Who are China’s environmentalists? How would you characterize today’s green advocates?

Journalists and broadcasters founded many of China’s most prominent green NGOs—after all, they witnessed the scale of the unfolding environmental crisis. China actually has a long history of civil society, which was suppressed during the Mao era. But the past 20 years have seen a flourishing of green NGOs. Now there are thousands registered, and many more unregistered. Today all sorts of people get involved in China’s environmental campaigns, from university students and middle-class urban residents protesting against the construction of polluting petrochemical factories or incinerators, to villagers in the countryside angry about pollution ruining their crops and their health.

[…] Why is public participation in environmental issues so important for China?

Without the public pressure to act responsibly, local officials will continue to chase short-term economic gains and disregard environmental concerns. A greener society needs journalists who can expose environmental problems, NGOs who can lobby for conservation measures, and lawyers who can represent communities that have been affected by pollution. That’s why citizens have been at the forefront of China’s environmental movement.

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Post tags: Chinadialogue, civil society, economic growth, environmental activism, incinerators, journalists, lawyers, local officials, middle class, NGOs, pollution, university students, villagers
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A district chief in a southern Chinese city told me this story: Heavy rains had triggered a flood that swept away over a thousand graves, affecting more than 10,000 people. The Chinese have a deep-seated belief that the state of one’s ancestors’ graves determines one’s own fate. To accommodate urbanization, these thousand-odd graves, originally dispersed over a variety of locations, had been shifted and placed next to one another — a process that was itself contradictory, because according to tradition, graves are not to be moved, lest later generations suffer some calamity.

[...] Instead of mobilizing the police, however, the canny district chief summoned a dozen or so practitioners of feng shui. They calmed the protesters, assuring them that when the graves were swept away it signified a fortune in the making. As folk wisdom has it, water is wealth — and an encounter with water means you will get rich. The protesters didn’t trust the government, but they did trust the feng shui masters.

Here’s another story, told to me by a former county official in Hunan Province, in central China. Consignments of timber, concrete and reinforcing rods were piled on a vacant lot to prepare for the building of a government office block. Every evening, local residents would sneak over and help themselves to construction materials, planning to use them for their own projects. In their eyes, stealing property from the government didn’t count as theft, unlike, say, stealing from your neighbor. County officials proposed security measures: a perimeter wall topped by an electrified fence, and regular police patrols.

No need for any of that, the county leader told them. His solution: wooden signs posted on all four sides. “For temple construction,” the signs read. This did the trick: when the locals saw that the timber, steel and concrete were going to be used to build a Buddhist temple, not only did they stop their pilfering, but under cover of darkness they even returned the loot they had carted home. Theft of temple property, superstition told them, would incur terrible retribution.

See more on Yu Hua via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: local officials, superstition, tombs, traditional culture, yu hua
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Zhu Jianguo, an independent political commentator based in Shenzhen, said: “Hu is relatively stronger than [predecessor] Wang Yang as he responds to issues with actions instead of the fancy catchphrases that Wang was known for.

[...] ”He is more practical than Wang Yang. Instead of getting rid of small and medium-sized enterprises from Guangdong, Hu has adopted a more nurturing approach to moderate economic restructuring.”

[...] As party chief of Inner Mongolia for five years before moving to Guangdong, Hu increased economic growth, almost tripling the autonomous region’s per capita gross domestic product to more than US$10,000.

But Professor Niu Haipeng , of Renmin University, was quoted recently as saying that Hu Chunhua had established a worrying environmental record in the process, with growth achieved at the cost of environmental degradation and public health.

The article also mentions that during the Southern Weekly censorship incident this January, Hu, in order not to clash with his local propaganda comrades, failed to defend Guangdong’s tradition of relative press freedom.

See also “Little Hu” Thrown into the Guangdong Fire, via CDT.

See more on Hu Chunhua via CDT.

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Post tags: CCP 6th generation, Guangdong, Hu Chunhua, local officials, officials, press freedom, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, Wang Yang
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Mr. Yan and his family actually missed two flights that day, according to the report. They first arrived late to board their flight from Kunming to Guangzhou in the morning after going to eat breakfast in the airport, then missed another flight in the afternoon after misremembering the departure time. As the video shows, Mr. Yan grew irate when told the family would not be allowed through the gate for a second time and proceeded to smash the area to pieces while a crowd – including several security guards – looked on.

[...] A statement posted to the website of the Fengle Group, which owns Yunnan Mining, said Mr. Yan would pay to replace the computers he smashed.

[...] “Apology? I strongly demand he be sent to try to smash up an American airport,” wrote one user of Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service. “A one-way ticket should be enough.”

The airport also came under fire from some commenters for not doing more to control a dangerous situation. “This is totally a terrorist act. Why didn’t airport security use force?” asked another Weibo user.

Jonathan Kaiman at the Guardian sees recent misbehavior by officials as a “symbol of arrogance and entitlement in China”:

The tantrum is not the only incidence of high-level misbehaviour that has gripped China during the past week. The Communist party secretary of a district bureau in Nanyang City, Henan province, drove a government car into a cinema on Sunday morning, injuring 26 people, according the state news agency Xinhua. Eight of the injured were hospitalised, two of whom remain in a critical condition.

