See more on the Chinese Dream, including an analysis by Perry Link and CDT founder Xiao Qiang, via CDT.

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Post tags: American dream, Asia Society, Chinese Dream, Evan Osnos, political reform, political slogans, Xi Jinping
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As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China’s movies aren’t nominated for the world’s biggest awards?

[…] The most popular answer to the question, held by ordinary Chinese and film experts alike, is: “Too few good films. That’s the real reason in recent years Chinese films have moved further and further away from the Oscars dream,” wrote The International Herald Leader newspaper, in a story carried on the country’s popular Tencent entertainment site.

An article by The Economic Daily, carried on People’s Daily Web site, gave another interpretation: “The Oscars have never been a communal forum, the films taken seriously have only the responsibility to portray the North American world view and the lives they’re willing to see.”

The Oscars’ presence in China is almost as thin as China’s at the Oscars, according to The Los Angeles Times’ Barbara Demick. Only one of this year’s Best Picture nominee has so far reached Chinese theaters: Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which as a co-production with China enjoyed exemption from tight import quotas in exchange for compliance with the whims of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television.

As for Oscar viewing parties? Unimaginable. The ceremony, which begins at 9:30 a.m. Monday in China, will be broadcast only in much-redacted form hours later by state-owned CCTV. (Last year, it didn’t air until 10:40 p.m. Monday.) […]

[…] “Nobody even has the live stream in China,” complained Raymond Zhou, film critic for the English-language China Daily. “The government won’t allow it. They are afraid somebody will say something against China.”

Chinese television used to broadcast the ceremony live, but stopped after Richard Gere, as a presenter in 1993, called on then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to remove troops from Tibet.

“The Chinese translators didn’t know what to do, so they just tried to ignore the sentences. After that, they were afraid of the Oscars,” said Wu Renchu, a Shanghai film critic. “It is regrettable. There are many Chinese movie fans, students and white-collar workers who really would like to watch the ceremonies.”

[Update: CCTV6's M1905.com (via Bill Bishop) is streaming the awards ceremony.]

Gere’s outspokenness earned him a twenty-year ban from the awards, ending tonight with a musical performance to mark Chicago‘s six-Oscar haul in 2003. “Apparently, I’ve been rehabilitated,” he told HuffPost UK. “It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they’ve banned you.” Despite this punishment, Gere became a symbol of Hollywood’s defiance of Chinese authoritarianism, before hunger for Chinese funding and market access made this a disposable luxury. From Damien Ma at Foreign Policy:

In Hollywood in the 1990s, China was an oppressive place. Red Corner opens with Gere gazing up at security cameras in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, ground zero of the infamous bloodshed of early June, 1989, seared into many Americans’ memories. Brad Pitt, too, had been blacklisted from China, ostensibly for starring in the 1997 feature Seven Years in Tibet, in which his character becomes friends with the young Dalai Lama.

[… But t]he era in which China could still be a menacing villain and stir political passions from the Spielbergs and the Geres appears to be ending. Even Brangelina are reportedly studying Mandarin. And the political drama surrounding disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, ripe for Hollywoodification, will never see the light of day. Too bad, because the Bo Ultimatum is the Chinese Godfather waiting to be made. As Hollywood gathers for its biggest awards night Sunday, the industry seems to be biting its tongue. After all, the future, as Jeff Daniels quips in Looper, is in China.

From The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos:

[… T]hese days, Hollywood directors find themselves in the curious position of being more compliant than some of their Chinese counterparts. When censors ordered the Chinese director Lou Ye to make additional cuts to his movie “Mystery” just over a month before the film’s release date, Lou took the unusual steps of publicly tweeting the censors’ demands and then removing his name from the credits. Online, he explained his decision to break the taboo of discussing censorship in the hope that the system would “become more transparent and eventually be cancelled.” He was not willing to comply in silence. “We are all responsible for this unreasonable movie-censorship program,” he wrote.

[…] By comparison, Hollywood has been less vocal on the subject of censorship. When James Cameron released “Titanic” in 3-D last year—having agreed to censor Kate Winslet’s breasts—the Times asked him about the compromises of working in China. He said, “As an artist, I’m always against censorship… [But] this is an important market for me. And so I’m going to do what’s necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I’m going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I’m not going to change people’s minds that way.”

Transparency might be a more constructive approach than either foot-stomping or meek compliance. While there may be no end in sight for Chinese film censorship, Osnos suggests that the industry could formally and publicly catalogue cuts made at SARFT’s behest. Lou’s defiance, meanwhile, together with changes recently imposed on imports such as Cloud Atlas and Skyfall, has prompted calls for a more codified and less capriciously restrictive system. From Kristie Lu Stout at CNN:

[…] Lu Chuan is calling for change in the censorship system, hoping that Chinese filmmakers can be governed less by guesswork and more by a transparent rating system.

Lu says there must be change for the sake of his craft and also because his audience demands it.

“In an American movie, you can blow up the White House. We cannot blow up (Tiananmen) Square. It’s different. But the audience wants to see a lot of exciting visual things. So I think the leadership will think about that.”

He’s asking for the freedom to film China’s own “Independence Day,” the freedom to blow up anything without fear of political blowback.

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Post tags: Academy Awards, Dalai Lama, Evan Osnos, film censorship, film distribution, film industry, hollywood, Lou Ye, Lu Chuan, oscars, Richard Gere, SARFT, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Titanic
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Where the old guard of Chinese contemporary art lived through the Cultural Revolution, the experiences of this new generation are more rooted in the everyday competition of urban life, and the rapid changes that China has gone through as they grew up. For one installation, the 30-year-old artist Li Liao laboured at a Foxconn factory for 45 days. With his wages he bought the very iPad Mini model he had been assembling. He displays it—alongside his work overalls, identity badges and contract—as “Consumption”. (The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has posted an interview with Mr Li.)

But they are not entirely divorced from the past. In another work, Zhao Zhao, a 30-year-old former assistant of Ai Weiwei, cut cubes out of stone Buddha statues that had been destroyed by Red Guards, “to return them to their original state…in a repetition of history”. And that tank fashioned from leather cannot help but hold a particular charge in a post-1989 Chinese setting, even if the artist who conceived it, He Xiangyu, was only three years old when those tanks rolled into central Beijing.

