“He was on hunger strike twice and force fed,” one source told Reuters, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. It was unclear how long the hunger strike lasted.

“He was not tortured, but fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Beijing for treatment,” the source said, declining to provide details of Bo’s condition and whereabouts which have been kept under wraps since his downfall.

[…] The recent lack of information about the case – Bo has not been seen in public since last March – harms the government’s credibility in the eyes of the people, said Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

“It’s not normal, too much time has past,” Bao told Reuters, referring to the lack of information from the government about the case.

“This is not good for the party’s image. They have not thought about this clearly. If they are able to properly deal with a big shot like Bo Xilai then they will increase people’s trust in the party,” he added.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Bao Tong, Bo Xilai, hunger strike, justice, rumors, Tiananmen, trials, trust
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Lisa Cameron, another of the study’s authors, discussed the findings (PDF transcript) with Sarah Crespi on the Science magazine podcast.

Some have expressed reservations about the study, however. From Rebecca Morelle at the BBC:

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

And from Louise Watt at the Associated Press:

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

A recent survey of 51,100 people by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the idea that Chinese society lacks trust, according to Xinhua. Its authors, though, point to a wider range of contributing factors including migration.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Migration would not account for differences between the Australian study’s native Beijingers, but its role in loosening the traditional social fabric finds anecdotal support in the Wang Yue incident cited above by Xin Meng. In October 2011, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore visited the Foshan marketplace where the accident took place:

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, demographics, Foshan, little emperor, migration, moral vacuum, one-child policy, population control, trust, trust crisis, Yueyue
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In today’s China, lack of popular trust in officials has become a vexing problem for the government. Something happens, big or small, the government comments, and the public is incredulous. The public always assumes they are covering something up, they are lying, they are twisting the facts, or even destroying evidence. Online, suppositions fly, but all in the same general direction — thinking the worst of the government. When the government conducts an accident investigation, no matter how it is done, there’s no way to earn the confidence of the public. And so, in the case of every major incident, the truth is always, inevitably, regarded as incomplete or delayed.

We must confess, concerning truth and trust, that the China of the past and the China of the present are two different worlds [existing side by side], operating each by its own logic. Government officials in China have, with little preparedness, been thrust overnight into an age of explosive information and fierce communication. But the ideas in their heads are still mired in the past. They find it impossible to avoid feeling panicked, angry, at a loss, or even wronged [by public opinion] ….

It’s quite simple. In modern societies, no state or government is trusted. The era in which the relationship between the government and the people is like the relationship between parents and children is long gone. The mark of a modern society is how “modern” its sources and transmission of information are. This means, too, that people have changed.

Source: Trust in China’s new media era – China Media Project

© samuel wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: microblogs, news media, officials, propaganda, trust, trust crisis, Zhang Ming
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In a move likely to foreshadow increased overseas access to China’s growing financial sector, Beijing regulators have approved three joint trusts that combine foreign investors with Chinese institutions.

Meanwhile, Caijing has learned that the foreign access limits set last year by the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) – a 20 percent cap for a single foreign investor, 25 percent for multiple investors — may be raised to 49 percent for joint trusts. Such a move would be in line with a current state policy that favors the gradual opening of the financial sector.

Foreign investors in the new trusts are the British bank Barclays, which teamed up with Xinhua Trust; National Australia Bank, which bought a stake in Lianhua Trust; and Britain’s Ashmore Investment Management, which signed a deal with Beijing Trust. Each overseas firm acquired up to 20 percent.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: foreign investments, trust
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

It may seem callous when nearly 70,000 people lie dead to wonder whether anything good economically could emerge from the rubble of the earthquake in Sichuan Province last month.

But as well as a short-term effect on economic output as reconstruction begins, there is a chance that the outpouring of civic spirit in response to the disaster may not only reshape Chinese politics but also strengthen its economic foundations.

The idea of social capital as a long-term driver of economic growth is well known to academics. In a 1995 book “Trust,” the political economist Francis Fukuyama identified social cohesion as one reason Japan and Germany recovered so quickly after World War II.

Chinese people, wary of working together for common purposes in groups beyond the family, appeared on Fukuyama‘s list of “low-trust societies.”

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, trust, trust crisis
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

As reported in the news, the announcement sounded ominous.

China’s chief censor has launched another round of crackdowns to eliminate what he labeled the “four fakes.”

(...)
Read the rest of A Warning On ‘Fakes’ That Doesn’t Add Up – Howard French (86 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fake news, propaganda, trust
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall