Kissinger on China - James Mann (Slate)

Chinese Dreams
By James Mann
Slate, May 30, 2011

Why is Kissinger so reverential and nostalgic about China?

Henry Kissinger in China
We are now fast approaching the 40th anniversary of Kissinger's groundbreaking trip to Beijing, which began on July 9, 1971. He was the first U.S. official to set foot in China in more than two decades, and his trip marked a turning point in the Cold War. It opened the way for America and China to team up, forcing the Soviet Union to confront both of them at the same time. In the four decades since, China has emerged as the core of Kissinger's legacy. Other aspects of his diplomacy no longer seem so important as they did at the time. The Vietnam peace agreement, for which he won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, fell apart two years later. Détente with the Soviet Union didn't last. By contrast, China takes on ever-greater importance for U.S. foreign policy.

Kissinger was not only present at the creation of America's relationship with the People's Republic of China; he sees the ties as his creation and has held a proprietary interest ever since. When he has not been at the center of Sino-American diplomacy, he has wanted to be there, and in his new book, On China, the now 88-year-old diplomat does his best to command as big an audience as possible. As he looks back one last time at America's opening to China, Kissinger is not just talking to Americans. He has written this book with an eye toward an audience on the Chinese mainland as well.
The result is a nostalgic and curiously reverential account. As an author, Kissinger has many admirable qualities. He remains, by virtue of his earlier work, easily the best memoirist of any American secretary of state or president in the modern era. No matter whether one agrees with him or not, his three volumes on his eight years in the Nixon and Ford administrations stand out for their anecdotes, insights, and distinctive prose style. These same qualities are still occasionally on display in his new book. But what stands out in On China, rather than the skeptical detachment that is the Kissingerian trademark in writing about world affairs, is how little nuance the passage of years seems to have lent his views.
In this tour through Chinese history, Kissinger seems to flounder until his own entry into the drama. The opening section, which covers ancient times to 1949, has the flat tone of a unit in a college-level survey course—with what almost seems like a chapter torn out. He jumps from the end of the 19th century to Mao's revolution, passing over in a few sentences the era when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party ruled China. Kissinger argues that the Nationalist regime didn't sufficiently control the country, because it was preoccupied with fighting off both the Chinese Communists and the Japanese. Or is it that he's also in a hurry to get past what is still a sensitive subject for the Chinese Communist Party, which fought the Nationalists in the bitter civil war and sees Taiwan's current Nationalist government as a continuation of that civil war?

When Kissinger begins to revisit the era when he ran American China policy, it's striking how much his views and assumptions about Chinese leaders still seem bathed in the sense of awe that he acquired in his early trips to Beijing. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and successors like Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin are regularly depicted as wise and far-sighted. In Kissinger's version, they make few if any mistakes. Where others have argued that China erred during the Korean War or in China's 1979 invasion of Vietnam—in which the Chinese suffered astonishingly heavy casualties—or in the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, Kissinger demurs. He maintains the Vietnam incursion was still a strategic victory for China because it "succeeded in exposing the limits of the Soviet defense commitment to Hanoi." Kissinger can't bring himself to say he approved of what he called the Tiananmen "tragedy" of 1989, but he nevertheless urges understanding, as he did at the time, for Deng Xiaoping's decision to launch the violent crackdown. After all, Kissinger says, even peaceful protests can be a tactic aimed at weakening a government and demonstrating its impotence.
In the last chapters, retracing the years since he left office, Kissinger still tries to plant himself center-stage—and still pays tribute to Chinese leaders whom he portrays operating on a lofty plane well above the mundane concerns of ordinary politicians. As he compares visits to China today with those of four decades ago, he emphasizes the subtlety of the government's diplomacy, even though some of its recent actions concerning the South China Sea and even Norway (which gave Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize) seem more heavy-handed than subtle. "What has not changed significantly," he marvels, "is the meticulous preparation, the complexity of the argumentation, the capacity for long-range planning, and the subtle sense of the intangible."
Meanwhile, the Chinese people are determinedly civic-minded and public-spirited in Kissinger's portrait: "Among the many extraordinary aspects of the Chinese people," he writes, "is the manner in which many of them have retained a commitment to their society regardless of how much agony and injustice it may have inflicted on them." This is a romantic stereotype that dates back to the 1970s, when China was first opening up, and visitors would report that if they left a used razor blade in a hotel room, a hall attendant would rush down the hall to return it to them. It is out of touch with today's China, where private interests often overwhelm wider social loyalties. Not a few Chinese people fear for the safety of their food, health, or pensions precisely because of the society-be-damned greed of others who pollute, dilute, or cheat.
Kissinger's account will have no trouble passing muster with any Chinese vetters, and thanks to an increasingly affluent middle-class readership in China, that spells a potential for lots of book sales. But there is another, more charitable interpretation of Kissinger's interest in a Chinese readership. He seems increasingly anxious about where the United States and China are headed and is eager to prevent any future confrontation. In his epilogue, he recounts how the rise of Germany in the 19th century led to World War I and examines the possibility that this history may repeat itself with the rise of China. He warns about nationalistic Chinese "triumphalists" who believe the United States is in decline. And he frets about Americans who want to build up military power for what they believe to be an inevitable conflict with China.
Kissinger has been trying to convey his views to American audiences for nearly a half-century. He has generally succeeded in persuading other American presidents and secretaries of state not to stray too far from the path he set in the 1970s. This time, it appears, he seeks to reach a mass Chinese audience as well with a plea for continued cooperation with the United States. Although Kissinger admits to a degree of pessimism about the chances for success, he still offers hope: "Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality," he writes. His own view of China, however, is now four decades old, and these days new the leaders of a more assertive China seem to be taking the country further and further away from his vision. Kissinger long ago created a new reality, but now his edifice is crumbling. Perhaps it's no wonder he's nostalgic.

James Mann is author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written three books about China, including About Face: The History of America's Curious Relationship with China.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2295399/

Kissinger on China - Wall Street Journal

HE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Henry Kissinger on China. Or Not.
By BRET STEPHENS
The Wall Street Journal, MAY 21, 2011

Statesman Henry Kissinger takes a cautious view of Beijing's reaction to the Arab Spring, and U.S. relations with the world's rising power.

New York - 'What I am reflecting about now is not that I don't think I know an answer to your question," says a pensive Henry Kissinger, sitting in his spacious Park Avenue corner office adorned with signed photos of former presidents and foreign leaders. "It's that I don't know whether I choose to talk about it at this moment and in this forum. . . . And I don't mind dropping the interview and I don't mind you saying that I refused to go any further and pay the price for it."

What sort of hard-hitting question should elicit such evasiveness from the former secretary of state? When it comes to Mr. Kissinger there is never a shortage of controversial topics, from the 1970 incursion into Cambodia to the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile to the turf wars he waged with his colleagues in the Nixon and Ford administrations. But my question, which comes a few minutes into our interview, is of a milder variety: "What are the historic sources of Chinese vulnerability, and what are the current ones?"

The topic of the discussion was no accident: Mr. Kissinger's 16th book, "On China," was about to hit bookstores when we sat down to talk. He had consented to our interview—the first, he says, that he granted in connection to the book—on the condition that two-thirds of my questions be about China. I had agreed, on condition that the questions be future-leaning and go beyond the book itself. (My review of the book appeared on these pages May 12, a day after our meeting.)

Mr. Kissinger, who will turn 88 later this month and remains sprightly and intellectually as sharp as ever, seems to be in a bright mood when I enter his office. But it darkens with my first question, which concerns the treatment of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who, like Mr. Kissinger, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

"I have not read his writings," he answers. "My impression is the Chinese are extremely sensitive to the implications of the Jasmine Revolution, and that they find themselves in a position where if demonstrations develop, they know, or think they know, that the American government might be supportive so that they are probably trying to prevent any temptation from that. That's how I interpret their general crackdown."

I press on. Does he denounce Mr. Liu's treatment? "My policy on this," he replies, "is to talk to them [Chinese leaders], but my personal view is not to denounce it publicly."

I ask a more general question: What's the right—and wrong—way of raising human rights issues with the Chinese? Mr. Kissinger addresses the subject repeatedly in his book, noting that while the U.S. cannot be silent on the matter, "experience has shown that to seek to impose them by confrontation is likely to be self-defeating—especially in a country with such a historical vision of itself as China." To me, he says that the Obama administration is "doing essentially the right thing: They are stating their general view and then they're preserving another category for their private discussions." He adds that "American statesmen can be more explicit on human rights issues than they should be on pressures or sanctions."