Bao Dong, himself 33 and one of the exhibit’s two curators, said that “since 2000…China’s artists no longer only face an autocratic system but one of soft power. The market and capitalism [is] a soft, invisible cage.” It takes just as much courage to be original and daring in these conditions, he thinks, and such is the challenge for young artists who have “grown up in a society and culture beset by binaries, constantly toggling between extremes”.

Photographs and more information on the exhibition are available at the Ullens Center’s website.

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The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing has an intriguing new take on China’s place in the debate over Apple, iPhones, and the people who make them. While Americans hash out the moral ups and downs of having our electronics produced by Chinese factory hands, a young performance artist named Li Liao decided to jump into the middle of it. He got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology. I watched two young men separately linger over it for very different reasons: one was a hip Chinese gallerygoer in chunky glasses and a camel-hair coat, taking it all in; the other was a gallery security guard in a borrowed suit and white gloves. He was studying the details of the contract.

Did the experience change your perceptions of Apple one way or the other?

I worked at Foxconn for forty-five days. Before that, I was already an Apple consumer. I don’t think this experience changed my perception of the products; it only made one thing clearer: many of the products in this world actually have nothing to do with the workers who made them. To most of the workers there, Apple was just a name, a logo.

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Post tags: Apple, art exhibition, artists, Beijing, Evan Osnos, factories, factory workers, Foxconn, IPad, labor conditions, manufacturing, Shenzhen
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Why is this happening now? At bottom, it’s a curious confluence of skill, corruption, and record-keeping. Twenty years ago, most foreign correspondents made their bones on exotic front lines, and rarely ventured into the wilds of business reporting until they came home. But these days the ranks of the foreign press include a number of people who came up reading 10-Ks and bond prospectuses and have the instinct to deploy those skills abroad. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of China’s economy has forced the bureaucracy to create a body of records that, if deciphered correctly, can provide a roadmap of relationships that no human source could easily match. And finally, the scale of corruption in China has grown right along with the economy, creating a target-rich environment.

…

Some are calling for the U.S. to respond by delaying or preventing Chinese journalists from entering the United States. Last year, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, introduced the “Chinese Media Reciprocity Act,” which would compel the State Department to deny visas to all but a handful of the some six-hundred-and-fifty Chinese citizens working in the U.S., until China removes the obstacles to Americans. France, I’m told, did the same thing behind the scenes, and the problems disappeared. But this strikes me as unattractive option that risks undermining the very values of free, unfettered reporting that empower the American press in the first place. (For a smart take, see this testimony by Robert L. Daly, an expert on Chinese-U.S. media dealings.)

But the U.S. can do much more, both privately and publicly. In public, the State Department, at a senior level, should strongly object to pressure on American journalists, with the same energy it has directed at obstacles to the free conduct of other American businesses in China, or violations of intellectual-property and human rights. In private, media reciprocity should become a priority, and U.S. officials can remind their counterparts that Beijing’s ambitious plans to expand Chinese media in the United States are vulnerable to a backlash. This problem will not get solved on its own.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Chinese authorities have failed to renew a visa and journalist accreditation for Chris Buckley, an Australian citizen who recently rejoined the newspaper from Reuters. On Thursday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said they were still reviewing his application. And in May 2012, Al Jazeera English had to close its operations in China after authorities refused to renew the visa of its Beijing correspondent, Melissa Chan.

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This reawakened the heavy criticism of Mo’s politics that followed the announcement of his prize in October, but had substantially subsided after he expressed hope that Liu could soon be free. Compounding matters, the Associated Press published the first interview in over two years with Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, while Chinese activists, international Nobel winners and hundreds of thousands of others signed petitions calling for the couple’s release.

Mo addressed his critics at several points during his lecture. From Howard Goldblatt’s translation at NobelPrize.org:

My greatest challenges come with writing novels that deal with social realities, such as The Garlic Ballads, not because I’m afraid of being openly critical of the darker aspects of society, but because heated emotions and anger allow politics to suppress literature and transform a novel into reportage of a social event. As a member of society, a novelist is entitled to his own stance and viewpoint; but when he is writing he must take a humanistic stance, and write accordingly. Only then can literature not just originate in events, but transcend them, not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics.

Possibly because I’ve lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. I know what real courage is, and I understand true compassion. I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer gives free rein to his talent. So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.

The announcement of my Nobel Prize has led to controversy. At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I’ve come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me. Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers. I was afraid he would succumb to the assault, but he emerged from the garlands of flowers and the stones, a smile on his face; he wiped away mud and grime, stood calmly off to the side, and said to the crowd:

For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated. I would like you to find the patience to read my books. I cannot force you to do that, and even if you do, I do not expect your opinion of me to change. No writer has yet appeared, anywhere in the world, who is liked by all his readers; that is especially true during times like these.

Many interesting things have happened to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that truth and justice are alive and well.

So I will continue telling my stories in the days to come.

Video of the speech is available on YouTube, though not yet with subtitles.

Mo’s critics responded by comparing him to a prostitute and a dwarf and calling his speech “powerless, disgraceful, a betrayal and a sellout”.

Meanwhile, fellow author Salman Rushdie wrote of Mo’s comments on Thursday that it was “hard to avoid the conclusion that Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the régime.” At The Atlantic, James Fallows warned that “as a public figure, [Mo] will forever be diminished by the stands he is taking, and avoiding, now.” The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos acknowledged that “the timing of Mo’s words could not have been worse”, but was more sympathetic regarding his general predicament:

For Mo Yan, China’s most famous user of words these days, they have never carried higher stakes. When Mo won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, the first Chinese writer to do so, the Communist Party’s propaganda chief, Li Changchun, made it clear that he intended Mo to remain in the fold. Li wrote to congratulate him, saying that the “victory reflects the prosperity and progress of Chinese literature, as well as the increasing national strength and influence of China.” It was impossible not to sympathize with Mo’s excruciating position: he was being asked to take a stand that would, without exception, alienate one side or another. The Chinese government, with one stroke, could choose to make his life miserable, and the rest of the world would decide how history remembers him. Until he won the Nobel, had spent his life tiptoeing back and forth across the line, kowtowing at some moments, speaking his mind at others. The time when he could perform that kind of balancing act was over. Nobody who has not borne the weight of writing under authoritarianism could casually dismiss his dilemma.

