance in many other social and economic aspects, least the political side of its really astonishing progresses over the last decades.

China’s Other Revolution
Boston Review, JULY/AUGUST 2011

Edward S. Steinfeld
China’s recent crackdown on dissidents suggests that the country’s authoritarian regime is here to stay.
But missed in all the headlines are the radical political and social changes China has undergone over the past twenty years.

Andrew G. Walder
The fate of the former Soviet Union is paramount in the minds of China’s leaders. (July 11)

Helen H. Wang
One of the critical conditions of democracy is present in China: a large and stable middle class. (July 12)

Baogang He
Even the phrase ‘civil society’ has been banned by propaganda officials. (July 12)

Ying Ma
Many of the capitalist roaders co-opted by the Party echo the government’s refrain that China is not ready for democracy. (July 13)

Guobin Yang
So disempowering are Chinese markets that a term was invented for ‘powerless social groups.’ (July 13)

Edward S. Steinfeld
Far from prioritizing self-preservation, the Chinese government has gambled on radical and socially destabilizing reforms. (July 14)

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Holding Strategy
Andrew G. Walder

This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Edward Steinfeld’s account of revolutionary changes in China’s economy and society over the past 30 years is compelling and on the mark. He is correct to warn that we should not underestimate remarkable cumulative changes in Chinese society and the economy, which have important and largely irreversible political implications. But his argument avoids an elephant in the room: China still has a Soviet-style political system that has changed little over the past two decades.
This is not a garden-variety personal or military dictatorship. There are only four other regimes structured like China’s, in Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. China’s network of Communist Party organizations, its conservative leadership in a national politburo, the preeminence of Party organizations over all government institutions, its subservient legal system, and its massive and growing security apparatus are all familiar to those who recall communist systems of 30 years ago. The recent crackdown is a symptom of the survival, indeed the revitalization, of a Soviet model of governance. The continuing strength of that model is not altered by revolutionary changes in the economy or by the staffing of government institutions by younger, better educated, and more worldly administrators. China’s economy and society may remind us of South Korea’s and Taiwan’s in an earlier era, but the core political institutions, and in recent years the political attitudes of the leaders, are more reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the late Brezhnev era. This makes China a deeply paradoxical polity, presenting its leaders with a real dilemma.
China today is indeed unlike China 25 years ago, and it is far more open and dynamic than the Soviet Union ever was. But political change, when it does occur, may not turn China into Taiwan or South Korea writ large. Our discussions of Chinese political change often appear to adopt an unconscious default position: China’s leaders are holding back a tide of change that leads to liberal multiparty rule, better governance, the elimination of corruption, political stability, the rule of law, and greater economic prosperity. But other political futures are just as likely.
The fate of the former Soviet Union and similar regimes is more relevant to China’s political dilemma and is surely paramount in the minds of China’s leaders. Out of some 30 independent states that emerged from the collapse of communism in Eurasia, no more than a third are now prosperous and well-governed multiparty democracies. Almost all of these success stories are small, ethnically uniform states on the periphery of the European Union—a “democratic crescent” that stretches from Estonia to Slovenia. Many of the other post-Soviet countries experienced dismemberment, civil war, and long periods of instability. Russia and Ukraine have undergone severe and prolonged recessions; their political systems are illiberal and deeply corrupt, though surely more “pluralistic” than before.
China’s leaders understand and are haunted by this history. Even if they secretly believe that a multiparty political system is desirable, they know the perils of a botched attempt at political change. Stability is the overwhelming priority of China’s leaders. It is seen, justifiably, as the foundation for China’s economic rise and growing geopolitical importance. The trajectory of Russia—the comparison that really matters to China’s elite—has been in the opposite direction.
So the prescription is: don’t rock the boat. Soviet-style political structures have well-known problems, but they have held China together for the past 30 years of wrenching social and economic change. Experimenting with democracy within the Communist Party, limited electoral mechanisms at the provincial and national level, a freer press, designing effective anti-corruption measures that tie the Party’s hands, and a broader openness in intellectual and political life are unnecessary gambles that risk everything China has accomplished. The elite don’t want to repeat Gorbachev’s naïve mistakes.
The fate of the former Soviet Union is paramount in the minds of China’s leaders.
What are China’s leaders so afraid of? Long before the attempted Jasmine Revolution, they knew how quickly and unexpectedly political challenges can arise. They were just as surprised as everyone else by the collapse of their brethren Soviet-style political systems from 1989 to 1991. And they had their own major crisis in May–June 1989, which escalated out of their control, split their top leadership, and forced a draconian military response.
Continuing social changes, not just history, leave the regime skittish. Waves of local protest—by farmers concerned with taxation and land tenure, urban homeowners expelled with little compensation in corrupt urban redevelopment schemes, tens of millions of state-sector workers laid off in enterprise restructuring and privatization since the mid-1990s, unprotected workers in export industries and the transport sector opposing unfair pay and poor working conditions—do not amount to a unified political movement to challenge Party rule. But China’s leaders believe that they make any kind of political opening a hazardous venture.
What China’s leaders fear is large and prolonged protests in key cities. Precisely because of the changes sketched so clearly by Steinfeld, these would be much harder to control than the protests 22 years ago, and would force the leadership once again to confront a choice between compromise (and perhaps spiraling demands for liberalization and political change) and brute force. This is the choice that has loomed suddenly for dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The same choice openly split China’s Politburo Standing Committee in 1989, which led to even larger protests and surprisingly strong popular resistance to the initial attempt to impose martial law.
What to do? For the time being, postpone any tinkering with core political institutions, and double down on surveillance and repression. China’s leaders have been far more creative at finding ways to monitor the Internet, curb the mass media, and halt incipient protest than at creating credible institutions to deter corruption and abuse of power by their own officials at the local levels. The strategy is conservative and corporate, designed to preserve the rise of a new Chinese state capitalism on a global scale by deploying refurbished Soviet-style institutions as enforcers. This strategy avoids the risks of liberalization and reform and postpones the structural changes necessary to create a genuinely Chinese political system that overcomes the flaws of the Soviet import.
This is, in short, a holding strategy, one that betrays a lack of confidence and political imagination. One might ask, if not now, with China’s economy riding high and public support for the regime strong, when? Incremental political reform will be much harder when the economic juggernaut begins to falter, the population begins to age, and the educated urban middle classes take prosperity for granted. By that point China’s political system—and perhaps with it the economy—may be in for a hard landing.

China’s Other Revolution - Edward S. Steinfeld (Boston Review)

2011-07-11T23:00:00.000-03:00

China’s Other Revolution
Edward S. Steinfeld
Boston Review, July-August 2011

This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

On April 3, 2011, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police just prior to boarding a flight to Hong Kong. He has been held incommunicado since. [Ed. note: He was released on June 22, after this article went to press.] Ai—known internationally as much for his far-ranging artistic projects as his criticisms of the Chinese government—is but one of many, perhaps thousands, of “troublemakers” rounded up by the Chinese government in recent months. Ai may be the most recognizable name globally, but other detainees have included rights activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, and academics. Some have been formally charged with “creating a disturbance” or “inciting subversion”; others have been disappeared through extra-judicial procedures.
The exact motivations behind the government’s expanding crackdown are uncertain, but it is safe to assume that images of Egypt and Tunisia loom large. Indeed, back in February and March, China too appeared caught in the undertow, with hints of a homegrown “Jasmine Revolution.” But the Jasmine Revolution drew small crowds and little energy. The dominant story soon became one of unyielding political repression and conspicuous public silence.
In the West this situation has inspired renewed focus on repression in China, with extensive coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, Le Monde, and elsewhere. At one level is concern for the detainees themselves, individuals who appear to have done nothing wrong but have been swallowed up by a criminal justice system affording them neither due process nor mercy. At a deeper level are geopolitical or even existential worries about what the Chinese government’s behavior signifies for a nation that is now a leading global power. Seemingly out of nowhere, China has emerged as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, the largest overseas holder of U.S. government debt, the largest exporter, and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And along with jaw-dropping technological advancement in the domestic economy, China has invested in military modernization. Yet even as China becomes a nation of global caliber, it appears governed by individuals determined to play by their own rules and to respect no limits to their exercise of power.
But why should the recent detentions arouse particular anxiety? After all, it is hardly news that China is governed by an authoritarian system. Extrajudicial detentions and reflexive repression of dissent—whether real or imagined—have always been the method of authoritarian regimes. We see it today in Syria, Libya, Russia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. And we saw it just a few decades ago in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and even Mexico.
The variety of nations (and political outcomes) on this list suggests that abuse of dissenters—conspicuous in spite of overseas condemnation—is characteristic of not just sclerotic, immovable regimes, but also of authoritarian systems undergoing profound processes of change and liberalization. It would be wrong to read the current crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression. Though there has been no “Chinese Spring,” in fundamental institutional, organizational, and behavioral terms, it would be hard to describe what has transpired in China over the past twenty years as anything but a revolution.

Lessons From South Korea and Taiwan
Those who doubt that profound change and harsh repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea and Taiwan. In January 1987, just seven years after a democratic uprising was crushed in the South Korean city of Gwangju and a few months before the military-backed regime would yield to popular demands for open elections, student protestors were being summarily rounded up by the police. At least one of the students died during interrogation. That same year Taiwan’s Kuomintang government announced the end of 38 years of martial law, a key step toward the establishment of democracy there. But in the months before the announcement, dissenters were still being shipped off, often by secretive military tribunals, to the notorious gulag on Green Island. Crackdowns on opponents, extrajudicial detentions, and violence are often the last-ditch efforts of authoritarian regimes.
Those who doubt that change and repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea and Taiwan.
Perhaps because of their willingness to use force even in their final days, these regimes can appear impervious to change and determined to remain in power. Given the empirical evidence available in the mid-1980s, one could reasonably have described Taiwan’s single-party state as “flexibly” authoritarian: grudgingly willing to mollify the populace with marginal institutional changes, but prepared to employ the gun to defend its grip on power. No one could have been sure whether the Taiwanese government—or South Korean, for that matter—would hold onto power indefinitely, succumb to violent overthrow precisely because of its resistance to change, or yield peacefully and voluntarily to popular desires for liberalization. The same can be said of China today.
The cases of Taiwan and South Korea also suggest that we should be cautious about the frequent observation that politics in China has lagged economics. Both Taiwan and South Korea, right up until the end of the democratization process, were successful and creative on the economic front but politically retrograde. At minimum the lesson here is that the absence of overt regime change doesn’t tell us much.
That leads to a final point about the Taiwanese and South Korean experiences, one equally applicable to the contemporary Chinese scene. Even as authoritarian regimes and their supporting institutions remain in place, subtle political shifts may be under way. Such shifts can include recomposition of the ruling establishment (i.e., the ruling party stays in place, but it ends up populated by new kinds of members), societal pluralization, depoliticization of daily life, and evolving efforts at regime legitimization—efforts that often lead to major changes in political discourse and participation. Ruling elites may push such changes with the most conservative intentions. The goal may be nothing more than regime survival. However, as the cases of Taiwan and South Korea show, such processes can take on a life of their own with members of the state and ruling establishment swept up in the wave of new attitudes, aspirations, and values. And that wave may crest suddenly or over the course of years.

