At 2:15pm protesters rolled out another long banner, this time white with black letters. The police, who earlier voiced that the red banner [reading "Anning oil refinery, don’t put our home into environmental hell!"] was too provocative, sent a small troop to inspect the white banner which read “Give me back beautiful Kunming! We want to survive! We want to be healthy! PX project, get out of Kunming!” Protesters rushed to engage with the police, asking whether or not the banner passed muster. With a supportive and encouraging nod from a police captain, the crowd burst into applause and paraded the banner around the square. […]

[…] Some media outlets reported cell phone service disruption at the protest zone. I personally did not experience this. No organization or local NGO announced themselves as the protest organizer and no names of organizations have been named by media outlets. At the same time, media reports have given very little credit to the protesters for maintaining civility (not a guarantee for Chinese demonstrations) and to the police force for patiently allowing (and thus softly promoting the demonstration). After all, Kunming’s security forces have to breathe the city’s air just the same as anyone.

Protesters are awaiting public announcement from the city or provincial government on the status of the PX plant. They are calling for greater transparency in the approval process and disclosure of the project’s environmental assessment. Until these results are delivered, this issue is likely to gain momentum among Kunming’s citizens making the 5/4 protest the first of many. […]

In contrast with the Kunming demonstration, planned protests in Chengdu on the same day were met with a obstructive tactics such as a “weekend-long earthquake drill” and—as NPR’s Louisa Lim reported—a rescheduled weekend:

The tentacles of the stability-maintenance machine go deep, and all of them swung into action in Chengdu. A woman who’d forwarded a message about the protest on social media was forced to apologize on television earlier in the week. At least 10 dissidents were put under house arrest or forced to “go on holiday,” according to a local human rights website. Meanwhile, employees at state-run work units were warned that they’d be sacked if they protested.

Then there was an enormous leafleting campaign. Households received letters from the government calling for “everyone to stand firm and not believe rumors, and not participate [in protests] in order to prevent people with other motives from seizing this opportunity to create turmoil.” The letters had the unintended effect of bringing the Pengzhou plant to the attention of those who hadn’t already heard about it, creating an even greater groundswell of suppressed discontent.

[…] Since any attempt to protest would clearly have been unwise, some citizens protested in silence by wearing facemasks. Given the levels of pollution, however, this was ineffective. Others commented wryly that the police show of force represented a new “Chengdu model” of dissent, where the actual marching had been outsourced to the security forces.

An editorial in the state-owned Global Times argued that heavy industry projects are economically necessary, but that trying to brush public concerns aside is the wrong approach:

China’s economic development is inseparable from the development of heavy chemical projects. However, the reality is that residents do not want to pay for China’s overall situation at the price of their living environment.

Questions over the development of heavy chemical projects are mainly discussed by local governments and enterprises. Governments have good intentions, with the goals of developing the economy and creating employment, while the public focuses on environmental situation. It has become a stalemate.

To break through this deadlock, local governments should make ordinary people’s environmental anxieties their first concern. They should represent ordinary people’s ecological and comprehensive interests and strive for these interests. Problems will be solved in a much more orderly and rational manner if governments are trusted by public in this regard.

[…] Hanging on to outdated social governance approaches will only make things worse. There is always a way out for heavy chemical projects. Current problems come from the methods of dealing with them.

Also at Global Times, a report on the protests by Chang Meng and Duan Wuning stressed the importance of timely transparency surrounding industrial projects:

“PX is a basic petrochemical raw material and is safe if proper protocols are followed. People are scared because there is a lack of access to information or participation in the projects,” Jin Yong, a leading petrochemical expert at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times.

[…] Information disclosure for both projects was opaque and came out late under public pressure.

“We met with the project committee in April, which was the first public communication event after the construction for two years,” a staffer of Green Kunming, a local environmental NGO, told the Global Times.

“Public rights to information access, participation in environmental policies and judicial remedies are key to solving these situations and preventing the EIA from being manipulated by developers and officials,” Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times.

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When the research team approached China’s Ministry of Commerce, which oversees main components of the country’s aid program, the answer they got was, “Everyone who needs to know about our generosity already knows,” Parks said.

The database, compiled from English- and Chinese-language media reports on African projects, includes an interactive map that breaks down information to country and project levels. It will continually incorporate contributions from those involved in African aid, Parks and Fuchs told Reuters in an interview.

The creators of the database offered no judgments on the contentious questions surrounding Chinese aid to Africa, saying their aim was to inform the debate with data that has been missing from existing aid statistics.

But Parks said one stereotype about China in Africa – that Beijing focuses on resource extraction and big infrastructure projects like roads, dams and stadiums – partly unravels in the face of the newly compiled data.

The beta web site for the new database includes data on Chinese projects as well as links to several recent academic publications on topic. In his first overseas trip last month, new Chinese president Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s commitment to maintaining “friendly relationships with all African countries.”

Update: As Fons Tuinstra points out in the comments, Johns Hopkins University’s Deborah Brautigam has expressed strong reservations with the database on her blog:

Today, a new paper and media-based dataset on Chinese aid/finance was released by the AidData project, in an event at the Center for Global Development. AidData collected these numbers over the past year, from media reports. According to AidData, the Chinese have committed $75 billion in official development finance to Africa, 2000 to 2011.

[…] I’ve already provided my comments to the authors in an earlier draft, and warned them about the pitfalls of this approach. Here’s my conclusion: this number is way off. Yes, it’s a start, and yes, the goal is a good one, but the approach, and the publication of this data at this early stage, is a problem, for several reasons.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa, Africa investment, economic development, transparency, Xi Jinping
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With all the negative attention that’s been directed to Ordos, has the local government — or local citizens — begun to see the new area as a failure? What incentives are the government providing to attract new?

I don’t think that the government would admit (that Ordos) is a failure. They’re still trying hard to bring people in. The government has moved its officials into the new town, and they’ve also moved some of the city’s best schools into the new town, to try to bring in young people. So high school kids — they have to go to the new town for school now.

There’s a huge campaign underway to occupy the city. They’re basically giving people from the whole region — and Ordos is bigger than Switzerland — incentives to move to the city, or they’re forcing them either by moving schools, hospitals, or other public facilities into the new city.

Our initial reaction to that was — “Oh, that’s terrible, that’s social engineering” — but the villagers that we’ve spoken to are actually really happy about this. Basically they’ve gone from being pretty poor to being quite wealthy, and they’ve opened bank accounts, purchased villas, they’ve got money in the bank for the first time in their life — they’ve basically retired with this money that they’ve been given.

Watch a trailer for the film:

And read more about Ordos via CDT.

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At a time when many American airports are falling into disrepair, China is quickening its air travel development, with plans to build nearly 100 more airports by 2015, including some at high altitudes, where special landing gear is required. Many of those airports are expected to lose money, but that hasn’t deterred the government, which views the expansion of infrastructure as vital to economic development.

[...]China’s building programs are supported by an authoritarian political system that brooks no challenges. When the government decides to build or expand an airport, there are no public hearings or any public protests of note.

[...W]ith expansion China’s airports will face tough management challenges, particularly if labor costs rise and air traffic slows. There are also concerns among some analysts who study economic development that China’s airport program is excessive and that the country’s high-speed rail is likely to erode the profitability of airports.

While the bottom-line of pricey projects are as of yet inconclusive, the Wall Street Journal reports that, even as air-travel in other countries continues to slow, China’s increased air travel is contributing to a global rebound in the industry:

Global airline-passenger traffic remains on track for double-digit growth this year as a rebounding Chinese market leads broader expansion by carriers in Asia and the Middle East, according to industry data published Wednesday.

[...]China’s domestic market has driven the broader recovery, with traffic surging 20% in February, or 13% after stripping out the effect of the Lunar New Year, a prime time for leisure travel. Last year, the holiday fell in January.

Other big domestic markets continued to shrink, with U.S. carriers cutting capacity to boost their pricing power while cautioning that automatic government budget cuts are starting to hurt business.

Also targeted for continued expansion under the current Five Year Plan is high-speed rail infrastructure. The Guardian cites competition with high-speed rail and environmental concerns as grounds for better integrating the two forms of travel rather than investing into new airports:

The 12^th Five-Year Plan’s goal of building 82 new airports by 2015 will increase China‘s airport network by nearly 50%. The majority of these airports will fly shuttles for passengers located in remote cities of China to hubs that connect to other major destinations. But as Chinese airlines are forced to cut prices to compete with the rapidly growing high-speed railway network, the answer is not more airports, but better-developed transportation networks.

[...]Airport construction is not only a bad economic investment — it also has adverse impacts as China struggles to reduce carbon emissions and pollution. High-speed rail, the main competition to air travel, emits less carbon dioxide per passenger. Requiring electricity rather than kerosene, high-speed rail travel can also help China decrease dependency on foreign oil and the associated susceptibility to price fluctuations and supply disruptions.

High-speed rail is already edging out regional flights and airports, with Shanghai starting to offer combined flight and rail tickets for onward travel to nearby cities. If other major cities follow suit, regional small airports will be further marginalised.

[...]What China needs is not more airports but smarter integration of its different transportation networks.

For more on infrastructure development and the airline or high-speed rail industries, see prior CDT coverage.

