China factor makes Asia volatile

Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri
The Statesman, 21 October

The closure of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of China as a major power in Asian affairs. This has been the result of its well-orchestrated post-Cold War twin strategy of building its power projection capabilities yet, at the same time, seeking engagement and friendship ~ which it regarded as a tactical input towards its envisioned goal of a great power status. A great power profile, Beijing’s leaders felt, was imperative for fulfilling its multi-faceted political, economic and military ambitions. And it is with this aim in view that China participated in global regimes like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). While it made a diplomatic offensive to engage its Asian neighbours, it went out of its way to perk up its bilateral relations with once “hostile” (the Chinese version of the term “hostile” also means “rival”) states like Russia, Japan, South Korea, and the Asean member states. It also made a desperate attempt to earn international credibility by participating in various international and regional multilateral fora thus trying to show a humane face to its armed forces. These efforts include publishing its defence spending, sending military personnel to six UN peacekeeping task zones in West Asia, Iraq and Kuwait, West Sahara, Cambodia, Mozambique and Libya. But despite all this, Beijing could hardly allay fears and misgivings amongst its Asian neighbours. Therefore, the strategic scenario in Asia remained as it was before the 1990s.

In fact, the China factor remained a source of concern to many states in Asia, particularly to those in the periphery of its borders. With many of these states Beijing’s relations have been far from friendly in the past and some bilateral disputes still remain unresolved. These states have every reason to be alarmed about China’s strategic intentions. In sheer size the Chinese military is awesome. With more than 3 million strong People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its huge military-industrial complex, China’s military system has no peer in the world. Obviously, this is a significant factor in the security and strategic calculations of other states in the region with a direct impact on their defence expenditure and arms-upgrading initiatives. Moreover, in the Asian strategic context, China’s nuclear inventory, including its ballistic missiles give it an edge over any other country in Asia. China’s Army, Air Force, Navy and missile force ~ each of them the largest in the continent ~ have mitigated many of the drawbacks stemming from structural and technological obsolescence confronting the Chinese military system. Although the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union has been a major setback to China in terms of ideological and systemic stability, it has significantly reduced its threat perception posed by the second most powerful global military power in the world. The Sino-Soviet dispute had long been a thorn in the flesh of Beijing. Somewhat relaxed, China now concentrated on not only economic development but also modernisation of its military capabilities. The nature of the military modernisation programme considerably heightened tension in the neighbouring states of China. This, in conjunction with Beijing’s readiness to use military force to bolster its domestic political goals and suppress all vestiges of opposition to it, as demonstrated by the brutal killing of pro-democratic agitators in June 1989 as well as its well-calculated military forays to secure territorial claims, or foreign policy goals, makes China an uncertain and volatile factor in the Asian strategic scenario.

Here it must be borne in mind that China holds the unique distinction of being a country that shares common borders with the largest number of nations. These nations are: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrghzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, North Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal. It also shares its maritime borders with Taiwan and Japan. This list can be further extended by including China’s adversaries in the unsettled maritime boundaries in the South China Sea which is the main focus of China’s military modernisation. China has fought wars with the USA in Korea (1951-53), India (1962), former Soviet Union (1968) and with Vietnam (1978-79). China has also been charged by various other neighbouring countries of giving not only support but also arms to local insurgents and military juntas amounting to blatant interference in their internal affairs. It has also been accused of violating international treaties to which it is a party by exporting certain prohibited military weapons and technologies. This track record does not assure its neighbours of peaceful coexistence with the Chinese dragon. It is, indeed, disquieting for many countries in Asia that the Chinese are still sunken in the “Middle Kingdom” syndrome – a sense of racial supremacy and expect all other nations to “kowtow” to it. In fact, the national pride of the Chinese has its root deep in a militaristic ethos and a history of external onslaughts, internal intrigues and changing regimes. This national mindset is essentially hegemonic and can never be conducive to a stable and balanced security paradigm.

China’s export of arms and military technologies to other countries merits a little elaboration. It is no longer a secret that Beijing exported almost all kinds of missiles, including its DF-3 (or CSS-2) intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons related know-how to Pakistan (it is widely believed that Pakistan’s Ghauri missile is a replica of China’s Deng Fong (eastern wind), huge arms to the Khmer Rouge that perpetrated a virtual genocidal ultra-left campaign in Cambodia in 1991, to the military regime in Myanmar beginning 1990 and to both Iran and Iraq during the Gulf conflict All this underlines Beijing’s destabilising strategy in Asia as a whole.

After the Gulf War came to an end, the Chinese leadership felt the necessity to revise its strategic concepts which resulted in the issuance of a “new operation decree” by Jiang Zemin in his capacity as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). This change came about after a long discussion in various forums, including the Liberation Army Daily. The new decree emphasised, for example, that “the basic task of warfare should be to safeguard the territorial integrity and reunification of the motherland. Offensive warfare should be the main pattern of military action and mobile warfare can play a vital role in realising strategic objectives. In waging local warfare under high-tech conditions, due to the features of high weapon efficiency, unsettled frontiers, and fast changing operational patterns, it is absolutely imperative to maintain a high level of alertness and force mobility in order to get an upper hand in battlefield initiative. Such thinking brought about some significant attributes to the Chinese strategic planning: all military campaigns will be offensive; the campaigns will be swift, stunning to the enemy, simultaneous operation by the maximum use of the army, airforce and, if needed, the navy; the timing of the operation will be bases on advanced and accurate information and intelligence and, above all, the first strike should be localised. Obviously, the neighbouring countries will ignore the implications of this strategy at their peril.

Clarifying the importance of this “new thinking” General Fu Quanyou said: “Operation decrees gives a new dimension to the capabilities of our armed forces. The existing operation decrees were promulgated in the mid-80s. Since then, far-reaching changes have taken place around us and we must now look afresh at our strategic perception. This perception demands our armed forces to remain in foolproof preparedness for any eventuality. Our enemies must not surprise us. We will surprise them. We must defeat them at the shortest notice and to this end in view, we must demonstrate our mastery over military technologies. And it is exactly for this reason that we must give our close attention to further modernisation of our military system.”

China’s military modernisation is far more complex than what normally meets the eye. One of the basic reasons for this complexity is the fact that the PLA is not only an all-encompassing monolith comprising the army, the navy and the air force, but also the armed police and every other ingredient of external and internal, even provincial, security. It is not an army of the state. It is an army of the Communist Party. However, in terms of power equations in China, the party, the PLA, and the state work more as separate, independent entities that coordinate as they revolve around their “Great Leaders” who often hold multiple offices and depend more on personal loyalties than official channels in which case “power” very often flows out of the barrel of a gun.

The “new operation decree” and its clarification by General Quanyou are no music to the states not only in China’s close periphery but also other states of Asia within the range of China’s ballistic missiles. The power imbalance resulting from China’s “offensive” military posture and “military modernisation” makes the strategic scenario of the continent of Asia not only increasingly variable but also volcanic.

The author is a senior fellow in International Relations at the University of London. He has recently authored Leftism in India 1917-1947

Understanding China

Subroto Roy
The Statesman, 22 October

The most important factors explaining China’s progress since the deaths of Mao Zedhong and Zhou Enlai have been the spread and quick absorption of modern Western technology under conditions of relative peace and tranquillity. The “capitalist road” came to be taken after all and the once-denounced Liu Shaoqui was posthumously rehabilitated by his shrewd old friend Deng Xiaoping. To be sure, the new technology itself has combined with democratic hatred felt by young Chinese against the corrupt elitist police-state gerontocracy, and this produced first a Wei Jingsheng and Democracy Wall and later the Tiananmen Square protests. There have been also in recent years many thousands of incidents of peasants resisting State-sponsored brutality, fighting to prevent their lands being stolen in the name of purported capitalist industrialisation, in an economy where, as in India, land is an appreciating asset and the paper-currency remains weak because inflation by money-printing is the basis of public finance. China’s multitudinous domestic tensions continue to boil over as if in a cauldron, and it seems inevitable Chinese Gorbachevs and Yeltsins will one day emerge from within the Communist Party to try to begin the long political march towards multiparty democracy and a free society ~ though of course they may fail too, and China will remain condemned to being a dictatorship of one sort or other for centuries more.

Absence of war

What has been seen in recent decades is the relative absence of war. The last military war the Chinese fought was a month-long battle against fellow-Communist Vietnamese in 1979, after Vietnam had run over and destroyed the Chinese (and Western) backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Before that, fellow-Communists of the USSR were fought in a border war in 1969. Before that was the border-war with India in 1959-1963 and occupation of Tibet 1950-1959.