The official, Liu Xianchong mistook the accelerator in his government-issued vehicle for the brake, reported Xinhua. The report cited local police as saying that Lie had been off work for seven months because of a cerebral infarction, a type of stroke. A special group to “handle the incident and its aftermath” was set up by the local party committee, Xinhua said. Liu has been detained.

Last week party disciplinary authorities said a former official in Shaanxi province had been expelled from the party for “serious wrongdoing” and “suspected crimes”. Yang Dacai rose to notoriety last August after he was photographed smiling at the scene of a road accident in which 36 people died. He became a symbol of official corruption when further photographs appeared on the internet of him wearing a number of luxury watches that many in China believe he could not possibly afford on a public servant’s salary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: airport security, corruption, Kunming, local officials, official conduct, officials, online public opinion, weibo, Yunnan
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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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Li Yuanlong, who once worked as a reporter for the state-run Bijie Daily in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, was taken to the airport along with his wife early Wednesday afternoon and “told to take a vacation” his son, Li Muzi, told China Real Time on Friday.

[…] The Bijie Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment. A person answering the phone at the Bijie city government propaganda office said Mr. Li was traveling with his wife, citing messages posted to former journalist’s account on the web portal KDnet. “They are very happy now! That’s his own personal matter – why are you asking us?” the person said before hanging up.

[…] Li Fangping, a Beijing-based lawyer who has been keeping track of the situation, said that he had talked to Li Yuanlong when he was on his way to the airport. “I can confirm that he is travelling under control,” the lawyer, who is not related to Li Yuanlong, said.

“This is a way for (the local government) to maintain stability,” he added. “The public still wants more details, even though the local government has already dismissed the relevant people. Because Li Yuanlong is the main information provider, and because he was a reporter who has a lot of friends in the media, they authorities are afraid that people will continue to contact him in search of more clues or that Li might even leak out information about other instances of social injustice.”

Chin had previously explored why this story in particular resonated so deeply with the public. Also from China Real Time Report:

Stories of suffering children are always hard to stomach, but they tend to hit with particular impact in China, where the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society have combined to imbue the young with an aura of unsurpassed importance. In this case, the impact of appears to have been amplified by similarities between what happened to the brothers and the Hans Christian Anderson short story “The Little Match Girl.”

The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year’s Eve after running away from her abusive father and trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books as an example of the difficulties faced by the poor in capitalist countries.

[…] Cao Lin, a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, [wrote:] “At a time when we’re crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre [….”]

Cao Lin was one of many in the state media to ask what had gone wrong, and who was to blame. Eight local officials were swiftly identified and fired. From Lin Xi at Global Times:

Eight local officials including two district chiefs in charge of civil affairs and education were dismissed or suspended from their duties by the Bijie municipal party committee on Monday because of the accident. Some people believe that these boys’ families and society should bear the primary responsibility for the accident instead of the officials. They think that it was the ignorance and indifference from the boys’ relatives and society which caused this tragedy.

However, the officials are not innocent because it is their duty to guarantee every citizen’s safety. The death of the five boys reflects management problems within government.

If the education system was better, these boys would have been taking lessons in warm classrooms instead of leaving school. If the assistance system was more active, they could have been found earlier and may have escaped death. Indeed, governments and officials have done nothing which directly caused this accident. However, it was the officials’ inaction which left the boys to die in the cold.

Many doubted, however that the sacking these eight officials had adequately addressed the root of the problem. From Rachel Wang at Tea Leaf Nation:

[…] As @bll2012 opined: “We are used to finding scapegoats when we encounter problems, then they give you a scapegoat! Then you shut up! You are so pathetic! Why not find the real cause: The failure of the social protection system.” Independent Chinese media Caixin (@财新网) also sounded a note of caution: “The tragedy in Guizhou did not only reflect management loopholes in Bijie alone, but also the defects of the mechanism protecting Chinese children’s rights. China is among the few countries that does not have a professional child welfare department. Administrative systems for child protection and rescue urgently need to be built.”

Therefore, according to the lawyer Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong was detained to prevent the damage from spreading any further. At The Daily Beast, Duncan Hewitt linked his treatment to the cases of Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) and Ren Jianyu, and suggested—as did Charles Custer at ChinaGeeks—that while local government may be directly responsible, the political climate in which such actions are tolerated and encouraged is one of Beijing’s making:

Li’s detention echoes what is now a common pattern in China, in which sensitive individuals are removed from circulation at sensitive times, and held either under effective house arrest at home, or in what are known as “black [i.e. unofficial] jails.” During the run-up to the recent Communist Party Congress, rights groups say over a hundred people faced such treatment—including the well-known human-rights activist Hu Jia, who was only released from a three-year jail sentence last year.