The AFP, quoting a Swedish newspaper, noted that some of Mo’s other comments had been less Party-friendly:

Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Friday said the writer’s comments that the Nobel Prize was “personal” and not “for a country” could […] be seen as a snub to the Chinese establishment.

“He made it clear to Chinese journalists that the prize has not been given to China, where it is being used on patriotic grounds,” it wrote.

[…] It also quoted Shelley W Chan, the US-based author of a book on Mo Yan, who called his writing “brave”. Chan accused his critics of not having read his work.

She argued that some of his criticism of the Chinese regime is quite explicit while some was more indirect. Parts of it could be seen as referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, still a taboo subject in Chinese society, she added.

The political content of Mo’s writings has frequently been cited in his defence. The Kenyon Review’s Anna Sun, for example, while attacking Mo’s written language as an impoverished Maoist husk, wrote that “politically, Mo Yan is clearly a writer with a strong social conscience, although he has not been a dissident; he is unafraid to satirize contemporary Chinese reality in his novels, and he is wryly conscious of the game of political negotiation he has to play with the state [….]“

At The New York Review of Books, however, Perry Link suggested that the political aspects of Mo’s writing, and even his apparent words of support for Liu Xiaobo, might in fact serve the Party’s purposes:

Mo Yan writes about people at the bottom of society, and in The Garlic Ballads (1988) he clearly sides with poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by predatory local officials. Sympathy for the downtrodden has had a considerable market in the world of Chinese letters in recent times, mainly because the society does include a lot of downtrodden and they do invite sympathy. But it is crucial to note the difference between the way Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture.

[…] Defenders of Mo Yan, both on and off the Nobel Prize committee, credit him with “black humor.” Perhaps. But others, including descendants of the victims of these outrages, might be excused for wondering what is so funny. From the regime’s point of view, this mode of writing is useful not just because it diverts a square look at history but because of its function as a safety valve. These are sensitive topics, and they are potentially explosive, even today. For the regime, to treat them as jokes might be better than banning them outright. In a 2004 article called “The Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” Liu Xiaobo observes that “sarcasm…has turned into a kind of spiritual massage that numbs people’s consciences and paralyzes their memories.”

[…] Chinese writers today, whether “inside the system” or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country’s authoritarian government. This inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in various ways. Liu Xiaobo’s choices have been highly unusual. Mo Yan’s responses are more “normal,” closer to the center of a bell curve. It would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two.

For another side of the argument from October, see Brendan O’Kane’s ‘Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?‘ at Rectified.name. “Spoiler alert”, O’Kane wrote by way of introduction: “in keeping with the general rule about headlines posed as yes-or-no questions, the short answer is ‘no.’”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, dissidents, Evan Osnos, James Fallows, literature, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, perry link, Sweden, writers, writers and literature
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1. China’s political system has the efficiency and consensus to produce far-sighted decisions that Washington can only envy. Faced with our own gridlock and polarization, Americans are understandably eager to find a rhetorical cudgel, and we entered 2012 repeating the line that Chinese leaders had become all that ours were not: ambitious, visionary, willing to pull for a larger purpose. In last year’s State of the Union, President Obama invoked China as the “home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer. “So, yes,” Obama said, “the world has changed.” And he was not wrong. But this year added some sobering facts about the haste, waste, and corruption associated with China’s Great Leap. When a bridge collapsed in August, killing three people and injuring five, it was the sixth bridge collapse in a little over a year. The authorities blamed overloaded trucks, but it turned out that the concrete had been adulterated with sticks and plastic bags, the kind of corner-cutting that Chinese regulators have found in the nation’s enormous railway construction project. For this and other reasons that follow, the myth of China’s political efficiency can be retired.

10. Local bureaucrats might be corrupt, but decision-makers at the top are carefully selected and have deep public approval. “If we speak candidly,” wrote Deng Yuwen, a deputy editor of the Party-run newspaper called Study Times, “this decade has seeded or created massive problems, and the problems are even more numerous than the achievements.” The Bo Xilai debacle exposed a gangland element to Party politics that reaches to the top, and the revelations about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth leaves no doubt about the extent of self-dealing. Inside and outside the Party, reformists are calling not only for economic liberalization but also for credible efforts to end the two-tiered society, to resume political reform, and to narrow the widening wealth gap. China faces more urgent threats to growth and social stability than any time since the uprising at Tiananmen Square, in 1989. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of strikes and riots and what Chinese officials call “mass incidents,” doubled to a hundred eighty thousand a year—and that will continue to grow until the political culture improves.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2012, Bo Xilai, bridge collapse, corruption, Evan Osnos, hard landing, human rights diplomacy, Internet censorship, leftover women, mass incidents, Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping, year end lists 2012
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In this contradiction—between Singles Day and illegal tweets, between needing the middle class to sustain the Party’s rule, and punishing the middle class for passing jokes around—lies the Communist Party’s essential problem. For years, the Party, and many observers abroad, believed that the middle class would be the Party’s greatest ally, that it had gained so much during the boom years that it would never risk the trappings of prosperity for fuzzy notions of political freedom. It was an idea that reached all the way back to the ancient sage Mencius, who declared that “Those who have property are also inclined to preserve social stability.” In modern China, that turned into the belief that the middle class would become the xiaofei qianwei, zhengzhi houwei: “the consumer avant-garde and political rear guard.”

[…] The arrest of Zhai Xiaobing, which has inspired a petition calling for his release, stirred a particular kind of dread among China’s self-made liberals because it reached into the privileged domain beyond the Great Firewall, the electronic dinner table where members of China’s new knowledge class were supposed to be able to joke freely, as long as they kept shopping. Day by day, it seems, the Party is confronting the fact that prosperity alone—the politics of goods—is no match for the politics of information.

Yasheng Huang questioned the nature of the link between stability and prosperity in a recent essay at Foreign Policy, featured on CDT earlier this week. “Some analysts believe that the Chinese people tolerate corruption in exchange for fast growth,” he wrote. “This is a bit like saying that New Yorkers tolerated Hurricane Sandy. Fast growth maintains a façade of stability not because it has secured tacit complicity from the Chinese people, but because it has funded the instruments of repression.”