The Economy Reaches Out
There are undoubtedly numerous differences between the China of today and the South Korea and Taiwan of yesterday. But in terms of sociopolitical change, China is increasingly looking like its previously authoritarian East Asian neighbors.
Since the early 1980s China has experienced no political revolution, no definitive ideological break from the past, and nothing even resembling a nationwide political movement. Since Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997, the country’s leaders have been conspicuous for their lack of charisma and vision. The sprawling Communist Party-state—inheritor of a 1400-year-old tradition of technocratic and highly interventionist bureaucratic rule—grinds on. On the surface, nothing has changed.
But under the surface, virtually everything has. The transformations are particularly striking in the urban industrial economy. At one time China exported almost no manufactured goods; now Chinese industry is deeply immersed in global supply chains. At the dawn of reform in 1978, virtually all Chinese industry was owned by the state. By 2008, in an industrial economy that had grown more than 25-fold, private firms were the dominant players, with foreign firms not far behind. That which was once allocated hierarchically by the state—basic commodities, industrial inputs, manufactured goods, labor (both high-skilled and low), housing, and health care—is now purchased in commercial markets. All manner of new rules have been developed to manage these markets: enterprise law, contract law, labor law, environmental regulations, and so on. And new actors populate core industrial and bureaucratic structures: private entrepreneurs, elite returnees from overseas, domestically trained technocrats, multinational commercial and financial elites, legal professionals, media professionals, and even self-described policy activists and social entrepreneurs. Once-taboo business entities are now vital to the national economy. In 2001, private entrepreneurs—capitalist roaders par excellence—were officially welcomed into the Chinese Communist Party.
Economic changes strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.
And China’s new professionals are not just in business. Of the 1.6 million citizens China has sent abroad for a year or more of study over the past 30 years, approximately 500,000 have returned, and a portion of these returnees now accounts for about a fifth of government ministers and vice-ministers. As Huiyao Wang of the Center for China and Globalization has documented, 78 percent of university presidents and 72 percent of directors of key state-run research labs are returnees. The Party has publicly declared a goal of recruiting 20,000 returnee scholars, entrepreneurs, researchers, and corporate executives to serve in positions of public administration.
With these changes in economic organization and labor, everyday habits have been radically transformed. Finding a job on one’s own, living in a dwelling of one’s own, communicating routinely with acquaintances extending beyond the workplace, working closely with global counterparts, expecting that the wealth and social circumstances enjoyed abroad are China’s destiny as well—all were unimaginable 30 years ago but today are routine. Hardly relegated just to the economic realm, these changes strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.

New Ways of Life
The hierarchical structures of the command economy bound citizen and commercial producer alike directly to the state. In the “old” days, from the 1950s through the early 1990s, if you were an urban citizen, you were most likely assigned to your employer—for life—by the state, housed by the state, and provided health care by the state. As Andrew Walder has described, these were mechanisms of political control that enforced citizen dependency upon the state. If you misbehaved politically, you could be squeezed out of your job, your home, etc.
Under this regime your social interactions were mostly limited to the physical confines of your workplace: not only did you work there, you lived there, and your future was determined there. In all likelihood, you would have had no telephone, no form of transport save a bicycle, and few social ties that would have encouraged you to travel. If you did want to travel, you probably would have needed your employer’s permission to buy the train ticket.
Today, for better or worse, virtually all of those control mechanisms are gone, replaced with freewheeling markets. As a Chinese citizen you now live where you can afford; work where you can find a job, often in a highly competitive labor market; and secure life necessities—everything from education to health care—primarily by shelling out cash. Whether rich or poor, you will almost certainly have a cell phone, and you will likely have a wide variety of social contacts.
In this new system state authority and the nature of state-society relations are radically different, a reality confirmed by the state’s frenetic effort to develop new rules to maintain control and influence. As a response to changing expectations of the role of the state, a new discourse of law-based governance has emerged. In addition to new tax, contract, property, and environmental laws, the state has promulgated national regulations on open government information—China’s Freedom of Information Act, in a sense. Some provinces, such as booming Fujian, have new labor rules that emphasize collective bargaining.
This does not mean that the system is fair or that the state has abandoned coercive and arbitrary intervention. Nor is every element of the state apparatus fully committed to implementing and enforcing these rules. But they would not exist at all if the state were still the main producer, wage payer, housing provider, and on-the-job enforcer in the industrial economy. And, by expressing rules in the language of law, the state, whether intentionally or not, has legitimized a broad discourse about the appropriate bounds of political authority and the responsibilities of an effective government.
This novelty and diversity—in organizations, actors, laws, discourses, and life choices—has created space for the reconfiguration of informal norms and deep-seated values. For instance, in the 1980s to label oneself a private entrepreneur, let alone entrepreneurial tycoon, was to invite arrest. Today that label invites admiration and elevated status.

New-Look State
China’s institutional transformation is hard to see in part because it has diverged from standard theoretical accounts of how change is supposed to take place. In China institutional change has been incremental and evolutionary, radical in its ultimate effect, but hardly in its origin and unfolding. Change has not come in response to exogenous shocks or what Ira Katznelson has called “unsettled times.”
It is also difficult to identify who is responsible for change. For at least fifteen years, there has been no charismatic leader or coherent group of reformers of the type associated with post-Soviet Russia. There are no visionary policy elites negotiating the complex terrain of domestic politics. None of the recent “administrations” have had a discernible institutional mission, whether to end socialism, build capitalism, privatize industry, or seek any of the other systemic transformations articulated by post-socialist reformers elsewhere.
More than a third of Communist Party members hold a college degree or higher, a far cry from the party’s peasant roots.
But—despite the persistence of an authoritarian, single-party state—the composition of elites drawn into the policy process has evolved. Whereas in the early 1990s, for example, overseas-trained returnees were held suspect, barred from positions of influence, today such individuals routinely populate the high echelons of the state economics bureaucracy. The minister of science and technology earned a PhD in Germany, where he subsequently worked for a decade at Audi. The number-two official at the central bank—and the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange—earned a PhD in the United States, where he was a tenured professor of economics. The head of the government’s banking regulatory commission has an MBA from the University of London; the head of the Shanghai government’s Office for Financial Services is a Stanford-trained economist; and the list goes on. Twenty years ago, these people would not have returned to China, let alone been appointed to positions at the core of the state.
The absorption of trained professionals into the state bureaucracy does not alone make for political transformation, but this pattern is consistent with a broader shift within the Communist Party to a more urbanized, professionalized, and educated membership. By 2010 the Party had grown to a record 78 million members, nearly a quarter of whom—at least by official accounts—are under the age of 35. More than a third of all Party members hold a college degree or higher and by 2007 just under 3 million Party members were working in private companies and an additional 800,000 or so Party members were self-employed, all of which suggests that the Party’s ideological roots in the rural peasantry and military are withering. And demand for Party membership is up. In 2009 only 10 percent of the applicant pool was admitted. We can, and probably should, argue about the quality of the data, but the overall trends seem fairly clear: the kinds of people who were running away from the Party—and China more broadly—following the Tiananmen crackdown are now the kinds of people competing to enter it.
Some might interpret this as Party-state co-optation. In the 1970s and ’80s, one could have said the same about the efforts of the Kuomintang to recruit technocratic elites, particularly native Taiwanese who had previously been shut out. Co-optation may well have been the intention, but the ruling establishment ended up populated by professionals who, while not revolutionaries, harbored no personal loyalty to the existing system and had little to gain by fighting for it. For many of these technocrats, the Kuomintang was just a vehicle for effecting change in the present. Once its utility in that role had been exhausted, it could be abandoned.

Driving Evolution
While there have been changes within the Party, and there is potential in that change, it is clear that the political establishment is responding to day-to-day institutional evolution elsewhere, not leading it. The example of Delta Electronics illustrates the point and brings together the disparate strands of economic, social, and political change in China.
The assembly of power supplies (the transformer “bricks” and accompanying cords) for laptops is typical of the kind of electronics manufacturing that takes place in China today. Most of these power supplies are produced by a single Taiwanese-owned conglomerate, Delta, which does much of its manufacturing assembly on the Chinese mainland. Fifteen years ago “manufacturing assembly” in China meant screwing together finished, imported parts. The institutional demands of accommodating these low-skill activities were relatively unobtrusive: sweatshop manufacturing did not challenge the establishment’s social and political comfort zone.
Today manufacturing assembly means something else, in part because manufacturers have sought to redefine it, and also because institutional changes have enabled and even forced that redefinition. In order to stay competitive and hold on to key customers such as Apple, HP, and Dell, Delta has to be able to design new power supplies, often on very short notice. This is because customers—the brand-name firms that conceptualize products—are increasingly pushing design tasks downward to their suppliers. The suppliers respond by enhancing their design capabilities in order to bind the customer more closely to them and increase the burden of switching to another supplier.
In Delta’s case customers have been demanding smaller and smaller power bricks. In a matter of weeks, Delta must be able to make a product to-spec, at low-cost, and in enormous quantity. In order to meet the engineering challenges these demands present, Delta has established research-and-development centers within easy driving distance of its manufacturing operations. Those R&D centers are run not by Taiwanese citizens, but by returnees from the United States: Chinese citizens who, after receiving advanced engineering degrees and working in Silicon Valley or other high-tech regions, have elected to return home. But if they are to come back, Chinese society has to accommodate the salary structures and housing they want, as well as the information access—and therefore high-tech infrastructure—they need in order to do their work. (Accommodation of this societal group overlaps with that of purely domestic entrepreneurs and researchers who are diving into global business operations.)
China has not surged forward economically while remaining frozen in place politically.
Returnees alone, though, do not make R&D centers function. They lead a staff, which today is composed of young graduates from China’s top science and technology universities: Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiao Tong. In order to take on the advanced design challenges Chinese companies now face, these young engineers needed an education decidedly different from the kind Chinese universities provided even fifteen years ago. The curricula of China’s top universities had to be revamped. More important, the criteria for selecting faculty were transformed as well.
Chinese universities—all state-controlled—were once closed-off communities shaped by rigid systems of seniority and internal promotion. Curricular reform—not to mention the hiring of outside experts—was aggressively resisted. In recent years, that resistance has been effectively quashed. The state has made overt efforts to break down barriers: the Chinese ministry of education requires—through the use of quotas—that universities have both overseas-trained faculty and domestic PhD recipients on their staffs. More subtly, many of these highly trained individuals—whether through their roles as policy advisors, public intellectuals, or commercial consultants—have become increasingly influential in shaping public attitudes and expectations.
All of these activities have been possible only because so much of the old system—economic, social, and political—has been tossed into the dustbin of history. For China to maintain its position as a center for high-tech manufacturing, commercial producers and the institutional environment both needed, and continue to need, upgrades. The aggressive and purposeful fostering of this dynamic has in turn led to surprising reconfigurations of societal power and unexpected openings for previously shunned individuals.
None of these changes, substantial though they may be, prove that China is on a path of democratization exactly like that traveled earlier by Taiwan and South Korea. What the changes do suggest, however, is that we should be cautious about reading too much into immediate political circumstances, such as the recent crackdown. In normative terms, we are right to condemn the crackdown. We are right to be concerned and to voice those concerns publicly. At the same time, we end up on shaky ground if we treat the events of the day as prima facie evidence of political stasis or institutional rollback. China has not surged forward economically while remaining frozen in place politically, and it is hard to argue that the Chinese government will tolerate only those changes that do not threaten its fundamental hold on power, the implication being that China has yet to experience anything approaching real political change. It would certainly be unwise to base public policy upon such premises.
Nobody can say for sure where China is headed. The real issue, though, involves interpreting where China is today and how it has arrived at this point. Whether with regard to China’s growth story or its current stifling of dissent—and especially with regard to the relationship between them—this is not about connecting the obvious dots. Rather, it is about correctly identifying, with plenty of room for debate, what the dots are and how they relate to one another causally. To make sense of what is unfolding right now, and to fully appreciate the range of possible outcomes, we have to acknowledge that profound change, both economic and political, has taken place in China in recent years. In places such as Taiwan and South Korea, brutal crackdowns on dissent were among the last vestiges of authoritarian rule. In contemporary China that could also be true. Indeed, given the last twenty years of change, it seems not just possible but likely.