In some cases the hard line taken against dissidents may be the choice of local authorities rather than necessarily being decreed from the center, says Professor Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, but he adds that it is nevertheless a sign of the prevailing mood in Chinese political circles:

“The golden rule seems to be that no one gets bad marks for picking on dissidents and others labeled trouble makers,” he says, “while for those who are lenient, on the other hand, the risks if things go wrong are still high.

Furthermore, a Central Propaganda Department directive previously published by CDT suggested that Beijing, while allowing some coverage, had chosen to grant local government considerable control:

[… Y]ou may report moderately on the incident according to Xinhua wire copy and authoritative information released by the local government. Do not put this news on the front page, do not lure readers to the story, do not link to the story, to do not comment on it, and do not dispatch journalists to the scene.

Li, the primary remaining conduit of information on the case, had long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2006, he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly inciting subversion in a series of articles posted to overseas Chinese websites. From the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on his trial in May 2006:

“Like many committed reporters in China, Li Yuanlong began posting his articles online after facing censorship at his newspaper,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “He is guilty of nothing more than expressing his criticism of official actions and should never have been brought to trial. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

Li reported for Bijie Ribao on rural poverty and unemployment in his native Guizhou province and had frequently been censored in recent years because of complaints by local officials embarrassed by his reports, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and CPJ sources.

[…] Li pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his lawyer rejected the notion that his criticism threatened state authority.

“He only criticized wrongdoings of some Communist Party officials or local governments,” the lawyer told Reuters. “The Communist Party and state power is not the same concept.”

At EastSouthWestNorth, Roland Soong translated one of Li’s essays, On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit, originally posted to exile site Boxun under the pen name Ye Lang (Night Wolf). In it, Li pecked at the raw nerve of China’s ‘crucifixion’ by foreign imperialists, defending former Peking University professor Jiao Guobiao‘s suggestion that it would have been better for the U.S. to “liberate” China from Communist rule at the end of the Korean War:

[…] If America really sent its soldiers to drive for Beijing, then this is more than ‘interfering internal politics of other countries’ and it is really the invasion by the ‘world police.’ I have been pondering why interfering in the internal politics of other countries and being the world police man have become terms of denigration that are natural and indisputable in “our” vocabulary. If your internal politics is a totalitarian regime covered up by dark curtains, then why should not the police in charge of maintaining world peace come and show you? As a common example, I am beating my wife and kids at home and someone else (such as the police) comes to stop me. I yell: “I’m beating my wife and my kids. What is this to outsiders? Why are you entitled to mind my family business?” Is that acceptable? As another example, a Chinese person falls into the river, or his house catches fire. There is an American on the side, but the patriots won’t let the Chinese person accept the help of the American. Instead, the Chinese person must wait for other Chinese to save him. The Chinese person will have to “sacrifice himself for the greater good.” Is this not the modernized version under the cover of patriotism of the old saying “It is a minor matter to starve to death; it is a major matter to lose your chastity”?

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Post tags: central propaganda department, china youth daily, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Times, Guizhou, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, jiao guobiao, journalists, Korean War, Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong, local government, local officials, Ministry of Truth, poverty, poverty alleviation, subversion, vacation-style treatment
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In July 2011, a Hong Kong newsmagazine published the story of a Chinese vice mayor desperate enough to petition the Chinese central government for justice after his daughter said she was raped by a mining magnate in January 2009. The daughter had initially pursued redress through official channels, responding to the alleged assault with the confidence that came from being raised in a family of senior officials in a country where political power and connections frequently trump all else. But when her rape complaint vanished into the vortex of the city’s opaque and highly politicized legal system, the family found that they had been outplayed.

Unsurprisingly, the story caused a sensation — but it did nothing to change the outcome. And so in September of last year, I received a call from a woman who introduced herself as “Long Meiyi, the daughter of the ‘petitioning mayor.’” In a sign of increasing helplessness, she had decided to reach out to a foreign journalist to publicize her case. Over a series of conversations across many months, the now 22-year-old Long told me the story of how the system stopped working to her advantage.

[…] Long’s ordeal is extraordinary and deeply ironic, in large part because her stepfather was responsible for Liupanshui’s “stability preservation” apparatus. Tian was one of the top officials overseeing the city’s police and courts — as well as the notorious “Letters and Complaints” system, which ostensibly provides an outlet for disgruntled citizens by allowing them to petition the central government but also collects intelligence against them. In China, where there is no independent judicial system, citizens appeal to Beijing in the hope that even if local officials are corrupt, the central government might deliver justice. It’s a slim hope. Most petitioners are physically prevented from reaching the designated offices and have to settle for displaying their documents at prominent locations, in symbolic acts of protest and desperation. Tian’s role was to quiet complaints against the powerful and the state — until the person complaining was his daughter, and he found that the stability-preservation machine that he helped run was more powerful than he was.

The case was previously the subject of a 2011 Caixin op-ed by lawyer Ding Jinkun (via CDT—original now deleted), who concluded:

Local business tycoons are in cahoots with the local authorities to a stupefying degree. The moneyed class is in fact so ingratiated with local government that the wealthy have become the de factor political rulers. What has emerged is a despotism where citizens are sacrificed on the altar of the powerful, where legal rulings are constantly harming the people they are meant to help. Citizens looking to protect their rights will simply never win versus officials or versus the rich. Their only choice is to perish together, pitiable and powerless.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guizhou, judiciary, legal system, local officials, petitioners, rape, stability preservation
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Authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Qidong dropped plans for a waste water pipeline linked to the factory, which is located in the nearby city of Nantong, after thousands of protesters angry about pollution took to the streets last week.

[…] The water discharge project was part of a planned expansion for the Jiangsu Oji Paper Nantong Mill, which began output in early 2011 with an annual capacity of 400,000 tons, according to the company’s website.

It is unclear if the expansion will go ahead now that the sewage pipeline planned for Qidong has been cancelled.

The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch reported that the the company’s long-term plans in China may indeed be affected:

“The impact (of the suspension) on its business is almost none” because the suspension will be limited to a short period, an official said.

An industry official, however, said the latest incident “shed light on a business risk in China.” Oji Paper could review its strategy in China, industry sources said.

Oji has been expanding its presence in China and other emerging economies where it is seeing demand for its paper products rise, since having seen paper demand falter in Japan.

Although the plant is a joint venture between Oji and the city of Nantong, nationality has become a prominent theme in the backlash against it. From China Real Time Report:

In China, nationalist comments were mixed with lingering calls for further protest on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service, showing yet again the anti-Japanese sentiment still to be found in China. “How can a Japanese paper factory come and damage Chinese people’s health and our environment? How can we with our 1.3-billion population be afraid of that little Japan?” said one Weibo user claiming to be in southern Guangdong province.

“The whole nation should boycott Japanese products,” says another weibo user.

“Little Japan, get out of my country!” said a third, based in Jiangsu province.

Online users also called for continued efforts against Oji paper itself. A search for the phrase “boycott Nepia” – the brand name of a tissue that Oji sells in China – turned up more than 100,000 posts Monday morning. ”Please don’t use Nepia anymore and kick it back to Japan,” said one Weibo user using the name Wang Xiaosai.

Forbes’ Jack Perkowski hailed the episode, writing that “environmentalism has arrived as a positive force for change in the country” and rightly highlighting China’s shortage of clean water. But as @桔子树小窝 (“Little Tangerine Tree Monkey”) pointed out in a post translated by Tea Leaf Nation, the pipeline’s cancellation will not prevent pollution from the plant:

When I realize that people either start jumping for joy or start slamming people left and right, I felt hopeless for our times.

[…] Basically, the long and short of it is that Nantong doesn’t want Oji Paper to dump its wastewater into the Yangtze River, so they want to build a pipeline to drain the wastewater into the sea. But the people of Qidong are unhappy that wastewater from some other part of the province is going into their backyard.

So the Qidong residents “went for a walk” (散步, an euphemism for street protests). As a result, Nantong shelved the pipeline. Please note that the pipeline is now shelved, but the factory remains open. So as of now…the factory continues to pump wastewater into the river, as usual.

In a Global Times op-ed, Fudan lecturer Daniel Shen made the same point, blaming the protests on the spread of “fragmented information” online and the local government’s failure to fill in the blanks.

People who participated in the protest should at least have known that the paper factory was already operating in 2011 and the waste water was being dumped into the Yangtze River after it was processed to meet the disposal requirement. […]

In fact, if the public can put more of their passion and energy toward researching these questions, their supervision of the government can become more effective. This is something that stripping off the local mayor’s shirt cannot achieve.

As to the government, it must learn how to communicate with the public. Currently, local governments in China often choose to either show a hard-line stance on protests or take the easy route by unconditionally accepting the public’s demand.

But neither way is effective, despite different reactions from the public. Adopting a hard-line stance on public protests is not only wrong but also stupid, while an unconditional compromise only shows how lazy, incompetent and irresponsible a government is.

Also at Global Times, media commentator Peng Xiaoyun suggested that officials avoid these pitfalls by ensuring proper public participation from the start:

The government should open up its policymaking process for public participation, building up a representative system that allows the citizens to approve its projects. A good example can be found in Panyu, Guangdong Province, where local residents have also been taking a stand against a garbage incinerator project. But unlike what happened in Shifang and Qidong, the petition in Panyu is now undergoing a positive transition from a traditional street demonstration to a professional lobby.

This is because local residents and the government have established a representative mechanism that enables effective public participation in policymaking. For instance, local residents elect their representatives with professional knowledge on this issue. The representatives would then be invited to bring the issue to the government’s work conference for negotiation. The public will also be informed of this process.

The fate of local projects shouldn’t depend on the whim of either local leaders or angry protestors, but experts and professionals. The government should stop shouldering all the responsibilities and instead invite the public to help. This actually can be beneficial to the government as it won’t have to take all the blame if a project goes wrong.

Sharing responsibilities with the public will also help boost the development of a civil society, as people will become more capable in managing their own community’s affairs.

Tang Jun, a social policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, also stressed the importance of communication and obtaining local consent while talking to China Daily:

“Some local governments failed to release enough information about projects before construction began,” Tang said. “They should let the public discuss the issues from the beginning so the public knows more about the projects, dispelling their concerns.”