The petition for @stariver can be found here.

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In a short follow-up article at The New York Times, Barboza explained how he had obtained these documents:

Thirty years of economic reform — and government policies aimed at attracting foreign investment — have created a set of government agencies that keep records on private corporations and their major shareholders, including copies of resumes and government-issued identity cards.

It is this system that allows news organizations, including The New York Times, to request and review corporate records. Although ordinary citizens are not allowed access to the records, they can hire a lawyer or consulting firm to request documents for a fee of $100 to $200 per company. The Times used this process in obtaining thousands of pages of corporate documents to review the business networks controlled by the relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

More details on the year-long investigation came from the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who revealed that the newspaper had discussed the article with Chinese officials. The warning this provided may have contributed to the unusual speed with which censors pounced in the early hours of Friday morning.

Joseph Kahn, the foreign editor, told me that he knew when the reporting on this story began – about a year ago – that it would be a “threshold issue” for the Chinese government.

“I expected it to test the limits of what they would tolerate from the foreign media,” he said. (In speaking with me, he emphasized that Mr. Barboza’s direct editor on the story was Dean Murphy, a deputy business editor.)

“For us, this is just classic New York Times investigative journalism,” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s what reporters do. For them, this is not what reporters do. This is what reporters are banned from doing.” He said he believed that, by various means, the story is still getting out in China and that “it has done nothing to diminish the reputation of our journalism.”

Mr. Kahn said that as recently as Wednesday, Mr. Sulzberger and the executive editor, Jill Abramson, met with Chinese government representatives at The Times. But the focus of that conversation was not about the journalism – it was about a political and cultural differences.

In short, Chinese officials were making the case that The Times not publish the article.

From some angles, this case must have looked persuasive. As Sullivan noted, the Times is now exiled from China just months after investing heavily in a Chinese-language site. It faces irate advertisers—who were not forewarned of the article and its likely consequences—at a time when ad revenues are already dropping sharply. But at The Guardian, Michael Wolff argued that the moral victory is well worth the immediate financial cost:

The Times’ story, by David Barboza, is the type of journalism that not only catches the powerful in flagrante delicto, but that revivifies the paper’s reason for being. This has not been a kind few years for the Times, with its management, its journalism, and its prospects, under constant and more often than not unflattering scrutiny. But a story like this is something of an instant brand turnaround.

The New York Times took on China and, in the first round, won. This being China, the Times will, surely, be engaged in a constant battle going forward – even, perhaps, a confrontation that defines the sides in some new international press battle. That will, no doubt, be to its short term economic disadvantage. But that is good news for the Times, too.

[…] The Times released dismal earnings yesterday and its stock dropped by more than 20%. But its real value took an incalculable leap today.

Reactions were not uniformly rapturous, however. The Chinese government voiced its displeasure through both heavy online censorship and its Foreign Ministry spokesman. From the BBC:

“Some reports smear China and have ulterior motives,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said when asked about the story in a daily press briefing. On the blocking, he said the internet was managed “in accordance with laws”.

[…] The BBC has also been affected, with the BBC World News channel blocked when a correspondent was asked about the story during a report, and the BBC News website blocked later on Friday.

Regarding this censorship, Graham Webster explained on his Transpacifica blog “what it means when we say NYT is ‘blocked in China’“, while Max Fisher at The Washington Post discussed the risk that restricting access to such a prominent site might simply draw attention to Barboza’s report: 此地无银三百两.

Tea Leaf Nation’s Rachel Lu reported suggestions on Sina Weibo—similar to one source’s suspicion expressed in the article itself—that the Times had recently been fed its information by Wen’s enemies, and become a “puppet” in the political manoeuvring ahead of the 18th Congress in November. (Bear in mind Barboza and Sullivan’s statements that work on the article began in late 2011.)

Just three days before the article’s publications, overseas Chinese media reported that a portfolio of documents on Wen had been delivered to various foreign media outlets. As Wen presents himself as a champion of China’s liberals and reformers, many assumed that the dirt on Wen was given to foreign media by Wen’s enemies or supporters of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, the fallen symbol of the conservative camp who yearned for a return to Communist or Maoist orthodoxy.

“What position is the New York Times taking? Have they been bought out by the supporters of Mao?” asked one user. “All sides are making their final moves and positioning their pieces–that is what I think about the NYT’s headline today,” commented another. Some believe the newspaper is being used as a pawn in the power struggle, “This time NYT really does not understand China–too much of a puppet.”

[…] No matter what happens to Wen and the line-up at the 18th Party Congress, Wen’s political legacy and historical image are likely to be forever tainted by the revelations in the article. One social media user has no sympathy: “A giant when he talks, but a dwarf when he acts. Fare thee well.”

At Reuters’ Breaking Views, John Foley anticipated gentler repercussions for Wen, arguing that the explosive details would be dampened by the familiarity of the general theme.

Fix one problem, and along comes another. On the day China expelled disgraced politician Bo Xilai from its parliament, a New York Times investigation alleged that Premier Wen Jiabao’s family controls financial assets worth $2.7 billion. The suggestion is explosive, particularly of a leader who has spoken out about inequality. But it is also mundane, and won’t much change the calculus for investors in the People’s Republic.

With only around three weeks until Wen steps down from his party post, the risk that this becomes a social hot potato is slight. China’s censorship machine works as efficiently as ever: visits to the New York Times website were swiftly blocked. Blog users discussed the story, but only in euphemism, referring to Wen by names like “Wo Jia Baobao” – “My baby”. Though the details are juicy, the idea that China’s elite are very rich is hardly surprising.

[…] Consider this year’s civil service examinations, which are on course to attract a record number of applicants – in some cases with 9000 applications for a single post. That power breeds money is China’s worst kept secret.

Isabel Hilton elaborated at The Guardian:

In 1992 the late Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese former leader and father of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, said: “Let a part of the population get rich first.” He did not explicitly assign that leading role to the Chinese Communist party, but the party, which continues to insist on its exclusive right to rule and its vanguard role in Chinese politics and society, took Deng’s instructions to heart.

[…] The symbiosis of politics and money extends to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress which, as the annual Hurun report on China’s rich has shown, is now a billionaires’ club: the wealthiest 70 members enjoy a combined net worth of $85bn. By way of comparison, the estimated combined net worth of 660 top US officials, including the president, reportedly adds up to a mere $7.5bn.

The extent of the NPC members’ combined wealth was originally dug out of Hurun’s figures by Michael Forsythe at Bloomberg in February. 

This enormous accumulation of wealth threatens the view that, as The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini put it early this month, “while there may be corruption and wrongdoing at lower levels, the system is governed by clean and selfless elites who live only to serve the masses.” Barboza’s article does not implicate Wen himself of corruption, but any discussion of the wealth surrounding the pinnacle of Chinese power is deeply sensitive, particularly before a leadership transition already shaken by the fall of the now scapegoated Bo Xilai. From The Economist:

Mr Wen and his fellow leaders would prefer any public attention to the business dealings of the powerful to be focused on the family of Bo Xilai, the former party chief of Chongqing region in the south-west. Coincidentally, just after publication of the New York Times story, it was announced that Mr Bo had been expelled from the NPC. This was hardly a shock given that he had already been stripped of every other title, including last month his membership of the party. It prepares the way, however, for Mr Bo to be put on trial (NPC membership confers a token immunity from prosecution). This event will likely be staged some time in the next few months and will be the most sensational of its kind involving a deposed Chinese leader since the trial of the “Gang of Four” in 1980. Managing news coverage of it will be a huge challenge to the “collective leadership”. It will want to convince the public that Mr Bo and family members were engaged in egregious corruption (not least in order to block any possibility of a political comeback by the ambitious Mr Bo). But it will not want gossip to spread about the business affairs of other ruling families (squirrelling money abroad appears a national pastime, as we explain in our China section this week).

The man all but certain to succeed Mr Wen next March, his deputy, Li Keqiang, will be among those squirming. In a powerful report just published, Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, has exposed the prominent role of Li Keqiang’s younger brother, Li Keming, in the tobacco industry—even as Li Keqiang has been overseeing reform of the health sector. Airing such conflicts of interest is taboo in the Chinese press.

While the authorities scuttled to cover up the New York Times exposé, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos diagnosed transparency:

The most substantive measure [the government] might take would be to require public officials to declare their assets, an idea that has been gaining favor among Chinese commentators in recent years. China had nearly ten million public servants, but local experiments to make them own up to what they own have failed. “No experiment that discloses the assets of junior officials but allows senior officials to continue keeping their assets secret can really expect to gain enough credibility and support to be sustainable,” Yiyi Lu, an expert on Chinese civil society, wrote recently. “If the party is genuinely prepared to embrace reform and openness, then disclosure of officials’ assets must start from those in the most senior positions.”

The Party is running out of time not because corruption is a drag on the economy—it can outrun that effect—but because the public is losing confidence. Last year, when two trains crashed on a stretch of China’s new railways, citizens were not inclined to see it as an example of the inevitable problems that accompany an ambitious new improvement to public transportation. Instead, they circulated an anonymous message that read, in part: “When a country is so corrupt that one lightning strike can cause a train crash … none of us are exempt. China today is a train rushing through a lightning storm…. We are all passengers.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, billionaires, civil service, corporate governance, corruption, Deng Xiaoping, economic reform, Evan Osnos, inequality, Internet censorship, investigative journalism, journalism, Li Keqiang, National People's Congress, new york times, official corruption, sina weibo, wealth gap, Wen Jiabao
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The Wenzhou crash killed forty people and injured a hundred and ninety-two. For reasons both practical and symbolic, the government was desperate to get trains running again, and within twenty-four hours it declared the line back in business. The Department of Propaganda ordered editors to give the crash as little attention as possible. “Do not question, do not elaborate,” it warned, on an internal notice. When newspapers came out the next morning, China’s first high-speed train wreck was not on the front page.

But, instead of moving on, the public wanted to know what had happened, and why. This was not a bus plunging off a road in a provincial outpost; it was dozens of men and women dying on one of the nation’s proudest achievements—in a newly wired age, when passengers had cell phones and witnesses and critics finally had the tools to humiliate the propagandists.

People demanded to know why a two-year-old survivor was found in the wreckage after rescuers had called off the search. A railway spokesman said it was “a miracle.” Critics jeered, calling his explanation an “insult to the intelligence of the Chinese people.” At one point, the authorities dug a hole and buried part of the ruined train, saying they needed firm ground for recovery efforts. When reporters accused them of trying to thwart an investigation, a hapless spokesman replied, “Whether or not you believe it, I believe it,” a phrase that took flight on the Internet as an emblem of the government’s vanishing credibility. (The train was exhumed. The spokesman was relieved of his duties and was last seen working in Poland.)

Within days, the state-owned company that produced the signal box apologized for mistakes in its design. But to many in China the focus on a single broken part overlooked the likely role of a deeper problem underlying China’s rise: a pervasive corruption and moral disregard that had already led to milk tainted by chemicals reaching the market, and shoddy bridges and highways built hastily in order to meet political targets. A host on state television, Qiu Qiming, became the unlikely voice of the moment when he broke away from his script to ask, on the air, “Can we drink a glass of milk that is safe? Can we stay in an apartment that will not fall apart? Can we travel roads in our cities that will not collapse?”

Osnos’ report is full of previously unreported details and is well worth reading in its entirety. See also a recent article in National Geographic by Ian Johnson (via CDT) about China’s high-speed rail system. Read more about the Wenzhou train crash, former Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun and about corruption in China, via CDT.

Update: Charlie Rose interviews Osnos about his article, the significance of the Wenzhou train crash, corruption in China, and the upcoming leadership transition.

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Post tags: corruption, Evan Osnos, high-level corruption, high-speed rail crash, Liu Zhijun, Ministry of Railways, online public opinion, railways
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In China, the Gangnam phenomenon carries a special pique. It has left people asking, Why couldn’t we come up with that? China, after all, dwarfs Korea in political clout, money, and market power, and it cranks out more singers and dancers in a single city than Korea does nationwide. Chinese political leaders are constantly talking about the need for “soft power”—they have dotted the globe with Confucius Institutes to rival the Alliance Française, and they have expanded radio and television stations in smaller countries that might be tired of American-dominated news. Last year, the Communist Party even declared culture a national priority and vowed to produce its own share of global cultural brands.