The really savage, fierce large-scale fighting in 20th Century Chinese history was seen in the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, the Civil War of 1945-1949 and the Korean War of 1950-1953. The occupation of Tibet and fighting against India resulting from Tibet’s occupation were really, from a Chinese Communist point of view, merely light follow-ups to those major wars of the Mao-Zhou era, especially fighting the USA and UN in Korea. Peaceful Tibet and naïve non-violent India stood no chance against the aggressive highly experienced Mao-Zhou war-machine at the time.

It may even be that Mao could live only with incessant external tumult ~ after fighting military wars, he orchestrated domestic conflicts in the Little and Great Leap Forward of 1949-1963 and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1964-1969, all among the failures of a cruel ill-educated man who led his people into social, political and economic disaster from which trauma they have been slowly recovering over the last thirty years.

Today Communist China’s military is geared to fight the non-Communist Chinese of Taiwan in a continuation of the Civil War. It seems unlikely there will be an actual invasion for the simple reason that Taiwan, though much smaller, may not suffer eventual defeat but instead inflict a mortal wound upon invading forces. Mao succeeded in driving Chiang Kaishek across the Taiwan Straits but it is post-Chiang Taiwan that displays the model of how strong, prosperous, democratic and self-confident Chinese people really can strive to be in the modern world. Everyone agrees Taiwan and China must one day unite ~ the interesting question is whether Taiwan will get absorbed into China or whether China shall take Taiwan as its new model! Just as Liu Shaoqi had the last word over Mao on the question of taking the capitalist road, Chiang Kaishek may yet have the last word over Mao on the best constitutional method for modern China’s governance.

Peculiarly enough, China’s Kuomintang and Communists were both allies of Russian Bolshevism (not unlike India’s Congress Party and Communists). Sun Yatsen’s collaboration with Comintern’s founders began as early as 1921. By 1923 there was a formal agreement and Stalin sent Gruzenberg (alias Borodin) to China as an adviser, while Sun sent many including Chiang to Russia on learning expeditions. “In reorganising the party, we have Soviet Russia as our model, hoping to achieve a real revolutionary success”, said Sun hopefully. But by March 1926, Sun’s successor Chiang, had begun purging Communists from the Kuomintang-Communist alliance; in July 1927 Borodin returned to Russia after failing at reconciliation; and by July 1928 Chiang had unified China under his own leadership, and Moscow had repudiated the Kuomintang and ordered Chinese Communists to revolt, starting the Civil War and instability that invited the vicious Japanese aggression and occupation.

China’s problems today with Taiwan and with Tibet (and hence with India) will not come to be resolved until China looks hard in the mirror and begins to resolve her problems with herself. No major country today possesses a more factually distorted image of its own history, politics and economics than does China since the Communist takeover of 1949. “Protect the country, destroy the foreigner” was the motto of the Boxer revolts in 1900, a natural defensive reaction to the depredations and humiliations that Manchu-dynasty China suffered at the hands of the British, French, Germans, Russians, Japanese etc for more than a century. The Boxer motto seemed to implicitly drive Mao, Deng and his modern successors too ~ hence the “One China” slogan, the condemnation of “splittism” etc. But the ideology Mao, Liu, Deng et al developed out of Stalin, Lenin and Marx seems base and stupid when it is unsentimentally compared to the great political philosophy and ethics of ancient China, which emerged out of wise men like Mo Tzu, Meng Ko (Mencius) and the greatest genius of them all, K’ung Fu Tzu, Confucius himself, undoubtedly among the few greatest men of world history. India has not been wrong to acknowledge Outer Tibet as being under China’s legal suzerainty nor in encouraging endogenous political reform among our Tibetan cousins. The Anglo-Russian treaty of 1907 undertook that Tibet would not be dealt with except through China, and the Indian Republic has been the legal successor of British India. Lhasa may be legitimately under Beijing as far as international relations goes ~ the more profound question is whether Beijing’s Communists since 1949 have not been themselves less than legitimate, and if so whether they can now transform themselves in the post Mao-Zhou era through good deeds towards greater legitimacy.

The root problem

The root problem between China and India has not been the Tibet-India border which was almost always a friendly one and never a problem even when it remained imprecise and undefined over centuries. The root problem has been the sheer greed and aggressiveness of Chinese Communists ~ who now demand not merely Aksai Chin but also a minimum of some 2000 sq km of Tawang and Takpa Shiri in Arunachal. The CIA’s 1959 map of the region, which would be acceptable to the USA, UK, Taiwan and the international community in general as depicting the lawful position, shows the Communist Chinese territorial claim to be baseless and Indian position to be justified.

Nehru’s India was naïve to approach the Mao-Zhou Communists with the attitude of ahimsa and a common Buddhism. But Mao-Zhou Communism is dead, and the Deng capitalist road itself has lost its ethical way. What India and the world need to do now is ask China or help guide China to find her true higher self. China’s Tibet problem and hence border-dispute with India would have been solved peacefully by application of the ways of great men like Confucius, Mencius and Mo Tzu, who are and will remain remembered by mankind long after petty cruel modern dictators like Mao, Zhou and Deng have been long forgotten. Why China’s Communist bosses despise Taiwan may be because Taiwan has sought to preserve that memory of China’s true higher self.

The author is Contributing Editor, The Statesman

China’s urgent clean-up act

The Chinese Communist Party’s congress that is going on now will shape the country’s policies on a variety of fronts. In the near-term, there is President Hu Jintao’s pledge to wean the economy off its dependence on exports and to expedite its climb up the technology ladder.

In the medium-term, there is political succession and relations with Taiwan. And in the very long-term, there is China’s - and the world’s - environment. China, Hu said, was determined to shift from a growth-at-all-costs trajectory to a more “balanced and sustainable” model of development. The world wishes him well - sincerely and prayerfully.

“China’s rapid development, often touted as an economic miracle, has become an environmental disaster,” writes Dr Elizabeth Economy in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. Chinese leaders have acknowledged that is so. “The economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace,” said Pan Yue, a vice-minister of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, in 2005. The Chinese government has announced a number of “green” measures over the past two years, but the situation has hardly improved. The primary reason seems to be that the central government - whose sincerity on this issue cannot be doubted - has had difficulty convincing provincial and local governments to heed its environmental mandates. One hopes Hu’s highlighting the environment in his address to the CCP congress will help bring the provinces on board.

By 2030, China will relocate 400 million people from rural areas to urban centres. Half of all the new buildings that will come up in the world over the next 25 years will be built to accommodate these millions. The air-conditioners, refrigerators and other assorted household items they will use will result in each consuming three-and-a-half times more energy than a typical rural dweller.

In the meantime, by 2020, China will have 130 million cars; and by 2040, even more cars than the United States. When one takes into account that China derives 70 per cent of its energy needs from coal and that it typically uses six to seven times more energy to produce a dollar of output than do developed economies, the extent of the calamity that may engulf China and the world becomes clear. And one has not even mentioned the problems posed by rampant desertification, polluted rivers, depleted ground water reserves and what not.

The Chinese people have as much right to become rich as do Americans, Europeans or Japanese. For their own sakes, as well as the world’s, one hopes they don’t choke before they become rich.

The Straits Times/ANN

Behold the power and glory that is China!

N D Batra
The Staesman, 17 October

Earlier the salesman pitch used to be: “You cannot afford not to be in China.” But now corporate CEOs are so eager to apologise to China for its own egregious behaviour.

Last month Mattel’s executive vice-president Thomas A Debrowski delivered a well-structured diplomatic apology: “Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologises to you, the Chinese people, and all our customers who received the toys.”

It is just like a rape victim apologising to the rapist: Pardon me for tempting you, sir.

Cleverly staged mass media propaganda and lobbying by people in high places, including some of the top CEOs of major US corporations and university professors, has helped the Chinese authorities in blurring facts with fiction, creating the perception of China’s relentless and inevitable rise as a global superpower. China fascinates corporate America with its myth of bountifulness but more so with its ruling party’s collective mind that controls the obedient masses that produce cheap goods for American markets and whose 1.3 billion worker-consumers would one day buy every branded product made in the United States.

You have heard the drumbeat, repeated ad nauseam, which China has come to believe that since Americans cannot do without its cheap goods, so why to worry about intellectual property thefts, currency manipulation to fuel exports, humongous trade surplus, defective toys, and tainted food products.

Consider, for example, 2008 Olympics, which the **Wall Street Journal** childishly put it as an event “to refashion the Olympics from a sports and merchandising extravaganza to an engine of political and social change.” That’s expecting too much from an organisation like the IOC that has been paying little attention to its own widespread problems, bribery scandals and drugs, for example.

If human rights were the deciding factor in determining the choice of the host city for the Games, Moscow under the Soviet Union and Berlin under the Nazis would not have been selected to host the Olympics.

China will be showcasing the Games in spite of its abominable record of suppression of human rights of the people of Tibet, the followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, political dissidents and scholars rotting in its jails without recourse to a fair trial.

In an Op-Ed piece in **The New York Times**, Slavoj Zizek wrote last week that in Tibet, the Chinese authorities “in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonisation. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks... in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States.” He forgot to mention gambling casinos, drugs, booze, and obesity.

Doing business with China is more important than human rights, though Americans along with rest of the world go on paying lip service to the problem. Trade and the Olympics had no civilising effect upon the Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; therefore, to expect a miracle to happen in China because of the Olympics in 2008 or increasing international trade is puerile and silly. Rising prosperity would not force China’s Communist Party to give up its monopoly over power and become democratic. Since Deng Xiaoping took the road to capitalism, replacing communist brutality with capitalist brutality, about three decades ago, China’s economy has been opening up and growing rapidly with its gross national product (GNP) rising to more than two trillion dollars.

The rate of annual economic growth has remained above 9-10 per cent. Made-in-China goods, apple juice, toys, shoes, electronics, and even golf clubs and handguns are found in every shopping mall of the world. Huge economic benefits are expected from the 2008 Games because it has necessitated an investment of billions in infrastructure and information technology to modernise and showcase Beijing for the events. Millions of tourists who would pour into China, perhaps take a train to Lhasa and visit the Three Gorges super-dam, nonetheless, are expected to remain silent observers.

The Deng Xiaoping market economy revolution unleashed China’s vicious capitalist energies, but not without the help from the outside world, especially the United States, which magnanimously opened its markets to China. Today China is a healthier, better-fed and better-educated nation than most other developing countries but it remains a closed society ensconced in pollution. Who needs freedom? That’s why George W Bush never preaches freedom to China though he repeatedly asks that it should let its currency rise.

China feels that it can compete with the best, but can it tolerate the noise and chaos of an open society like the multicultural and multiracial United States, where the people demand accountability from their political leaders?

Beijing with the help of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco has been trying to expand its control into the digital domain and expects to have the same control over cyberspace as it has over Tibet. The Internet might bring about tremendous political upheavals in China, so be warned: Don’t move my cheese.

Large centralised political systems break down due to internal pressures triggered by communications technology, unless they have built-in capabilities for adjustment, which China does not have at present. And so it is difficult to say what might happen in China in the age of the Internet, satellites, cell phones and hosts of other wireless, digital, and interconnected sensing devices that are becoming available. China wants to control the uncontrollable, the digital generation swapping billions of text messages on cell phones, the generation that could self-organise itself into a smart mob. Look at Myanmar’s recent Buddhist monk uprising, which must be giving the Chinese rulers sleepless nights.

The authoritarian regime is getting ready to open its doors, skies, and cyberspace to a worldwide audience during the 2008 Olympics. But will it be able to close the skydome once the crowd is gone? Yes, of course, with the help form corporate America, which one day might become a dancing bear for China, if others follow Mattel’s obsequious behaviour?

(Dr ND Batra is working on a new book, This is the American Way)

Shaping the future of China at a challenging time

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 15 October

The directions and policies worked out by the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will be of great interest to the whole world. The leaders elected to the new Politburo will determine the country’s political and economic course at a momentous time.

The leadership of the world’s most populous country will gather today behind closed doors at the Great Hall of the People on the western flank of Tiananmen Square to begin a week-long meeting. This gathering — the most consequential of its kind in half a decade — will be the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, arguably the world’s single most powerful political party.

Towards the end of the meet, the new top-level leadership of China represented by those who are either able to retain their places in, or find themselves newly elevated to, the influential Political Bureau of the party will emerge on to the stage from behind a curtain. While President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are assured a place on stage for a second five-year term, speculation over the composition of the rest of the Politburo is what has veteran China-watchers at home and abroad caught up in a frenzy of tea leaf reading.

The group of men (there are few women in the top echelons of political power in China) that will be dramatically revealed at the end of the week will also be the ones to determine the political and economic course that China will take in the next half-decade and beyond. The actions and decisions of these leaders will exert a profound influence not only on the lives of 1.3 billion Chinese but increasingly beyond national borders, on the wider world. Attention will particularly be focussed on those individuals who are likely to replace the current “fourth generation” of politicians when their term comes to an end in 2012, at the 18th National Party Congress.

The congress will also be a test for how far the current President Hu Jintao is able to re-staff the Politburo with his own supporters. Analysts say that for the last five years Mr. Hu’s room for manoeuvre has been cramped by the presence of a group in the politburo loyal to his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. Unlike Mr. Jiang, Mr. Hu has made a more just society rather than untrammelled economic growth the rhetorical cornerstone of his administration. However, despite developing an agenda that clearly differentiated him from the previous leadership, the consensus among experts is that the President’s hands have been tied when it came to actual implementation of his ideas.

Whether or not Mr. Hu will at last be able to shake off the shadow of his powerful predecessor will also determine his chances of success at pushing through his own chosen candidate to take over as leader of the party and country after 2012. If Mr. Hu is able to achieve this, it will be the first time a future leader of the CCP will be chosen by someone who is not a veteran of the Long March of the 1930s. Mr. Hu himself had the blessings of Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s economic reforms and paramount leader of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, Mr. Hu like Jiang Zemin before him lacks the political capital and stature of former leaders like Mr. Deng or Mao Zedong. His ability to anoint a leader of his choice is thus constrained.

Over the last five years, Mr. Hu has had to develop a style of governing based on consensus-building and compromise among what analysts say is a far more divided and fractious power elite than appears on the outside. Unlike in previous times, the choice of this new generation of leaders is thus far from a foregone conclusion. There are real choices to be made and much will depend on what those choices are.

Currently there are a number of senior party officials in their late 40s and early 50s. Each of them has a reasonable chance of taking his place among the fifth generation leadership. Analysts in China have divided them broadly into two groups: the ‘elitists’ and the ‘popularists.’ The former are, in the main, party ‘princelings’ or those with strong familial links to the party. These include the Shanghai party secretary, Xi Jinping, and the current Trade Minister, Bo Xilai, whose fathers were well-known party leaders.

The careers of the majority in the ‘elitist’ camp have been spent in the booming eastern coastal regions of China or in the central government in Beijing. They are, on the whole, comfortable with the western world and tend to speak fluent English.

The ‘popularist’ camp, on the other hand, which is the group Mr. Hu reportedly favours, is represented by people like Li Keqiang, the party secretary of Liaoning province, and Wang Yang, the Mayor of Chongqing municipality. These are men who have spent their careers away from the prosperous seaboard, in the less developed, western regions of China and have worked their way up party organisations like the communist youth league. The two groups thus represent distinct socio-political and geographic constituencies.

Both Mr. Xi and Mr. Li are widely expected to be promoted to the all-powerful nine-member standing committee of the politburo, with Mr. Xi outranking Mr. Li by a wafer thin margin. Which group is ultimately victorious in the quest for leadership will be critical in determining China’s future. The country is currently at a crossroads. In the coming years, the CPC will have to confront a series of formidable, seemingly paradoxical, challenges.

The contours of these challenges have already become clear during Mr. Hu’s first term in office. They include developing a more inclusive and just society by sharing the fruits of economic growth more equitably and narrowing the widening chasm between the urban rich and rural poor on the one hand and the wealthy coastal areas and underdeveloped interior provinces on the other.

Mr. Hu has thus already identified what he calls the development of a “harmonious society” as necessary for the social stability that is key to continued party rule. However, Beijing is also aware that any substantial slowdown in economic growth could hurt party legitimacy as well.

Another issue that the leadership must grapple with is the imperative of healing the serious environmental degradation China has suffered as a result of the vast scale and rapid pace of its industrialisation. Drawing up a cost and balance sheet between the benefits and legitimacy derived from delivering growth and the environmental fallout will not be easy.

Also unresolved is the particularly complex question of political reform. The CPC has declared that it is its intention to build “democracy with Chinese characteristics.” In other words, it will be the leadership’s quest to attempt a reconciliation of continued one-party rule with greater democratic participation. The two main planks of this project are a gradual increase in intra-party democracy and the development of the rule of law. The idea is that citizens will be given legal rather than political rights, so that although multi-party democracy remains firmly off the agenda, the average Chinese will eventually be able to use the courts as a means to protect their rights.

None of these challenges is straightforward. Some of them, notably the issue of one-party democracy, involve an experiment that is unique in world history. Moreover, the country’s domestic complexities need to be redressed against the backdrop of an increased Chinese presence and influence in world affairs. China is already the world’s fourth largest economy and is set to become the world’s largest trading entity within a few years. Global economic growth is thus steadily more dependent on China’s performance.

Beijing’s actions have also emerged as a significant influence on multilateral efforts to address a range of concerns from the nuclear issue in North Korea to the recent protests and subsequent crackdown in Myanmar. The stance that China’s new leadership takes towards issues of a global and regional nature will be critical in determining their eventual outcome.

