The successful launching of the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft, powered by a Long March 2F rocket, was shown live on state television from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in western China.

The crew is expected to spend up to 20 days in space and dock with the orbiting Tiangong 1 space lab module, a kind of miniature space station, which China launched in September 2011. The crew will conduct experiments and live for a time in the space module.

China has spent billions in the past decade to build a space program to compete with the United States and Russia, and it plans to eventually put a Chinese astronaut on the moon, perhaps by 2016.

The launching put China’s first woman into space, a 33-year-old air force pilot named Liu Yang.

Along with reports on the launch, the BBC also ran a profile of Liu.

State TV, which has aired documentaries about her, says she trained to fly transport planes and was cool under pressure after a multiple bird strike disabled one engine on her plane.

Hailing from the central province of Henan, she is also described as an eloquent speaker, an avid reader and a lover of cooking.

“From day one I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts,” she told state media.

“As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space. This flight will be much higher and further away.”

Aside from reports about China’s first female astronaut, analysts are also claiming that space missions could have implications beyond scientific advancement, according to the New Yorker:

There are arguments for space programs, of course: They rally national pride, attract talent to science, and throw off inventions with valuable new military and civilian uses. But watching China hurl one object after another into orbit, one can’t help but wonder if it says less about China’s dynamism in technology than about the obstacles it faces in becoming a true world leader. As the Wall Street Journal notes today,

When Chinese leaders approved the plan for a space station in 1992, “Chinese space professionals believed they would be latecomers to an expanding human presence in low Earth orbit,” Gregory Kulacki, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a recent research note. “Ironically, by the time they finish their space station in the early 2020s, the Chinese might be the only people left up there.”

Over the last decade, China has moved with purpose, putting its first person into space, completing an inaugural spacewalk, and launching two lunar orbiters. But it is not doing anything rash; the pace, four missions in four years, is a stately one. “China’s careful, sustainable approach cannot be compared to some early Soviet ‘firsts,’ which took safety shortcuts in order to achieve politically-timed space spectaculars,” according to Andrew Erickson, of the U.S. Naval War College. “By working on its own terms, on its own time, Beijing is building for the future.” The caution also reflects the risk that when a project becomes so closely identified with national pride, its success or failure becomes doubly significant.

This mission is the first step to build a Chinese space station by 2020, but there are also reports about further developing China’s space program. The Wall Street Journal adds:

Now that docking technology has been achieved, analysts say, other significant hurdles to establishing a space station include the logistics of keeping humans alive in space for extended periods.

A Chinese space station’s launch will also rely in part on the successful development of the Long March-5 rocket, which officials have said will make its maiden flight in 2014.

Additionally, according to defense analysts, China is developing optical imaging technologies and near-real-time data-communication systems that will allow it to monitor U.S. naval activity in the Asia-Pacific region.

Beijing also is seeking to cut its reliance on the U.S. Global Positioning System, which the U.S. could in theory deny access to in the event of a conflict.

While the launch was successful, Global Times editor Hu Xijin’s post on the success of the launch garnered criticism, and he responded to critics telling them to get their ‘heads checked.’ From The Shanghaiist:

Global Times editor Hu Xijin (胡锡进) rallies the troops over the successful launch of Shenzhou 9 in a post on Sina Weibo that has attracted 6,000 retweets and 3,000 comments:

With the successful launch of Shenzhou 9, yet another great step has been made by Chinese space research. This progress has created conditions for China’s overall advancement and China should wisely use opportunities like this to do good for all the people. If China can do space well, it shows that as long as we put our mind to it and work hard, we can solve all of the most complex problems. Let us make that determination! May our astronauts complete their mission and come back safely.

When his remarks ignited an avalanche of criticism and debate, he followed up with a word of advice to critics:

If you’re happy for the successful launch of Shenzhou 9, you’re a normal Chinese person. If you have not the slightest care for it, you are also a normal Chinese person. But if it has made you unhappy, or even angry, my advice to you is to get your heads checked. Because you’re probably very special, often depressed, and seldom happy. This can’t be good for your health.

Read more about developments in China’s space program, via CDT.

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Post tags: astronauts, manned spacecraft, Shenzhou 9, space exploration, space program, women
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Chinese media described Major Liu Yang, from Henan, as a “hero pilot” who achieved a successful emergency landing after a dramatic birdstrike incident spattered the windshield of her plane with blood.