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Post tags: 12th Five-Year Plan, airline industry, airport, economic development, high-speed rail, infrastructure, infrastructure projects
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When China adopted capitalism in the 1980s, Wu, then a local party secretary, promptly switched the village economy from agriculture to manufacturing and trade. It subsequently developed into one of China’s most successful economies.

[...] Unlike villagers elsewhere in China, Huaxi’s more than 2,000 residents were shareholders in a public company – Jiangsu Huaxi Group Corporation. They earned handsome dividends and shared the wealth with Wu’s family, who ran the business and managed village affairs.

[...] But unlike shareholders in other corporations, villagers lose their shares and benefits if they leave Huaxi. This was condemned as “unfair”.

Wu’s son and successor, Wu Xieen, is the now village party secretary and chief executive of the Jiangsu Huaxi Group Corporation. Wu’s sons control 90 per cent of Huaxi’s wealth, while his family members occupy most of key positions in the village government, said media reports.

Chinese official media, on the other hand, did not question Wu’s style of leadership, nor did they question the fake cover photo of Wu on Time magazine. From Barry van Wyk at Danwei:

In their fulsome praise of Wu Renbao today, China’s newspapers all mention that he made the cover of Time magazine in 2005. So I went looking through all the covers of Time magazine in 2005 and came up empty-handed. It was then, however, that I discovered that the newspaperNew News (新消息报) from Qinghai province had kindly printed the said Wu Renbao Timecover, inadvertently revealing that it and all the other Chinese newspapers had been embarrassingly duped by a blatantly fake Timecover. It boggles the mind how this newspaper didn’t notice its terrible mistake, with the fake cover being such a nut job of nonsensical grammar. The fake Wu Renbao cover, it emerged, was in fact ripped off of thisTime cover from January 2006. This fakery has already been reported on Weibo today (e.g. here or here), and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet.

Yet before we completely dismiss New News as a sorry excuse for a newspaper, it would probably be remiss not to mention that this snafu (as with everything else related to Chinese news reporting) was likely first propagated by Xinhua itself. Looking back at the paper trail of news reports yesterday, it does appear as ifXinhua was first with publishing a story of the news of Wu’s death and the claim that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2005 in a report published at around 20:30 last night. As mentioned above, Xinhua had already reported the false assertion on its Weibo account just after six last evening.

Inexorably in China, all news leads back to Xinhua, and then all the rest follow.

See more on Huaxi Village via CDT.

The fake “TIME cover” is embedded below:

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economic development, huaxi, Jiangsu, model village, rural development, Wu Renbao
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Stahl interviews developer Wang Shi who acknowledges that the bubble is “dangerous” and on the verge of bursting. In an accompanying Internet feature, Stahl also interviews real estate mogul Zhang Xin — the “richest self-made billionaire woman in the world” — who made waves not for her comments on the real estate market in China, but on democracy, made in the last minute of this clip:

60 Minutes Overtime gives more background on Zhang’s comments and discusses her activity on weibo:

[The SOHO Sanlitun office and shopping area, developed by Zhang Xin and her husband Pan Shiyi. Photo by TonyV3112 / Shutterstock.com]

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Tsezung Kyab, 27, torched himself in front of the main prayer hall of the Shitsang Monastery in Luchu region of eastern Tibet at around 1:30 pm (local time). He passed away at his protest site, the same place where his cousin Pema Dorjee, 23, passed away in his self-immolation protest on December 8, 2012.

[…] This is the second self-immolation protest in Tibet in as many days. [On Sunday], Phagmo Dhondup, a Tibetan in his 20’s set himself ablaze near the Jhakhyung Monastery in Palung region of eastern Tibet. His condition and whereabouts are not known.

On Tuesday, news emerged of another case on Monday, in Ngaba. From Phayul:

Sangdag, a monk of the Dhiphu Monastery, set himself ablaze on a main road in Ngaba district at around 10 am (local time).

According to the exile base of Kirti Monastery in Dharamshala, Sangdag’s present condition is unknown.

“Soon after Sangdag carried out his fiery protest, Chinese security personnel arrived at the scene and doused the flames on his body,” Kirti Monastery said in a release today. “He was taken a hospital in Ngaba but shortly after that the Chinese police bundled him away to another place.”

These protests brought the total number of Tibetan self-immolations within China to 107 since the start of 2009. Six other cases have occurred in India and Nepal, while two further incidents in Sichuan province are disputed on the grounds that they may have been accidental. The International Campaign for Tibet publishes perhaps the clearest and most comprehensive list of Tibetan self-immolations, though at time of writing it has not yet been updated to include Sangdag’s.