90 years of Chinese Communist Party and the role of Mao Zedong

2011-07-10T18:37:00.001-03:00

Zee Exclusive
'Mao a terrific personality in Chinese history'
ZEE News (Noida, India), Sunday, July 10, 2011, 11:01

Founded with just 50 members in 1921, the Communist Party of China is now the largest political party in the world with 80.269 million members. On July 01, the flourishing party celebrated its 90th anniversary. China has come a long way under the CCP, which seized power in 1949. China was then led by Mao Zedong. It took the country years to get onto the path of reform after 30 years of famine and Cultural Revolution. The Dragon finally opened up after the death of Mao in 1976. China is today the world's second-largest economy.

At a time when Arab Spring is shaking the Middle East, the CCP tried hard to woo China's 1.4 billion citizens by kicking off a campaign ahead of its anniversary. It organised concerts, TV shows, a propaganda film, commemorative coins, and even a red games sporting competition. However, in the end, Chinese President Hu Jintao had to acknowledge the need to fight state corruption to keep hold of public support.

In an exclusive interview with Kamna Arora of Zeenews.com, Dr Jagannath Panda, an expert on China, discusses the complexity in today’s China about Mao’s legacy, and successes and failures of the CCP.

Dr Jagannath Panda is Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He is also the author of the book titled 'China’s Path to Power: Party, Military and the Politics of State Transition' (Pentagon Security International, 2010).

Kamna: What is the status of China's Communist Party in its 90th anniversary? Has it lost its charisma or still enjoys people’s support?

Dr Panda: The Chinese Communist Party has reached an important juncture with its 90th anniversary celebration. Though the Party has gone through many changes since its inception, the core elements of the Party still remain intact. Building a “socialist structure” or an official slogan for “socialist harmonious society” is still regarded an important task. There is a widespread concern to establish “socialist harmonious society” among the top leaders including the current President Hu Jintao and the future leaders like Xi Jinping and Le Keqiang. The Party’s attempt here is to engage the interests from all quarters, particularly of the socio-political actors, legal communities, labour and the military. That speaks about the moderate nature of the Communist Party in today’s context.

Though it is difficult to argue outrightly that the Party has lost its charisma, it is definitely safe to argue that the Party is no more the same charismatic party that it used to be during the revolutionary period of China. Many political ideologies and institutions still hold their fundamental values for China since the revolutionary period; and these are still found clearly in the Chinese constitution and various governing institutions and associations under the Communist Party.

However, what is interesting to note here is the Chinese idea of establishing “socialist harmonious society or world” is linked with China’s global affairs and foreign policy strategy. To revive its charisma in the 21st century, top leadership in the Communist Party has tried to leave some landmark imprints on China’s global strategy through implementing thoughts like “peaceful rise” (heping hueqi) and “harmonious world” (hexie shijie). These thoughts are interesting Chinese formulations, as these are mainly instrumental thoughts in conveying to the people of China and the world the message that the reference point of the idea of “peaceful rise” is that China would like to grow within the status quo and international norms rather than pushing hard for any alternative world order. Similarly, the idea of “harmonious world” represents an extension of China’s domestic efforts at building a “harmonious society”. Though it is impossible to settle on what could be the final character of the Chinese Communist Party, the democratic elements within the Communist party offers stimulating ideas at many policy levels for debate in the light of the significant consequences they imply for world politics. The impact of the Chinese Communist Party is huge, both internally and externally.

Kamna: Do you think the current leaders in the party have managed to live up to the original ideals of the founders of the party?

Dr Panda: Current leadership in China are trying to maintain a right balance between the original ideas and the contemporary realities. The sense of establishing a “socialist democracy” in which the “government must act in accordance with law” has been pushed systematically by the Party since the days of Deng Xiaoping. The concept has in fact become a major segment of the Chinese political process.

Leaders like Jiang Zemin propounded the “three represents” to uphold the legitimacy of the Communist Party which supposed to represent the “most advanced mode of productive force, the most advanced culture and the interests of the majority of the population”. Similarly, establishing a society based on the “rule of law” is an interesting attempt among the contemporary leaders. However, it seems that instituting the rule of law in an authoritarian system like China leads to paradoxical outcomes, like the formation of “socialist democracy”. Despite the absence of full-fledged rule of law, perhaps the most striking feature among the current leadership in China is the realisation of the significance of law, legalisation of the process and the institution, and a necessity to form a legal order. This is clearly observed at different scales and in different forms.

At the moment, the Chinese case presents a cautious approach to its institutional politics, because both the surface of the politics and problems are structural in nature. Therefore, while the Chinese Communist Party may abstract sufficient time to institute an interest-based political order and transition, all these trends seems to uphold Party’s legitimacy, promote economic growth, strengthen military and maintain a balance between domestic and global security challenges.

Kamna: How do you read this when the party says Mao's ways led to chaos in entire society?

Dr Panda: This has been a debate in China always. Some Chinese call Mao as a ‘good leader’ and some call him as a ‘bad leader’. But the consensus remains in China that Mao is a terrific personality in Chinese history and restored most of the Communist path. However, what is important to note here is that Mao’s legacy remains debatable in China today and China’s effort of building a “socialist democracy” seems paradoxical given the nature of Party control over its monolithic social and political system in a post-Leninist state. To put it in other words, Stanley Lubman’s allegory of the “bird in a cage” is a reminder of this limit. The complexity in today’s China about Mao’s legacy and its political discourse is broadly divided into three mainstream categories; the official formulations, neo-conservative intellectuals; and liberals. That speaks about China’s confusing state of affairs today.

Kamna: What are the successes and failures of the largest political party in the world?

Dr Panda: The most impressive achievement of the Communist Party today is China’s steady and quick economic growth over the past three decades. In fact, the grand success of the Chinese economy- fostering growth in many aspects- seems to defy conventional wisdom. Further, a wide-ranging programme of institutional and political reforms is currently underway, with the strengthening of citizen’s rights, building legal structure, preparing a modern and advanced military, and citizen participation in governmental and political processes. The Chinese Communist Party’s leading role in the Chinese political discourse is abhorrent to the liberals, who view the system of multiparty competitive elections as best suited to complex societies comprising different groups with often contradictory interests. However, this is not easy to bring systemic changes to China so easily where the problem is structural, and when the Communist Party is at helm.

The Communist Party is open to the democratic ideas; but not open to the democratic system. That has been the problematic part of the Chinese Communist Party in China. Issues like human rights, media censorship and one-Party structure brings the Communist regime to the bad lime-light. It often highlights the Chinese Communist Party’s failure to rise to the contemporary social realities. Problems like unemployment, corruption, lack of social freedom often highlights the failure of the Communist regime in China. These not only discloses several deficiencies in the political system but also highlight why China’s global posture still remains suspect even today

W.T.O. Says Chinese Restrictions on Raw Materials Break Rules

2011-07-05T16:35:00.000-03:00

W.T.O. Says Chinese Restrictions on Raw Materials Break Rules
By STEPHEN CASTLE
The New York Times, July 5, 2011

BRUSSELS — The World Trade Organization said Tuesday that Beijing violated global rules by restricting exports of nine raw materials used in high-technology products, in a case that has stoked tension between China and its Western trading partners.

The ruling is in response to a complaint lodged by the United States, the European Union and Mexico in 2009, which underscored the growing concern among Western governments about Chinese trading policies. It also strengthens European arguments against Chinese restrictions on the metals.

The decision Tuesday concluded that Chinese quotas, export duties and license requirements put in place a discriminatory regime for the export of industrial raw materials, including coke, zinc, magnesium, bauxite and silicon metal.

“This is a clear verdict for open trade and fair access to raw material,” said Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner. “It sends a strong signal to refrain from imposing unfair restrictions to trade and takes us one step closer to a level playing field for raw materials.

“I expect that China will now bring its export regime in line with international rules,” he continued. “Furthermore, in the light of this result, China should ensure free and fair access to rare earth supplies.”

In its decision, a W.T.O panel rejected China’s argument that its restrictions were motivated by a desire to protect the environment and prevent a critical shortage of the materials.

Europeans had challenged China’s environmental protection argument by pointing out that the consumption of the raw materials was not being controlled domestically.

China must now either appeal the ruling or comply with it by removing the restrictions. If it fails to do either, the United States, the Union and Mexico could eventually be allowed to respond with equivalent trade sanctions, according to W.T.O. rules.

The nine raw materials covered by the ruling are used in medicines, compact discs, electronics, the automotive industry, ceramics, refrigerators and batteries, among other products.

European officials said the export restrictions increased the global price for the raw materials, giving Chinese companies a clear commercial advantage.

They also made it harder for non-Chinese companies to procure the raw materials by making them less readily available on the global market.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 6, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: W.T.O. Says Chinese Restrictions on Raw Materials Break Rules.

A Russian view of China’s development - Andrey Denisov

2011-07-05T12:44:00.000-03:00

A Russian view of China’s development: An interview with the country’s first deputy foreign
minister Andrey Denisov
Yermolai Solzhenitsyn
McKinsey Quarterly, July 2011

Andrey Denisov has spent much of his career studying China. The economist and diplomat discusses the keys to China’s social and economic success.