Tang also said that closing all possibly polluting manufacturing industries would improve the environment, but it’s not practical.

“A large proportion of the country’s population now works in manufacturing,” he said.

The broad consensus in favour of peacefully pre-empting protests shows recognition of the high stakes in adapting economic development to public concerns. Failure to do so threatens the unwritten contract between government and people, suggests Rob Schmitz on American Public Media’s Marketplace:

Years ago, as China stood on the precipice of an era of unbridled economic growth, its leadership made a deal with the people: you don’t challenge our authority, we give you a better quality of life. For the Chinese, ‘better quality of life’ used to mean the freedom to make money.

Not anymore, says U.C. Irvine China historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: They’re not willing to accept the idea that being able to buy more stuff at the store means your quality of life is improving if you’re worried about the pollution levels of the water you drink, if you’re worried about the quality of the air you breathe, if you’re worried about whether your children will grow up in a decent environment.

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Post tags: anti-Japan, environmental protests, Guangdong, industrial pollution, Japan, Jiangsu, local government, local officials, nationalism, NIMBY, Panyu, Qidong, river pollution, water pollution
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Large and sometimes violent demonstrations against the planned construction of one of the largest copper smelting complexes on earth prompted local officials in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to continue backpedaling furiously on Wednesday. The local government of Shifang, the planned site of the smelter, announced in a statement that the construction of the $1.6 billion complex had not only been suspended but also permanently canceled.

The smelter was supposed to be the centerpiece of a planned economic revitalization of an area devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, through the creation of thousands of construction jobs at a time when the overall Chinese economy is suffering a sharp slowdown.

A police official in Shifang said in a telephone interview that everyone detained in the protests had been released. The police acted after a crowd estimated by local residents in the tens of thousands defied the police and assembled Tuesday evening to demand the release of dozens of students jailed in the protests on Sunday and Monday.

Suspicion and resentment still linger, however. From Reuters:

“People are still waiting to see if the government follows through on its promise not to build the plant,” said the man. “There will be more protests if we are not convinced.”

[…] Despite the dual concessions, some Chinese called for the punishment of officials responsible for the violent crackdown. An 18-year-old resident told Reuters by telephone on Tuesday the police had beaten protesters the previous night.

“What are we going to do about the bastards who used violence on innocent people?” wrote a microblogger.

A Global Times editorial defended the need for heavy industrial projects like the one at the centre of the dispute, but urged local governments to gain public backing before pushing ahead, warning that “what happened in Shifang should never be repeated.”

China does need petrochemical plants and molybdenum copper projects. As a densely populated country with many underdeveloped areas, China has to bear the cost of undertaking tiring and environmentally risky industries that many developed countries won’t go near.

It is in such circumstances that local governments should earnestly deal with every single industrial project that carries environmental concerns. They should tell the truth to the public, rather than harbor the illusion that public opinion can be controlled when it comes to environmental issues.

Projects like the plant in Shifang can bring jobs and revenues, and they are not unattractive at all to a rational public. It is very normal that the project leads to some environmental worries and even opposition. Facing up to this can prompt local authorities to raise environmental protection standards. From a macro perspective, Chinese society will ultimately accept these projects while coming up with methods to stem their risks.

At China Real Time Report, Russell Leigh Moses took a relatively sympathetic tone, arguing that local officials are caught between conflicting pressures and messages from their superiors

Local Communist Party leaders are struggling to be both powerful and popular, responsible for keeping the local economy humming and unemployment low. They have to convince communities that local economic development will not harm the environment or public health.

But these cadres also recognize that economic growth in their area depends on keeping connections with industries that might pollute–that the path to promotion in China continues to depend largely on bringing in the goods and cementing stronger relationships with other officials, who can protect you if protests do break out and blame is cast.

And all the while, officials are being told to do all that and to resist the temptations of corruption.

So it’s not surprising that cadres sometimes get policies wrong, as they seem to have done in Shifang.

Also at China Real Time Report, Liyan Qi pointed out Tuesday’s 10% jump in shares of Chenguang Biotech, whose products include “the hot stuff” used to make tear gas. Weibo users suggested that the rise may have been fuelled by the Shifang clashes. Whatever the truth of the matter, the company’s shares have drifted back towards their pre-protest price since the violence ended.

See also CDT’s translation of a Han Han blog post, ‘The Liberation of Shifang’, in which he attacks officials’ heavy-handed response and willingness to promote polluting industries from whose effects they will largely be sheltered; China Media Project’s compilation of censored weibo posts related to the protests; Ministry of Tofu’s round-up of photos and translated weibo comments; and a CNN report including footage of the crackdown from several viewpoints:

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Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, cadres, environmental protests, Global Times, industrial pollution, local officials, NIMBY, Shifang, Sichuan
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“The government spent lots of money to watch the little blind one,” Liu Wencai, an elderly farmer, told The Associated Press as he walked down a village alley. But when asked about the hired enforcers, Liu said, “I cannot answer.”