Another report from Phayul last week illustrated the risks faced by anyone suspected of sharing information about the protests. A 20-year-old Tibetan man was reportedly sentenced to two years in prison after two photographs of self-immolations were found on his phone, along with other images:

“He was apprehended by Chinese security personnel during a routine check near the city mosque,” the release cited a Tibetan source as saying. “Upon checking his mobile phone, the Chinese police found two photos of self-immolation protests, images of Tibetan national flag, and other photos showing Chinese atrocities on Tibetans.”

The release added that he was kept in various prisons for over a week during which he was constantly interrogated. Topden was later sentenced to two years in prison on charges of being a “reactionary, inciting the public, and threatening social stability.” He is currently being kept in a prison in Toelung region.

[…] In December last, four Tibetans were arrested in Rebkong region of eastern Tibet on similar charges of storing “reactionary” materials in the phone after they were found keeping photos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in their phones.

This is just the latest in a string of sentences passed on people accused of involvement in the protests. The crackdown is also said to have included confiscation of TV equipment, restrictions on travel, withdrawal of government benefits from families of self-immolators, and beatings and arrests.

Over the longer term, China has attempted to secure its rule over Tibetan areas with economic development. Xinhua’s China View reported the official removal of 130,000 people from poverty in the Tibetan Autonomous Region last year, pointing to long-distance trucking as a key driver of prosperity:

At The New York Times’ Latitude blog, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore acknowledged that Tibet has seen some material gains. But the settlement of nomadic herders has been a core policy to “raise living standards”, and this, she writes, has left many with government stipends and alcohol in place of traditional livelihoods and communities.

The Chinese government has […] undermined Tibetan nomads’ claim to land by ordering the fencing of private pastures and resettling populations, often forcibly. Since that campaign started in the 1990s — accelerating over the last decade — more than one million Tibetan herders across the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated regions of western China have been resettled. According to the state-run China Daily, the government spent almost $550 million from 2009 to 2012 on the resettlement of Tibetan nomads in Qinghai.

Herders have traded their livestock and their lifestyle for a small annual stipend. They often relocate to compounds in town — like the colorful ones I saw — where local officials can monitor their activities more easily. “People who live in these houses look at it like a jail,” one young Tibetan told me. “The community is gone.”

What’s left of it is being turned into a social underclass. Many older Tibetan nomads are illiterate, and aside from irregular construction work there is little they can find to support themselves once their stipend runs out. Those who cannot speak Chinese complain of being treated with contempt; they say shopkeepers of ethnic Han origin order them not to touch produce.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation (via CDT) recently hosted a discussion of past and present self-immolations with Columbia University’s Robert Barnett, Oxford University’s Michael Biggs and the International Campaign for Tibet’s Bhuchung Tsering. A blog post translated at High Peaks Pure Earth, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of the ongoing debate on the Tibetan web. Its author, Naktsang Nulo, dismisses the accusation that any but the youngest and most impressionable self-immolators could have been fooled into committing such an act, but implores others not to follow their lead and urges the Dalai Lama to issue a similar appeal.

What I want to state and request again and again from my heart and mind with deep sadness is that no matter what savage and brutal rule you may have to endure, please do not resort to self-immolation. You may come up with any other methods of resistance and struggle, but please do not set yourself on fire. I want to request again that no matter how pure your aims and hopes are, please do not resort to self-immolation.

[…] There are many ways to fight for freedom, to fulfill one’s aspirations and to struggle against the government. At a time when there is a so-called good leadership of the Communist Party, good governance from the administration, good economic development and good livelihood for the people, it seems that an individual, a group of people or a nationality can demand rights from the government, regional authorities or even the Communist Party by submitting appeals and through legal channels. It appears that one may not necessarily have to resort to self-immolation. Perhaps these are just the words of someone like me who does not know much. But what I want to request again is that no matter what savage and brutal rule you may have to endure, please do not set yourself on fire. Whatever methods of struggle and resistance one must adopt, do not resort to self-immolation. No matter how pure and incomparable your hopes and faiths are please do not set yourself on fire. I particularly want to request our root guru, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to pray for the sea of suffering in Tibet and kindly make a statement to ask the brave Tibetans not to self-immolate.

In an iSunAffairs Weekly article translated and republished at Phayul, New York-based political science professor Ming Xia examined the question of whether such a call would be effective or desirable. Xia’s primary focus, however, was the lack of support for Tibetans among Han intellectuals in China, which Andrew Jacobs also examined at The New York Times in November. The two groups face shared obstacles, Xia argued, but many Chinese fail to recognize this because of state propaganda or revulsion at the act of self-immolation viewed from a non-Buddhist perspective.