When the final line-up of the Politburo is announced later this week, a group of truly global leaders will be revealed. In their educational and family backgrounds, ideological leanings, past achievements and personalities will lie the clues to how China is likely to evolve at this critical juncture in the country’s history. The strategic and diplomatic establishment in India would do well to take cognisance of this fact.

Silent struggle in Beijing - Communist Party Congress May Test Hu Against Jiang

Rajinder Puri
The Statesman, 13 October

China’s Party Congress is held every five years. The 17th Party Congress will start on Monday and end next Friday. China’s President gets two five-year terms. At the end of his first term the Party Congress chooses his successor who is groomed for five years before becoming the President himself. The 17th Congress should indicate President Hu Jintao’s clout in the remaining five years of his tenure. A clear signal may be provided by the choice of his successor to be anointed in 2012. There is dissension about who it should be. Former President Jiang Zemin is apparently opposing Hu’s choice of successor.

Jiang was considered marginalized after he relinquished the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission (CMC). But Hu’s drive against corruption, purging Jiang’s favourites, indicated that a power struggle continued. Most purged victims were identified with the Shanghai group, closely linked to Jiang. This group had exercised unfettered power during Jiang’s tenure.

Respective nominees

Hu is reportedly backing Li Keqiang, 52, the top party official in Liaoning province as his successor. Jiang is backing the new party leader in Shanghai, Xi Jinping, 54. Xi is a scion of the Shanghai group. This group has traditionally neutralized the authority of Beijing. If Hu fails to get his man in, it would greatly undermine his authority and make him a virtual lame duck.

Western observers believe that the Hu-Jiang dissension is a power struggle unrelated to policies. This is assumed because there seems broad consensus on Hu’s stated policy of creating “the harmonious society” through improving health and social services, and by reducing the vast income disparities between cities and villages.

This apparent consensus could be misleading. There are serious divisions between Hu and Jiang regarding not only domestic priorities but also foreign policy.

Shanghai represents China’s affluent south and its overseas-linked coastal belt. Beijing worries about the poorer north, about rampant corruption among party officials in provinces, and about China’s increasingly exploited and rebellious peasantry. Chinese farmers, with tacit consent of Beijing, are expected to put forward 1000 petitions in the Party Congress.

Alarming conditions in the interior impelled Hu’s crackdown against corruption targeting Jiang’s loyalists. The most prominent among them was Chen Liangyu, the powerful CPC Shanghai party chief who was disgraced and arrested for corruption in September 2006. He was one of the closest allies of Jiang Zemin.

Differences between Hu and Jiang regarding foreign policy are equally significant. It was under Jiang that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exponentially expanded business operations in the US, got involved in the narcotics and illegal arms trade, indulged in nuclear proliferation, and abetted insurgency and terrorism in and among different nations. This created powerful vested interests in the army and in the party. That is why it remains unclear how much control Hu actually exercises over the PLA.

Mixed signals from China in the immediate aftermath of North Korea’s nuclear test, and China’s claim to all of Arunachal Pradesh despite earlier assurances of not disturbing settled populations, do indicate possibility of a rift at the top in Beijing.

The outcome of the Hu-Jiang struggle could have long term implications for China’s relations with the US and with Israel. During the Soviet era Israel became China’s second biggest armaments supplier after Russia.

America turned a blind eye to this. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union the US attitude changed. Tension developed between America and Israel because Washington wanted to curb Israel’s defence links with China. Right from 1992 under President George Bush Senior, through the Clinton years, tension simmered between the US and Israel over this issue. Washington sought embargoes on Israel’s selling defence equipment to China. Israel continued to defy America. The CIA consistently criticised Israel’s dealings with China. In October 1993, CIA Director R James Woolsey confirmed to a Senate committee: “We believe the Chinese seek from Israel advanced military technology that US and Western firms are unwilling to provide.” And Israel apparently was ready to oblige.

Differences arose over Israel’s transfer to China of US technology from the Lavi fighter programme, and over Israel’s supply to it of four Phalcon planes upgraded with Russian radar systems. Under pressure of the Clinton administration Israel reluctantly cancelled the latter deal. The flashpoint came in 2005. In the guise of repairing the Harpy assault drone that Israel sold to China in the mid-1990s, it upgraded the drones capable of destroying radar stations and anti-aircraft batteries. US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, the third most senior official in the Pentagon, demanded the resignation of Amos Yaron, the top bureaucrat in Israel’s defence ministry, over the Harpy controversy. Matters were smoothed out only after considerable effort.

Decisive influence

It should not surprise, then, if some sections in Israel welcome Jiang’s return to a position of decisive influence. Especially because China has flown recently a kite that might seriously alarm Israel. A US-based historian and technology consultant, Song Hongbing, recently wrote a book, Currency Wars. It is unabashedly anti-Semitic and traces sinister international financial conspiracies to the Rothschild family.

The book has become a rage in Hu’s China. Over half a million copies of it are in circulation. Significantly the book has been published by China’s state-owned China International Trade and Investment Corporation (CITIC) group. Could CITIC have done this without a nod from the top? India should, for its part, worry for being an obvious and soft target for China. In communist dictatorships power struggles sometimes result in one of the aspirants instigating a foreign adventure in order to alter the balance of power. If the Hu-Jiang rivalry escalates to a fight to the finish, India should be doubly cautious. There are current reports of Chinese incursions into Bhutan. Meanwhile PLA has made claims against India on the Sikkim border. Will the Hu-Jiang rivalry reach an early resolution?

The author is a veteran journalist and cartoonist

China facing rising US trade protectionism

Miao Yingchun
The Stesman, 12 October

Low-priced Chinese exports have helped ease inflation in the US and has have benefited the country's consumers. The use of trade protactive tools is detrimental to US consumers and does nothing to help the less vigorous industries.

On 14 September, China requested the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to settle its dispute with the United States over Chinese coated paper after negotiations with the US failed.

China was seeking WTO help following a preliminary decision by the US Department of Commerce to impose duties on coated paper imported from China.

It was the first time that China has filed a case in WTO against the US since the country’s entry into the world trade body in 2001.

The frequent usage of trade protective tools, like anti-dumping, anti-subsidy duties, guarantee measures and special guarantee measures, has become a source of trade conflicts between China and the US.

According to WTO statistics, China is the most targeted country in US anti-dumping investigations. Since the first anti-dumping case involving menthol produced in China in 1980, Chinese exports have been subject to 10.2 per cent of all anti-dumping cases investigated in the US. The anti-dumping cases involving Chinese exports have significant values, some more than $100 million.

On 30 March this year, the US Department of Commerce decided to impose an anti-subsidy tax on coated paper produced in China. This was a significant change in the US anti-subsidy tax policy. Before that, this tax was only imposed on products from market economies and China had always been treated as a “non-market economy” by the US authorities in nearly all trade-related issues.

The Chinese products involved in the anti-dumping cases are mostly in the light and chemical industries, and machinery and electronic products such as bicycles, colour TV sets and steel pipes.

The products have helped China gain a considerable position in global trade, and has led to more jobs in the country. A conservative calculation shows that the light and textile industries employ 50 million people a year.

In the anti-dumping cases initiated by the US, China is the victim of a high proportion of confirmed dumping. Between 1980 and 2006, the US International Trade Committee (ITC), the institute authorised to give decisions on the anti-dumping litigations, concluded that 70 out of 111 Chinese commodities had been dumped. This rate is much higher than other trade partners of the US.

The US authorities are also using more diversified means to protect its domestic market from Chinese products after China became a WTO member. The frequent use of anti-dumping measures toward Chinese exports by the US is primarily due to economic pressure.

With its huge trade deficit, the US has undergone an industrial restructure. The government has to protect domestic industries from foreign competitors. As one of the biggest trade partners of the US, China has not only increased its exports to the US but has also added value to its commodities in recent years thanks to the development of Chinese manufacturing.

Thus, competition between Chinese exports and US domestic products have become more intensive. It is, therefore, natural for the US authorities to resort to anti-dumping measures to protect their domestic industries.

Another motive is the strategic interests of the US. Researchers from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, Thomas J Prusa and Susan Skeath, found that US anti-dumping cases were often driven by political pressure, national security interests, and historical economic relations.

Theoretically, anti-dumping is meant to fight unfair competition. However, if used to obstruct free trade and protect incompetent industries, it would cause serious damage to global trade.

It affects the commercial interests of exporters, especially those in developing countries.

The abuse of anti-dumping measures has made it a non-tariff trade barrier to protect a country’s market from imported products and services. Thus, consumers have to pay much more for goods or services than they should in an open market.

Low-priced Chinese exports have helped ease inflation in the US, and has benefited the country’s consumers. The use of trade protective tools is a detriment to US consumers and does nothing to help the less vigorous industries.