Asked about the guards who once stood at a bridge entrance to Dongshigu and chased outsiders away, a middle-aged man in blue overalls on a motorcycle refused to answer. Before riding away, he made a throat-slashing gesture as a warning that the topic of security remains taboo ….

On the road outside Chen’s home, three women — taking a rest from field work — told reporters they are happier now that the security guards are gone. But they quicky dispersed when four local officials showed up and asked reporters to leave so as not to distract farmers during harvesting season.

“This village is very peaceful. Nothing happens here,” one of the officials said. “It needs a quiet environment to develop its economy.”

A likely factor in the villagers’ lingering wariness is suspicion that the dismantling of the security machine has more to do with a cover-up than with any real resolution or relaxation. Chen’s brother, defying local authorities’ request that he “keep a low profile”, voiced these concerns to Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee:

Chen Guangcheng’s eldest brother, Chen Guangfu, told Reuters by phone that the authorities in the northeast Shandong province last Saturday night destroyed “black houses” – which he called symbols of “barbarity and tyranny” and where he said countless supporters of his brother had been beaten.

[…] “Not a shred of evidence is left after they’ve destroyed everything at the scene. Everything has been moved,” Chen Guangfu said.

“The two guard posts that were built specially for putting Guangcheng under house imprisonment at the entrance of the village,” he said. “For the past two years, countless netizens (Internet supporters of Chen) endured violent beatings in these houses.”

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, cover-up, Dongshigu, house arrest, illegal detentions, linyi, local officials, police brutality, security crackdown, security guards, Shandong
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Perhaps the most immediately urgent situation is that of Chen’s nephew. Chen Kegui is now being held on charges of attempted murder after he took a kitchen cleaver to guards breaking into his father’s house in the middle of the night.

Chen [Guangcheng], who is now receiving treatment in a Beijing hospital and preparing to go to the United States to study, said his nephew was a scapegoat of officials angered by Chen’s audacious escape and demands that they be investigated.

Asked why police in his home province of Shandong in east China would arrest his nephew, Chen said, “Revenge.”

“I think this is revenge gone wild, and it’s their final battle,” he told Reuters by telephone from the Beijing hospital where he is being kept ….

“They beat him savagely,” Chen said of his nephew. “He was beaten so badly that his face was covered in blood. I heard he was beaten so badly that three hours later his face was still bleeding,” Chen said,

The Washington Post’s Keith Richburg reported a tense atmosphere around Chen’s home village of Dongshigu:

“I don’t dare go over there,” one woman said, pointing across the cornfields toward the bridge that separates her village from Chen’s. “They don’t have guns, they use sticks. If you look like an outsider, like you’re not from the village, they beat you ….”

Interviews conducted in Xishigu, the nearby village, revealed a climate of fear. “We’re all scared,” said one young man, a farmer in his mid-30s with a young daughter. “They might come and arrest us.”

A 56-year-old man who gave his surname as Wang said Chen’s many relatives in the area are all under strict watch, including those not under house arrest. “Even if his family members are allowed to go out, they are followed by those thugs,” the man said.

Reprisals have not been restricted to Dongshigu and its immediate surroundings. Richburg described being chased from the village by vehicles bearing license plates from elsewhere in Shandong province (and one with no plates at all), while other incidents have taken place still further afield: David Bandurski at China Media Project reported a number of apparently related weibo account suspensions while, according to Reuters, one lawyer who had volunteered to represent Chen Kegui had his license suspended in Guangdong:

Chen Wuquan, a lawyer based in the southern province of Guangdong, told Reuters the Guangzhou Lawyers’ Association had confiscated his license “temporarily” last week during a standard annual renewal. The lawyer Chen is not related to the Chen family from Shandong.

The association told him it could not renew his license because it had to deal with a complaint about an article he had written about the Chinese legal system.

“It must be related (to the nephew’s case),” Chen Wuquan said. “Because this kind of complaint should be processed quickly. It’s not possible that they would have to confiscate my license and not allow me to handle new cases.”

Despite this, Chen Guangcheng himself has continued to draw a line between the actions of the local and central governments. Some of the detentions elsewhere in China do appear to have been much much less harsh than those in Dongshigu: escape participant He Peirong, for example, described her interrogators as “very polite”, and said that they watched the prison break film ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ together. In contrast with his warnings of local authorities’ “crazed” vengeance, and despite a lack of evident progress in his application for travel documents and permission, Chen told Voice of America that he was “very happy” with the central government’s handling of the case. He had faith, he said, in their assurances of an investigation into the local authorities’ actions.

“To the Chinese government, I am very happy with the cool-headedness and restraint with which they’ve handled this case,” he said. “I hope the Chinese government, especially the central government, can continue to take steps towards further emancipating their minds, deepen reforms, and better address social injustices ….”

The activist told VOA he last spoke with Chinese authorities on Monday, and that they reaffirmed a pledge to investigate what he called the “illegal happenings” in Shandong.

“The important thing is that they will handle the case publically according to Chinese law – they expressed this very clearly. But they haven’t clearly said when this will begin,” he said.