First as intellectuals living in the free world, we must be aware of the fact that the Chinese intellectuals and Tibetans are victims of the same authoritarian rule and that they are both facing a profound identity crisis. It raises a fundamental question for Tibetans, which is whether Tibetans would continue to be Tibetans if there were no Buddhism. And as for the Chinese intellectuals, the question is whether they would still be “intellectuals” if they do not have the right to free and independent thinking and the right to pursue truth. Since the two challenges are closely interlinked, it is therefore incumbent upon the Chinese intellectuals to pay close attention and support the demand of the Tibetan people.

[…] No doubt, resorting to self-immolation is not a good option. Tibetans today, however, do not have the luxury to choose between “good” and “bad”. Tibetans can only chose between “bad” and “worse.” Losing their religious faith is worse than self-immolation for Tibetans. The Chinese Communist regime wantonly insult the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, ban his portrait to be hung in the temples, expel the monks devoted to the Dalai Lama from their monasteries, establish “Temple Management Authority” and “Work Units” in the monasteries, and send millions of copies of the so-called “four leaders” (Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao) to the temples. All of this represents a serious threat to the religious freedom of the Tibetan people.

[This post was edited to remove a link to an outdated NPR story.]

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Indeed, business is booming for buyers, movers, rehabilitators and sellers of old buildings. No data is available, but anecdotal evidence and business reports suggest increasing numbers of cultural significant structures in underdeveloped parts of the country are being sold and moved to wealthy cities. Other buildings, like the Confucian temple in Zhongyang, are being moved by developers so hungry for land that they’re willing to pay for a delicate relocation.

Many buildings cannot be moved legally. Under Chinese regulations, the central government can designate certain cultural structures state-owned and immovable. But ownership of anything not on list is subject to local government control.

Zhongyang’s director of cultural tourism, Qiao Jinping, told Caixin the apartment building developer and local officials coordinated a “relocation-protection-style” project that combined support for economic growth with historic preservation.

“The developer bought the land (from the government ) and paid a large sum of money that helped us resolve the funding problem,” Qiao said. “Rather than let the Confucian temple collapse, we elected to have it be reborn elsewhere.”

[...]Business interests that jumped on the historic preservation bandwagon, meanwhile, have found ways to leap barriers posed by local government financial constraints.

The solution to Zhongyang’s Confucian temple conundrum, for example, balanced new property development and preserving the old for future tourism growth.

For more on historic design in peril, historical preservation and architecture, see “Razing History” and ”Old Building Restoration Taking Hold in China“, via CDT.

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Post tags: architecture, cultural preservation, design, economic development, historic preservation, historical preservation, urbanization
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Even many critics of the grave-razing program […] acknowledge that China needs to reform funeral practices (and, inevitably, encourage cremation) to meet growing land demands. What primarily offends these commentators is the brusque method used to clear away the graves in Zhoukou. On Nov. 19, Zhong Yongheng, a native of Zhoukou and a journalist with People’s Daily, the official, self-declared Communist Party mouthpiece, used his account on the Twitter-like Ten Cent microblog, to post his family’s experience with Zhoukou’s program. His family, he notes, no longer lives in Zhoukou but has relocated north to Beijing:

“You should give us notice at least before you damage our ancestral tombs, don’t you think? My family members are all in Beijing and didn’t get any advance notice from anyone. Then we suddenly received news that our ancestral tombs were leveled by an excavator. My parents turned toward the south, wailing.”

[…] So far, there’s no evidence that Zhoukou’s officials — or its government — will benefit financially from the grave- clearing program. On the contrary, the Beijing News has reported that some low-level government officials, under pressure to provide good examples for the farmers, have personally dug up their ancestors’ bones.

In one tragic case of a low-level official making an example of his ancestors, however, the digging dislodged a large tombstone that crashed onto two of his living family members, killing both. Sympathy was a rare sight in the several hundred comments left beneath the Beijing News story, many of which suggested that supernatural forces were at play. Meanwhile, other comments took a more vindictive approach, with one of the most repeated comments qualifying as the most direct: “Deserved it.”

At Global Times, Yu Jincui wrote that the “aggressive and showy tomb excavation campaign stinks to high heaven“, explained the depth of the taboo surrounding burial sites, and condemned the authorities’ heavy-handed attempt to overrule locals’ concerns.

In Chinese tradition, the removal of ancestral graves is the biggest insult one can endure, and those who excavate tombs are said to be subject to the most vicious curse.

[…] Considering the cultural and historical background of tombs and the importance they have for people, villagers’ resistance to their removal is not only understandable, but also predictable. In order for this plan to work, the government needs to both cooperate with and respect local residents.

[…] Those who excavate others’ tombs are traditionally considered to be cursed. The reputation of some historical figures is forever tainted by their merciless excavation of others’ tombs, such as Sun Dianying, a warlord in the 1920s who desecrated and looted the Eastern Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In light of strong public opposition, tomb removal in many cities has been halted, including in Zhoukou.

I am afraid the efforts of these local officials are doomed to go down in history as a bad example in the tale of China’s funeral reform. China’s local governments should understand that using force to promote reform is no longer effective today. Leaders in Henan and other provinces should take time to reflect on this.

Caixin’s Wang Yong acknowledged the economic and political pressures on local officials and the need for reform of burial practices. But, he argued, the “tomb-flattening campaign” epitomised the “typical” Chinese approach of using a huge and inflexible bureaucracy to shunt economic development forward at all costs.

First, there are usually serious legal complications. In the case of forced tomb removal, article 20 of the Mortuary Service Administration Act says that improperly buried remains can be forcibly removed. But according to the Administration Enforcement Law that came to effect last January, the act has no authority to enforce the provision. If enforcement is to be implemented, an administrative decision must be made by the civil affairs officials and executed by a court.

Had the Henan authorities followed this procedure, even if they had enforced their “tomb-flattening policy” for 10 years, they wouldn’t have achieved much. Sadly, the political movement is often in total contradiction with the rule of law in China.

Second, value and cost calculations follow the internal logic of bureaucracy. Career promotion is the incentive and “political achievements” are the yardstick. Officials follow this without thinking of the interests of the community as a whole.

This is why even when scholars such as Yao Zhongqiu, a research fellow at Cathay Institute for Public Affairs, call for the protection of traditional Chinese culture and people’s freedom to worship, tradition still bears no weight in the face of the pressure placed on officials.

It is difficult to calculate the hidden social cost of people’s mental suffering. It does not affect officials’ “political achievements,” therefore it does not enter into their consideration.

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Post tags: death, economic development, forced evictions, funerals, Henan, land reclamation, local corruption, local officials, tombs
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China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea said on Friday that they would push forward in developing economic zones.

The message came during a meeting between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and a DPRK delegation headed by Jang Song Thaek, chief of the central administrative department of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Wen said the government would continue to push bilateral ties forward, support DPRK to improve its economy and people’s well-being. He is confident the country will also make progress in national development.

Jang said Kim Jong Un, top leader of DPRK, attached importance to the bilateral relations, believing the friendship will be passed from generation to generation.

Aside from developing joint economic projects, Wen has urged Pyongyang to allow the market to revamp North Korea’s economy. From Reuters:

Premier Wen Jiabao encouraged North Korea to allow “market mechanisms” help revamp its economy, state media said on Saturday, and laid down other pre-conditions as China tries to wean its impoverished ally off its dependence on Chinese aid.

As well as allowing freer rein to market forces, the Chinese premier also recommended Pyongyang encourage economic growth by improving laws and regulations, encouraging business investment and reforming its customs services.

Beijing has had difficulty managing the relationship with North Korea, which it views as a strategically critical buffer between itself and U.S. military forces in South Korea.
But North Korea is often more cantankerous than China would like, in particular towards South Korea, even though the economic relationship between China and South Korea is far more important. Bilateral ties are also not always smooth.

According to the New York Times, Jang’s visit has garnered an unusual amount of attention from North Korean media:

Mr. Jang, 66, widely seen as Mr. Kim’s point man in overseeing the development of the zones, is the most powerful North Korean official to visit China since Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, went there in August 2011. South Korean analysts consider Mr. Jang to be a significant influence in Kim Jong-un’s recent efforts to tame his military and carry out his economic revitalization program, which, according to South Korean news media, includes allowing farmers to own part of their annual yield as an incentive. Such a plan, if put into effect, would be one of the most drastic reforms in North Korea, which officially sticks to “socialist economic principles.”

Mr. Jang is the brother-in-law of Mr. Kim’s father, who died in December. When Kim Jong-il was alive, Mr. Jang often preferred to stand in the background while party secretaries and military leaders stood closer to the elder Mr. Kim during official functions. Mr. Kim once banished Mr. Jang from Pyongyang, the capital.

But his prominence has risen with the ascension of Kim Jong-un. Mr. Jang and his wife have climbed the party hierarchy as they worked to ensure a smooth transition of power in the Kim dynasty.

North Korea’s state-run news media have provided daily updates on Mr. Jang’s trip, coverage that is highly unusual for anyone except for the top leader. Bolstering that prominence was China’s willingness to grant Mr. Jang meetings with its top leaders — a treatment that South Korean news media called “a level befitting a head of state.” Mr. Jang was visiting China as the chief of the central administrative department of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Amid continuing speculation on Kim Jong-Un’s first visit to China, Jang’s visit is seen as a prelude for the young Kim’s own trip, China Daily reports:

The visit is also widely speculated as a prelude to one by Kim Jong-un to Beijing. Kim has yet to visit Beijing but his father, Kim Jong-il, was a frequent visitor to China in his later years.