Meanwhile, her rival, Captain Wang Yaping, from Shandong, is said to have flown rescue missions during the Sichuan earthquake and piloted a cloud-seeding plane to help clear the skies of rain for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Liu and Wang face very strict standards:

“They even must not have decayed teeth because any small flaw might cause great trouble or a disaster in space,” said Pan Zhihao of Space International, published by the China Academy of Space Technology.

The Guardian suggests that Chinese officials are concerned about space travel’s effects on a woman’s fertility, and that the female astronauts must therefore already be mothers. But Wang Xianmin, an official with China’s space program, insisted that there is no such requirement, according to Jinghua Times.

Compared to the first Russian and American female astronauts’ high profiles, Wang and Liu are more mysterious. Mark McDonald described their limited media exposure at the International Herald Tribune’s Rendezvous blog:

Their names were only confirmed last year when it was discovered they had autographed an envelope (along with their five male colleagues) featuring a postage stamp commemorating their astronaut class. They are rarely profiled in the Chinese media, and they make no public appearances, whether at local science fairs or international air shows.

Some suitably heroic details have emerged, however. From Damien Grammaticas’ BBC report on ’China’s female astronaut quandary‘:

The Shenzhen Special Zone Daily says [Liu] is an only child with a penchant for making patriotic speeches.

In a letter home after her first parachute jump, she explained why she never let her parents visit her during her four years in pilot training.

“Baby eagles”, she explained, “can never soar under their family’s wing”.

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Against a backdrop of rapid socio-economic change and modernization, China continues to be an authoritarian one-party state that imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones—with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

At the same time Chinese citizens are increasingly rights-conscious and challenging the authorities over livelihood issues, land seizures, forced evictions, abuses of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequalities. Official and scholarly statistics estimate that 250-500 protests occur per day; participants number from ten to tens of thousands. Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing the boundaries of censorship, despite the risks of doing so, by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrong-doing, and calling for reforms.

China’s state media has responded to the report with a flurry of indignation, as HRW’s Nicholas Bequelin noted:

此地无银三百两： People’s Daily and China Daily have published a total of 10 (!) articles on Human Rights Watch (@hrw) in one week.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) January 31, 2012

(“此地无银三百两”: “No 300 taels of silver here”; to draw attention to something by denying it.)

People’s Daily, for example, suggested that criticism of China’s rights record arose from Western insecurity:

It seems that some Western countries and NGOs have set out to attack China over its human rights issues. They first assume that human rights are being ignored, then seek evidence from rumors, and make speculations to blindly accuse China of violating human rights with the real purpose of distorting China’s international image ….

Why does the West still hold a prejudice against China’s human rights? The only reason is that the Cold War mentality and ideological hegemony still prevails. As long as China is a socialist country, the West will insist on distorting its image and see China as a threat to the Western system.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been too boastful of its political system, believing it is the only system that has universal value in the world.

China’s significant economic progress has stirred Western anxieties. Distorting China’s human rights becomes the only political choice.

Elsewhere, People’s Daily also criticised the report for failing to acknowledge China’s progress in legal reform. From Xinhua:

The World Report “gave no word on the great progress in terms of China’s judicial reforms that have been demonstrated in the Criminal Procedural Law draft amendment,” the article said.

Legal experts say the draft amendment will help improve the protection of criminal suspects’ human rights, by preventing judges from accepting confessions from tortured suspects and giving these suspects more defense options.

In fact, the report does acknowledge the amendment, but reiterates concern at the prospect of legalised enforced disappearances:

In August 2011, in an effort to … improve the administration of justice, the government published new rules to eliminate unlawfully obtained evidence and strengthened the procedural rights of the defense in its draft revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. It is likely it will be adopted in March 2012.

However, the draft revisions also introduced an alarming provision that would effectively legalize enforced disappearances by allowing police to secretly detain suspects for up to six months at a location of their choice in “state security, terrorism and major corruption cases.” The measure would put suspects at great risk of torture while giving the government justification for the “disappearance” of dissidents and activists in the future. Adoption of this measure—which is hotly criticized in Chinese media by human rights lawyers, activists, and part of the legal community—would significantly deviate from China’s previous stance of gradual convergence with international norms on administering justice, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1997 but has yet to ratify.

See more on CDT.