The last three decades have brought visible changes in every aspect of Chinese life. Andrey Denisov, Russia’s first deputy foreign minister, former minister-counselor of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the People’s Republic of China, and Russian ambassador to the United Nations, has spent years inside and outside China studying the country’s astonishing ascent. “I entered the economics department of university and began to learn Chinese in 1969. It was the worst year in the whole history of relations between the two countries,” Denisov recalled in a recent interview. “Thus, if anyone told me at that moment what China would become 40 years later, and that I would experience it with my own eyes, I would have refused to believe them.”
In this excerpt from an interview conducted by McKinsey’s Yermolai Solzhenitsyn, Denisov discusses China’s socioeconomic reforms and potential lessons for Russia. The complete interview was published this year in the 22nd edition of Vestnik McKinsey.1

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McKinsey: What is the secret of China’s successful economic reforms?
Andrey Denisov: In China, they have carefully studied various models of economic growth, various economic theories and doctrines, and examples of successful industrialization and modernization. But most important is that they have adapted the approaches they select to their own realities. It is safe to say that China’s reforms owe their success to the combination of the best international practices and the national Chinese specificity, with due consideration of local conditions.
McKinsey: Can you give us an example of something that China borrowed from other countries and adapted for its own use?
Andrey Denisov: China began to establish special economic zones along its coastal belt, making good use of a big, hardworking, disciplined, and unpretentious population—in terms of wages and salaries—and a convenient location at the crossroads of global trade routes. Special economic zones were not invented in China; it is an international practice. But in China, they have become a driver of reforms, while in other countries, including Russia, they actually stagnate.
McKinsey: What are some other reasons why economic reform has succeeded in China, whereas others have failed?
Andrey Denisov: I have already mentioned the labor force and the beneficial geographic location with regard to the global markets. The third factor is the existence of the immense internal market. The fourth aspect is the Chinese expatriate community, which is committed, as they say, to “the rejuvenation of their motherland.” Chinese populations abroad remain Chinese. They are citizens of their country—if not in their passports, then in their souls. They possess vast financial resources, and these resources have been funneled to China. The country retains strong governmental power and efficient management, which helped to build a mighty, open economy literally from scratch.
Take another feature of China’s way. Amid revolutionary enthusiasm, the Chinese did not slacken managerial discipline and did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can argue about correctness or faultiness of this or that ideological course or political model, but it is absolutely obvious that in China the ideology was totally subordinated to the objectives of economic performance. And this ideology has become a framework of the management model rather than a set of dogmas never to be questioned by anyone.
Generally speaking, the Chinese mentality presumes consistent and gradual actions, the lack of haste, or, to put it simpler, no hustle and bustle when it comes to transformations. Therefore, in any aspect of China’s reform, the most important constituent is common sense. It is the ability to take a practical view of your needs and opportunities, to act not with haste but step by step, and to pursue the decision once it is already made.
McKinsey: What is unique about China’s experience?
Andrey Denisov: I would point out a rather interesting aspect, which is sometimes overlooked when studying China’s reforms. The leaders of China, Deng Xiaoping in the first place, made good use of the purely political factors related to the world alignment of forces. Those were the days of the Cold War, which was rather violent, for that matter. But China managed to position itself in such a way that it became of interest to the American leadership that Chinese–American tensions relax, and the relations between the two countries then began to normalize. The United States offered China vast opportunities, in terms of both technological resources and trade prospects. China got access to the immense American market. And I think you will agree that in the shortest possible time, China managed to oust everybody from this market, including the American manufacturers themselves. Anything you buy in a supermarket in the United States—be it clothes, household appliances, or domestic articles—bears a label “Made in China.”
Hence, the West, and the United States in the first place, helped China’s integration into the global economy. Not only did they open their markets and provide technologies, but they really helped China become a part of the world’s economy. It is quite obvious that such factors come together very seldom, if ever at all.
That is why the Chinese experience is so unique. But most important has been China’s ability to sustain national specificity: their nonadmittance of a purely mechanical application of any foreign practices; their common sense; their consistent and gradual approach to transformations; their patience; and, maybe, the fact that at all stages of the reforms, all layers of China’s society benefited from these reforms in their everyday life. Some of the Chinese—for example, residents of the maritime cities—benefited more, some less, but nobody, or almost nobody, lost. There are no socially important groups in the country that would have been driven by the reforms to the sidelines of social progress.
McKinsey: What are the weaknesses in the Chinese development model?
Andrey Denisov: The country’s political leaders clearly understand that, along with unquestionable successes and achievements, China still has weak points, and many of them. Despite all its merits, China’s development model involves taking over existing processes. China is very capable of copying, adjusting, adapting, and borrowing the experiences of others. But it has not yet delivered its own breakthrough technologies. Chinese exports, including high-tech products, are the result of utilizing imported modern technologies rather than proprietary solutions. One way or another, China will definitely face the necessity to upgrade to a new scientific and technological level.
McKinsey: Does modernization of the Chinese economy have a downside?
Andrey Denisov: Yes, certainly. Sometimes it results in increased social tensions; indeed, the urban territories differ greatly from the rural ones, and coastal regions are absolutely distinct from the inland. The country suffers from acute environmental problems, from the lack of arable land and water. Social problems also exist, such as high levels of corruption. The authorities realize it perfectly. And it is not by mere chance that they punish corruption so severely in China: even high-ranking officials have no guarantee against lengthy terms of imprisonment or even the death penalty.
McKinsey: More than a few people in eastern Russia are afraid that millions of Chinese will cross the border. How real is this notion? And how will relations with China develop in the border regions of Siberia and the Far East?
Andrey Denisov: Naturally, I am not a supporter of apocalyptic scenarios, which are based on superficial perceptions of some external indicators rather than on a thorough analysis of the situation. If China had designs on these lands, we would have known of this for centuries already. But the Chinese state has always existed within the same borders it currently holds. Siberia and the Far East are not quite fit for China’s economic and social model. Until recently, it was rather hard to develop agriculture in these regions due to harsh natural and climatic conditions. And agriculture was the foundation of the Chinese economy for ages. So it pays to look first at history.
Now let’s shift to modern times. In 2004, China and Russia displayed sufficient political wisdom to finally settle the border issue which, like a thorn, still remained in the flesh of our relations. To secure its interests, China has found it much more advantageous to have a prosperous, reliable, and useful neighbor nearby than a target for expansion. Russia’s situation is completely different, with its boundless spaces and scarce population—not growing, at best, or even reducing—of Siberia and the Far East. But these regions are attractive in terms of mineral reserves and transportation opportunities. In Russia, we must make all possible efforts to speed up the development of these areas. The summit of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation countries, which is scheduled to take place in 2012 in Vladivostok, is being viewed primarily as an opportunity to discuss the development of these regions.
In this respect, China is an extremely valuable partner. China mainly purchases raw materials, lumber, and mineral products from Russia, while selling us finished goods and food. But it is up to Russia to change this equation. The Chinese partners are ready to build mutually beneficial relations, not unilateral ones. Not so long ago, the program of Russian–Chinese economic cooperation in Siberia and the Far East was adopted. Now that the framework is in place, everything depends on what we will do to fulfill this program. So, apocalyptic scenarios might be best kept for the movies, not for objective political analysis.
McKinsey: Since Russia’s population is declining, should it encourage immigration from China, to help these regions’ development?
Andrey Denisov: We already have enough Chinese labor force there. But it is just a labor force. The Chinese are indisposed to take roots and settle down in these territories. They still view the bilateral economic cooperation as seasonal work. I mean, people arrive, work, earn money, and go back to China. These are mainly construction and agricultural workers. Of course, many Chinese are doing some commerce as well. The Chinese are good at that, really.
McKinsey: But Russia also buys what they sell.
Andrey Denisov: Exactly. I do remember those times when they were buying from us. For instance, they were buying buckets and woolen coats. They were buying, ridiculous as it may seem, felt hats in large quantities. It was not so long ago, just in the late 1980s. At that time, we were buying less from them than they from us. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was an economic sponsor. We assisted China in restoring its economy at that period. And they remember it.
But today the situation has changed. Yet, until recently, in some areas such as equipment and technology, we were selling more to China than China was selling to us. The share of machinery and equipment in our imports from China already exceeds the same share in our exports to China. In this category of goods, we are now approximately on par, but the balance is gradually shifting to the Chinese side.
McKinsey: In the decades to come, will Russia abandon its generally Europe-oriented political and economic model and turn to Asia, and China, in particular?
Andrey Denisov: I am deeply convinced that Russia’s civilization as such is Europe-oriented. And this is a natural aspect of our development. But our turning to Asia is nonetheless natural. Why so? Because we are physically present there. I remember the time—the 1970s and the 1980s—when the sole sign of Russia’s presence in Asia was its Pacific fleet. It was very powerful and was sailing with its firepower for all to see.
Today the situation has changed. We need an economic presence in this region in the first place; we need to become necessary for this region. Russia is still not recognized as an Asian country, despite all its Asian associations. We even became an ASEM2 member, which gathers the leaders of European and Asian countries. For a long time, we held off from ASEM, because we ourselves do not always know who we are.
We should look at Australia, and especially New Zealand, and how these Anglo-Saxon countries searched out their Asian-Pacific identities. I believe that these conscious spiritual efforts deserve deep respect and attention, and we should follow this example. Turning our face to Asia must not be a political move, but an inherent natural act.
People who live in Siberia, in Eastern Siberia, in the Far East, perceive themselves as residents of Russia, but of this part of Russia. They are not temporary dwellers, they do not think, “OK, we will live here for some time, work here, and then we’ll leave for Saint Petersburg, and our children will study there.” We must cultivate the sentiments of permanence, of better conditions for a better life in the Far East. And much depends on ourselves here. But I do not believe that artificial models can be implemented. It must be a natural process.
For historical reasons, since the 16th century, Russians have found their way to the far-distant Pacific coast, to Kamchatka, to Chukotka. This migration grew from some inner flame, some impulse. And only afterwards, the purposeful actions followed. One of the outstanding Russian economic projects of the 19th century, of course, was the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was laid in the territory of both Russia and China. The Chinese Eastern Railway is also part of this story. We have really good examples, and we should remember them.
McKinsey: Still, Russia and the Asian countries would seem to have limited knowledge of one another. What do you think?
Andrey Denisov: I agree. In the field of economic cooperation, we are looking to achieve more but must put up with what we’ve got, since our ambitions are out of sync with our capabilities. This is also true for cultural cooperation. This is a point of mutual interest, mutual attraction.
I am very pleased that interest in China—Chinese culture, language, medicine, philosophy—is rising around the world. For example, we have discussed that the Chinese might lack creative potential when it comes to technology, but when it comes to filmmaking, for example, creativity abounds. Chinese film directors gather awards at many international film festivals as their motion pictures reflect a unique outlook on the world around them.
It is crucial that the governments of China and Russia have a good understanding of this. Hence the focused effort, the “Year of Russia” in China, followed by the “Year of China” in Russia. This is a program including more than 300 important events—exhibitions, tours, concerts, festivals, public meetings—that funds are allocated for. This is not manna falling from the sky.
I see, with great pleasure, interest in the Chinese language awakening in Russia. The very process of learning Chinese is fascinating. And it is quite distinctive, by the way, that universities in the Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia teach Chinese. Young people choose this language and go to China with pleasure. There are many people already who live in China who are like expats, like Englishmen who live in Hong Kong, because they connect their future with this country. They get married, have children, work—and very often work for Russia, thus helping it to implement various cooperation projects. And nobody in China is afraid of it. Our fellow countrymen like to live and work there, and this is good. The Chinese culture is extremely deep. And I believe that this interest will only grow.
We know that the culture and spirit of a people is transferred through their language. There are many translators of Russian literature in China, Chinese people who connected their lives with Russia. And this is also very good!

About the Author
Yermolai Solzhenitsyn is a director in McKinsey’s Moscow office.

Malthus, Marx o mercado - Moises Naim e a China

2011-07-03T03:22:00.000-03:00

Malthus, Marx o mercado
MOISÉS NAÍM
El País, 03/07/2011

¿Llevará el crecimiento de la clase media en los países pobres a una catástrofe para el planeta?

Acabo de regresar de China. La velocidad de los cambios que allí ocurren no deja de sorprenderme. A pesar de que mi última visita no fue hace mucho, he percibido enormes transformaciones. Eso sucede cuando un país gigante crece al 10% al año. Visité China por primera vez en 1978, cuando apenas comenzaban sus reformas económicas. Recuerdo de ese viaje las grandes avenidas casi sin coches y llenas de una multitud en bicicleta, todos vestidos más o menos igual, verde olivo o azul. Hoy esas mismas avenidas están bordeadas de rascacielos con la arquitectura más audaz del mundo, están llenas de automóviles y de gente vestida de todos los colores y estilos. En mi primer viaje, la economía china era solo el 40% del tamaño de la Unión Soviética. Hoy es cuatro veces más grande.