“It is a custom for the DPRK top leader to pay his first foreign visit to China,” said Zhang Liangui, a professor on Korean Peninsula studies at the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

“In the current situation, it is necessary for Pyongyang to step up communication with Beijing and to let the Chinese leaders and Kim Jong-un know each other.”

On Friday both Hu and Wen offered condolences for floods which severely hit the DPRK this summer.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bilateral ties, economic development, Kim Jong-un, North Korea relations, Wen Jiabao
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Qianhai officials signed co-operation deals with 37 companies in Hong Kong this week, while Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital said it had been appointed to bring leading foreign funds to the zone, a sign that China is wasting no time in developing the area.

[…] Shares of Shenzhen government-backed commercial property developer Shahe Industry, which is 15 minutes by car from the proposed business zone, hit their highest in more than a year in early July even though a company executive said it had not signed any deal on the Qianhai project. Its shares have surged more than 70 percent so far this year, outpacing an 18 percent gain in China’s property index.

Some market watchers, however, are skeptical.

“The Qianhai concept and government tie may have played into the share price surge, but solely investing in the concept is irrational,” said a Shenzhen-based analyst who declined to be named.

Read more about the central government’s plan to develop Qianhai, which is officially called the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone, via China Daily. For more on property investment and related policies, see Pressure Building on China’s Property Sector, via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economic development, Guangzhou, housing bubble, property prices, qianhai, real estate
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“The past 15 years was a period when Chongqing’s overall strength achieved the fastest growth, its urban and rural areas experienced the biggest changes, and its people received the most benefits in its history,” Zhang said.

“Meanwhile we must note that the Wang Lijun incident, the death of Neil Heywood and the serious disciplinary violations of comrade Bo Xilai have greatly tarnished the image of the Party and the nation and have had a grave impact on Chongqing’s reform and development,” he said.

…

“We must strictly separate Chongqing’s achievements over the past five years and the painstaking efforts of local officials and residents from the three cases. On the other hand, we must sincerely draw lessons from those cases and earnestly improve our work,” Zhang told the delegates.

Zhang’s remarks come as the CCP’s central leadership determines how to finish off Chongqing’s disgraced former leader, who is believed to be under house arrest in Beijing, but The Associated Press notes that he gave no update on the investigation. The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore reports that while an investigation may be concluded, senior CCP officials may still be at odds over how to rule on the cases of Bo and his wife:

One businessman in Chongqing, a former mid-ranking city official, said he had heard that Mr Zhang was stilled referring to Mr Bo as “Comrade Bo” in recent meetings and that Mr Bo had done much work to develop Chongqing.

“This means that Bo’s case is not yet closed and there is still a fierce struggle in the central government,” he said. “Zhang is being very prudent and extremely cautious about the words he uses. Bo’s power is not yet exhausted.”

“I would say we are still in a vacuum. They have not yet pinned him down entirely, or decided on the nature of the case. Bo has powerful allies and his Leftist route is the one the Party has been walking down for ever and is difficult to divert from.”

A second former Chongqing official also said Mr Bo could face more lenient treatment and that the central government appeared keen to extend the limbo around him for as long as possible and to dissipate the momentum around his case.

“He still has support in Beijing and they want to protect him. They are trying to fade the case out. Bo’s political career is dead, but they will try to protect him otherwise. One way of them doing that is the rumours that have spread that his wife is schizophrenic, or mentally ill,” he said.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, economic development, gu kailai, murder, Neil Heywood, scandal, Wang Lijun, zhang dejiang
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This has been an era of protest in China. The government stopped releasing figures a few years ago, but academics with access to internal documents say there are tens of thousands of demonstrations each year. The reasons are manifold – land grabs, ethnic unrest, factory layoffs, corruption cases and territorial disputes. But I have come to believe the fundamental cause is ecological stress: foul air, filthy water, growing pressure on the soil and an ever more desperate quest for resources that is pushing development into remote mountains, deserts and forests that were a last hold-out for bio and ethnic diversity.

This is not primarily China’s fault. It is a historical, global trend. China is merely roaring along the same unsustainable path set by the developed world, but on a bigger scale, a faster speed and at a period in human history when there is much less ecological room for manoeuvre. The wealthy portion of the world has been exporting environmental stress for centuries. Outsourcing energy-intensive industries and resource extraction have put many problems out of sight and out of mind for western consumers. But they cannot be ignored in China.