I ask if he can explain his point a little more fully. "I'm not sure I want, really, to engage in an extended conversation on the subject," he says. "I have intervened on specific cases, and there's no question that I prefer democratic institutions. But I have not joined public denunciations in order to preserve the possibility of maintaining influence on human rights issues."

***
"Maintaining influence" has, of course, been the great hallmark of Mr. Kissinger's career since leaving government service in 1977. He has done it in various ways. He is the author of bestselling memoirs and treatises on diplomacy, along with countless magazine articles and op-eds. He is a confidante to senior U.S. government officials and a "carrier of messages," often private and highly sensitive, between them and their foreign counterparts. And he is the founder of an international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which does work for a closely held list of corporate clients.

The multiple and potentially overlapping roles have, at times, proved problematic for Mr. Kissinger: In 2002, he stepped down as chairman of the 9/11 Commission after facing calls to disclose the names of his corporate clients. At other times they have proved helpful: In 1989, he helped mediate a dispute between Washington and Beijing over the case of Fang Lizhi, a Chinese dissident who had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy. Mr. Fang eventually made it out of China and now teaches physics at the University of Arizona.

Still, it remains an open question whether, and to what extent, Mr. Kissinger's private roles influence—or inhibit—his public pronouncements. Sensing that I have exhausted his patience with my questions on human rights, I return to the subject of the Arab Spring and its relevance to China.

"I don't think the Arab Spring is necessarily a democratic manifestation, I think it is a populist manifestation," he says. "I think the . . . challenge that China faces in the political field is the impact of the changes in its economy on its political evolution."

He then pauses for a long while. "See, I don't know whether it's useful to go much further in this interview, to tell you the truth. And if I want to express myself on human rights in China, I should . . . not do it as something in response to this sort of dialogue."

Okay. Maybe we can discuss the subject Mr. Kissinger has just raised—the impact of China's economic growth on its political evolution. I ask him if he has thoughts about the argument advanced by Carnegie Endowment scholar Minxin Pei in his widely acclaimed book, "China's Trapped Transition," which contends that an autocratic China will never fulfill the promises of genuine economic reform. Mr. Kissinger has heard of neither the author nor the book, so I summarize the argument.

Mr. Kissinger resorts to generalities. "In the next phase," he says, "[the Chinese] will have to align their political reality with what has been happening in the last 20 years under the impact of reform." I try to pursue this line of questioning by asking what he makes of evidence that Beijing has been backsliding on economic reform, using the case of Google as an example. He says, "the issue of reform, of political reform, will have to be substantially up to the next group of leaders."

Here I sense an opportunity to glean something from Mr. Kissinger's famous store of acquaintances. Has he met Xi Jinping, heir apparent to current president Hu Jintao. "I've met him, yes," he says.

"And what's your impression of him?"

"You can't form an impression of Chinese leaders on that basis," he answers, "because when they rise through their hierarchy, it serves no purpose to indicate differences or even alternative directions." He adds, however, that he thinks Mr. Xi "is a more assertive personality" than the incumbent leader, and notes that he comes from a family that was a victim of the Cultural Revolution. "This," he suggests, "produces a kind of perspective that is not necessarily the traditional Chinese perspective."

Is this new perspective more nationalistic? "Nationalism will play an important role," he says.

This prompts me to ask how the U.S. and its allies should respond to China's recent spate of aggressive moves in the South China Sea, reminiscent as it is of German behavior before World War I. Once again, Mr. Kissinger pauses for the interview-equivalent of an eternity before offering, "Not that I haven't thought about this." I observe that it's the subject of the last chapter of his book.

Another long pause. "No, it's exactly what I write about in the last chapter." He then becomes almost expansive. "I think the United States has to remain part of Asia. I think the United States has to maintain relations with a number of countries that are adequate to express this, but it has to do this . . . not on the basis of a military containment policy, [but] within the framework of a cooperative option for China. Now, is it possible to do this? That is the challenge that is before us."

Inevitably—at least from my point of view—this raises the subject of Taiwan. On the matter of arms sales to the island, Mr. Kissinger says he isn't opposed to them per se, but that "over an extended period of time it will lead to a confrontation." So what, in the long term, is Taiwan's fate? Mr. Kissinger suggests negotiations with the mainland "in which the de facto autonomy of Taiwan is preserved." On the model of Hong Kong? "Certainly beyond the Hong Kong pattern," he says.

I don't get any further.

"I really think that what you should say is that you tried to get down this road with me," he advises. "I won't do it. I've written what I have to write on the subject. Let me take my beating as a result of that, and just stop it. That's a bigger news story than anything I can possibly say in an interview. I will not now discuss a confrontational strategy with China in a formal way."

***
He offers this remark at about the half-hour mark of what is supposed to be a 90-minute interview. We carry on for another desultory half-hour mainly by switching the subject to the Middle East, and Mr. Kissinger demonstrates he's perfectly capable of being lucid, discursive and incisive when he wants to be. With respect to China, however, he does make two additional noteworthy comments.

The first is personal: "I am trying to protect the option of a political relationship between the United States and China," he says.

The second is more prophetic. "Is it possible," he asks, "to achieve enough of a cooperative pattern [with China] to avoid sliding through a series of mutual misconceptions, of stepping on each other's toes, into a situation where an ultimate confrontation becomes inevitable? And looking at the fact that we have not known how to end our little wars, I have no great hope that either side would know how to end such a conflict. . . . Am I optimistic that it's going to be done? No."

The remarks hint at what may be Mr. Kissinger's fundamental view of U.S.-China relations—that they are already so fragile that it could be derailed by some candid remarks by him in a simple newspaper interview. Alternatively, he may simply have in mind his own opportunities for "maintaining influence."

One thing, at least, is clear: The day after our interview, Mr. Kissinger passed along a statement he wanted included: "I deplore the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo and I urge that he be released."

Mr. Stephens writes "Global View," the Journal's foreign-affairs column. Write to bstephens@wsj.com.

Understanding the Chinese Society - Thomas B. Gold

Foreign Policy Research Institute
www.fpri.org

UNDERSTANDING CHINESE SOCIETY
by Thomas B. Gold
Footnotes - The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center
Vol. 16, No. 1 - April 2011

Thomas B. Gold is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2000, he has also served as Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP), a consortium of 14 American universities and the British Inter-University China Centre which administers an advanced Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing He presented this address at FPRI's History Institute for Teachers on "China and India: Ancient Civilizations, Rising Powers, Giant Societies, and Contrasting Models of Development," held in March 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania. The program was cosponsored by three centers at Penn - the Center for East Asian Studies, the South Asia Center, and Penn Lauder CIBER (Center for International Business Education and Research) - and was supported by a grant from the Cotswold Foundation.
Video files of the lectures and corresponding powerpoints can be accessed here:
http://www.fpri.org/education/1103china_india/
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1601.201104.gold.chinesesociety.html

UNDERSTANDING CHINESE SOCIETY
by Thomas B. Gold

There is a curse attributed to an ancient Chinese philosopher which goes, "may you live in interesting times." (I learned recently that this curse was likely made up by an unknown foreigner and not a Chinese after all.) Yet, as I prepared this presentation about Chinese society, I could not help keeping my eyes on the unfolding political events in the Middle East, and North Africa as well as post-earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster Japan, and asking questions at the very root of Sociology: what makes social order possible? How do societies hold together, if they do, in the face of inconceivable and unprecedented breaches of their accustomed ways of doing things? How do the leaders of these societies think about and try to plan for, to quote a popular business book, "Black Swans" - highly improbable events?

So I thought I would start this presentation on "understanding Chinese society" with an exercise of trying to put myself in the shoes of China's leaders, who just completed two big political meetings-the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference-where they defined how they see themselves and the tasks ahead. They, too, were also observing and analyzing the turmoil in the Middle East, North Africa and Japan while keeping an eye on their own rapidly changing society.

What conceptual tools do China's leaders draw on to understand their own society? I see three main components:

The first is the Chinese tradition, which is both this-worldly and practical. There are two streams of note. One is Confucianism which stresses the middle way, harmonious society, knowing one's role in society and performing it well, hierarchy, mobility through education and self-cultivation, and enlightened officials who also serve as moral exemplars. The other, harder, stream is Legalism, where the ruler relies on severe laws and harsh punishments to maintain power and order. There is no idea of an impersonal legal system or concept of everyone being equal before the law.

The second component is a Leninist one-party dictatorship. This is not just a typical military strong-man dictatorship, but is a system led by the Chinese Communist Party, (in theory) a disciplined, centralized and enlightened (through the study of Marx, Lenin, and Mao) vanguard committed to leading the masses to socialism and then communism.

Third, the leaders see China as a developing country with a large rural population, much of which is still poor and concerned with ensuring the basic necessities of life. In this view, "human rights" means food, shelter, clothing, a job and health care.

So putting this together, as China's leaders see it, theirs is a large, populous developing society without a tradition of Western-style democracy, but rather a population which requires and looks to a strong central authority to provide order, set an example, and take care of their basic needs.

As they look around the world, what do they see?

They see the former socialist bloc which experienced state and economic collapse, where the communist parties lost power. The parties lost legitimacy and were undermined by the rise of civil society from below, as well as contagion and interference from the West. They now see long-time dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa being overthrown by mass movements (the "Jasmine Revolution") led by youth using the Internet and social networks. It is the twenty-first century version of the movements which brought down communism in Eastern Europe (and almost China) from 1989 to 1991.

What lessons do they draw from this? They cannot lose legitimacy; they cannot permit their people to organize outside Communist Party control, especially using the new tools of telecommunications. They must demonstrate the Party's commitment to modernization, an improving standard of living and effective leadership. Besides words, they need to keep the economy growing to provide jobs and incomes so people will be busy working and consuming to improve their material lives, and have no interest in-or time for-politics. They have to control the Internet and other sources of information about the turmoil going on outside.
And finally, they must not allow the growth of social forces outside Party control which might challenge its monopoly on political power.

At the March 2011 meeting of the National People's Congress, the chairman of the Standing Committee, Wu Bangguo, stated:
"On the basis of China's conditions, we've made a solemn declaration that we'll not employ a system of multiple parties holding office in rotation." He ruled out the possibility of separating executive, legislative and judicial powers, adopting a bicameral or federal system. "If we waver, the achievements thus far in development will be lost and it is possible the country could sink into the abyss of internal disorder."

Outsiders do not often realize or fully appreciate that China is far from monolithic and, with the rapid economic development of the past 30 years, has become an increasingly complex and difficult society to manage.

There are many forms of inequality and diversity. To tick off a list:

* Geography: China is huge with a wide range of climate and topographical conditions.

* Natural Resource Endowment, especially as regards water (the North is dry, the South is wet) and the presence of valued minerals, many of which are deep in the interior regions.

* Levels of Development, particularly between the coastal areas and the interior.

* Urban, suburban and rural residence. The hukou system still provides advantages to those with official urban residence permits.

* Income and wealth as a result of the reforms. Much of this has derived from corruption. You see conspicuous consumption at the same time as beggars living on the streets, even in the frigid Beijing winters.

* Guanxi (connections) to powerful officials and families, as well as connections to the outside world.

* Links to modern technology, such as the Internet and cell phones.

* Real and virtual links to the outside world.

* Age: This is more than just a "generation gap," because of the dramatic lurches and shifts in development strategies since 1949. Different age cohorts have been raised with different sets of tools and expectations. People in their 50s and above expected the Communist Party to take care of them while younger groups have been raised to be entrepreneurial and take initiative. Many older people have had trouble adapting to the new society's norms and engaged in noisy protests in the early 2000s.

Many of these forms of inequality intersect, with ethnicitycand gender being prime axes.

The Chinese government no longer tries to homogenize the population but to "harmonize" what it acknowledges are differing and legitimate interests. However, "harmony" has become code for old-fashioned suppression of perceived challenges, and, in popular cynical parlance, to "be harmonized" means to be subject to coercion. The leaders, especially with the events of early 2011, have become particularly concerned with order and not letting what outsiders see as minor protests spiral out of control.

Another important area of diversity in Chinese society is ethnicity. Officially, there are 56 ethnic groups, with the Han comprising 92 percent of the population. The other 55 groups vary widely by their numbers, standard of living, physical and cultural (such as language and religious) similarity to the Han, geographical location (such as remote areas or close to cities), whether or not they have cross-border brethren (such as ethnic groups in Central Asian countries as well as China; Mongols, Koreans, many of the groups in the Southern border regions); whether or not they are part of global diasporas (such as Koreans and Tibetans), and whether or not there is a strong separatist movement among them, in particular, the Tibetans and Uighurs who also enjoy a degree of international support.

March 2011 marked the fifty-second anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule and the flight of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to India, and the third anniversary of violent and violently suppressed demonstrations in Tibet against what many see as harsh Chinese rule. This also includes what is seen by some as a strategy by the Han to encourage Han migration into Tibet so that the Tibetans and their culture will be increasingly marginalized and rendered powerless. This happened in Inner Mongolia and is occurring in Xinjiang. The new Beijing-Lhasa railroad is seen by some as an instrument to speed up this process as well as to facilitate the extraction and removal of valuable resources from Tibet and the movement of troops in.

At the March 2011 meeting of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama announced that he would relinquish his political role while retaining his spiritual one. He planned to pass the political role to a new leader to be elected at the conference. He has tried to build effective institutions to survive after he has gone. He also declared that he might break with the traditional lengthy process of selecting a new Dalai Lama through reincarnation.
The Chinese leadership said this was all a trick by the Dalai Lama to install someone while he is still alive to prevent Beijing from managing the succession, as it did in 1995 with the second most powerful figure of Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen Lama. Bizarrely, the atheistic communist government has declared that the new Dalai Lama must be identified through traditional reincarnation, which they hope to manage.

There is a very active Tibetan diaspora, and the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, is an internationally revered figure, which puts the Beijing leaders in a very difficult spot as they continue to condemn him.

Another notable minority nationality is the Uighurs, one of several Turkic Muslim groups in far west Xinjiang, the area of the Silk Road. They do not have a charismatic leader on the order of the Dalai Lama but there is a foreign-based independence movement. The Chinese have made efforts to connect this with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, and some Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan and remanded to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo. There has been sporadic violence in Xinjiang as well, with July 2009 witnessing a particularly bloody episode.

Finally, turning to education, this has traditionally been seen as a route to upward mobility in China, with no barriers to students of any age who work diligently. From the dynasties through the present, China's education system has been based on rote memorization and regurgitation of approved texts. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the education system became a literal and figurative battleground, and intellectuals were violently persecuted.
With the adoption of the Four Modernizations at the end of 1978 as the guiding strategy for development, education received new emphasis and investment as the third priority after agriculture and industry, but before national defense.

China now has nine years of compulsory free education. However, this has not yet become universal and there remain problems of funding, particularly in the rural areas where officials charge illegal fees. The system has become increasingly stratified, with key schools at every level offering superior facilities. The government has dramatically expanded higher education and many universities, and some high schools, have links and exchanges with institutions abroad and are beginning to offer programs in English to attract foreign degree-seeking students.

While education provides a channel for mobility, the same sorts of inequality found elsewhere also exist in China. Students from families possessing more wealth and income, are able to provide better nutrition and health care, an environment for study, tutors, extracurricular enrichment activities, access to the Internet, foreign contacts and even study abroad, which all serve to reinforce existing inequalities. None of this is unique to China.

While Chinese students score extremely high on standardized tests and are doing well enough to test into top universities abroad, there is great concern that the traditional pedagogy-stressing memorization and teaching to the test-is not producing the kind of innovative and creative graduates able to lead China's economy into the top ranks. There are now problems of tightening labor markets even for college graduates in China. This has resulted in the so called "ant tribe" of job seekers. There are an estimated 100,000 of them in Beijing alone.

In conclusion, China is a diverse society characterized by increasing complexity and dynamic change. It is in the process of a difficult and dangerous transition with no clear end point or guidelines. The leadership watches the events unfolding in other countries with which they share many characteristics, and are concerned to maintain control and order, even if this attracts condemnation from abroad.

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Big Brother with chinese characteristics: the results are the same (or worse...)

Quando na China, eu tinha de usar um VPN, ou um provedor virtual de conexão à internet, do contrário eu simplesmente não conseguiria acessar decentemente sites e blogs fora da China, ou então me conectar a redes sociais. Seria impossível, simplesmente. E sem VPN, praticamente 70% dos clicks para acessar sites absolutamente inocentes, que não tinham nada a ver com direitos humanos, Tibete, ou qualquer outro tema sensível aos olhos do Big Brother, resultavam em redirecionamento para o Baidu, o que passa pelo Google chinês.
Claro, eu dispunha de 60 dólares para assinar um serviço estrangeiro de VPN, o que está fora do alcance da quase totalidade dos chineses.
O Big Brother continua eficiente, até o dia em que a coisa explode...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

China Tightens Censorship of Electronic Communications
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times, March 21, 2011
Editors' Note Appended

BEIJING — If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.

A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off.

He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence.

A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.

“The hard-liners have won the field, and now we are seeing exactly how they want to run the place,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst of China’s leadership. “I think the gloves are coming off.”

On Sunday, Google accused the Chinese government of disrupting its Gmail service in the country and making it appear as if technical problems at Google — not government intervention — were to blame.

Several popular virtual private-network services, or V.P.N.’s, designed to evade the government’s computerized censors, have been crippled. This has prompted an outcry from users as young as ninth graders with school research projects and sent them on a frustrating search for replacements that can pierce the so-called Great Firewall, a menu of direct censorship and “opinion guidance” that restricts what Internet users can read or write online. V.P.N.’s are popular with China’s huge expatriate community and Chinese entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars who expect to use the Internet freely.

In an apology to customers in China for interrupted service, WiTopia, a V.P.N. provider, cited “increased blocking attempts.” No perpetrator was identified.

Beyond these problems, anecdotal evidence suggests that the government’s computers, which intercept incoming data and compare it with an ever-changing list of banned keywords or Web sites, are shutting out more information. The motive is often obvious: For six months or more, the censors have prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom.”

But other terms or Web sites are suddenly or sporadically blocked for reasons no ordinary user can fathom. One Beijing technology consultant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution against his company, said that for several days last week he could not visit the Web site for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange without a proxy. LinkedIn, a networking platform, was blocked for a day during the height of government concerns over Internet-based calls for protests in Chinese cities a few weeks ago, he said.

Hu Yong, a media professor at Peking University, said government censors were constantly spotting and reacting to new perceived threats. “The technology is improving and the range of sensitive terms is expanding because the depth and breadth of things they must manage just keeps on growing,” Mr. Hu said.

China’s censorship machine has been operating ever more efficiently since mid-2008, and restrictions once viewed as temporary — like bans on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — are now considered permanent. Government-friendly alternatives have sprung and developed a following.

Few analysts believe that the government will loosen controls any time soon, with events it considers politically sensitive swamping the calendar, including a turnover in the Communist Party’s top leadership next year.

“It has been double the guard, and double the guard, and you never hear proclamations about things being relaxed,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, an investment and strategy consultancy based in Beijing, and a 17-year resident of China. “We have never seen this level of control in the time I have been here, and I have been here since the beginning of the Internet.”

How far China will clamp down on electronic communications is unclear. “There’s a lot more they can do, but they’ve been holding back,” said Bill Bishop, a Internet expert based in Beijing. Some analysts suggest that officials are exploring just how much inconvenience the Chinese are willing to tolerate. While sentiment is hard to gauge, a certain segment of society rejects censorship.

For many users, an inoperable V.P.N. is an inconvenience, not a crisis. But Internet consultants said interfering with an e-mail service on which people depend every day is more serious. “How people respond is going to be more intense, more visceral,” one consultant said.

Google began receiving complaints from Gmail users and its own employees in China about a month ago, around the time anonymous Internet posts urged people unhappy with the government to gather every Sunday. Some Gmail users found their service disconnected when they tried to send or save messages.

Engineers determined that there were no technical difficulties on Google’s end, Google said; rather, the hand of the Chinese government was at work. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond Monday to calls or faxed questions about Google’s statement.

Disrupting Web sites and Internet connections is a standard tactic in dealing with companies that fall out of government favor. Mark Seiden, an Internet consultant, said Chinese officials typically left the companies and users to guess the reason.

In the Google case, an article on the Web site of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official publication, offered a strong hint. The March 4 article, attributed to a netizen, called Google a tool of the United States government. Like Facebook and Twitter, the article said, Google has “played a role in manufacturing social disorder” and sought to involve itself in other nations’ politics.

China has treated Google as a threat for some time. Last year, Google closed its search service and redirected Chinese users to Google’s Hong Kong site after the company said China was behind a cyberattack aimed partly at Gmail accounts.

Mr. Moses, the Beijing analyst, said the latest moves further expand government control of electronic communications. “The model for this government is that every day is a new challenge and a new opportunity to show the strength of the state here,” he said. “There is clear confidence in the capability of the political authorities to maintain order.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Jonathan Kaiman and Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

Editors' Note: March 26, 2011
An article on Tuesday about Chinese censorship of digital communications began with a description of two interrupted cellphone calls, which were cited as possible examples of “a host of evidence over the past several weeks” that the authorities were increasing their efforts out of concern that antigovernment sentiment might spread from Arab countries. In one call, a Beijing entrepreneur lost his cellphone connection after he used the English word “protest” twice. In the second, a call was lost after the speaker twice used the Chinese term for protest.

The article did not point out that in both cases, the recipients of the calls were in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. Because scrutiny of press communications could easily be higher than for those of the public at large, the calls could not be assumed to represent a broader trend; therefore, those examples should not have been given such prominence in the article.

Brasil-China: dificuldades a frente - OESP

Material sobre a China, para refletir, não sei se existe algo a ser feito, uma vez que a China é quem determina o padrão do relacionamento, não o Brasil.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A China se volta para os chineses
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo,07/03/2011

O novo plano quinquenal de desenvolvimento da China, que foi referendado em outubro pelo Comitê Central do Partido Comunista e deve ser aprovado pelo Congresso Nacional do Povo no encontro anual que começou no sábado, dia 5, em Pequim, imporá uma profunda mudança de rumo na evolução da economia do país, com impactos importantes sobre o resto do mundo.
Este é o 12.º plano quinquenal chinês. Embora as projeções de crescimento neles contidas sejam geralmente subavaliadas e, por isso, desmentidas na prática, esses planos têm tido papel importante na determinação dos caminhos seguidos pela China. O quinto plano quinquenal resultou nas reformas e na abertura da economia no fim da década de 1970. Em meados da década de 1990, o nono plano transformou as estatais em empresas voltadas para a conquista de clientes ao redor do mundo, o que permitiu à China abocanhar fatias cada vez maiores do mercado internacional.
O que está sendo aprovado nestes dias "provavelmente entrará para a história como uma das iniciativas mais ousadas da China", previu o economista Stephen S. Roach, membro do corpo docente da Universidade Yale e atualmente ocupando cargo de direção do Morgan Stanley na Ásia, em artigo reproduzido pelo Estado na quarta-feira.
Serão profundas as mudanças no modelo econômico chinês, que hoje prioriza investimentos em grandes unidades industriais e em exportações. Nos próximos cinco anos, o crescimento chinês se baseará no mercado interno, no consumo e na melhoria da qualidade de vida e da renda dos chineses
As mudanças começaram a ser pensadas há quatro anos, quando o primeiro-ministro Wen Jiabao apontou o paradoxo que vivia a economia chinesa, cujo crescimento vertiginoso encobria inconsistências graves, como a instabilidade do processo, vários desequilíbrios e a sua insustentabilidade. A recessão no mundo industrializado iniciada em 2008, que reduziu a demanda de produtos da China e afetou sua economia, mostrou o lado frágil do modelo vigente. Para reduzir sua dependência do mercado externo, a China agora se volta para os chineses.
Essa será a principal característica do 12.º Plano Quinquenal, que começou a ser elaborado no segundo semestre de 2008, quando os dirigentes chineses fizeram a avaliação dos resultados do plano anterior até aquele momento. Desde então, o governo e o partido ouviram acadêmicos, políticos e um grande número de profissionais. Daí surgiram as grandes linhas, que foram novamente discutidas com diversos colaboradores e por fim submetidas às instâncias decisórias do Partido Comunista e, agora, do Estado chinês.
Para fortalecer o mercado interno, o novo plano prevê a redução da ênfase no setor industrial, que sustentou o crescimento chinês nos últimos 30 anos. Será dada prioridade para outros setores da economia, como comércio varejista e atacadista, logística e serviços de saúde.
São setores menos eficientes do que a indústria, com menor produtividade, que por isso não garantirão o ritmo de crescimento que o país mostrou nos últimos anos. Mas, por proporcionarem maior numero de empregos, permitirão que as cidades recebam mais trabalhadores originários das áreas rurais, assegurando-lhes renda mais alta. Desse modo o governo chinês pretende compensar a redução do ritmo de crescimento, com o aumento mais rápido do emprego e da renda dos trabalhadores - o que terá como resultado adicional a redução da tensão social e política.
Para conseguir um rápido aumento do consumo doméstico, o governo terá de mudar o arraigado hábito de poupança dos chineses, que, sem dispor de um sistema previdenciário confiável, poupam tudo o que podem para garantir a sobrevivência na velhice.
Mudar isso exigirá a construção de um novo sistema previdenciário, público e privado, o que representará um enorme desafio político para o governo.
Se o 12.º plano quinquenal corresponder à expectativa do governo, a China dará um forte impulso nas economias de seus parceiros comerciais. Mas reduzirá seu papel de financiador dos déficits de países como os EUA. Será outra grande mudança.

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O que esperar da visita de Dilma à China
Roberto Barth
OESP, 7/03/2011

Em sua primeira viagem para fora da América Latina, a presidente Dilma Rousseff visitará a China. Tem lógica a escolha, pois hoje os chineses já têm a segunda economia do mundo - rumando para ser a primeira, muito em breve. Por outro lado, é a maior importadora das commodities brasileiras.
A presidente embarca em abril. Na agenda estão previstas reuniões com representantes do empresariado chinês. O ministro das Relações Exteriores, Antonio Patriota, afirma que serão feitos esforços para reduzir os danos causados pelas importações de produtos chineses no mercado nacional.
Uma das propostas é negociar parcerias para ampliar as exportações de minério de ferro e aço do Brasil para a China. Para isso não haveria a necessidade da viagem dessa comitiva cara, uma vez que os chineses necessitam comprar nossa soja e nosso minério de ferro, entre outras commodities, para alimentar sua enorme população e ter acesso à matéria-prima essencial para seu gigantesco parque industrial. Vale salientar que a população da China teve um ganho enorme de renda e agora passa a demandar mais comida, item escasso num país com pouca área cultivável.
Do mesmo modo, o crescimento de seu parque industrial demanda mais e mais matérias-primas básicas, também indisponíveis naquele país. Ou seja, o Brasil passa a ser uma das alternativas mais viáveis ao abastecimento de commodities à China. Os chineses necessitam comprar aqui, não dependendo de nenhuma viagem para promover nossas vendas.
A outra explicação para essa viagem da presidente e sua comitiva é atender aos apelos do empresariado nacional para evitar que os produtos chineses prejudiquem, ainda mais, o mercado brasileiro, levando à maior desindustrialização.
Mas em 2005 foi exatamente a mesma coisa. O Ministério da Indústria da China convidou o governo brasileiro e representantes dos inúmeros setores industriais nacionais - que já naquela época se sentiam altamente prejudicados pelo surto de importação de produtos chineses - a organizarem uma missão de alto nível a Pequim. Na ocasião, seriam negociadas formas de autorregulamentação, por parte dos chineses, em suas exportações ao Brasil de diversos produtos, como forma de conciliar os interesses comerciais de chineses e brasileiros.
Vários setores industriais brasileiros sentiram-se aliviados e juntaram-se à missão, como forma de resolver esse grave problema. Tinham, com o governo brasileiro, a esperança de conseguir negociar uma solução viável para todos. O governo brasileiro esteve representado, naquela oportunidade, por inúmeros integrantes do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio (MDIC), inclusive com a participação do então ministro Luiz Fernando Furlan.
E eu estava lá.
Qual foi a nossa surpresa quando, exaustos, após mais de 40 horas de viagem aérea, fomos surpreendidos logo na primeira reunião com a informação de que o governo chinês não estava disposto a negociar nada. Dizia inclusive nem saber o que estávamos fazendo lá! Ficamos em Pequim por 11 dias, e foram 11 dias sem nenhum avanço no assunto. Fomos muito bem tratados pelos chineses, uma vez que hospitalidade é uma de suas qualidades. Mas negociar aquilo que era nosso propósito, a autorregulamentação das exportações chinesas ao Brasil, nem entrou nas conversas. Voltamos todos, inclusive o próprio ministro, sem que os chineses tivessem sequer ouvido nossas reivindicações.
Agora, com um governo novo, as esperanças de que nossos velhos problemas serão resolvidos se renovam. Todos cheios de vontade de resolver os assuntos pendentes. O ministro Fernando Pimentel, do MDIC, e sua equipe estão trabalhando arduamente para solucionar o problema das importações desleais que causam danos ao setor industrial brasileiro. Dilma tem a mesma diretriz.
Mas os chineses, inclusive seu governo, mantêm seu plano de criação de empregos via ampliação do setor industrial exportador. E, mesmo com muita hospitalidade, não estão interessados em ceder. E não têm nada a negociar conosco sobre esse assunto, uma vez que já compram do Brasil os produtos (commodities) e as quantidades que lhes interessam para suprir sua população e sua indústria.
No que está muito correto do ponto de vista deles, o governo chinês olha os interesses de sua população e segue rigidamente o excelente plano traçado há mais de 30 anos para criar milhões de empregos. Para isso, mantém sua moeda subvalorizada, concede incentivos aos exportadores, conserva os sindicatos sob seu controle, não dá nenhuma importância à preservação do meio ambiente. E também não se importa com as reclamações de governantes de outros países. Estão muito corretos em governar para a melhoria da qualidade de vida de sua população. E, nisso, têm tido muito sucesso. Aplicando essa política, chegaram à segunda economia do mundo, e, repito, logo serão a primeira.
O governo brasileiro deveria fazer o mesmo. Olhar pela população brasileira, pela indústria brasileira, pela criação de empregos no Brasil.
Aqui fica uma pergunta à presidente Dilma: o que ela espera de resultados concretos dessa viagem? Tenha a certeza de que toda sua comitiva será muito bem recebida pelos chineses, porém é preciso agir firmemente para obter resultados concretos contra esse grave problema da indústria brasileira: o comércio desleal nas exportações chinesas ao Brasil.

UM DOS FUNDADORES DA COMISSÃO DE DEFESA DA INDÚSTRIA NACIONAL (CDIB), É DIRETOR DA SUPERGAUSS PRODUTOS MAGNÉTICOS

China-Russia military cooperation - Washington Post

Military strength eludes China, which looks overseas for arms

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 25, 2010; 12:00 AM 



MOSCOW - The Moscow Machine-Building Enterprise Salyut on the east side of town has put up a massive Soviet-style poster advertising its need for skilled workers. The New Year's party at the Chernyshev plant in a northwest suburb featured ballet dancers twirling on the stage of its Soviet-era Palace of Culture.
The reason for the economic and seasonal cheer is that these factories produce fighter-jet engines for a wealthy and voracious customer: China. After years of trying, Chinese engineers still can't make a reliable engine for a military plane.
The country's demands for weapons systems go much further. Chinese officials last month told Russian Defense Minister Anatoly E. Serdyukov that they may resume buying major Russian weapons systems after a several-year break. On their wish list are the Su-35 fighter, for a planned Chinese aircraft carrier; IL-476 military transport planes; IL-478 air refueling tankers and the S-400 air defense system, according to Russian news reports and weapons experts.
This persistent dependence on Russian arms suppliers demonstrates a central truth about the Chinese military: The bluster about the emergence of a superpower is undermined by national defense industries that can't produce what China needs. Although the United States is making changes in response to China's growing military power, experts and officials believe it will be years, if not decades, before China will be able to produce a much-feared ballistic missile capable of striking a warship or overcome weaknesses that keep it from projecting power far from its shores.
"They've made remarkable progress in the development of their arms industry, but this progress shouldn't be overstated," said Vasily Kashin, a Beijing-based expert on China's defense industry. "They have a long tradition of overestimating their capabilities."
Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategic Technologies and an adviser to Russia's ministry of defense, predicted that China would need a decade to perfect a jet engine, among other key weapons technologies. "China is still dependent on us and will stay that way for some time to come," he said.
Indeed, China has ordered scores of engines from the Salyut and Chernyshev factories for three of its new fighters - the J11B, a Chinese knock-off of the Russian Su-27; the J10, which China is believed to have developed with Israeli help; and the FC1, which China modeled on an aborted Soviet design. It also told Russia that it wants a third engine from another factory for the Su-35.
How China's military is modernizing is important for the United States and the world. Apart from the conflict with radical Islamism, the United States views China's growing military strength as the most serious potential threat to U.S. interests around the world.
Speaking in 2009, Liang Guanglie, China's minister of defense, laid out a hugely ambitious plan to modernize the People's Liberation Army, committing China to forging a navy that would push past the islands that ring China's coasts, an air force capable of "a combination of offensive and defensive operations," and rocket forces of both "nuclear and conventional striking power."
The Pentagon, in a report to Congress this year, said that that the pace and scale of China's military reform "are broad and sweeping." But, the report noted, "the PLA remains untested in modern combat," thus making transformation difficult to assess.
'Could be sitting ducks'
One area in which China is thought to have made the greatest advances is in its submarines, part of what is now the largest fleet of naval vessels in Asia. In October 2006, a Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine reportedly shadowed the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier and surfaced undetected four miles from the ship. Although the Pentagon never confirmed the report, it sparked concern that China could threaten the carriers that are at the heart of the U.S. Navy's ability to project power.
China tried to buy Russian nuclear submarines but was rebuffed, so it launched a program to make its own. Over the past two years, it has deployed at least one of a new type of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine called the Jin class and it may deploy as many as five more.
The Office of Naval Intelligence said the Jin gives China's navy its first credible second-strike nuclear capability; its missiles have a range of 4,000 miles. But in a report last year, the ONI also noted that the Jin is noisier than nuclear submarines built by the Soviets 30 years ago, leading experts to conclude that it would be detected as soon as it left port.
"There's a tendency to talk about China as a great new military threat that's coming," said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. But, when it comes to Chinese submarines carrying ballistic missiles, he said, "they could be sitting ducks."
Another problem is that China's submariners don't train very much.
China's entire fleet of 63 subs conducted only a dozen patrols in 2009, according to U.S. Navy data Kristensen obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, about a tenth of the U.S. Navy's pace. In addition, Kristensen said there is no record of a Chinese ballistic-missile sub going out on patrol. "You learn how to use your systems on patrol," he said. "If you don't patrol, how can you fight?"
Anti-ship capabilities
China's missile technology has always been the pointy edge of its spear, ever since Qian Xuesen, the gifted rocket scientist who was kicked out of the United States during the McCarthy period in the 1950s, returned to China.
U.S. government scientists have been impressed by China's capabilities. On Jan. 11, 2007, a Chinese missile traveling at more than four miles a second hit a satellite that was basically a box with three-foot sides, one U.S. government weapons expert said. Over the past several years, China has put into orbit 11 of what are believed to be its first military-only satellites, called Yaogan, which could provide China with the ability to track targets for its rockets.
China is also trying to fashion an anti-ship ballistic missile by taking a short-range rocket, the DF-21, and turning it into what could become an aircraft-carrier killing weapon.
Even though it has yet to be deployed, the system has already sparked changes in the United States. In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said China's "investments in anti-ship weaponry and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific - particularly our forward bases and carrier strike groups." The U.S. Navy in 2008 cut the DDG-1000 destroyer program from eight ships to three because the vessels lack a missile-defense capability.
But the challenge for China is that an anti-ship ballistic missile is extremely hard to make. The Russians worked on one for decades and failed. The United States never tried, preferring to rely on cruise missiles and attack submarines to do the job of threatening an opposing navy.
U.S. satellites would detect an ASBM as soon as it was launched, providing a carrier enough warning to move several miles before the missile could reach its target. To hit a moving carrier, a U.S. government weapons specialist said, China's targeting systems would have to be "better than world-class."
Wu Riqiang, who worked for six years at the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation as a missile designer, said that while he could not confirm that such a missile existed, he believed weapons such as these were essentially "political chips," the mere mention of which had already achieved the goal of making U.S. warships think twice about operating near China's shores.
"It's an open question how these missiles will do in a conflict situation," said Wu, who is now studying in the United States. "But the threat - that's what's most important about them."
Morale trouble
The deployment of a naval task force to the Gulf of Aden last year as part of the international operation against pirates was seen as a huge step forward for China. The implication was that China's military doctrine had shifted from defending China's borders to protecting China's interests, which span the globe. But the expeditionary force has also provided a window into weaknesses of the People's Liberation Army, according to a new report by Christopher Yung, a former Pentagon official now at the National Defense University.
China's lack of foreign military bases - it has insisted that it won't station troops abroad - limits its capacity to maintain its ships on long-term missions. A shortage of helicopters - the workhorses of a naval expeditionary force - makes it hard for the ships to operate with one another. China's tiny fleet of replenishment ships - it has only three - doesn't give it enough capacity to do more than one such operation at a time.
China's navy, according to Yung, also has difficulty maintaining a fresh water supply for its sailors. And poor refrigeration on its ships makes it hard to preserve fruit and vegetables, something that makes for griping on board.
"The sailors during the first deployment had a real morale problem," Yung said, adding that following their mission, they were taken on a beach vacation "to get morale back up."
Empowering local commanders, considered key to a successful fighting force, is something that Beijing clearly has yet to embrace. British Royal Navy Commodore Tim Lowe, who commanded the Gulf of Aden operation for the U.S. 5th Fleet up until May, noted that while other navies would send operations officers to multinational meetings to discuss how to fight pirates, China would dispatch a political officer who often lacked expertise. The concept of sharing intelligence among partner countries was also tough for the Chinese to fathom. To the Chinese, he said, "that was an unusual point."
Tension with the Kremlin
China's military relations with Russia reveal further weaknesses. Between 1992 and 2006, the total value of Russia's arms exports to China was $26 billion - almost half of all the weapons Russia sold abroad.
But tensions arose in 2004 over two issues, Russian experts said. Russia was outraged when it discovered that China, which had licensed to produce the Su-27 fighter jet from Russian kits, had actually copied the plane. China was furious that after it signed a contract for a batch of IL-76 military transport planes it discovered that Russia had no way to make them. After receiving 105 out of a contracted 200 Su-27s, China canceled the deal and weapons negotiations were not held for several years.
Purchases of some items continued - S-300 air defense systems and billions of dollars worth of jet engines. An engine China made for its Su-27 knock-off would routinely conk out after 30 hours whereas the Russian engines would need refurbishing after 400, Russian and Chinese experts said.
"Engine systems are the heart disease of our whole military industry," a Chinese defense publication quoted Wang Tianmin, a military engine designer, as saying in its March issue. "From aircraft production to shipbuilding and the armored vehicles industry, there are no exceptions."
When weapons talks resumed with Russia in 2008, China found the Russians were driving a harder bargain. For one, it wasn't offering to let China produce Russian fighters in China. And in November, the Russians said they would only provide the Su-35 for China's aircraft carrier program if China bought 48 - enough to ensure Russian firms a handsome profit before China's engineers attempted to copy the technology. Russia also announced that the Russian military would buy the S-400 air defense system first and that China could get in line.
"We, too, have learned a few things," said Vladimir Portyakov, a former Russian diplomat twice posted to Beijing.

Nobel Peace Prize (2) - The Economist

Explain in vain

Dec 10th 2010, 8:28 by T.P. | BEIJING

TO HEAR China’s foreign ministry tell it, today’s ceremony in Oslo, in which the Nobel peace prize is to be awarded to Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned Chinese dissident, is nothing more or less than “an anti-China farce” orchestrated by “a few clowns” on the Nobel prize committee. Whatever the merits of that complaint, the Norwegians will be hard-pressed to match the atmosphere of farce that was achieved by a hastily organised ceremony in Beijing yesterday. Ostensibly, the Chinese ceremony was designed to honour the recipient of the newly established “Confucius peace prize”.

The winner was Lien Chan, a rather dowdy senior Taiwanese politician who has been at the forefront of recent efforts to improve cross-strait relations. (In November his son, Sean Lien, was shot at a political rally in Taiwan; revenge, some suspect, for his father’s work.) As will be the case in Oslo—but for very different reasons—the recipient was not on hand for the ceremony in Beijing. Indeed, a statement from Mr Lien’s office said that he had never heard of such an award and had no plans to accept it.

Unlike the Norwegians, who plan to mark Mr Liu’s absence with the understated eloquence of an empty chair, the organisers of the Confucius prize ceremony recruited a six-year-old girl as a stand-in for Mr Lien. The young Miss Zeng Yuhan (pictured above) seemed somewhat flustered by the proceedings, in which she was thrust before cameras and handed a beribboned stack of Chinese currency in the amount of 100,000 yuan, worth about $15,000.

The event’s organisers seemed flustered too, as they were able to offer only the fuzziest of answers to even the most obvious questions: just who is this little girl? What is the Chinese government’s involvement in their selection of a winner? To what extent is the prize intended as a riposte to the Nobel committee?

The Chinese government, for its part, has been singularly focused on neutralising the impact of Mr Liu’s selection since it was announced in October. In addition to scolding Norway and promising that its standing with China would suffer, it has mounted a heavy-handed campaign to deter other nations from sending any dignitaries to attend the ceremony in Oslo.

China has vastly overstated its success in this effort, citing the 100+ countries that will not attend the ceremony as proof that most of the world supports its position. In fact invitations were extended to only the 65 countries who keep embassies in Norway. Of those at least 45 have accepted. Those who have declined have done so for a variety of reasons.

At home China’s authorities have taken other steps, mounting a stern crackdown against the already beleaguered community of dissidents, rights activists and critics of the government. Mr Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest shortly after the big announcement, and an extra contingent of security forces were posted to the streets around her Beijing home on the eve of the Nobel ceremony, 7,000km away.

A number of Chinese activists have been stopped from leaving the country in recent weeks, apparently to ensure that none of them wends a way to Oslo to pick up the award on Mr Liu’s behalf. Chinese censors have been more active than usual in recent days, blocking internet news websites and foreign television broadcasts that are usually allowed in.

Mr Liu is a 54-year-old poet and literary critic with a long history of political activism, including a role in China’s massive pro-democracy movement of 1989. He was sentenced on Christmas Day of 2009 to an 11-year jail sentence on charges of inciting subversion. His crime was to have organised and publicised Charter 08, a petition that called for sweeping reform and the liberalisation of China’s stern one-party political system. The petition was launched December 9th 2008, just in time for December 10th, which is Human Rights Day—so designated because it was the date in 1948 that the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Nobel ceremony is scheduled on that date each year for the same reason.

In October, China was quick to blast the Nobel committee for seeking to make a hero out of a Chinese criminal. The award, China's foreign ministry insisted, constituted misguided interference in China’s affairs as well as a violation of China’s judicial sovereignty. China has held to that line consistently over the past two months. Indeed, it is the same rhetorical line China took in 1996, when the European Parliament awarded the Andrei Sakharov prize for freedom of thought to Wei Jingsheng, another Chinese dissident, then in prison. At the time China accused the European parliamentarians of slandering China and committing “violent interference in China’s internal affairs”. China then foresaw “damage to Sino-European relations and eventually to the interests of Europeans”.

Like the EU's ambassador to China in 1996, who tried to explain that “parliaments in Europe do not take instructions from executives”, Norway this year has struggled to convince China that the government exerts no control over the independent Nobel committee. Neither side seems any more likely to accept the other's explanation.

Nobel Peace Prize (1) - The Economist

Asia

Asia view

China and the Nobel peace prize

The empty chair

Dec 10th 2010, 19:48 by J.M. | LONDON

CHINESE leaders probably failed to anticipate the battering that China’s image abroad would suffer as a result of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. They would have expected that their boycott of the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10th would invite comparisons in the West between China and the Soviet Union, which responded with similar fury to the award of the prize to Andrei Sakharov in 1975. It is unlikely they fully realised that their behaviour would be equated even more prominently with that of Nazi Germany.
The empty chair reserved for Mr Liu at Oslo’s town hall, and the absence of any of his family members to receive the award on his behalf, made this the first such ceremony since 1936 when Carl von Ossietzky, a jailed German pacifist, was a similar no-show. Adolf Hitler refused to let him go to the ceremony. Mr Sakharov was not allowed to pick up his prize either, but his wife, Elena Bonner, happened to be abroad at the time and was able to go in his place.
China is extremely prickly about being compared with Nazi Germany. This newspaper got an earful from Chinese officials in 2001 for publishing a leader arguing that China was not suited to host the Olympic Games because “the world has no cause to honour a government that governs in this way with a sporting event intended to promote human dignity”. The Economist reminded readers of the similar position it took on the Nazis’ hosting of the Olympic Games in 1936.
Chinese officials are less touchy about Soviet analogies. Indeed, they play them up. The state-controlled Chinese media have not been bashful about casting Mr Sakharov and Mr Liu in the same light: both tools of a Western conspiracy to undermine communism (this piece, in Chinese, is typical of the genre). Never mind that Western governments, anxious to secure Chinese help with everything from global economic rebalancing to curbing climate change, have little interest in annoying China by talking about Mr Liu. China’s propaganda machinery prefers to portray the West as duplicitous.
But the propagandists probably had not fully thought through the headlines that would be created by the sweeping crackdown on dissidents since the prize was announced in October. By putting Mr Liu’s wife and numerous others under house arrest, and stopping activists from leaving the country in order to prevent them from going to Oslo, the headlines were recalibrated to reflect a comparison with 1936, not 1975 (or 1983, when Lech Walesa's wife accepted the award on his behalf, or 1991, when Aung San Suu Kyi's son took home his mother's prize). China knows that memories of Nazi Germany evoke a more visceral repugnance in the West than do those of the Soviet Union. Comparisons with Germany early in the last century are also unwelcome for Chinese leaders given their efforts to convince the world that China’s rise will have none of the same consequences that Germany’s did.
The battering suffered by the West during the global economic crisis appears to have made Chinese leaders thicker skinned. But the state-controlled media’s handling of the first “Confucius Peace Prize”, which was awarded in Beijing this week, suggests that officials remain sensitive. The Chinese press played the event down. Officials said the government did not have a hand in it (as the party-affiliated Global Times reported, in Chinese). Perhaps they might have worried that Hitler too organised a home-grown version of the Nobel prize, the German National Prize for Art and Science, in response to von Ossietzky’s award.

A China como copiadora universal...

A gana de crescimento da China
País está determinado a alcançar superioridade tecnológica de qualquer maneira
JOHN GAPPER - DO "FINANCIAL TIMES" (17.12.2010)

Viajar em um dos novos trens chineses de alta velocidade, como fiz recentemente, é experimentar o rápido avanço industrial da China.

Fomos de Nanjing a Xangai a uma velocidade com a qual o serviço da Amtrak entre Nova York e Washington pode apenas sonhar.

Caso a CSR Corporation, a companhia chinesa que construiu o trem, consiga o que pretende, os Estados Unidos poderão experimentar essa tecnologia na próxima década.

A CSR fechou acordo com a General Electric para que participem juntas, em competição com Siemens e Alstom, da concorrência para a criação de serviços ferroviários de alta velocidade na Flórida e na Califórnia.

À primeira vista, o trem de alta velocidade serve como símbolo da transição pretendida pela China, de polo fabril para economia inovadora e de alta capacitação.
O trem também serve como símbolo de outra coisa: a determinação de obter superioridade tecnológica de qualquer maneira, o que inclui tomar tecnologia ocidental e alterá-la o mínimo necessário para poder alegar que foi desenvolvida no país.
O uso dessa estratégia pela CSR causou irritação à sua antiga sócia, a Kawasaki Heavy Industries, fabricante dos trens-bala japoneses.

EXIGÊNCIA
Empresas ocidentais precisam revelar detalhes de suas tecnologias se desejam obter contratos, e depois se veem forçadas a concorrer com estatais chinesas.
Isso vem abalando a antiga fé das companhias ocidentais em que seriam necessárias décadas para que a China as alcançasse.

Nada disso é acidental. A China quer se tornar economia avançada e usa seu poder de mercado para tomar um atalho, ao "digerir" a propriedade intelectual alheia.

É difícil sentir raiva da China por estar vivendo uma fase de fiscalização pouco intensa das leis de propriedade intelectual quando tantos outros países, entre os quais os Estados Unidos, fizeram o mesmo um dia.

Mas existe uma diferença entre pirataria informal, que o governo chinês reconhece como problema e tenta reprimir, e a absorção de tecnologias com aprovação estatal.
A primeira questão envolve um setor privado agindo com exuberância descontrolada, e a segunda é um esforço oficial para permitir que o país pule um estágio de desenvolvimento industrial.