President George W Bush decided not to provide import relief for the US pedestal actuator industry in 2003 when the ITC believed the industry was threatened by Chinese exports. He argued: “The import relief would have an adverse impact on the US economy clearly greater than the benefits of such action”.

His explanation could be applied to other Chinese exports to the US market. And hopefully, Sino-US trade disputes could be reduced if this was accepted by others concerned.

China Daily/ANN
(The author is a researcher with the Department of World Economics, Wuhan University)

China in Three Colors

September 23, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Beijing

After a week of meetings with Chinese energy, environmental and clean-car experts, I’m left with one big, gnawing question: Can China go green without going orange?

That is, can China really undertake the energy/environmental revolution it needs without the empowerment of its people to a whole new degree — à la the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004? The more I see China wrestling with its environment, the more I’m convinced that it is going to prove much, much easier for China to have gone from communism to capitalism than to go from dirty capitalism to clean capitalism.

For China, going from communism to its state-directed capitalism, while by no means easy, involved loosening the lid on a people who were naturally entrepreneurial, risk-taking capitalists. It was tantamount to letting a geyser erupt, and the results of all that unleashed energy are apparent everywhere.

Going from dirty capitalism to clean capitalism is much harder. Because it involves restraining that geyser — and to do that effectively requires a system with some judicial independence, so that courts can discipline government-owned factories and power plants. It requires a freer press that can report on polluters without restraint, even if they are government-owned businesses. It requires transparent laws and regulations, so citizen-activists know their rights and can feel free to confront polluters, no matter how powerful. For all those reasons, it seems to me that it will be very hard to make China greener without making it more orange.

China’s Communist Party leaders are clearly wrestling with this issue. I could hear it, feel it and see it. I could hear it while interviewing government officials. They’ve always wanted a steadily rising G.D.P., which is essential for China’s stability and for the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party, whose abiding ideology is “G.D.P.-ism.”

But more and more I heard these same officials now saying they want a better environment and a higher G.D.P., because the air has become so filthy here, and the damage to China’s health, rivers, landscape, glaciers and even G.D.P. has become so severe, that the legitimacy of the communist regime, for the first time, is in some way dependent on making the air cleaner. And China’s leaders know it.

For now, though, they want to address this problem without having to change the basic ruling system of the Communist Party. They want to be green and red, not green and orange. I could feel it the minute I arrived.

“Hey, is it a little warm here in your office, or is it just me?” I found myself repeatedly asking in Beijing. No, it wasn’t just me. In June, China’s State Council dictated that all government agencies, associations, companies and private owners in public buildings had to set air-conditioning temperatures no lower than 26 degrees Celsius, or 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Air-conditioning consumes one-third of the energy demand here in summer.

The government just ordered it from the top down. Sounds effective. But then you pick up the Shanghai Daily and read: “More than half of the city’s public buildings have failed to obey power-saving rules setting air-conditioning at 26 degrees Celsius, according to local energy authorities.” Hmmm — seems to be a little problem with follow-up.

In 2005, China’s leaders mandated a 20 percent improvement in energy productivity and a 10 percent improvement in air quality by 2010. You can see why — or maybe you can’t.

I was at the World Bank office in Beijing, meeting with a green expert, and outside his big bay window all I could see through the brownish-gray haze was the gigantic steel skeleton of the new CCTV skyscraper — spectacular six-million-square-foot headquarters reaching to the heavens — one of 300 new office blocks slated for Beijing’s new Central Business District.

I play a mental game with myself now as I am stuck in traffic in Beijing. I look at the office buildings I pass — which are enormous, energy-consuming and architecturally stunning — and I count the ones that would be tourist attractions if they were in Washington, but here in Beijing are just lost in the forest of giant buildings.

And that brings me back to China’s leaders. Right now they want it all — higher G.D.P., greener G.D.P., and unquestioned Communist Party rule. I don’t think you can have all three. I also don’t think they are going to opt for democracy. I am not even sure it is the answer for them right now. So they are seeking a hybrid model — some new combination of red, green and orange. I hope they find it, but right now the vista is mostly an ugly shade of brown.

Beijing’s billboards brought down

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, August 4

Advertisements that glorify luxury face the axe; Mayor says they are not conducive to “social harmony.”

Plastered alongside the multi-lane highways that slice through the Chinese capital are massive billboards exhorting readers in technicolour to “Conquer the world” or “Be a foreigner’s landlord” by buying homes in apartment blocks with monikers such as “Merlin Champagne Town” and “Park Avenue.” Or at least Beijing’s roads were thus adorned until weeks ago.

In May this year, Mayor Wang Qishan expressed his unhappiness at the frequent presence of billboard advertisements that glorified luxury through the use of certain catchphrases including “deluxe,” “supreme,” “ultimate,” and “luxury” itself. The Mayor said the public expression of such sentiments went against the interests of “social harmony.” Soon after, the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce issued a statement that certain advertisements in the capital did not “conform to the demands of socialist spiritual civilisation.”

Ever since, squads of workers have been swarming Beijing’s avenues, dismantling advertisements for luxurious goods, tearing down offending posters, and scrubbing clean all traces of the promise of “La Dolce Vita” that upmarket real estate developers had been using to lure in their nouveaux riche prey.

The face-scrub that Beijing is thus currently undergoing is more than a mere municipal matter. Over the last 30 years, China has transformed from being one of the world’s most equal, albeit poor, societies to one with a rich-poor gap that is larger than even than that of India’s. According to the United Nation’s 2005 Human Development report, China’s gini coefficient — a commonly used statistical measure where 0 represents perfect income equality and 100 perfect income inequality — was 44.7, compared to 32.5 for India.

Urban incomes in China are now more than three times those of the 750-million-odd peasants who live in the countryside. A recent study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences revealed that the richest 10 per cent of Chinese hold 40 per cent of all assets, with the poorest 10 per cent owning only two per cent.

Over the last few years, tens of thousands of mass protests have broken out all across China’s countryside, owing their origin in large part to disaffections resulting from perceived inequalities of income and power. These protests have set off alarm bells in Beijing. Since 2005, the government has thus made the creation of a “harmonious society” the centrepiece of policy. The concept of “harmony” emphasises more equitable growth and opportunity in order to ensure social stability and stem any nascent rebellion against party rule.

To this end, agricultural taxes have been abolished and subsidies increased. After decades of following Deng Xiaoping’s precept “to get rich is glorious,” the party has begun to frown upon conspicuous consumption. The crusade against advertising luxury products in Beijing is only one part of a broader national campaign. Steep taxes on products such as yachts and jewellery have been instituted. In March, Premier Wen Jiabao criticised the use of land for golf courses and the building of expensive villa-style homes. Some weeks later Xinhua, the official news agency, warned that the rich risked sinking “into depravity.” With several instances linking party officials to corrupt lifestyles having come to light, Beijing has also forbidden the building of indoor gardens, multi-storey atriums or hi-tech karaoke rooms in government and Communist Party offices.

In China, official corruption and real estate development are strongly linked in the public perception. In Beijing, for example, a property boom driven by speculation fuelled in the aftermath of the city’s winning the Olympic bid, led to large-scale and often illegal destruction of vast tracts of the historic city centre. The resultant glass and chrome creature of “New Beijing” has emerged from the ashes of the proletarian concrete blocks and old-style alleyway housing that used to be the home to the city’s laobaixing, a term that refers to the “average local.” The laobaixing, however, have had their own homes demolished to make way for shopping malls and luxury villas which they themselves are unable to afford. Thus the majority of Beijingers have been consigned to living on the outskirts of the constantly expanding city while the wealthy from around the country and abroad buy up property in the centre.

Real estate prices in Beijing have jumped 42 per cent in the last three years and nine per cent in the first quarter of this year alone. A survey conducted earlier in the year by the Beijing Municipal Social Sciences Academy revealed a lack of affordable housing to be the number one concern of city folk. Average prices for apartments within the fifth-ring-road of the city are between 8,000 and 10,000 Yuan ($1,000-1,300) per square metre. In the central business district, an area that till a few years ago housed hutongs and factories, super luxurious apartments complete with swimming pool and gymnasium access, jacuzzis in the bathrooms and gilt-filled lobbies, cost upwards of 30,000 Yuan ($4,000) per square metre.

The annual average salary in Beijing, however, is just over 36,000 Yuan ($4,800). In the countryside average annual incomes are closer to $400. To have the capital city covered in billboards urging people to move into deluxe apartments, one square metre of which costs several times the annual income of the millions of migrant workers who toil to build those very apartments, has understandably caused a few raised eyebrows.

The PLA turns 80 today

Marshal Lin Biao’s photograph (centre) is included in the ongoing exhibition at the military museum in Beijing. Opinion is divided on the implications of this.




Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, August 1

China’s army is in the midst of wide-ranging modernisation with the aim of reducing its size while upgrading its technological prowess.

It’s a steamy hot weekday morning in July but, despite the heat and the pressures of work, the museum in western Beijing is teeming with activity. There is an almost carnival-like feel to the scene. Bright umbrellas patterned with the familiar golden arches of McDonalds provide some shelter from the sun. Children run around chattering excitedly, their parents panting after them begging them to be careful.

Through the occasional gaps in the thick mass of humanity, sleek fighter jets, muscular armoured vehicles, and shiny rocket launchers make an oddly jarring appearance. The museum in question is the Junshi Bowuguan or Military Museum and the crush of people is explained by the opening of a new exhibition of Chinese military history to mark the upcoming 80th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the world’s largest military force.

The PLA boasts 2.3 million soldiers, 800,000 reservists, and an armed police numbering 1.5 million. Given the tumultuous 20th century history of China and its neighbouring region, the army has played a key role in determining the course of the country.

The PLA began life as a rag-tag assemblage of fighters relying mainly on guerrilla tactics. It is eulogised in Chinese history textbooks as the force behind the establishment of the communist state in 1949. Several decades later, China’s army is in the process of wide-ranging modernisation with the aim of reducing its size while upgrading its technological prowess.

Defence budget burgeoning

China’s defence budget has thus been burgeoning over the last few years with Beijing announcing a particularly sharp hike of close to 18 per cent in military spending for 2007. The official figure for the military budget in this ongoing fiscal is thus $44.94 billion. However, the United States and Japan both accuse China of understating the true figure. Pentagon reports regularly claim that the real budget is well over $100 billion — when all military spending is accounted for, a number China flatly denies.

For Beijing, managing the rise in its international profile has led to a delicate two-pronged strategy in which it attempts to reassure neighbours of its “peaceful” intentions, even while pressing ahead with modernising the PLA into a force capable of significant power projection. China has thus been upgrading its nuclear arsenal to include more mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles such as the DF-31A and the JL-2 submarine-launched missiles. At the same time, it has been mending fences with a number of neighbours who, given the fraught historical relations, continue to keep a suspicious eye on developments within the PLA.

In order to allay fears and rebut criticisms of the “opaque” nature of its military modernisation, the use of joint military exercises as a diplomatic tool has gained popularity in Beijing. Thus, later in the year, the armies of India and China are scheduled to hold their first ever joint manoeuvres, only weeks after China conducts exercises with Russia and other Central Asian countries under the banner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Combined with the ongoing joint training with Thailand’s armed forces, it’s a busy year for the PLA as it enters its eighth decade in existence.

And while the joint military exercises point to a sharp symbolic shift in China’s external relations with its neighbours, an internal shift vis-a-vis its own history is also discernable at the military museum. A former Defence Minister, Lin Biao, whose name was expunged from history books after he was accused of plotting to kill Mao Zedong, has been resurrected and included in the exhibition. His portrait is prominently included in a display of the “Ten Marshals,” a group who are considered to be the founding fathers of the PLA.

Lin, a long-marcher and one of Mao’s closest comrades was designated as the Chairman’s constitutional successor in the late 1960s. However he died in disgrace in 1971 in a mysterious air crash over Mongolia. He was branded a traitor for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mao and was on the run when he died.

China’s official news agency Xinhua quoted a senior researcher at the Military Museum as saying the decision to include Lin in the exhibit was intended to demonstrate “objective thinking” and to “show history as it was.”

Political analysts within China remain divided over the interpretation of this move. Some commentators have claimed that the inclusion of Lin’s portrait in the exhibition is tantamount to his rehabilitation, and could thus be a first step towards an official reinterpretation of modern Chinese history, including thorny issues like the Cultural Revolution and 1989 Tiananmen protests. Others have dismissed the importance of Lin’s inclusion as exaggerated. They point out that military histories have been known to include sections on Lin’s contributions since the 1980s.

At the exhibition itself there is the usual rush of people taking photographs in front of Lin’s portrait. However, a 12-year-old boy who is clicking away with his camera shakes his head in ignorance when asked if he recognises the picture of Lin. Embarrassed by the attention he smiles shyly before running off to wait in queue for a chance to fire a warship’s gun.

The PLA celebrates its birthday today, August 1.

China’s experiment with village elections

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 24 June

Are they simply a limited experiment aimed at ensuring better compliance with central government directives in the potentially restive countryside or do they hold within them the seeds of genuine political change across the system?

Deep in the countryside, away from skyscraper-filled boom towns such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, millions of villagers in China’s 700,000 villages have been involved in an ongoing experiment with democracy that grabs few headlines outside of the country but has, some experts say, been responsible for fundamentally changing Chinese political culture. Over the last decade or so, direct elections to village councils have gradually been made mandatory across China so that for the first time in the 5000-year history of this former empire, villagers are learning about filing nominations and secret ballots. In China, peasants have for centuries borne the burden of the actions of capricious rulers at the centre. The ability to elect their own leaders is thus revolutionary.

The broader significance of village elections for China’s political culture, however, remains contested. Are they simply a limited experiment aimed at ensuring better compliance with Central government directives in the potentially restive countryside, or do they hold within them the seeds of genuine political change across the system? Direct elections to village councils date back to experiments carried out in the late 1980s, but it was only in 1998 that these were formalised into law and made mandatory.

Following the collapse of the village commune system after the economic liberalisation initiated in 1978, certain leaders within the Communist Party began pushing for village self-governance as a means to counter political apathy and violent rebellion by creating mechanisms of participation and conflict resolution. Moreover, it was felt that leaders elected by villagers themselves would find it easier to implement central government policies regarding taxes and family planning.

Since 1998 elections to village councils, which comprise between three and seven members, have been institutionalised and are now carried out every three years. The council’s main responsibilities lie in deciding the allocation and use of communal land, the running of village enterprises, and the implementation of family planning directives. Councils can also decide local matters like village subscription to newspapers, the renovation of a school building, or the installation of cable television.

Jing Yue Jin, a leading political scientist at the People’s University in Beijing, says the success of these elections has been variable. Key to the village council’s ability to effect discernable change in the lives of villagers is finance. In wealthier provinces where villages have significant assets, usually comprising collectively owned enterprises, the village committee has greater power. The stakes are thus high in elections to these committees with the consequence that they are often fiercely contested. In contrast, in poor areas where villages lack an independent source of funding, the village committees are largely toothless leading to political apathy and disinterest in the electoral process.

Other than the monies derived from village enterprises, the councils are financially wholly dependent upon the township government, the lowest official tier of rural government. “For most cadres at the township level, village elections are simply a source of trouble,” says Dr. Jing.

Indeed, for township officials the elections represent somewhat of a loss of authority. Used to untrammelled power they now have to contend with elected and hence popular village chiefs with agendas that may conflict with their own. There have thus been several instances over the years where township leaders have subverted the election process, ensuring that their own yes-men are “elected.”

A further complication is the legally ambiguous relationship between the council and the village Communist Party secretary. Prior to the introduction of elections, the village party chief used to be the clear and sole authority in the village. With the implementation of the new system, however, friction between the party secretary and the head of the village council has become commonplace. Dr. Jing adds the rise of gangsterism, vote-rigging, and return of clan-based loyalties as other challenges confronting the election process.

However, the biggest obstacle to the success of the electoral experiment, he says, is the lack of a post-election management mechanism. “The villagers can now participate in electing their leaders but once elected these leaders often return to acting in traditional, non-accountable, non-transparent ways,” he explains.

Jian Yi, an independent filmmaker who recently made a documentary on the history of village democracy, agrees that “democratic management and monitoring of the village committee elected fails in most places since they are easily manipulated by party committees and township officials.”

Nonetheless, he remains guardedly optimistic regarding the broader impact of the electoral experience. “In places where village elections are better conducted, people actually do learn the rules of democracy; how to negotiate and compromise rather than to start yet another violent revolution,” he concludes.

Yawei Lu, Associate Director of the China Elections Project, a programme run by an American NGO that works with the Chinese government in monitoring elections, elaborates: “In the past the legitimacy of the government was thought to flow from the ‘barrel of the gun.’ But, in today’s China the legitimacy of the government, at least theoretically, comes from the people. Democracy at the village-level has been crucial for this.”

From the very beginning, village elections have been seen by democratic reformers within China as a starting rather than endpoint. The hope has been that the electoral process would eventually be extended vertically, to higher levels of township and county government, as well as horizontally, to local-level party officials.

Although this hope remains largely unfulfilled, there have been some signs of the spread of elections beyond the confines of the village. Thus, for example, local party secretaries are now often appointed by a “two-ballot” process, wherein the first ballot involves a popular vote on potential candidates with the second ballot restricted to party members. The importance of popularity even for party officials is thus gradually being recognised.