El cambio fundamental es que millones de chinos han salido de la pobreza, formando una clase media que, si bien es mucho más pobre que la de Europa o EE UU, dispone por primera vez de medios para consumir más comida, medicinas o electricidad. Y esto no solo pasa en China: Turquía, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brasil, Colombia y en muchos otros países pobres la clase media viene creciendo.

¿Se transformará este gran éxito de la humanidad en una catástrofe para el planeta?

Hay tres maneras de responder a esta pregunta. La primera es la de Thomas Malthus, quien en 1798 explicó que, visto que la población crece a mayor velocidad que la producción de alimentos, inevitablemente las hambrunas, las enfermedades y las guerras "reequilibrarían" la situación. El Club de Roma patrocinó en 1972 la publicación del libro Los Límites al Crecimiento. Vaticinaba una catástrofe malthusiana alrededor de 2000 y pronosticaba que el petróleo se agotaría en 1992. Obviamente, Malthus y sus seguidores subestiman el impacto de las nuevas tecnologías. La revolución verde en la agricultura, por ejemplo, llevó a que en 20 años se duplicara la producción de cereales en los países pobres. En general, el mundo hoy produce más alimentos per cápita que nunca, y cada vez hay más tecnologías que permiten la explotación de recursos naturales antes inaccesibles.

Y esta es la segunda respuesta: el problema no es de producción, sino de distribución. Muy pocos consumen demasiado y demasiados consumen muy poco. Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, consume el 25% de la energía que se produce en el mundo anualmente, a pesar de que su población es solo el 4,6% del total mundial. Cada alemán gasta casi nueve veces más energía que cada indio, y 30 veces más que un bangladeshí. Desde esta perspectiva, Carlos Marx tiene razón: hay que obligar a que haya una distribución más igualitaria del consumo. Y eso lo tiene que hacer el Estado, casi seguramente por la fuerza.

La tercera manera de ver esto es a través de la óptica del mercado: los precios y los incentivos resolverán el problema. Si hay escasez subirán los precios, disminuirá el consumo y aumentarán los incentivos para ser más eficientes e inventar tecnologías para producir más a menor costo. Si el precio del petróleo sigue subiendo, el viento, el sol y el mar pueden competir con los hidrocarburos. Si el algodón sigue caro, más productores sembrarán algodón. Esto ha venido pasando, y los aumentos en producción y las maravillosas nuevas tecnologías lo confirman. El problema, sin embargo, es que los ajustes del mercado son brutales y no resuelven el problema de los consumidores, para quienes cualquier disminución en el consumo (obligada por el alza de precios) significa pasar hambre. Tampoco resuelve el problema de las fallas de mercado a nivel global: los océanos se deterioran a gran velocidad por su explotación indiscriminada. Y ya sabemos lo que está sucediendo con las emisiones de CO2 que calientan el planeta.

Ni Malthus, ni Marx ni los mercados nos dan respuestas adecuadas para las difíciles preguntas que plantea el explosivo crecimiento de China o la expansión de la clase media y el consumo a nivel mundial. Las respuestas tecnológicas estimuladas por el mercado pueden llegar tarde para evitar graves daños sociales y medioambientales. La exagerada intervención del Estado para corregir desigualdades asfixia la aparición de soluciones que solo los mercados pueden generar. Y si son desatendidas, las fallas de los mercados pueden hacer el planeta invivible.

Las ideologías rígidas no ayudarán a encontrar salidas. Hay que echar mano de todas las ideas, inventar otras nuevas y darle rienda suelta al pragmatismo y la experimentación. En el pasado, la humanidad halló soluciones para problemas sin precedentes. No hay por qué suponer que no las volverá a encontrar.

Communisty Party of China's happy birthday: 90 years old (still counting...)

2011-06-28T01:28:00.000-03:00

Mao Inc. – China’s Terribly Successful Communist Party Turns 90
By Erich Follath and Wieland Wagner
Der Spiegel, 27/06/2011

Beijing’s communists are among the world’s most successful capitalists, but their economic ascent is often overshadowed by its human rights violations. The Communist Party now faces a crucial test: Can it become more democratic without jeopardizing its hold on power?

China needs heroes, shining role models, ordinary people who can bring positive change to society through their actions. This was true at the time of Confucius, but it has been particularly true since China has had a communist party. And because the Chinese Communist Party channels, organizes and monitors everything, it didn’t take long after its victory in the 1949 revolution to establish a “Foundation for Altruism and Courage” that selects China’s heroes. Its various decisions over the past decades reveal a surprising and even sensational development.

In the 1950s, the government in Beijing celebrated Shi Chuanxiang, a model worker. In the pre-communist era, he had worked hard as a day laborer, was often hungry and was ashamed to be exploited. According to the official version of the story, it was only after the party had come into power that Shi found work that allowed him to be more independent: as someone who literally collected excrement for socialist development, and who even managed to increase per capita transport capacity from 50 to 80 buckets of feces. “To make the world a cleaner place, I happily put up with the stench,” Shi said as he accepted the party’s award, standing next to the president in the Great Hall of the People.

A New Hero for a New Age

Until a few years ago, the phrase “to breathe the spirit of Shi” was still being chanted as a slogan in schools. But now, in 2001, a new spirit is in the air. Today’s official role models show how thoroughly the party has adjusted to conform to a globalized era. Enter Duan Wenyin, 27. He is the man the communist authorities are currently touting as their latest hero of the revolution.

Mr. Duan runs his hand over his impeccably tailored suit. His hair is perfectly gelled. He speaks smoothly and chooses his words carefully. An eloquent, practiced sense of modesty is part of his persona. “No, I don’t want to be a hero,” says Duan, a graduate of an elite university, in the village of Beigou 60 kilometers (38 miles) east of Beijing, “but a patriot.”

Portraits of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Deng Xiaoping hang next to each other at the entrance of the local party headquarters building. Duan looks up at the wall, where a slogan reads: “Li dang wei gong,” or “Commitment of the Party to the Community.”

Following the government’s advice to new university graduates, Duan first spent three years working as a volunteer in the countryside. He turned the village upside-down with his ideas, which included setting up a small library of books on proper family planning, organizing a contest for the most well-kept house and even helping to organize an internal party election for the post of mayor. In doing so, he helped turn Beigou into a model community that now attracts tourists, who bring funds into the local coffers. He can even imagine staying longer, perhaps working as an entrepreneur in the tourist industry or as a local party official.

His pride and joy is having been accepted into the party. “Hundreds in my graduating class applied, but only a few received a response,” says Duan. Acceptance into the party was “extremely helpful” to his subsequent professional development, he says. Now Duan, a young party official, makes himself useful by settling disputes over a new road and compensating the farmers “as fairly as possible” for the land grab, learning about the problems encountered in the local chestnut harvest, issuing reprimands and words of praise, and creating incentives — all with the goal of achieving the “harmonious society” that the party proclaims as its highest objective. Duan, unlike the “heroes” of past decades, isn’t expected to sacrifice himself. He is allowed to show initiative, behave like a capitalist and even get rich. He can even criticize the party leaders in Beijing on purely procedural matters. There is only one thing Duan cannot do: position himself outside the system.

Duan, the model Chinese from a model village with his sights firmly set on a model career, has no intention of doing that. He waves as we say goodbye, satisfied with himself and the world and his party. Perhaps he doesn’t love the party, but he needs it, because although it isn’t capable of achieving everything for him, nothing is possible without it.

Paving the Way for Consumer Communism

This week is a particularly Chinese week. On Monday, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, 68, is coming to Berlin with 13 of his cabinet ministers, carrying a questionable “gift” in his luggage: the release of the now-muzzled Ai Weiwei, the most famous artist-dissident in the People’s Republic. And the Chinese Communist Party is celebrating its 90th birthday on Friday, July 1.

The momentous event has already cast its shadows, as the party employs original methods to drum up enthusiasm in advance. For instance, thousands of Beijing residents have been sent classic communist songs on their mobile phones and asked to forward them to others. Those who can prove that they have forwarded the songs to at least 10 people they know are entered into a prize drawing. The party seems to be paving the way for consumer communism.

Television programming has been purged of anything even remotely resembling social criticism, including crime films and family dramas. “Red” programs that publicize the progress of the People’s Republic are now in demand instead. The high point of the Communist Party’s culture festival is an elaborately produced movie called “The Founding of a Party,” which was financed in large part by General Motors. In return for its funding, the American automaker stipulated that the actors would always drive Cadillacs on the set of the melodrama about the hardships of the early days of the revolution.

China’s communists have not been shy. Little is sacred, while almost everything can be bought, even the Great Hall of the People. When the party is not in session in the magnificent building, with its more than 300 rooms and enormous paintings, companies like Ford and Kentucky Fried Chicken can rent space at astronomical prices.

A Dinosaur Which Has Learned to Adapt

The membership of the Chinese Communist Party is almost as large as Germany’s population. Its 78 million members make it the largest political party in the world, and a very successful one at that — a terribly successful party, say many anxious Western observers. Soviet communism ended up in the dustbin of history. The parties in North Korea and Cuba led their people to economic downfall and are considered discredited. Communist parties stood — and continue to stand — for an incurable sclerosis, while their leaders are viewed as dinosaurs. The outcome of the socialist idea has served as ample proof that it cannot work in practice.

In China, this quasi law of nature seems to have been suspended. The dinosaur has learned to evolve, and adaptation instead of agony shapes the picture, as Beijing rushes from one economic success to the next. In the last 30 years, China has increased its gross domestic product by about thirty times and has overtaken Germany and Japan as an economic power, and it will likely leave the United States behind by 2020, becoming the world’s largest economy. No other country has amassed such large foreign currency reserves as the People’s Republic. If it wanted to, Beijing could buy up all the companies listed on Germany’s DAX index with only one-third of its $3 trillion (€2.1 trillion) in reserves.

Politically and militarily, China is becoming increasingly self-confident in its role as the only superpower next to the United States. Beijing intimidates its Pacific neighbors with new land and naval weapons systems, making territorial claims in waters from Japan to Vietnam to the Philippines.

The Biggest Challenge of Our Time

The party has come a long way in the last nine decades. It consisted of all of 57 members when it was founded as an underground organization in Shanghai in 1921. In 1927 its brigades, worn down by a superior adversary and on the run, were on the verge of demise. In 1949, they triumphed on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and united the giant country. Today, as the only force that can take on the United States, the Communist Party is understandably bursting with self-confidence. At 90, and (at least) a little wiser, the party now strives to permanently correct China’s economic course without diverging from the rigid one-party system.

Can this balancing act across all ideological Grand Canyons even work? What are China’s communist functionaries doing right and what signals have they heard — signals that have remained hidden from other nations? How is the world’s largest party faring internally? Is it run by a meritocracy in which the best make it to the top, or are family relations more important? And why can it be so flexible and modern and yet so thin-skinned vis-à-vis its critics, often operating with Stalinist harshness?

A few countries in Asia and Africa have stopped treating Western democracy as the measure of all things, and are instead trying to imitate the “Beijing model” of a capitalist economy combined with authoritarian policies. China is the biggest challenge of our time and raises central issues, such as whether the party can maintain the giant country’s position at the top of the global economy in the long term without opening up politically. Or whether the communists will eventually fail because of the contradictions produced by a rapid rise to power unimpeded by any opposition: the extreme differences between rich and poor, rampant corruption, environmental destruction and brutal clashes with Tibetan, Uighur and Mongolian minorities.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton underscored the contradictions in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which she was highly critical of Beijing. The Chinese system is doomed, she argues, adding that Chinese officialls are “worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand.”