Whether Chen’s professed faith in the central government is sincere or simply pragmatic, it gives Beijing room to co-operate without appearing to capitulate. The theme of officials abusing power behind a benevolent emperor’s back is traditional; it is found, for example, in the 14th Century classic The Water Margin, whose later chapters describe the outlaws’ amnesty and subsequent adventures as the emperor’s loyal soldiers. But The Economist dismisses this scheme as a poor reflection of the current reality:

Like many Chinese, Mr Chen portrays his own struggle as part of a wider gulf between an overwhelmed central government and maverick local authorities. After his escape, in a videotaped message, he implored the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to investigate abuses in Linyi. Speaking from his hospital bed in Beijing, where he is recuperating from a broken foot suffered during his escape, Mr Chen says: “It is clear that the central government needs to turn over the Shandong soil in which the crimes of local officials have grown.” It is a modern rendering of an ancient countryside lament: “If only the emperor knew…”

But the emperor does know, and the emperor rewards. Although there has been an expansion of social and economic freedoms in many areas, under the Communist Party’s system of cadre evaluations, local officials are graded on the basis of a series of internal targets that have little to do with the rule of law. The targets are meant for internal use, but local governments have sometimes published them on websites, and foreign scholars have also seen copies. The most important measures are maintaining social stability, achieving economic growth and, in many areas, enforcing population controls. Cadres sign contracts that spell out their responsibilities. Failure to meet targets can end a cadre’s career. Fulfilling them, even if it means trampling laws to do so, can mean career advancement and financial bonuses.

At China Real Time Report, Russell Leigh Moses puts a similar point in a somewhat more optimistic context:

It would be wrong to think that Chen’s case is another example of local authorities getting away with bad behavior while the central government stayed ignorant. That’s as much a canard as the belief that Beijing’s refusal to lock Chen up represents a sudden concern about China’s image overseas. Chinese officials are aware that their reputation is under the microscope again; but most are far more concerned with being seen as hanging tough than they are with being generous. In this and so many other issues, the Party line remains the hardline ….

But there’s another scenario: There are cadres who might think that Chen Guangcheng has a point, and that the continuing harassment of him and his family are reckless acts by a Party that should know better. These officials might not agree with all of Chen’s opposition, but his complaints about cadres running amok surely resonate with those in the Party who continue to be anxious about what they perceive to be the stalled state of reform ….

Chen Guangcheng is yet another cautionary tale in the run-up to the leadership handover here later this year. The decision on his fate will not change China, but it promises to provide another clue as to where some want the Party to go.

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Post tags: central government, Chen Guangcheng, detention, house arrest, interrogation, lawyers, linyi, local corruption, local officials, Shandong, sina weibo, weibo
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Feeling heavy in the dead of the night we came to the agreement that no matter what, we would not raise our fists in retaliation. If they beat us, we’d bear the beating. If they beat us too much, we’d run. If we couldn’t run, we’d leave it up to fate. Some people accuse us of doing all this for show, but at the time, we really did prepare ourselves, prepared to bleed, prepared to suffer pain. We just wanted to verify what it takes in this country, at this time, to visit an imprisoned “free man.” But it was not until the end that we learned the outcome and truly understood the distance spanning between us and Chen Guangcheng. It was exactly like as Enchao said: The longest distance in the world was from the gate of his village to his house.

It was October 15th, 2011. It was an ordinary day. Four fat men and a woman arrived in an unfamiliar city. In the deep of the night, the woman slept. The two fat men sleeping in another room snored loudly, threatening to wake the whole city. Another fat man snored in a different room, mumbling in his sleep and occasionally grinding his teeth. The fourth fat man couldn’t sleep. He sat on the toilet and smoked a cigarette, mindlessly flipped through a book. In a village near these five people, a group of guards surrounded a door, their eyes watched a single room.

In that room sits a blind man. He has been tortured for his activism. He sits in darkness and yet he struggles to find light for the rest of us. On this tranquil night, I hoped that he was having a good dream, a dream filled with color, a dream filled with light and the memories of home.

At Global Voices Online, Andy Yee explores Chen’s house arrest as a manifestation of China’s colossal stability maintenance machinery. He cites and translates numerous arguments from Chinese commentators, including the following from Xiao Han, of the China University of Politics and Law:

In the stability maintenance system, the more sensational the situation, the better it is for executors of stability maintenance. This brings power as well as economic benefits. In ancient China, there is a strategy of keeping the mobs close in order to strengthen oneself. Generals will not destroy bandits immediately, but will keep them alive in a fight-and-release tactic in order to keep asking for resources from the top. The stability maintenance system exhibits similar characteristics. In the Chen Guangcheng case, the Linyi authority not only beats up Chen and his family, it also kidnaps and detains visitors. This not only serves as an intimidation to Chen’s supporters, but is also a way to create tension in order to legitimize its violence. This can help them gain supports and power from the top. However, as all this is too outrageous, it leads to a condemnation from the pubic and waves of fearless visits. This results in a slight improvement in Chen’s situation, but visitors are still subject to harsh treatments. From the point of view of stability maintenance, the local government has already achieved its evil aim: to exaggerate the seriousness of the situation. Although the superiors of the Linyi authority know that this is a bad consequence of the stability maintenance system and its specific implementation, they are already tied to the same vested interests and can by no means display “weakness” towards Chen.