MICROINOVAÇÃO
Caso a China esteja tentando se iludir e acreditar que "microinovação" e "renovação inovadora" são tão boas quanto inovação real, correrá o risco de não realizar seu sonho de se tornar uma economia avançada.

Thomas Howell, advogado especialista em questões de comércio internacional no escritório de advocacia Dewey & LeBoeuf, diz que os Estados Unidos poderiam contestar a China por meio da Organização Mundial de Comércio (OMC), mas que mudanças são mais prováveis caso os chineses percebam que suas práticas atuais os prejudicam.

"Há um limite ao crescimento quando a inovação de um país vem de fora", disse.
Até o momento, a China não parece estar recebendo essa mensagem.

É difícil resistir isoladamente quando a China exerce controle sobre as aquisições da segunda maior economia do planeta e sobre o maior mercado mundial para infraestrutura.

E os chineses são mestres em esmagar dissidências e oferecer recompensas aos que cooperem.

Mas, a menos que as empresas ocidentais decidam resistir em conjunto, com apoio das empresas privadas chinesas, as autoridades da China não terão problemas em continuar usando a tática do dividir para governar.

Tradução de PAULO MIGLIACCI

No antigo Kazakistan chines: repressao contra uigures

China Pressed to Account for Uighurs’ Fate

By ANDREW JACOBS

The New York Times,  December 18, 2010

BEIJING — A human rights organization has called on the Chinese government to publicly account for the fate of 20 ethnic Uighurs who were deported to China from Cambodia one year ago as they awaited a determination on their asylum applications with the United Nations.
Until now Beijing has refused to provide any information about the Uighurs — men, boys, a woman and two infants — who were sent back to China on Dec. 19 over the objections of the United States, the European Union and United Nations officials. They were forcibly returned the day before Chinese Vice President Xi Jinpin arrived in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, for a visit that yielded a package of loans and grants worth $1.2 billion.
The Uighurs, who made their way to Cambodia with the help of Christian missionaries, said they were fleeing a crackdown that followed deadly ethnic rioting in the China’s far western Xinjiang region in July 2009. Many of the 197 people dead were Han Chinese migrants killed during two days of violence in the regional capital, Urumqi. An unknown number of Uighurs were also killed or injured in a brief spasm of Han vigilante attacks that followed.
Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, have long complained about Han migration to the West that they say dilutes their numbers, culture and language. The Chinese government, in turn, often accuses Uighurs of engaging in “separatism” when pressing their demands for expanded religious freedom and political autonomy.
In its only statement to date about the fate of the deportees, the Chinese Foreign Ministry suggested in February that the Uighurs had been tried or were set to face trial. “China is a country ruled by law,” Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote in response to questions sent by The New York Times. “The judicial authorities deal with illegal criminal issues strictly according to law.”
China has insisted the Uighurs were wanted in connection with the rioting, although they did not publicly provide any evidence of their involvement. In the months that followed the violence in Urumqi, hundreds of Uighurs were detained and at least nine were executed.
Human Rights Watch said they feared that those deported faced torture, long prison terms or worse. “Both China and Cambodia should be held accountable for their flagrant disregard of their obligations under international law,” Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director, said in a statement.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said 22 people initially applied for asylum in their Phnom Penh office but two disappeared before the group was handcuffed and forced onto a Chinese plane. In their statements, the applicants said they feared harsh punishment if returned to China.
“I can tell the world what is happening to Uighur people, and the Chinese authorities do not want this,” one man, a 27-year-old teacher, wrote. “If returned, I am certain I would be sent to prison.’ ”

Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee

Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee
By Debbi Wilgoren and Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 10, 2010; 7:46 AM 



The blue-and-white upholstered chair reserved for him was empty. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo Friday, jailed Chinese dissident and intellectual Liu Xiaobo was nowhere to be seen.
Yet his campaign to bring universal human rights and democracy to China was recognized at a somber and formal ceremony made more visible, in many ways, as a result of Beijing's efforts to suppress it.
"We regret that the laureate is not present. He is in isolation in a prison in northeastern China," said Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad. "Nor can his his wife or closest relatives be with us....This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate."
The audience of several hundred dignitaries, diplomats and officials responded with sustained applause and a standing ovation. An oversize portrait of Liu, 54, had been hung on the stage in the stately hall. His eyes, behind his trademark spectacles, appeared to take in the proceedings.
"Liu has only exercised his civil rights. He has not done anything wrong," Lundestad said. "He must be released."
When he finished speaking, he placed the medal and certificate normally awarded to the laureate in the empty chair upon the stage, triggering another ovation.
China blocked broadcasts of the ceremony on television and Internet sites. Just before 8 p.m. in Beijing, as the ceremony was beginning, CNN and BBC television channels went blank - as they had intermittently throughout the day. Chinese television news led their programs with stories on the latest economic figures, and new worries over inflation.
Also, some text messages containing the words "Liu Xiaobo" and "Nobel prize" were being blocked from delivery.
Chinese Internet users, or "'Netizens," tried to start an online campaign of support for Liu by changing their avatars either to yellow ribbons or empty chairs. One image being passed around online and via Twitter showed a black chair, in the shape of a human with arms and legs, and with handcuffs around the ankles.
Meanwhile, police in Beijing maintained a heavy presence outside the apartment compound of Liu's wife, Liu Xia, who has had her telephone and Internet communications cut off for several weeks, since the announcement of the prize.
The government prohibited the Lius and their family members from leaving China to attend Friday's ceremony, and barred other activists from traveling or even gathering at cafes or public places for fear that they would find a way to celebrate the occasion.
The crackdown triggered outrage and condemnation from around the world. It was the first time the award was not presented to a laureate in person since 1936, when Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist jailed by the Nazi regime, was prevented from attending the ceremony.
The absence of Liu and his family members also meant that the $1.4 million cash prize went uncollected.
Foreign embassies in Norway were warned that if they sent representatives to the Nobel ceremony, they would risk unspoken diplomatic "consequences." China broke off trade talks with Norway. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu denounced the Nobel committee members as "clowns" and accused them of "orchestrating an anti-China farce."
As of Dec. 6, the Nobel committee said, 46 countries had announced they would send representatives to the prize ceremony. Fifteen countries--China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia,Pakistan, Iraq , Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Egypt, Sudan, Cuba and Morocco--said they would stay away.
The government of Serbia had planned to boycott the ceremony in order to maintain good relations with China, but reversed that stance on Friday in the face of an outcry at home and from the European Union and said it would send an human rights official--not a diplomat--to witness the event.
"We had to affirm our relation with China and respond to Serbia's interests with regard to the European Union," Human Rights Minister Svetozar Cipliche told the Associated Press. Serbia is a candidate for EU membership.
President Obama, chosen to receive the prestigious prize one year ago, said in a statement that Liu "is far more deserving of this award than I was."
"I regret that Mr. Liu and his wife were denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony that Michelle and I attended last year," Obama said. "...The values he espouses are universal, his struggle is peaceful, and he should be released as soon as possible."
Liu was jailed after authoring Charter '08, a pro-democracy manifesto that was published Dec. 10, 2008 and has since been signed by more than 10,000 people inside and outside China.
Obama said Liu "reminds us that human dignity ... depends upon the advance of democracy, open society, and the rule of law."
Scores of activists, lawyers and professors have been prohibited from leaving the country in recent days, or placed under house arrest, with their telephone and Internet lines cut. As the Nobel ceremony drew closer, some were also told not to speak to reporters.
The Chinese government continued its furious assault on the Nobel committee in the state controlled press on Friday. The lead headline in the Global Times said; "Beijing firm on Nobel." The China Daily lead story claimed: "Most nations oppose peace prize to Liu."
Activists said the crackdown has had one unintended, opposite effect - that of underscoring the need for political reform that Liu was awarded the prize for championing.
"The more people are barred from leaving the country, and the harder the government works to stifle news of the Nobel ceremony domestically, the more meaning the event takes on for the curious ordinary Chinese," Renee Xia, the international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said in an e-mailed statement.
Wilgoren reported from Washington. Richburg reported from Beijing.
(See other Nobel laureates, including Poland's Lech Walesa and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, who were prevented from receiving their prizes in person). (Read about how Chinese media have demonized Liu Xiaobo.)

THIS STORY

• Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee
• Q&A, 2 p.m.: Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo: China clampdown
• Statement by President Barack Obama on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize

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