Really?

The United States has the White House, France has the Elysée Palace, Germany has the Federal Chancellery — and the People’s Republic has a secret.

Secretive Leaders

China is ruled from a mysterious location that very few foreigners have seen from within. The country’s leaders operate from a shielded complex behind high, red walls. Some of the buildings date back to feudal times, while gray, utilitarian structures were added following the Communists’ victory and the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The secluded and well-guarded district in the middle of Beijing is called Zhongnanhai, or “Middle and Southern Sea.” Formerly part of the Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai was a place where emperors, concubines and eunuchs once concocted courtly intrigues.

The Top Nine, or Permanent Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party, the most powerful group in China, meet in the southern part of this refuge. Their meetings are businesslike and completely off-limits to the public. They are never called upon to smile for news cameras, they only appear in public together on very special occasions, and they rarely appear for more than a few minutes.

They are nine men in dark suits, muted ties so similar that they could have been bought together at a group discount, and obviously dyed hair. No one within the ranks of China’s stiff technocrats is known for his charisma. They even clap in unison at official events. President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao, 68, has a degree in hydraulic engineering, and all but one of the members of the Permanent Committee are engineers. They have all been professional politicians for several decades, with careers that seem almost as interchangeable as their physical appearance.

For some, their path to the top was facilitated by the fact that they had been born as “princelings” into influential families. But to make it to the very top and hold their ground there, they also had to prove their worth as capable bureaucrats. They learned to forge coalitions within the party and anticipate positions capable of producing consensus. According to leading experts on China, the view of a monolithic Chinese Communist Party widely held in the West is wrong. In fact, they say, the party’s leaders are often sharply at odds over the right approach. But once internal compromises have been reached, all senior leaders usually form a united front in championing these decisions in public.

According to US diplomats whose secret cables from Beijing were published by WikiLeaks, the expanded Politburo, consisting of 24 men and one woman, is characterized by a “consensus system in which members can exercise veto power.” In fact, the cable continues, “true democracy” prevails in the Politburo.

Record Figures for Red China Inc.

It is certainly true that China’s impressive economic figures can outshine everything else. Hardly a day goes by in which Red China Inc. does not report new record figures. And the more helplessly world leaders, from US President Barack Obama to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, struggle to reform their traditional market economies, to free the United States of its debts and to keep Europe liquid, the more enviously the West eyes China’s rapid growth.

At first glance, China’s recipes for success should not be effective: five-year plans, manipulated exchange rates, no private ownership of land. But these factors represent only one side of things in the giant country. The other is an unbridled capitalism that the party manages in a thoroughly non-ideological way that includes investments in the future. For example, Beijing has increased its research and development spending by an average of 21 percent a year since 2000 (as compared with 4 percent a year for the United States). “Socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” — the term alone underscores the Communist Party’s flexibility. And what exactly the “Chinese characteristics” are remains vague — and expandable as needed.

“Zou Chuqu,” or “swarm out,” is the slogan the party uses to encourage the economy to acquire know-how and buy up companies abroad. The policy represents the best of both worlds, as Chinese business executives go on shopping sprees armed with loans from state banks. And in the giant country itself, the party plays the “barbarians” off against one another. Like a powerful groundskeeper, it assigns foreign companies to local partners, with which they are to modernize China’s industry.

A Party as ‘Omnipresent as God’

In the process, the party never budges a centimeter from its sole claim to political leadership. China, says party leader Hu, is and remains a “democratic dictatorship of the people.” The party’s octopus arms encompass far more than government functions. Through its “organization department,” the Communist Party controls virtually every important position in the country. In the words of a Beijing professor, the party is as “omnipresent as God.” It controls the army, the intelligence service, the press, the courts and the state-owned companies, placing them in a more privileged position as they compete with private enterprise.

A look at license-plate numbers reveals the true hierarchy in a city like Shanghai, where the local party chairman’s plate number is 00001, while the mayor and deputy party chairman has 00002. Other insignias of power are even more telling. All 300 high-ranking party officials have a special telephone called the “red machine,” with which the members of this top echelon can communicate with one another on a secret, secure line.

“If Vladimir Lenin were reincarnated in 21st-century Beijing and managed to avert his eyes from the city’s glittering skyscrapers and conspicuous consumption, he would instantly recognize in the ruling Chinese Communist Party a replica of the system he designed nearly a century ago for the victors of the Bolshevik Revolution,” Australian communism expert Richard McGregor wrote earlier this year in the US journal Foreign Policy.

However, comparisons with the extinct Soviet Union are as unwanted in Beijing as references to the current turmoil in the Arab world. The calls on the Internet for a Chinese ” jasmine revolution” have made the country’s normally self-confident leaders so nervous that they have banned the use of the term on the Internet.

‘Seventy Percent Positive’

Hardly anyone is as familiar with the Communist Party’s sensitivities as Professor Xie Chuntao, who teaches at the Beijing Cadre School. He looks thoughtful as he sips his cappuccino in a café in Xidan, a popular watering hole for the capital’s smart set. He answers “13 Questions for the Party” in his new book. Xie admits that the Communist Party does not have a handle on important social issues.

Nepotism is Xie’s biggest concern. The central bank recently revealed an astonishing number when it claimed that corrupt officials had illegally moved 800 billion yuan (about €85 billion) abroad in the last two decades. Xie also worries about the growing lifestyle differences between rich and poor and between the urban and rural populations, as well as the dramatic aging of society. The privileges enjoyed by the children of senior party officials are also not a taboo subject for Xie. “The cadres I teach want me to address everything openly,” he says. “They are familiar with the problems.”

And the solutions? The shrewd intellectual struggles with the question. “There is no corruption in Singapore,” he says. “That should be our role model.”

Would that include Singapore’s elections, which include opposition parties?

The professor says he can imagine this happening in the long term. In fact, he has already sent his daughter to Singapore to study. And as far as further economic development is concerned, the advice of Western experts is more than welcome. “I try to get the best professors from Harvard and Yale as guest lecturers.”

However, the views of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and artist Ai Weiwei are non-negotiable for the cadre educator. “Those who attack the party so directly and want a completely different system are placing themselves outside of society.” According to Xie, the Communist Party must remain responsible for the interpretation of history. And no one should be allowed to challenge the image of the Great Chairman. In his view, Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping’s assessment of the dictator and revolutionary should remain valid for all time: “Seventy percent positive.”

A Journey into Chinese Communist History

Two excursions to different regions of China are like two journeys through time into the historic heart of Chinese communism.

The first stop is at the Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, a city of 23 million. The museum is housed in a brick building in a former working-class neighborhood of a city once subjugated by foreign powers. It offers a look back at the 1920s, when Shanghai was the epitome of excess, a paradise for trading companies from the West but a hell for most local residents, a place where life was shaped by child labor, prostitution, gang crime and opium dens.

Mao Zedong, the eldest son of a relatively affluent farming family, a rebel against authority, came to Shanghai in July 1921 to secretly launch the Communist Party, together with 12 others. The main exhibit at the museum, a room filled with “faithful reproductions” of the revolutionaries, suggests that Mao was already their leader at the time. He is the only one standing at the table, a shining light, a Jesus among his disciples. In truth, however, the ambitious delegate from Hunan was more of a tagalong at the beginning, although that would soon change when he retreated to the mountains and, using a combination of his charisma and tangible threats, led the farmers in uprisings.

The Renaissance of the ‘Whore of Asia’

The museum on Xingye Street, which gets very few visitors, feels like a left-over socialist foreign body in the midst of a glittering capitalist world. The relic sits in the midst of the commotion of Xintiandi (“New World”), an exceedingly chic neighborhood today, where bars, boutiques and German beer attract the rich and the beautiful. Once again, anything goes nowadays. The Bar Rouge, not far from the showroom of an Italian racecar maker, is the top attraction on the nearby Bund, Shanghai’s waterfront boulevard. The Shanghai of 2011 is no less than a renaissance of the “Whore of Asia,” as the city used to be known in the 1920s and 1930s. This city is indeed red, but it is the red of a Ferrari.

The second stop is Yan’an, a city of 2 million near the Yellow River, in Shaanxi Province in central China. If the religion of Chinese communism has a Mecca, it is the city’s yellowish Loess Plateau with its mysterious caves, the endpoint of the legendary “Long March” that led Mao’s troops through 10,000 kilometers of the country over 370 days as they fled from the rival Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek.

Mao survived the ordeal and attained the unlimited leadership of the Communist Party in Yan’an, but this was partly the result of his having had a horse at his disposal and the fact that he even rode in a litter for a time. Mao, who preached equality, never had a problem with the notion that some were more equal than others. Of the 86,000 soldiers who had set out with him and suffered terrible ordeals, often barefoot and without food, less than one in 10 survived.

A Revolutionary Disneyland

Mao set up his headquarters in the Yan’an caves in October 1935 and remained there for the next decade, gathering his strength. He had no objections to funding his movement with the proceeds from opium poppy cultivation, and he was happy to accept the help of the Soviet Union. However, his communist project was always primarily a national and independent project. In fact, Mao oriented himself more heavily toward the Chinese emperors, who had united the realm with dictatorial severity, then toward Marx and Lenin.

Today the Yan’an caves, with their whitewashed walls and colorful strings of lights, resemble a revolutionary Disneyland. In Mao’s former quarters, the guide introduces am eight-year-old schoolgirl wearing a pioneer uniform. She has won a contest and, as a reward, is now permitted to recite a few words she has learned by heart: “The Great Chairman was very sincere and honest. He unified our nation and lives in our hearts forever.”

Battles between the Red Army and the Kuomintang are reenacted outside twice a day. As smoke and the sound of heavy artillery fill the air, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek’s troops stage a treacherous attack on a wedding party. But Mao’s guerillas carry the day with their cunning and superior fighting spirit in this cowboys and Indians version of the Communist Party’s sage. Nevertheless, the background is dead serious. “Patriotic education is essential to our survival. The future of the party lies in the spirit of Yan’an,” Wang Yimei, the director of the brand-new history museum, says with a steady voice. An enormous statue of Mao stands guard in front of the architecturally impressive circular building. It seems almost defiant, as if the old man were trying to compete with the hypermodern television towers and skyscrapers of modern-day China.

On the evening before the anniversary fireworks, China’s communists agree on a few things. For one, the Communist Party is thrusting aside “setbacks,” such as Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” The campaign, which forced farmers into communes in the late 1950s and claimed the lives of an estimated 45 million people, has not been seriously scrutinized to this day. The same approach is taken to the witch-hunts of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.

Instead, the party proudly highlights its positive achievements, such as national unity, the liberation of more than 300 million Chinese from poverty and widespread stability in a modernized, autocratic system. It believes that without its firm grip, the country would drift apart and descend into chaos.

The Sharp Contradictions of Modernization

But parts of the Communist Party leadership and the intellectual elite are deeply divided over the most important issues of all: the party’s path into the future, and how it should react to the increasingly sharp contradictions brought about by modernization.

The two most prominent advocates of the different schools of thought are Prime Minister Wen, who is increasingly telling the foreign media that he supports opening up the system. He has even said that, “yearning for democracy is unstoppable, and freedom of speech is indispensable.” On the other side is Wu Bangguo, 69, the chairman of the National People’s Congress, officially the country’s second-in-command. “If we waver, the achievements gained thus far in development will be lost,” says Wu, “and a multiparty system is out of the question for China.”