Moreover, some experiments in direct elections at the township level have also taken place. However, these elections have been held without the formal consent of the centre and, although Beijing has on occasion chosen to ignore them, technically they remain illegal.

Dr. Yawei is of the opinion that if China were to seriously attempt to expand elections across the political system, the experience of village democracy would prove to have been “an excellent learning ground.” “All the challenges facing the electoral process at the village level will also exist at other levels and so they [village elections] would be very valuable.”

But Dr. Jing says that despite 20-odd years of experimenting with elections most scholars in the field are disappointed with the results. “The village councils have not been as responsive to the needs of the people as we had once hoped so that the link between elected leaders and improved life for villagers is difficult to establish,” he asserts.

Electoral democracy in China, Dr. Jing continues, has never been an unquestioned, a priori goal. It has rather been looked upon as a practical tool. “The Chinese government today has a problem solving attitude. Their main concern is thus whether or not something works. Elections in villages have not been shown to directly increase the living standards of villagers. Thus the leadership has gone from being optimistic to less optimistic about these elections,” he says.

Dr. Lu agrees that Beijing is showing signs of giving up on grassroots participatory mechanisms as a way of developing rural areas and focussing instead on top-down funding for projects pre-determined by the Centre as necessary to create what is being called a “new socialist countryside.”

Ultimately it is clear that the real significance of village elections will turn on the outcome of elite contestations over the direction of political reform in China.

According to Dr. Jing, these contestations have begun to heat up of late. There are two main contending frameworks for political reform within the party, he says.

The more traditional of the two follows the line of thinking espoused by Deng Xiaoping and argues that democracy is a linear but gradual process, so when the time is ripe direct elections should be extended upwards until they reach all the way till the central government. Thus Deng had predicted that China could expect to hold general elections by 2050.

The other competing framework for reform focusses less on elections and more on non-electoral means of participation. “Some scholars believe China does not need to copy the west for a political model but can forge its own way, creating a ‘deliberative democracy’ that stresses dialogue rather competition,” says Dr. Jing. While the details of how this ‘deliberative democracy’ would function remain hazy, it is a concept that meshes well with the current Chinese leadership’s emphasis on “harmony” and is accordingly finding favour in Beijing.

The ultimate course that China’s political reform will take is still far from obvious. Dr. Jing predicts that it may become clearer after an important twice-a-decade party congress is held later this year. “In the run up to the congress, stability is paramount and no leader is willing to experiment boldly with reform. Afterwards, we hope the situation will become more flexible,” he smiles, concluding, “In China it is not only economics that’s cyclic, but also politics.”

Reports of Forced Labor Unsettle China

NYT, June 16
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, June 15 — Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they disappeared.

Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.

The next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.

This story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.

The children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work under brutal conditions — scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little more than water and steamed buns — in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.

As the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved workers were recently rescued.

Mr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to make bricks. “You will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, and don’t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,” he said the children were told. “They also charged them 50 renminbi for a blanket.” That is equivalent to about $6.50.

Mr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.

In some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed kilns and resold them to other factories.

The director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker’s Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in isolated areas.

“Those factories are located in very remote places and most them are illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for people outside to know what is going on there,” said the union official, Zhang Xiaosuo. “We are now doing a province-wide investigation into them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.”

Liu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a different explanation. “My first reaction is that this seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance,” Mr. Liu said. “Forced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local governments don’t care too much.”

Zhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to Shanxi Province in search of him.

“You just could not believe what you saw,” Ms. Zhang said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Some of the kids working at these places were at most 14 or 15 years old.”

The local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, she said, they even demanded bribes.

“We finally got into that place, and I saw people hauling carts of bricks with great difficulty,” Ms. Zhang said. “Some of them were very small, and the ropes they pulled left tracks of blood on their shoulders and backs. Others were making bricks, standing by the machines.

“They had to move the bricks from the belt very quickly, because they were hot and heavy and they could easily get burned or hurt by the machines.”

By Friday, with the help of Mr. Su, Ms. Zhang finally located her son at a kiln near the one to which Mr. Su’s children had been taken.

Another father, Cai Tianliang, said he had set out to Shanxi Province in May from his native Henan Province in search of his missing 19-year-old son after a local television broadcast had shown a team of television reporters and Henan parents searching the Shanxi kilns for kidnapped children.

“I thought there was a great possibility that my son was also kidnapped, so I went there twice,” Mr. Cai said. “The usual thing is for an owner to have more than one factory, and to shift people without identification from one place to another.”

On his first trip, which he took with a group of parents, Mr. Cai said he found few clues. On a second visit to the area, he said, he was refused police permits to enter any of the brick factories but persisted anyway.

“We located a place called the Zhenjie Brick Factory in a town called Chengbei, and at first they would not allow us in,” he said, “but we kept negotiating. Finally, they let a few of us in, and they found my son inside.”

Like many other parents, Mr. Cai said he was dumbfounded by the boy’s condition when they were reunited.

“My son was totally dumb, not even knowing how to cry, or to scream or to call out ‘Father,’ ” he said. “I burst into tears and held him in my arms, but he had no reaction. He was in rags and had wounds all over his body. Within three months he had lost over 10 kilos,” about 22 pounds.

Mr. Cai said he tried to rescue a 16-year-old boy he found there, but was refused by the factory boss. “He said I could only take my own,” Mr. Cai said, “and must leave other people behind at the kiln.”

China battles Internet addiction

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 9 May

The number of Internet users rose from virtually zero in the 1990s to 137 million by the end of 2006. Of these at least 15 per cent are under the age of 18; and 2.3 million minors could be classified as addicts.

IN A nondescript compound on the southern outskirts of Beijing, groups of youngsters in military fatigues run in disciplined lines, sweat pouring down their foreheads in the noon sun. Drill sergeants bark relentless orders right in their faces, which on closer inspection are revealed to be painfully young. Inside the combat outfits many of those marching, running, and performing a variety of callisthenics are only 13 or 14 years old.

This is a military training camp, but the youngsters in question are not soldiers in training. They are in fact Internet addicts receiving treatment at a government-funded, military-run Internet Addiction Treatment Centre, located in Beijing's Daxing County.

Alarmed by a China National Children's Centre (CNCC) report that claimed 13 per cent of Internet users under the age of 18 were addicted to the Net, online addiction has emerged as the focus of a concerted campaign by the Chinese Government to battle what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation. The number of Internet users in China has spiked from virtually zero in the 1990s to 137 million by the end of 2006. Of these at least 15 per cent are under the age of 18 and, on the basis of the CNCC report, 2.3 million minors would be classified as addicts.

In the last few months, local media in China have been awash with highly publicised cases of obsessed Internet game players flunking out of school with some committing suicide and even murder. In 2005, a Shanghai court gave an online gamer a life sentence after he was found guilty of stabbing a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword — a virtual prize earned during game-play.

More recently, in March, China's official news agency Xinhua, quoted a Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents report stating that almost 35 per cent of its detainees were "goaded into committing crimes, mostly robbery and rape, by violent online games or erotic websites."

The Daxing addiction treatment centre is the first and largest of eight government-funded "rehabilitation camps" set up around the country, intended to address the special needs of juvenile Internet addicts. On average, the centre houses 70-80 patients, although during school vacations, the number of its wards can shoot up to 250.

The majority of the patients are 14 to 18 years old, although the youngest to have been treated at the centre was 11. Ninety per cent are male and, according to Tao Ran, the centre's director, most are addicted to online games although Internet chat, online pornography, and gambling have also been known to cause addictive behaviour.

The centre is part military boot camp, part hospital, and part juvenile detention centre. Treatment consists of a mixture of psychological counselling, drugs, and military-style discipline. Mr. Tao says the centre can boast of a 70 per cent success rate with most patients needing a one to three-month-long course of treatment.

The treatment period can however be tumultuous since the majority of addicts are involuntarily committed to the centre by their parents. The dormitory areas are thus cordoned off with prison-style metal grills and hefty padlocks. In the past patients have tried to escape. One even slashed his wrists, although quick intervention saved him.

Given its relatively recent origins, the nature of Internet addiction remains somewhat of a global controversy. At issue is whether or not heavy Internet use should be defined and treated as a mental disorder. Mr. Tao, who built his career treating heroine addicts in the 1990s, has little patience for such debate. He says that having researched and treated a variety of addictions both physical and psychological over two decades he is convinced that Internet addiction is virtually the same as other types of more conventional addictions both in terms of its symptoms as well as the negative impact it has on the addict's ability to function normally in society.

Thus if deprived of the Internet, addicts can quickly turn nasty and resort to theft and violence in order to secure money for use in Internet bars. In addition, they often stop eating and sleeping for days at a stretch causing serious harm to their health.