People’s Daily also objected to the report’s claim that “the government continues to build a ‘new socialist countryside’ [in Tibet] by relocating and rehousing up to 80 percent of the TAR population, including all pastoralists and nomads.” From Xinhua:

The People’s Daily article, jointly published by two Tibet experts, said the HRW’s conclusion was groundless and contradictory to basic facts.

The two authors, Zhang Ming, or Lorong Dramadul, with the China Tibetology Research Center, and Professor Yang Minghong with Sichuan University, hoped that their experiences and observations from over 20 years of field research in Tibet could help clarify the misunderstandings.

They cited official statistics and said that in 2011, 1.85 million Tibetans, or 61 percent of the total population, had settled in permanent residences.

“No more than 150,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the Tibetan population, had left their original residence,” the experts wrote.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Pan Xizhe’s op-ed at China Daily accused Human Rights Watch of sloppy methodology and political motivations:

At first glance, Human Rights Watch appears to be keen on the protection of international human rights. But it actually carries out its work with double standards and bias. Its observations lack political neutrality and its research methods are questionable. The organization’s employment of unqualified workers has also hurt the credibility of its report. Human Rights Watch should reflect inward before passing on judgment to others.

The media and international observers have long criticized Human Rights Watch for passing judgment of human rights conditions of a country or region through tinted lens. It turns a blind eye to human rights issues in some countries while criticizing others vehemently. The Sunday Times quoted a human rights insider in the United States as saying that the organization caters its reports to the US government, which greatly affects its objectivity ….

In the China portion of its report, Human Rights Watch used expressions such as “estimate”, “possibly”, and “probably”. It criticized China’s judiciary system, religious institutions, regional autonomy by ethnic groups, family planning policy as well as foreign and economic policies.

The US section of the report, which criticises the Obama White House’s failure to pursue Bush administration officials for approving the use of torture and decries America’s “abusive” counterterrorism policies, growing poverty and world-leading prison population, can be read here.

While the World Report looked back at 2011, at The Diplomat, HRW’s Phelim Kine looks ahead to 2012:

These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013 ….

The government’s overriding obsession with maintaining its monopoly on power make it likely that these abuses will continue under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Foreign governments could help reverse this trend and give support to Chinese who want a more accountable government by more vigorously engaging the government on such violations. Thirty years since the launch of China’s economic reform and opening, a decade after China entered the World Trade Organization, and five years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the deterioration in respect for human rights and rule of law in China should be of serious concern for all countries seeking long-term, sustainable and mutually-beneficial bilateral relations with China.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, criminal procedure law, disabled, human rights watch, industrial pollution, leadership transition, legal reform, Li Keqiang, migrants, minorities, press freedom, religious freedom, Tibet, women, Xi Jinping
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Women make up 49% of China’s population and 46% of its labour force, a higher proportion than in many Western countries. In large part that is because Mao Zedong, who famously said that “women hold up half the sky”, saw them as a resource and launched a campaign to get them to work outside the home. China is generally reckoned to be more open to women than other East Asian countries, with Taiwan somewhat behind, South Korea further back and Japan the worst. And its women expect to be taken seriously; as one Chinese female investment banker in Beijing puts it, “we do not come across as deferential”.

Young Chinese women have been moving away from the countryside in droves and piling into the electronics factories in the booming coastal belt, leading dreary lives but earning more money than their parents ever dreamed of. Others have been pouring into universities, at home and abroad, and graduating in almost the same numbers as men. And once they have negotiated China’s highly competitive education system, they want to get on a career ladder and start climbing. The opportunities are there. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who runs a consultancy, 20-first, that helps companies improve the balance between the sexes in senior jobs, points out that China already has a higher proportion of women in the top layers of management than many Western countries.

The piece follows a September report in The Economist on increasing numbers of women rising to the top of the corporate ladder in emerging economies, including China. As the article points out, however, a sharp gender divide still exists among China’s political elite: Just 13 of the 204 newly elected members of the CCP Central Committee are women.

For more CDT coverage of women in China, see also “Brisk Business for China’s Female Bodyguards, Spies” and “Leta Hong Fincher: China’s “Leftover” Women.”