Wu and the party’s hardliners, such as Zhou Yongkang, the head of the Central Political and Legislative Committee, are now setting the tone. They are responsible for extreme increases in the military budget and spending on national security. The people must fear the government, or the country will fall apart, China expert McGregor has quoted a high-ranking Chinese official as saying. At the same time, it is also clear that the system still places more emphasis on enticement and career opportunities than on naked repression.

The new urban middle class now has a lot to lose: the possibilities of social advancement, and the freedom to shop and go out, seem more appealing to many Chinese than the vague promise of democracy and the separation of powers. As long as the party achieves economic growth hovering around 8 percent, and as long as inflation (currently 5.5 percent) remains reasonably under control, little more than regional pockets of unrest are to be expected in China.

Growing Influence for the Rich

The wealthiest individuals are to play a prominent role in the Communist Party, which is astonishing when one considers that businessmen, the former “class enemies,” were not permitted to join the party until 2002. One in three of China’s 189 dollar billionaires is now a party member, one in eight of the country’s super-rich holds a “significant” political advisor post, 83 are members of the National People’s Congress (a number that is likely to rise), and 38 Chinese “parliamentarians” are wealthier than the wealthiest member of the US Congress. They include delegate Zong Qinghou who, with assets of $12 billion, is the richest man in the People’s Republic of China.

Zong meets with visitors in his native Hangzhou, which, with its idyllic setting on West Lake, is nothing short of a paradise. He is wearing an ordinary blue shirt, basic dark trousers and inexpensive linen shoes. His office is also plainly furnished, with almost nothing but management books from around the world on the shelves.

This much modesty is demonstrative. Zong’s mantra is not to show off with one’s wealth. The 65-year-old multibillionaire, who made the roughly 30,000 employees at his 58 production sites shareholders long ago, tries to set an example with his own work ethic. He works 14-hour days, smoking and drinking tea are his only luxuries, and he spends no more than $20 a day.

Zong started life at the very bottom, the son of poor parents, and had only a middle-school education. He worked on a salt farm as a teenager. Together with two retired teachers and €14,000 in loans, he finally managed to produce milk-based soft drinks.

The business eventually blossomed into Wahahah, which later entered into a joint venture with the Danone Group. When the French accused Zong of undermining the joint venture with parallel products, his employees came to his aid with strikes and protests. In one campaign, which had strong nationalist overtones, the protesters berated the foreigners with their signs until they were so unnerved that they gave up and allowed the Chinese to buy them out.

Does Zong, a member of the Communist Party, see himself as more of a communist or a capitalist?

‘If There Is Anyplace in the World Where Socialism Prevails, It’s Europe’

He smiles. “That’s a very German question,” he says. “I’m a pragmatist.” As such, he says, he fights for the rights of business owners and workers. “If there is anyplace in the world where socialism prevails, it’s Europe,” he says. In Zong’s opinion Europe, with its high taxes and welfare states, is a dead end. “People in your country should work harder,” says the richest man in China, sounding almost sympathetic.

American political scientist David Shambaugh’s recent book about the Chinese Communist Party is subtitled “Atrophy and Adaptation.” The astonishing thing is that the party’s atrophy and adaptation are opposing tendencies, and yet they move forward at the same time. “Some observers predict a collapse of the system in the long term, some predict a prolonged stagnation, and others are convinced that they are seeing signs of a real reform process.” Shambaugh believes that a successful cleansing of the party is the most likely future development.

If that happens, however, the Communist Party will have to move well beyond the current nostalgia for Mao. It is possible that heightened patriotism could be used to develop a new, but hardly controllable ideological cement for society. The country’s leaders seem themselves confronted with entire new problems following the saturation with consumer goods. They will have to provide a population whose age structure is dramatically changing with services that were practically unknown until now: adequate pensions, insurance, healthcare.

Whether they are prepared for this seems very questionable. However, the skeptics, who never thought the Chinese Communist Party was capable of the impossible, have been disabused again and again. The party leaders still manage to pull off every sleight of hand and Mao paradox. The Great Chairman of communism is simply being repurposed, and turned into a role model for globalization, into the Great Board Chairman.

What is the closest comparison to this strange Chinese party, this admirable but despicable institution with its quasi-religious aspirations, partly ossified and partly willing to reform, fluctuating between total repression and the recognition of pluralism?

The Catholic Church, at least to an unofficial envoy of the Chinese Communist Party during a visit to the Vatican in 2008. “We have the propaganda department, and you have the Heralds of the Gospel. We have our organization department, and you have the College of Cardinals.” When the Vatican representative asked the Communist Party envoy what he thought the differences were, he replied: “You were sent by God, but we were sent by the devil.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Illusion and dellusions about China - a naive American (NYRBooks)

2011-06-27T18:36:00.000-03:00

My Disillusionment: China, 1973
Perry Link
The New York Review of Books, June 25, 2011
Perry Link

The author with with a professor of Chinese at Fudan University, Shanghai, 1973

The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. My father was a radical leftist professor who admired Mao Zedong. And that influence, along with the Vietnam War protests—a movement in which I was not only a participant but an activist—led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes.

I was living in Hong Kong and wrote a letter to Beijing. A few months later I received a charming reply on two sheets of paper that looked like they had been labored over for days by a Red Guard with little English and a faulty typewriter. The letter explained that the Chinese people had nothing against me, but that I was from a predatory imperialist country and could not visit the People’s Republic. Before I left Hong Kong I bought four volumes of “The Selected Works of Mao Zedong,” and, rather grandiosely, ripped the covers off of them so that I might carry them safely back to the imperialist US.

In May, 1973, however, I got another chance. A year earlier, in April 1972, the Chinese ping-pong team had visited the US to break a twenty-three year freeze in diplomatic relations, and I had served as an interpreter. I made a good impression on Chinese officials on that US tour, in part because I led four of the six American interpreters in a boycott of the teams’ meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House. (Nixon had ordered the bombing of Haiphong just the day before; to me, small talk in the Rose Garden just didn’t seem right.)

A year later we US interpreters asked if we could visit China, and the answer was yes. Over a four-week itinerary we visited Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Xi’an, Yan’an, Beijing, and Tangshan. The bill for the trip—room, board, airfare, rail, sightseeing, everything—was $550. It was a friendship rate.

But it was during that trip that cracks began to form in my image of the People’s Republic. I carried a small camera and took walks on my own, in search of “real life.” I had learned in graduate school that there were no flies in China after the “Four Pests” campaign of 1958—which in the name of public health was supposed to eradicate mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows as well. When I saw a fly on a white stone table in Suzhou, I photographed it. I thought I had something.

When four of us boarded a crowded bus in Yan’an, the town in central Shaanxi Province that had been the Communists’ base from 1936 to 1948, the driver shouted “waibin!” ( “foreign guests—make room!”). Immediately four seated passengers stood up, offering us their seats. The old man who stood up next to me did not, in my impression, seem to want to. I said, “Please, you sit,” but he said nothing and remained standing. Embarrassed, I remained standing, too, and for the rest of the ride the people on the bus endured the ludicrous spectacle of an empty seat on a crowded bus.

We foreigners always rode “soft sleeper” class on the railroad, while most people were riding “hard seat” class. I asked our guide about it. “Why is there a soft-sleeper class?” I said, my socialist principles in mind. “Who rides in it, besides us?”

“The leaders,” the guide replied.

“Why?” I asked, unaware that this was a stupid question.

“They are busy. They have many burdens. They need soft-sleeper.”

My image of a classless society had suffered a blow, and it suffered a few more before the tour was over. The example that sticks most in my mind happened in Tangshan, about a hundred miles east of Beijing, when we visited its huge coal mine. We descended in an elevator far below the earth’s surface. (This was three years before a magnitude 7.8 earthquake buried countless workers in that same mine.) Riding small railroad cars through a maze of tunnels deep underground, I noticed various signs: “slow!,” “sound horn!,” etc. The signs were in traditional Chinese characters, not simplified ones, and I also couldn’t help noticing that there were no political slogans among them. All the signs were strictly business. This contrasted sharply with the surface of the earth, where slogans and quotations from Chairman Mao, on splendid red-and-white banners, or giant red billboards with gold writing and trim, were everywhere.

After emerging, I asked our guide: “Why are there no quotations from Chairman Mao down there with the miners?”

Her immediate reply: “Oh, it’s too dirty!” She seemed a bit irritated at me for suggesting such an inappropriate location for the Chairman’s thoughts. To me, though, it was a hard fact to swallow: the dirt of the mines was okay for the working class but not for the thoughts of its leader.

The inner insecurity of the guides became apparent to me in something that happened in Shanghai, when I bought a souvenir for my mother. She was born on a farm in Nebraska and was a salt-of-the-earth type. Her name was Beulah, she ate wheat germ, and brown was her favorite color. In a small shop I found hand-brooms I knew she would like. They were crafted of sorghum stalks, light brown with dark flecks. Lovely. And symbols of the dignity of labor—which I knew she also would like. I imagined that she might hang it on a wall in her house, so I bought one.

Afterwards one of our guides, very nervous, accosted me. He seemed torn between handling an emergency and trying to maintain politeness.

“Why did you buy this?!” he asked.

I explained about my mother.

“Let me get you a better one!” He took the broom back to the shop and returned with another—not much better or worse, to my eye, but in his view more nearly perfect. Then, sitting next to me on the mini-bus ride back to the hotel, he began to interrogate me.

“Doesn’t your mother like silk? …China has silk. China has jade carvings, China has cloisonné. Why do you buy a farmer’s broom to represent China to your mother?” I began to realize that the guide saw what I had done as “unfriendly.” My mother and I were looking down on China.

And this started me wondering: did this guide, deep inside, respect China’s working people, the wielders of brooms—and want my mother to have the impression that “China is silk” only because he guessed that she, from a bourgeois society, would respect silk but not brooms? Or was it maybe worse than that? Was he participating in the larger hypocrisy of a society that pretended to value brooms over silk but in reality did not?

From time to time I tried to strike up conversations with ordinary citizens, people with whom meetings had not been arranged. This was not easy. People constantly formed crowds to look at us, but kept their distance and stayed quiet. I have a vivid memory of one man—I would guess he was about thirty—who was part of a crowd but made eye contact with me. When I tried to address him personally—“What’s your name?”, “How are you?”—his lips and eyebrows contorted wildly, from what seemed to me like severe pain, so I stopped.

Children were a bit less inhibited, and plainly curious about us. On any walk of ten minutes or more on a city street we attracted a long train of them, as if we were pied pipers. I was amused to note, one day as we were walking past the gates of the Beijing Zoo, that some children who already held tickets to go see hippos and giraffes chose instead to follow us.

During one meeting with children—this was in Xi’an—a number of them gathered around us and seemed willing to talk. I asked a boy what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I want to go to the toughest place and serve the people!” He pronounced the words in a sharp, confident, high-pitched voice.

“And you?” I asked another.

“I want to go to the toughest place and serve the people!” A sharp, confident, high-pitched voice—and exactly the same words.

I asked three or four more, of slightly different ages and of both sexes. All the answers were identical. I do not believe our handlers had prepared this scene for us; it had come about in too casual a manner. And I don’t know how much of the conformity resulted from training in how to answer this question and how much may have come just from others seeing that the first boy had produced a good answer and wanting to play things safe by doing the same. In any case, it left me with a deep impression.