So, should we expect a Chinese Gangnam soon? Don’t count on it. “PSY is a satirist, making fun, and having fun,” said John Delury, an expert on China and Korea who teaches international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul. “[…] But China, especially acting in its official, soft-power capacity, is only comfortable exporting things that show off the greatness of its ancient civilization or economic development. That’s not terribly inviting.”

[…] In China, some artists have looked on enviously. In a comic strip highlighted by China Digital Times, the cartoonist known as Peaceful House Pearl Shimao envisioned a Chinese-style Gangnam phenomenon he called “Shanghai Style.” Instead of being celebrated for his madness, the dancer ends up being sent to a mental institution for “involvement in multiple activities,” “running crazily all over the place,” and being a pig.

PSY’s satirical counterpoint aside, K-pop is itself no beacon of free-wheeling nonconformity. Also at The New Yorker, John Seabrook explores the K-pop industry and its rigid “cultural technology” formulae, which cover everything from artists’ lifestyles and diet to the ideal chord progressions and make-up colours for different target markets. Foremost among these is China:

In its early years, the Korean Wave didn’t feel as imperialistic to other Asians as a Chinese wave might have. But more recently, in Japan and in some parts of China, there has been a backlash from a loud minority, which may be one reason that the agencies are promoting their groups more assiduously in the West. This year, China passed a law limiting the amount of foreign programming that can be shown on Chinese TV. Hallyu, far from seeming like a benign export from a nonthreatening country, is now commonly described as an “invasion,” as though it were a sort of mental Asian carp that is clogging up the minds of the young.

[…] Lee Soo-man, S.M.’s founder—people in the company refer to him as Chairman Lee—is K-pop’s master architect. Lee retired as the agency’s C.E.O. in 2010, but he still takes a hand in forming the trainees into idol groups, including S.M.’s newest one, EXO. The group has twelve boys, six of them Korean speakers who live in Seoul (EXO-K) and six Mandarin speakers, who live in China (EXO-M). The two “subgroups” release songs at the same time in their respective countries and languages, and promote them simultaneously, thereby achieving “perfect localization,” as Lee calls it. “It may be a Chinese artist or a Chinese company, but what matters in the end is the fact that it was made by our cultural technology,” he has said. “We are preparing for the next biggest market in the world, and the goal is to produce the biggest stars in the world [….]“

Seabrook also talked to The New Yorker’s Sasha Weiss about the K-pop machine, how PSY succeeded abroad where more conventional “idols” have failed, and how ‘Gangnam Style’ might undermine future plans for a K-pop invasion of America. But the real goal, he says again, is China:

I think that the large picture here is there’s a … the world’s biggest music market is coming down the road. And that’s China. Everybody knows it: one day China is going to be the world’s biggest music market …. And so, what kind of music are the Chinese people going to listen to? Are all of our Western artists going to have a new fantastic flowering of back catalogue and new songs, are The Beatles going to sell another three billion songs, is it going to be newer artists from Korea or other countries, or is it going to be Chinese artists? And that’s, like, the big question. And in some ways, K-pop, as successful as it is, is really only the canary in the coalmine for what that’s going to be like.

Finally, Seabrook has compiled an annotated playlist of K-pop YouTube videos, including Girls’ Generation’s ‘Gee’:

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, confucius institute, Evan Osnos, Gangnam style, pop culture, pop music, soft power, south korea
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Months ago, in preparing for this show, we started reaching out to Americans living in China and asking for their stories. A shocking amount of the expats came back with stories about different times they were on Chinese television. So many people sent us their China TV stories that we began to wonder, “have ALL of you guys been on TV?! Is this the consummate expat experience in China?” Several expats talk to Ira about why the Chinese love foreigners on their TV shows. And Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker who writes about China, says it’s hard for Americans living in China to figure out what to tell friends and family back home.

In this section, New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos interviews Baidu’s Director of International Communication, rock musician and “uber-expat” Kaiser Kuo:

In Act II, author Michael Meyer talks about his experiences living in rural China:

Read more about foreigners in China, via CDT.

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Post tags: Evan Osnos, foreigners in China, kaiser kuo, views of China
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From the Associated Press:

“I believe that no matter how difficult the environment nothing is impossible if you put your heart to it,” he told a cheering crowd at NYU shortly after arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport on Saturday evening.

“We should link our arms to continue in the fight for the goodness in the world and to fight against injustice. So, I think that all people should apply themselves to this end to work for the common good worldwide ….”

“For the past seven years, I have never had a day’s rest,” Chen said through a translator, “so I have come here for a bit of recuperation for body and in spirit.”

Chen thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, along with the embassies of Switzerland, Canada and France.

Some Americans welcomed Chen not with cheers but, in comments collected by Offbeat China, with complaints about the burden he would place on the US taxpayer. The combined hourly rate of the several US officials who negotiated on his behalf is likely quite high; however, an NYU spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that, while he could not discuss financial specifics, “I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that there have been significant offers of philanthropy regarding Mr. Chen.”

With Chen and his family finally out of China, diplomats involved in the wrangling that secured their departure anonymously disclosed their account of the negotiations to The Washington Post.

Over the course of the negotiations, the Chinese never put any proposals on the table. Their role was strictly reactive. At the end of each meeting, Cui would leave to report the latest terms to Chinese leaders. At times, he would enter the next meeting having come directly from the compound reserved for China’s highest leaders.

“We would put something forward, and were getting answers back almost immediately from the highest levels,” one senior administration official said. “I have never seen the Chinese government working this rapidly and efficiently.”

Meanwhile, the 12-hour time difference with Washington meant U.S. negotiators were getting little sleep, spending most of their night hours briefing the White House and State Department via secure lines at the embassy.

Negotiating with Chen could sometimes be as difficult as negotiating with Chinese officials. Conversations with him could be deeply moving. He often seemed fragile — a blind man with few possessions, sleeping in a small unadorned room in the barracks of the embassy. He talked of how much he missed his wife and worried about his children.

But he could pivot in an instant, displaying a steely shrewdness as he detailed the demands he wanted conveyed to Chinese officials.

One Chinese scholar quoted by the South China Morning Post drew a pessimistic conclusion from the episode:

“It was an acceptable solution among the three parties after a series of negotiations between Beijing and Washington,” Professor Shi Yinhong , a Sino-US expert at Renmin University, said. “But I hope Chen’s incident is just an isolated case, not a trend.”

Shi said mainland scholars were more suspicions about US intentions towards China’s internal issues after Chen’s case. It came at a sensitive time, just before the Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

“I think our leadership should remain vigilant … because the Chen case showed Washington doesn’t watch us only on our human rights,” Shi said.

“It also wants to affect our politics at the highest level.”

But Orville Schell was among many who pointed to encouraging signs for the crucial US-China relationship in the two sides’ conduct during the crisis.

… China showed either a new maturity, or a much keener sense of realism, perhaps recognizing that relations with the U.S. are even more important than the fate of a single dissident, even if his flight is represents a sublime loss of face ….

In many ways, it is tempting to look back at the whole transaction as something of a hopeful breakthrough. With a minimum of posturing, the two countries did manage to work their way through a very difficult problem. Evidently, each saw sufficient common interest to find a mutually agreeable solution. That is a very hopeful sign.

At The New Yorker, Evan Osnos saw similar grounds for cautious optimism in Chen’s expression of gratitude to the Chinese government for their “restraint and calm”:

… It might not have been the first thanks on everyone’s lips. One could read that as a diplomatic comment, intended to protect those still in China, including his mother (whose house is reportedly being fenced off by local officials) and the fellow dissidents who helped him escape.

But it must also be read as the measure of a man with extraordinary presence of mind. He is, after all, correct: by the standards of official Chinese conduct in many other areas, its handling of Chen’s departure was restrained and calm. And that is one of the modestly encouraging facts to emerge from the final accounting of this whole complicated business: presented with diplomatic dynamite, neither China nor the United States succumbed to its worst instincts. The American handling of the affair was far better than the fevered early indictments suggested, and the Chinese have, so far, kept their promises to Chen and the United States. Those involved should take confidence from that ….

And from Bloomberg:

… With Chen now in New York, the two sides can return to nurturing a relationship that has progressed to a point that a case like his can be handled without a serious rupture, said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“It reinforces the trend since late 2010 for the two leaderships to find a way to steer around sensitive subjects and promote pragmatic near-term relations,” Paal said ….

“I think this brings the matter to a close,” Bonnie Glaser, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an e-mail. “Both countries will focus on their domestic politics, upcoming elections in the U.S. and the 18th Party Congress in China later this year.”

While many headlines hailed Chen’s arrival in the US as an ending, Perry Link told NPR that although “the tangle is finished for this particular case, it seems … the problems of human rights in China are not problems of one or two people whose cases have to ‘be resolved,’ quote-unquote. It’s a very deep, underlying long-term problem and we should view it that way.” As others stressed, the news brings no resolution for family and supporters still in China. From Jonathan Watts at The Guardian:

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said Chen’s departure was no cause for celebration as his family remained under pressure and there may be less incentive for the central government to investigate wrongdoing by the local authorities.

More importantly, Bequelin said, it raised questions about the wider environment for activists. “This is a reflection that there is no room for human rights defenders in China. We don’t know if this will turn into a temporary stay or exile, but in either case it begs the questions why someone like Chen Guangcheng cannot freely operate in China. What is it that stops the authorities from tolerating or even embracing someone like Chen?”

Bequelin’s comments were echoed, perhaps surprisingly, in a weibo post by Global Times editor-in-chief, Hu Xijin, quoted by Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times: “Today, Chen and his family have already taken an American airplane to New York. It makes people feel regret and sigh that in China today this is the only way to solve his problem.” His wistfulness was not matched by an editorial in his paper, which took a dismissive tone: “The drama around Chen is a colorful bubble. Nothing is left when it bursts.” Otherwise, as Tatlow wrote, Chinese media were largely silent about his departure, focusing instead on athletic victories, the South China Sea, or the ongoing clean-up of ‘foreign trash’. The famously independent Caixin did publish a report on Chen’s arrival in New York, but William Farris noted on Google+ that this was quickly taken down.

While some expressed reservations or disappointment, there was broad approval of Chen’s decision to leave from activists remaining in China. The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts spoke to several:

He Peirong – who played a key role in the escape by driving Chen from Shandong to Beijing – said she sympathised, even though the reverberations of Chen’s flight remain unclear. “I support any decision made by Chen, but it’s too early to say whether his departure is a good thing for China’s rights movement. Things are not settled. Problems are not solved. His family is still in China. The people who helped him escape are still in China.”

He – who was detained for several days after Chen’s escape and remains under surveillance – spoke of her admiration for Chen.

“He has done more than you could expect from any individual … Although he has experienced so much injustice and so many threats, he sticks to his beliefs. He is like a piece of jade: always smooth and warm.”

Chen’s lawyer Liu Weiguo said similarly that, despite his reservations about the outcome, “for the Chinese rights movement he has done more than enough. We can’t ask him to do any more. Now he needs time to rest.” Teng Biao, who precipitated the second phase of the diplomatic crisis by persuading Chen to abandon the idea of remaining in China, stood by his earlier position, telling Watts that “[Chen's] safety and freedom are the priority. Whether this is a good thing for the rights movement is secondary now.”

None seemed to entertain any hope that the concessions granted to Chen and his family were signs of a wider easing. From Reuters:

“There won’t be any big changes for us now that Chen Guangcheng has left. There are still many reasons to keep up control and stability preservation,” Jiang Tianyong, a Beijing human rights lawyer, said in a telephone interview, referring to the Communist Party’s terms for controlling dissidents.

Jiang, a long-time campaigner for Chen’s freedom, said he remained under house arrest, despite police officers’ earlier promises that he would be released after Chen left.

“I still don’t know when they’re going to let up,” Jiang said of the police restrictions. “This is no way forward, but especially with the 18th party congress, the high pressure will probably only grow, not decrease.”