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Post tags: CCP Central Committee, gender equality, Mao Zedong, private sector, state-owned enterprises, women
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ZHANG YIN (also known by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan) was the eldest of eight children of a lowly Red Army officer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for “capitalist offences”. Today she is one of the world’s richest self-made women, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something. She has been capitalising on her insight ever since. Nine Dragons Paper, which she founded with her husband in 1995, is now one of the world’s largest paper recyclers.

The emerging world is home to many businesswomen like Ms Zhang. Seven of the 14 women identified on Forbes magazine’s list of self-made billionaires are Chinese. Many firms in emerging markets do a better job of promoting women than their Western rivals, some surveys suggest. In China, 32% of senior managers are female, compared with 23% in America and 19% in Britain. In India, 11% of chief executives of large companies are female, compared with 3% of Fortune 500 bosses in America and 3% of FTSE 100 bosses in Britain. Turkey and Brazil come third and joint fourth (behind Finland and Norway) in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries by the proportion of CEOs who are women. In Brazil, 11% of chief executives and 30% of senior executives are women.

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An initial glance at some facts and figures appears to underscore significant progress in gender equality—at least in the government sphere.

Women today in China account for forty per cent of government officials, compared to below 33 per cent in 1995—which incidentally was the when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing.

21.3 per cent of NPC delegates in 2008 were women (the latest available data, according to the All China Women’s Federation). In 1954, that figure was just twelve per cent.

Impressive. But consider that the female proportion of NPC delegates has not significantly changed since virtually the early 1970s, stuck around 21 per cent all this time.

Women are even less well represented in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), making up fewer than eighteen per cent of the NPC’s main advisory body.

Read more about women in politics via CDT.

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The two annual meetings will mark the unveiling of China’s latest five-year plan, which calls for a shift away from an economy based on exports and massive public works to one powered by consumer spending.

Foreign economists and political leaders say the change will be a critical part of the effort to rebalance global trade. In China, it is seen as crucial to sustaining the country’s economic growth and the party’s unchallenged rule.

The uncertainty is whether the leadership can pull it off. The last five-year plan, issued in 2006, also proposed measures to boost incomes in an effort to restructure the economy.

In the end, however, exports and public projects revved up the economy, and the gross domestic product was 10.3 percent higher in 2010 than in 2009, well above the government’s target. Meanwhile, consumer spending’s share of the G.D.P. plummeted almost 10 percentage points from 2000 to 2009, to 35.6 percent — roughly two-thirds the level in many Asian nations, and half of that in the United States.

Other proposals to be decided on at the meetings include an adjustment in personal income tax; improving food safety, and delaying women’s retirement age. One proposal that is certain not be be discussed is a call, issued every year by the Tiananmen Mothers, to launch an investigation into the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

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Napoleon is famously said to have declared, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.” That is becoming true even in spheres that China historically has had little connection with, like chess, basketball, rare earth minerals, cyber warfare, space exploration and nuclear research.

This is a process that Miss Hou exemplifies. Only about 1 percent of Chinese play chess, and China has never been a chess power. But since 1991, China has produced four women’s world chess champions, and Ms. Hou is the one with by far the most promise.

[...]

It will be many, many decades before China can challenge the United States as the overall “No. 1” in the world, for we have a huge lead and China still must show that it can transition to a more open and democratic society. But already in discrete areas — its automobile market, carbon emissions and now women’s chess — China is emerging as No. 1 here and there, and that process will continue.

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Three decades after China embarked on dazzling economic reforms, much has changed for women. Unlike their mothers, whose working — and, often, private — lives were determined by the state, women today can largely choose their paths. Rural women are no longer tethered to communes; urban women no longer are assigned jobs for life or need permission from work units to marry, although all women must apply for permission to have a child.

Yet along with freedom has come risk, as socialist-era structures are dismantled and powerful cultural traditions that value men over women, long held in abeyance by official Communist support for women’s rights, return in force. Many employers are choosing not to hire women in an economy where there is an oversupply of labor and women are perceived as bringing additional expense in the form of maternity leave and childbirth costs. The law stipulates that employers must help cover those costs, and feminists are seeking a system of state-supported childbirth insurance to lessen discrimination.

The result is that even highly qualified candidates like Ms. Feng can struggle to find a footing. Practical concerns about coping in a highly competitive world are feeding into a powerful identity crisis among China’s women.

“The main issue we face is confusion, about who we are and what we should be,” said Qin Liwen, a magazine columnist. “Should I be a ‘strong woman’ and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife, support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines?”

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