[…] As I have noted at greater length elsewhere, I had come to fear that China may be where the 200-odd-year-old carbon-fuelled capital-driven model of economic development runs into an ecological wall. Britain, where it started, and China may be bookends on a period of global expansion that has never been seen before and may never be repeated again.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, air pollution, Britain, economic development, economic growth, environmental protests, guardian, jonathan watts, Latin America, water pollution
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Several other outlets, including QQ.com, republished the article under a title which some felt better conveyed its argument: ‘China Must Permit Some Corruption, the Public Should Understand’ (both headline translations from China Media Project). Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin disagreed, and demanded—and received—an apology. An abridged translation appeared on the newspaper’s English-language site under a third heading, ‘Public should have realistic view of anti-graft drive‘, whose tone fell somewhere between the others.

Corruption is obviously thriving in China with limited resources to curb it. Some assume it can be rooted out if a democratic system is adopted. This is naïve thinking.

[…] Public supervision needs to be enforced, so that it can drive the government’s determination in its anti-corruption campaign. But the public should also be objective and realistic. They need to understand the reality that corruption cannot be completely banished from China at this time, rather than suffer in the pursuit of an unrealistic goal.

[…] Corruption derives from officials’ own misbehavior and the flaws in our system. But they are not the only causes. Corruption is also a result of our current level of development.

David Bandurski posted a full translation of the Chinese original at China Media Project.

Appeals to “our current level of development” are common regarding issues as diverse as human rights and environmental degradation. As Helen Gao wrote at The Atlantic, however, many observers found the Global Times’ argument deeply unconvincing:

… [The] editorial has drawn disbelief, ridicule, and satire on social media here. The editorial is surprising not for acknowledging that corruption is a widespread problem but for telling readers that they should resign themselves to accepting that “proper level” of corruption. In appearing to diverge from the official line that the Communist Party is committed to fighting corruption in all its forms, and suggesting that it is even willing to accept some corruption, the editorial has unwittingly reinforced many peoples’ worst beliefs about their government and its true intentions.

[…] “Yes, we should also understand a proper number of high-speed rail crashes, a proper level of poison in milk, a proper amount of leather in food, a proper use of torture in extracting testimonies, a proper sum of compensation for forced eviction and demolition, a proper reduction in reported embezzled money, a proper degree of lies in news, proper distortion of truth, proper screening of public opinions, proper social regression, and proper loss of civilization…” vented Xu Xin, a prominent Chinese legal scholar.

Zhaobudaoedeganjue summed up the public reaction on Weibo with one line: “You can be properly corrupt, so can I properly protest!”

China Media Project followed up its translation with a scathing response by program fellow Yang Hengjun, originally posted in Chinese on his blog:

On the Global Times take on the issue of corruption, response to Web user 1: It is all true to say [as the Global Times editorial does] that, to varying degrees, all countries in the world have corruption, that in China it is relatively serious, and that at present there is no way to utterly root it out. Some web users believe that the Global Times … has spoken the truth, that it is like the courageous child pointing out that the emperor’s news clothes [are a fraud]. But this isn’t where the problem lies. The problem lies in the conclusion the paper comes to after it has pointed out that the emperor is wearing no clothes — that the naked emperor is pleasing to look upon. They have broken through the floor of universal human values.

On the Global Times take on the issue of corruption, response to Web user 2: Some official media go even faster and farther than the authorities in challenging universal values, as though they are testing the intelligence and patience of the people. Monopoly media that go unchecked are not an outgrowth of freedom of speech, but rather brainwashing propaganda, a hotbed of fascism. If we do not refute them, they will someday reach the following conclusion — that in fact rape exists in all countries, that it cannot be utterly eliminated, and therefore a moderate level of rape is reasonable, something that women who are raped should understand and accept.

At The Diplomat, Mu Chunshan paired the row over the editorial’s headline with another recent media controversy as illustrations of ideological debate in the run up to this year’s leadership transition:

Recently, the official Beijing Daily ran a commentary arguing that issues such as social instability and food insecurity were being exaggerated by the media, risking public panic. The paper added that the media had forgotten the values of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Guangdong-based Time Weekly interviewed a number of analysts who lashed out at the commentary, arguing that reporting the truth is the media’s responsibility. Soon after, though, the president of Time Weekly reportedly headed to Beijing to apologize, adding that the outlet would deal strictly with the journalists involved in producing the story.

[…] If nothing else, the two incidents have offered the people the chance to better appreciate the importance of the media in helping understand society. And despite their apologies and backtracking, Time Weekly and QQ have done a very good job not only of drawing attention to some important issues, but also of shining a light on the progress (and otherwise) of the Chinese media landscape.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, David Bandurski, economic development, Global Times, Murong Xuecun, QQ, Wen Jiabao, Yang Hengjun
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The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.

Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.

Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.

How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.

This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China's rise, chinese philosophy, economic development, foreign policy, U.S. relations
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