As in recent days, the most urgent concern was for Chen Kegui, Chen’s nephew, who faces charges of intentional homicide for attacking intruders into his father’s home when Chen Guangcheng’s escape was first discovered. From The Wall Street Journal:

Lawyers who have taken up the case of Mr. Chen’s nephew said it wasn’t clear how Mr. Chen’s departure would affect the outcome.

“It’s hard to say, since China never plays its cards in the proper order,” said Chen Wuquan, a Guangzhou-based lawyer whose license was revoked by local authorities just as he was preparing to travel to meet with Chen Kegui this month.

“I think [the authorities] will be more strict in dealing with Chen Kegui,” said Liang Xiaojun, another of the lawyers involved in the case. “They won’t care about the international viewpoint.”

While a number of lawyers volunteered to defend Chen Kegui, his family’s eventual choice of Ding Qikui and Si Weijiang was rejected by local officials, supposedly at his own request. Chen Guangcheng told The Financial Times that similar obstruction had occurred before his own sentencing to four years in prison in 2006. “That this naked, shameless abuse can still happen again six years later …,” he said, adding that he suspected Chen Kegui had been tortured to make him accept a public defender in place of the lawyers appointed by his family.

The longer term fear arising from Chen Guangcheng’s departure is that he may, like others before him, be barred from re-entering China and find himself trapped and increasingly powerless abroad. Wang Dan argued in a recent New York Times op-ed, and Human Rights Watch’s Phelim Kine told The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, that the Internet had changed the nature of political exile. Nevertheless, worry about Beijing’s enthusiasm for exporting dissent muted Orville Schell’s optimism about the state of Sino-US relations. From Asia Society:

The tactic of facilitating the most prominent critics of the Party to go into exile was something like the outsourcing of the manufacture process of a very polluting and unwelcomed home-based industry. There might initially be some complaints from dispossessed workers, but ultimately all, or almost all, would be forgotten, and the ongoing problem, if there were one, would be someone else’s.

With dissidents like Fang Lizhi and Wei Jingsheng, Chinese officials learned that interest in the opinions of such activists and concern for their well-being quickly waned once they were abroad. The political oblivion usually followed rather rapidly. Moreover, a short while after they left China, these once-celebrated voices seemed to lose the requisite standing necessary to being taken seriously as authorities on Chinese affairs. The process of being exiled effectively turned them into political eunuchs. Far better, so the Chinese leadership seemed to have concluded, to endure a few days of high intensity bad press as a prelude to watching a dissident parked harmlessly and unheard in Queens, sink out of site. The alternative was to have someone like Liu Xiaobo stuck in a Chinese jail writing damning essays and winning Nobel Prizes. (At least so far, neither Liu nor the Chinese Government has shown any inclination to engage in such export tactics in his case.)

In his interview with NPR, Perry Link also described the history of this trend:

The record of dissidents leaving China has changed pretty dramatically over the last 23 years, since the Tiananmen Massacre. At the time, the Chinese government was angry to see people like Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi and Fu Xiao Jun and many, many others who fled and congregated at the time at Princeton University, where I was teaching. There were about 25 of them. And the government didn’t like that because they wanted them to come back. They were wanted and so on.

By now, I think we should say that the Chinese government’s policy has changed about 180 degrees. Now, they’re quite happy to see what they view as troublemakers like Chen Guangcheng be exiled, because the record over the last two decades of people who’ve come out has been that their influence inside China dramatically declines, and they feel frustrated. And their followers back in China feel frustrated.

So this exit of Chen Guangcheng is in one sense a win-win situation, because he and his family are now safe. And back in China they weren’t and didn’t feel that they were safe. And the Chinese government wins because it gets rid of a thorn in its side.

Link continued to describe Chen’s rural background, a potent contrast with that of the sterotypical Chinese urban-intellectual dissident. Sui-Lee Wee and Terril Yue Jones explore similar ground in a profile at Reuters:

“It was his own feelings of discrimination from the time he was a kid that really got him interested in law,” said Jerome Cohen, a China law expert and professor at New York University’s law school. Cohen has become a supporter and confidante of Chen.

“He felt the community leaders, instead of making blind people an object of sympathy, treated them as an unneeded burden on the community, people who didn’t pull their weight, people who claimed they shouldn’t pay tax like able-bodied farmers.

“That was what started him off ….”

“My first impression was I could be talking to a Chinese equivalent of Gandhi,” Cohen recalled. “This is a man with a quiet charisma, considerable intelligence, very articulate and a steely determination.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, diplomacy, Evan Osnos, exiles, Fang Lizhi, Global Times, homicide, human rights watch, Jerome cohen, Jiang Tianyong, jonathan watts, liu binyan, Liu Xiaobo, new york city, Nobel Prize, Orville Schell, perry link, South China Sea, Teng Biao, Tiananmen, U.S. relations, wang dan
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The following are all by deeply knowledgeable writers with original observations (rather than a pastiche of the conventional wisdom), and, most unusually, there is not book among them with a dragon on the cover. This list is emphatically incomplete, but in the spirit of another one of my favorite sites, here are five recent titles from the Letter from China bookshelf that are surprising or entertaining or useful.

Read more recommendations of books about China from the Five Books’ website, via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, Evan Osnos, five books
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… Macau still runs, more or less, as a separate state, and I’ve been reminded how much you can learn about a society by seeing what its people buy when they step outside the country. In the seventies, the Soviets went in search of genuine Levi’s. In the nineties, Chinese scholars stocked up on Disney paraphernalia for their mermaid-and-princess-obsessed kids. These days, you step across the border from China to Macau, and you are inundated with what?

Baby formula. In the prime real estate where one might expect to find the usual array of borderland businesses—jewelry shops, money changers, electronics vendors—there are, instead, pharmacies for blocks in every direction They are stacked to the ceiling with big, coffee-can sized containers of baby formula. To get an edge, stores put signs in the window promising: “Real Merchandise, Guaranteed.” When demand really spikes, the stores have to limit mainlanders to a few cans each, to prevent a run on baby formula.

Read more about melamine and food safety, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: babies, border, Evan Osnos, food safety, macau, melamine
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