Mr. Tao says the patients brought to the clinic usually suffer from a mixture of anger, loss of self-esteem, depression, bad nutrition, insomnia, and lack of self-control. The military discipline at the centre helps them to regain a schedule and builds up both their physical strength and mental discipline. The intensive counselling aims to gradually restore their self-confidence and to help them re-establish positive goals. Some 30 per cent of cases are additionally treated with drugs including anti-depressants and even anti-psychotics.

Unreasonable pressure

According to Mr. Tao, the underlying cause for this trend of rising cyber addiction is unreasonable pressure from parents and schools to excel in examinations. Unable to bear the constant criticism and expectations, youngsters come to depend on the Internet as an "escape" from real world stress.

"For me online games were an environment that I could control and where there were no restrictions placed on my freedom," recalls Sun Qian Han, a 24-year-old patient at the Daxingcentre.

Mr. Sun began to play Internet games in 1998. In the beginning, he spent only three or four hours a day online but gradually his addiction grew to uncontrollable proportions. In 1999 he spent three months non-stop at an Internet Café, sleeping three or four hours at most, playing games for 20 hours at a time.

An excellent student, Mr. Sun dropped out of school although with his parents' support he finally managed to graduate in 2005, four years later than his contemporaries. He is currently enrolled at a Polytechnic in Yunnan province but every few months finds himself sliding back towards an online binge. He thus voluntarily checked himself into the Daxing Centre two weeks ago, although his parents foot the $1,200 monthly fee.

Steps to curb addiction

Over the last two months or so the government has announced a host of measures it says are aimed at curbing Internet addiction. These include an ordinance issued in March banning the opening of any new Internet bars in the country for the remainder of the year. In addition, Net bar owners have been ordered to install anti-addiction software on their computers and to be extra vigilant in collecting information on users including their real names, age, and identity card numbers.

Critics have pointed out that this campaign meshes a bit too conveniently with China's broader efforts to control the Internet. Access to many major online international news sites are blocked in China and some 50,000 personnel are employed to monitor Internet traffic, censoring information that is deemed too politically sensitive by the government.

But Mr. Sun believes the new measures will be helpful, if implemented strictly. His worry is that most Net bar owners put profit first and are thus loathe to turn underage users away or to implement any regulations that would be detrimental to their business. "All of us addicts are above average in our IQ," he says towards the end of the interview. "But our talents and energy are wasted by this addiction." Mr. Sun intends to stay on at the centre for another few weeks before heading back to his college in Yunnan. He is studying to be a software engineer.

Looking for a place in the sun

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 14 April

China's migrant workers have been crucial to sustaining the economic boom. Now attention is turning to their plight.

"WHAT WOULD you like to drink," asked the apple-cheeked girl in carefully enunciated English. Appreciative giggles filled the room in response to her effort and she smiled shyly in acknowledgement, handing out make-belief drinks to the make-belief restaurant patrons.

This scene was being played out in a classroom in a Beijing school called BN Vocational, where 20-odd students were busy learning the basic skills required by the hospitality industry. A scene that would have been less-than-remarkable were it not for the fact that all the students were children of the Chinese capital's most disadvantaged section of society — migrant workers.

Visitors to China's showcase cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are usually awestruck at the shiny surfaces of their skyscrapers and the smooth breadth of their expressways. But much of the razzle and dazzle of these cities is in fact owed to the back-breaking labour of legions of migrant workers; an underclass of Chinese society that has been crucial to the country's economic boom but is at the same time testament to the visceral inequalities that have emerged.

By official accounts there are currently between 150 million and 200 million migrant workers in China, the vast majority from the relatively impoverished countryside, working at construction sites and sweat-shops in cities along China's booming seaboard. They perform a host of other menial jobs considered too dirty or dangerous by city folk.

Easily identifiable by their blackened teeth, ill-fitting clothes, mannerisms and rural accents, they are a world apart from their urbane and wealthy city compatriots. For decades, migrant workers were systematically denied access to basic public services such as health care and education, and were subject to harassment and even forcible deportation by police, almost as if they were illegal foreigners in the cities they moved to. The reason was their legal status as holders of rural as opposed to urban residence permits or internal visas called "hukous." China's hukou system was first instituted in the early 1960s. Until the start of economic reform in the late 1970s, rural migrants were not allowed to move to or work in cities at all.

After the country started on the path to economic liberalisation, the Chinese authorities had to balance competing desires for maintaining and reforming the hukou system. On the one hand, economic growth was predicated on a mobile labour force, while, on the other, ensuring that the infrastructure of cities was not overwhelmed required continuing restrictions on this mobility.

Eventually market considerations won out and in recent years there has been a considerable easing of hukou requirements. Thus, Beijing alone is currently estimated to have a migrant labour force of some four million. China is, in fact, currently experiencing an across-the-board urbanisation process that is historically unparalleled in terms of both speed and scale. According to official data, China's urbanisation rate rose from 17.9 per cent to 41.8 per cent between1978 and 2004, while it's urban population increased from 170 million to 540 million.

Educating the children

But this easing of restrictions on the internal movement of people has meant that Chinese cities are increasingly struggling with the consequences that this wave of new migrants has for urban planning, security, and social integration. One of the greatest challenges of all is to ensure an equitable education for the children of the newcomers. Estimates of the number of migrant children in Beijing vary between 300,000 and 500,000. Until 1998, the capital did not allow public schools to admit non-residents at all. Since then migrant children have been permitted to enter the city's public school system. Around two-thirds of them, in fact, attend public schools. However, many of these schools charge a hefty extra fee to enrol migrants, usually $1000-$3000, which is beyond the means of many migrant families and an intolerably heavy financial burden on others.

Although the government has now declared illegal the charging of extra fees for migrant children, it is a practice experts say still continues. Already stretched for resources, most schools simply do not have the budget or capacity to accommodate the extra migrants without these supplementary fees.

For children unable to find or afford a place at a public school, the only other option is to attend one of the hundreds of often illegal, privately run migrant schools of which there are over 200 in Beijing alone. Standards fall far short of that in public schools but they do provide at least a basic grounding in reading and writing.

The real problem these days starts at the high school level, which is not subsidised by the government and is thus prohibitively expensive for the average migrant worker family. The vast majority of migrant children consequently never study beyond middle school, which, in turn, impacts their future employment prospects, keeping them locked down in a spiral of inadequate education and menial jobs.

"But even before the high school level there are still issues," says Yao Li, the Chairperson of BN Vocational School, Beijing's first privately run and funded school specifically aimed at imparting practical skills to migrant children of high-school age. These problems, she says, are not so much of access as those of attitude. Thus while migrant kids may no longer physically be excluded from the public school system, they face more subtle psychological challenges. "These [migrant] kids look different. Their families are poor and have a different lifestyle to those of city children. So the parents of city kids don't want them to mix with migrants because they think they are dirty and might contaminate them," she explains.

Yao Li started up BN Vocational in late 2005, after she quit her job as general manager of a real estate company. The school takes in around 80 teenagers a year and teaches them courses in electronics, plumbing, computers, and hospitality services. The students are given this training totally free of charge and at the end of the two-year training period, which includes an internship, are guaranteed jobs.

To be selected, the students must finish middle school and then pass a special entrance examination. Most of those chosen come from migrant families where per capita income is less than 300 yuan ($38) a month. The average per capita income for Beijing residents in 2006 was well over $200.

One of the school's top performers is a 17-year-old girl from China's northeast Shandong province, called Wang Na. For her, the chance to study at BN Vocational represents an opportunity to begin climbing up a social ladder that in contemporary China has becoming increasingly steeper and harder to scale. "If after graduating I can get a good job and maybe save enough to later go to university, everything will be different. People will no longer look down on me because I will be the same as them," she says.

BN Vocational is funded by a slew of multinational and domestic corporations. Dell has donated computers, Motorola the equipment for the electronics laboratory. Real estate developers, banks and chemical corporations are amongst the long list of other private sector donors to the school. Additional funds are raised for the project through the organising of gala charity dinners at five-star hotels and luxury golf competitions where wealthy Chinese spend as much in a day as the families of the students see in a year.

The attention BN Vocational has garnered may push the government to expand on this vocational education model. Yao Li says several officials from the municipal education department have visited the school since it started and some have expressed an interest in setting up more schools along the same lines.

With growing inequality becoming the primary source of social tension in China, the plight of migrant workers is in general receiving more attention from the central government. Thus in early April the State Council announced that it was considering setting up a centralised department to oversee and coordinate the growing numbers of migrants across the country. Pilot projects in several provinces where the distinction between urban and rural hukous has been completely scrapped are also ongoing. But fundamental to any policy or structural shift aimed at addressing issues of social justice is education. How China meets this challenge will be fundamental to shaping the country's future.