See also Caijing magazine’s description, translated by the Dui Hua Foundation, of China’s machinery of stability preservation, via CDT.

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, film industry, linyi, local officials, Murong Xuecun, security guards, stability, Xiao Han
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In 1998, the Asian Financial Crisis brought the region’s economy grinding to a halt …. China was not immune to the effects …. But if the economy was indeed sliding into recession, it was not evident to the National Bureau of Statistics. Official data for the year shows GDP growth of 7.8%, down only slightly from 8.8% in 1997 and within spitting distance of the magic 8% that is believed to be the minimum required to maintain social stability in China.

The 1998 GDP data has generated a storm of controversy. Academic economists have expended much energy in either defending the NBS calculation or, more common, attacking it and offering their own alternative estimates. Professor Harry Wu of Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and the late Professor Angus Maddison were among the most stern, concluding on the basis of their own index of industrial production that China’s GDP grew just 0.3% in 1998 (minus-0.1% in Professor Wu’s recent updated results) ….

The government has never admitted any problem with the data. Indeed, in a revision to the historical GDP data as a result of the 2004 Economic Census, the 1998 figure was the only one that was left untouched. But it has come close. The story that has trickled out in speeches and articles in the official press points the finger of blame at an excess of enthusiasm from local officials. Caught between the reality of an economy in crisis and the dream of career progression that depends on delivering growth hitting the 8% mark, officials engaged in rampant falsification of production data. Premier Zhu Rongji spoke of a ‘wind of embellishment and falsification’ that swept through the statistical system ….

Suspicions about the reliability of China’s data continue to focus on lying officials ‘adding water’ to bias the GDP numbers upward. But the more real risk is that that a large chunk of a rapidly changing economy has again been overlooked by the statisticians, and the official data understates the true size of the Chinese economy.”

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Post tags: economic growth rates, GDP growth, local officials, statistics, Zhu Rongji
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“I have complained again and again, but they fob me off and say, ‘Go ahead and sue us. You will never win’,” Zhou says. “The government officials have all invested in these projects. Everyone knows that. How else do they force them through so quickly …?”

They normally attract little attention. While mega-projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the South-North water diversion affect millions of people, the impact of each small diversion in remote areas is often felt by a less than 1,000 families. But with 85,000 dams in China, the multiple affect is huge and even when small, can cause immense ecological damage, particularly when clustered together, poorly designed and irresponsibly operated ….

But the authorities are committed to an expansion of hydropower, which means the best that environmentalists can hope for is probably the closure or postponement of a handful of particularly damaging or illegal projects in the most ecologically sensitive areas.

Environmental values remain second to economic priorities, as was evident outside Shennongjia on a roadside propaganda slogan: “Green is just fashion. Ecology is just a brand.”

See also, via CDT: China’s Biggest Relocation Project Yet, on resettlements to make way for the South-North Water Diversion Project, and China’s Coal Rush Leaves Three Million Living on the Edge, on the similar impact of coal mining on local communities.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corrupt officials, environmental regulation, hydropower projects, local officials, UN
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The daughter of a former vice mayor accused a wealthy local businessman and Party member of rape. After pursuing the case unsuccessfully for two years, the father, Tian Wanchang, resorted to petitioning in Beijing. Consequently, the man once responsible for “maintaining social stability” in his city has been labelled an “unstable factor” by local authorities. Ding launches a ferocious attack on the social ills the episode reflects:

A case like this cuts to the core of Chinese society, and the picture it paints is not flattering. It is a picture of jungle warfare, of a primitive world where power, force, is the only law. It is only because, in this case, the two sides happen to be more evenly matched – officialdom versus wealth – that anyone even knows that this case exists. Imagine a similar case involving the wealthy on one side and an ordinary citizen on the other – is there even any doubt that the case would never see the light of day? The injustice would certainly remain buried forever, regardless of the truth or the severity of the crime.

In this case, we have in Mr. Tian an official once in charge of maintaining social stability who, over the course of his career, doubtlessly clamped down on many who had been labeled disturbers of the peace. And now, following a bitter turn of events, he himself has been labeled one of those “unstable factors” threatening the very society he worked for years to maintain order in. More ironic still, despite his years of service to the state he is now unable to seek legal recourse for his own daughter. How is a father, how is anyone, expected to stomach a travesty of this magnitude?

Local business tycoons are in cahoots with the local authorities to a stupefying degree. The moneyed class is in fact so ingratiated with local government that the wealthy have become the de factor political rulers. What has emerged is a despotism where citizens are sacrificed on the altar of the powerful, where legal rulings are constantly harming the people they are meant to help. Citizens looking to protect their rights will simply never win versus officials or versus the rich. Their only choice is to perish together, pitiable and powerless.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guizhou, law enforcement, local officials, petitioners, police, rape, wealth gap
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