In the years since 1973 I have learned much, much more about how wrong I was to take Mao Zedong’s “socialism” at face value. I lived in China for a full year, from 1979-80, studying post-Mao “scar literature” and coming to realize, by talking with Chinese writers and readers, that even the denunciations that could be published in that era showed only the surface of the disastrous cruelties that had befallen China. The honesty and shrewd analysis in the writings of the journalist and dissident Liu Binyan had a tremendous influence on me.

Still, though, I remained somehow reluctant to conclude that the Communist Party of China would flat-out lie. It seems that only personal experience could teach me this lesson. In February 1989 my friend Fang Lizhi and I, and our spouses, were blocked by police on the streets of Beijing as we were headed to attend a large banquet at the invitation of US President George H.W. Bush. The Chinese leaders did not want Fang at the banquet, and ordered police to monitor and channel us through the streets long enough to make sure it did not happen. This experience surprised me, but is not what changed me. What changed me was the report on the incident that appeared a few days later from the official Xinhua News Agency and was broadcast across China. It told, in detail, a fabricated story that departed in major ways from what my own eyes had seen. Agitated, I brought the report to Fang and asked him, “How can they do this?” Fang is a kind man. He did not want to embarrass me for my naivete. He just chuckled.

A version of this essay originally appeared in The Hong Kong Economic Journal.
June 22, 2011 10 a.m.

Movies on the old and new China - New York Times

2011-06-25T20:10:00.000-03:00

People, You Will See This Film. Right Now.
Shiho Fukada
The New York Times, June 24, 2011

A movie theater in Beijing.

BEIJING — This month China’s great masses are being mobilized by their leaders for an unusual purpose. Employees at state-owned companies and at all levels of government are joining students from grade school to universities as they leave their homes, head out into the heat and do their duty: ensure the financial success of the government’s latest propaganda film, “Beginning of the Great Revival.”

The movie, which opened on Wednesday on almost all of the country’s 6,200 screens, is part of a campaign to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party next Friday. It is also playing in 29 American theaters, including ones in New York and Los Angeles.

The movie, along with its sister film, “The Founding of a Republic,” which was made for the 60th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, is an attempt to update the state-sponsored propaganda movie to appeal to younger audiences, by adding screen stars, a subplot and modern production methods. The government has stacked the deck, so success is virtually guaranteed. Government offices and schools are buying tickets in bulk and organizing viewing trips in the middle of the workday, and there are officially sanctioned movie review contests, presentations of paintings inspired by the film and group singing of classic Communist songs at cinemas.

The film claims to have a cast of 178 of the most well-known Chinese-language actors, including Chow Yun-fat and Andy Lau. It borrows stylistic cues from popular Korean soap operas and makes Mao Zedong, the Communist Party leader who died in 1976, both a romancer and a revolutionary, playing up the love story between him and his second wife. It cost $12 million to make. By contrast, just over 10 percent of movies made in China last year had a budget of more than $1.5 million.

Newspapers and television are barred from being critical of the movie, and caustic online reviews have been erased by censors. (Unfortunately for the filmmakers and the government, that edict does not cross borders; in a review in The New York Times, Andy Webster said the movie “demonstrates that mainstream Chinese cinema can be as guilty of self-indulgent overstatement as anything out of the West.)

Both “Beginning of the Great Revival” and “The Founding of a Republic” are attempts by the party to wrest the attention of a new generation away from the Internet, where opinions often deviate from the official line, said Paul Clark, a professor of Chinese culture and film at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who is a visiting scholar at Peking University.

“Movies have always been the most effective, consistent form of mass-media propaganda in presenting a party-blessed version of history,” Mr. Clark said.

The two-hour movie begins with the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty. Historical characters flash across the screen so briefly that their names appear beside them as explanations. Mao is portrayed in soft-focus lighting as a trim, dewy-eyed and idealistic young man prone to slow-motion frolicking with his beloved in the snow.

But politics take precedence. In the movie’s last scene, the theme is spelled out on the screen: “Under the leadership of the Communist Party, China has been on a glorious path of ethnic independence, liberation, national wealth and strength.” The text is superimposed on a Tiananmen Square flooded with computer-generated fans of Communism, waving red flags.

Yu Yi, 21, who was on summer break from the University of Bedfordshire, in England, and had recently joined the Communist Party, said the scenes of student protests brought tears to his eyes.

“It really made me more patriotic,” he said. “It made me glad I joined the Communist Party.”

Internet reviews have been scathing, but the censors have responded quickly and deleted or changed most of the negative responses.

Other Netizens have commented about the absurdity of the authoritarian Communist government lionizing a period of revolutions against authoritarianism (in this case, the oppressive Beiyang government).

And there is resentment among some Chinese that the film is standing in the way of summer blockbusters. Variety reported that the premieres of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” will be delayed in China.

Before “Revival” earns a certain amount in ticket sales, for example, 800 million yuan (about $124 million), “other imported films will not be shown,” Gao Jun, a Chinese movie distributor, said at a news conference at the end of May, Southern Metropolis, a Chinese newspaper, reported.

Hitting that box office figure will most likely not be difficult, given all the official help. “The Founding of a Republic” earned $65 million at the box office, the fourth-highest-grossing domestic movie of all time.

As of June 19, “Beginning of the Great Revival” has earned $18 million, and with the state buying up so many tickets, it is likely to surpass the revenue for “The Founding of a Republic.”

But whether all those purchased tickets translate into actual viewers is another matter. On the north side of Beijing, tickets were nearly sold out for a recent afternoon showing, but the theater itself was less than half full.

Most of the audience was sent there by a nearby company, which bought the tickets and gave employees half a day off to watch the film.

Chen Gang, a taxi driver waiting outside the movie theater, said he had no plans to watch the movie.

“It’s a political homework assignment,” he said. “It has nothing to do with reality.”

Adam Century and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 25, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: People, You Will See This Film. Right Now..

Don’t overestimate China’s rise - Moon Chung-in

2011-06-22T16:49:00.000-03:00

Don’t overestimate China’s rise
Moon Chung-in
Korea Joongang Daily, June 21, 2011

China cannot afford to invest power and resources for external aspirations with such preoccupations at home.

I attended the June 12-13 World Economic Forum on East Asia in Jakarta, Indonesia. China was the central focus of the meeting amid growing antagonism and a joint stand among Southeast Asian nations against China over territorial claims in the South China Sea. China said it wants to settle the dispute through dialogue, but few among Southeast Asian states were reassured.

But is the hard-headed standoff the only approach? In his recent book “On China,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger compares the intransigent rivalry between the British and Germans in pre-World War I Europe to the present tension between the United States and China.

In his concluding chapter arguing for a “balance of power” and the use of meaningful diplomacy to work out sticky foreign and economic affairs with China, Kissinger cited the “Crowe Memorandum,” authored by Eyre Crowe, a senior British foreign officer, for presentation to British Foreign Secretary Earl Grey in 1907.

The memorandum suggested that the British Empire take a hard-line approach to the recently unified German state, a policy that would eventually influence the break out of World War I seven and a half years later. “England must expect that Germany will surely seek to diminish the power of any rivals, to enhance her own by extending her dominion, to hinder the cooperation of other states, and ultimately to break up and supplant the British Empire,” Crowe argued. The conciliatory moves from moderate German statesmen, he argued, were gestures to mask ambitions for expansion and advised against any attempt to seek alliance or mutual trust between the two powers.

Kissinger expressed concern that the same power game and choices are laid out between two major protagonists in the Pacific. Hawkish policy makers in Washington are arguing that “China is surely seeking to extend its dominion and ultimately supplant the United States” in calling for actions to suppress China’s increasing global clout. He warns the U.S. against repeating the apparent European fallacy of a century ago as its relations with China cannot be a zero-sum game, and advised the two major powers to instead seek a richer “co-evolving” pattern of alliances.

His argument, based on his ample experience in dealing with China, also makes us rethink our own response to China’s assertiveness. To pose as a formidable challenge to the U.S., China must be equally competent in capabilities, motives and political will. But China today falls short of meeting these qualifications.

In capabilities, China cannot be genuinely regarded as a rich country even if it becomes the world’s largest economy in terms of gross domestic product by 2017, as the IMF predicts. Even as the world’s largest exporter and holder of foreign exchange reserves, the economy supports an enormous population of 1.3 billion people, of which a majority remain poor.

In military power, it is hardly comparable to the United States. The United States has military alliances with more than 60 countries compared with China’s one alliance with Pakistan. China cannot think of mobilizing military power on a global scale.

China should not be seen as a real threat in intentions as well. Its foreign stance is still a “peaceful” rise, as the leadership is primarily engrossed in domestic affairs of improving the wide wealth gap among the income classes and regions, dealing with corruption, and addressing resource and environmental problems. It must maintain peace with the outside world to pursue harmony within. The egocentric and hard-line view remains a muffled voice in governance.

Will we see the Chinese leader pursuing aggressive expansion in the near future? The bureaucratic leaders after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping won’t likely pursue a risky gamble on the global stage. They are too preoccupied with more urgent complexities at home - such as the growing democratic movement, a restive ethnic minority and other social unrest. China cannot afford to invest power and resources for external aspirations with such preoccupations at home.

If the international society overestimates the minority’s view and mounts an excess defensive against China, it may only end up provoking Chinese military aspirations and nationalism.

Inflated defense and debate over China’s rise can only accelerate its presence as an imminent threat. We must learn from the wise wisdom of a veteran diplomat who experienced it all.

*The writer is a professor of political science at Yonsei University.

Shanghai Express

Ian Buruna on China - Le Monde

"Le modèle chinois ébranle les certitudes américaines"

China's booming cities: lessos for Europe? - NYTimes

OPINION

What China Can Teach Europe

By DANIEL A. BELL

The New York Times, January 7, 2012

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The New York Times

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A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 8, 2012, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: What China Can Teach Europe.

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How Deng Did It

By JONATHAN MIRSKY

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA

The Rape of Nanjing - a (true historical) novel

Recreating the Horrors of Nanjing

By ISABEL HILTON

The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 2011

Jerry Bauer

NANJING REQUIEM

A version of this review appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In Harm’s Way

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Cradle of Confucianism

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China's Economic Dominance (3) - Arvind Subramanian

China's Economic Dominance (2) - Wall Street Journal

China's Economic Dominance (1) - The Economist

Why is China afraid of the Dalai Lama? - Fred Hiatt (WP)

Dissident Chinese Writer Flees to Germany - Liao Yiwu (NYT)

(Non) Democracy in China - The Economist

O modelo chines de desenvolvimento - Rubens Antonio Barbosa

American entrepreneur finds US an underdeveloped country, compared to China

Liu Xiaobo Empty Chair: a book from the New York Review of Books

China’s Other Revolution - A forum for debating the question

China’s Other Revolution - Edward S. Steinfeld (Boston Review)

90 years of Chinese Communist Party and the role of Mao Zedong

W.T.O. Says Chinese Restrictions on Raw Materials Break Rules

A Russian view of China’s development - Andrey Denisov

Malthus, Marx o mercado - Moises Naim e a China

Communisty Party of China's happy birthday: 90 years old (still counting...)

Illusion and dellusions about China - a naive American (NYRBooks)

Movies on the old and new China - New York Times

Don’t overestimate China’s rise - Moon Chung-in