Pomfret's China

No Hummer Sale to China?

2009-06-26T14:32:43Z

The sale of GM's Hummer division to China was front page news and used by many a bloviator (see my main man Peter Goodman here) as an another example that CHINA IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!! ]]> More than a merely economic event -- the latest sign of China's rise and American struggles -- the deal is a cultural moment. ... China has come to embrace many of the attributes and modes of consumption that Americans may reflexively consider their own, complete with the sprawl and tangle of highways familiar to any resident of Los Angeles or Atlanta. The problem is that, according to Chinese state-run radio, the deal isn't going to go through. The BBC, quoting state-run radio here, reported that the country's planning agency would block the sale on two grounds. First, it said, Hummer is at odds with the country's planning agency's attempts to decrease pollution from Chinese manufacturers. (Um, I'll say.) Second, the prospective buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong, is a construction equipment maker with no experience in manufacturing cars. So much for the Hummer, or (in Chinese) "bold horse," galloping across China. And perhaps we can hold off on the China-taking-over-the-world schtick, as well.

Have China's Censors Gone Nuts?

2009-06-11T22:40:54Z

Here is a really smart post on China's nutty net nannies by Rebecca MacKinnon, China Internet watcher extraordinaire.

China's Rising Internet

2009-06-10T16:21:31Z

Two disparate events in recent weeks in China point to an interesting development. China's Internet users are challenging the government and forcing it to respond. First China's plan to force computer manufacturers to install censoring software and then the furor over a pedicurist who killed a government official after he beat her when she rejected his demand to have sex. tongxinglian, homosexual in Chinese. That, he said, could set back China's fight against HIV/AIDS. The government has been forced to respond. It's now saying that installing the software would be left up to consumers -- although the website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had said it was mandatory. And the China Daily quoted Liu Zhengrong, deputy chief of the Internet Affairs Bureau of China's State Council Information Office, as saying the software is designed just to filter Internet pornography -- implying that it wasn't also to censor sensitive political topics. Here's one story in the Chinese English-language press about the pushback. The next case is that of Deng Yujiao -- the pedicurist from Hubei province who was attacked by a government official after she refused to have sex with him and then promptly stabbed him to death with a knife. Deng became famous after a series of Chinese newspapers ran blow-by-blow stories about the affair. The Southern Metropolitan News, China's scrappiest paper these days, quoted her as telling her lawyers that one of the officials shouted at her: "You are a prostitute, but you still want to have a good reputation." Then he started beating Deng on the face and shoulders with cash. "Don't you want money?" he asked her. "You have never seen money! How much money do you want? Just say so. Would you believe that I am going to beat you to death with money today?" The furor was so intense from the Internet that authorities released Deng from the mental hospital where they'd incarcerated her and placed her under house arrest. The official New China News Agency also quoted the police as saying Deng was defending herself, although "excessively," again in apparent reaction to the waves of sympathy for her. While the Internet has actually strengthened considerably China's regime over the past decade -- helping it to both control the news in ways it couldn't before, and providing China's security services with valuable window into the thoughts of the country's malcontents (they can read all their email) -- it does indeed cut both ways. How these two controversies play out could tell us a lot about where China is these days. My guess? Deng gets a short sentence. And the floodwaters of the Internet will swamp the "Green Dam."]]>

Post 6/4 -- How the CCP Has Stayed in Charge

2009-06-08T17:59:04Z

This is my take on how the Communist Party has managed to stay in power for the 20 years after Tiananmen Square.

A Changing Chinese Tune on North Korea?

2009-06-02T22:21:49Z

There are surprising noises coming from China these days about North Korea. One influential Chinese academic thinks China's policy -- long supportive of the hermit kingdom -- might be changing. Zhu Feng's recent piece. Zhu is a political heavyweight. He's the deputy director of the Center for International & Strategic Studies at Peking Univesity. Zhu basically argues that 1) North Korea's claim that it carried out two nuclear tests because the UN Security Council criticized it for its sat/missile test is bogus. He cites "Chinese experts" who tell him that North Korea would have needed six months to prepare a test. That means, Zhu said, that North Korea planned to undertake these tests all along. This leads Zhu to a pretty significant, and I'd argue newsworthy, conclusion about China's role in all this. China, he said, had always believed that North Korea's nuclear program was negotiable. That Pyongyang might be willing to give up its nukes as long as its economic and security interests could be met. Now, Zhu writes, all the evidence "points in the opposite direction. In fact, the recent nuclear test by the DPRK is not just a slap in the face of China, but a sobering wake-up call for the Chinese leadership to face up to the malignant nature of their North Korean counterparts." And then the kicker, which gets into the argument I made in a previous post: China, Zhu said, has tried to juggle its twin concerns about North Korea -- de-nuclearization and preventing instability of the Kim Jong-il regime. But, he writes, once North Korea clarified that it had no intention to give up its nuclear weapons and instead upped the nuclear ante by escalating military tension on the Korean Peninsula, "Beijing's longstanding and delicately balanced policy toward Pyongyang became a casualty of the second nuclear test from its neighbor of the North." So what is China going to do? Zhu thinks China's policy could change. "The reason is simple: the DPRK's possession of nuclear weapons was not scary as long as it was believed to be temporary and could be eventually eliminated. North Korea's secretive conspiracy to become a de jure nuclear power, however, has recklessly crossed Beijing's 'bottom line.'" Zhu points out that Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie joined the international community on May 27 to decry North Korea's nuclear test. The PLA has historically been the biggest friend of the Kim Dynasty. "This is a significant sign," Zhu writes, "that China's policy toward the North might shift." And with a veritable toddler -- Kim Jong-un, the 25-year-old son of Kim Jong-il's third wife Ko Yong-hee (d. 2004) -- being readied for Lil Kim's throne, Beijing might have an opportunity. Stay tuned. ]]>

The Chinese Pedicurist Who Struck Back

2009-05-29T17:51:05Z

This is a really interesting piece from the South China Morning Post on a story that has captivated China. Two reporters beaten as gag on case tightens Pressure on activists over accused killer's plight SCMP He Huifeng May 29, 2009 Two reporters were beaten in Hubei's Badong county as local authorities sealed off the epicentre of a scandal involving a cadre allegedly killed by a hotel pedicurist. Two reporters - Kong Pu from the Beijing Times and Wei Yi from the Nangfang People Weekly - were beaten yesterday morning by officials in Yesanguan town, according to media sources. They were interviewing a grandmother of the 21-year-old pedicurist, Deng Yujiao . The reporters were left bruised by the attack and both had their cameras smashed, the sources said. They were detained from 1pm to 5pm, and there were a number of security personnel monitoring their hotel after their release. Both reporters said they had proper media credentials. A media gag was introduced by central government censors on Tuesday. News organisations were ordered to halt their reporting on the case and recall reporters from Hubei, saying the case was under judicial investigation. Deng's plight has sparked one of the biggest civil rights movements on the mainland in recent years as various groups showed their solidarity with her. Many netizens and reporters have travelled to Yesanguan to follow the case voluntarily. But a group of five women's rights activists who arrived in Yesanguan on Monday said the town was eerily quiet because access to it had been cut by local authorities. "We were told by local residents that the ferry from Yichang to Badong had been suspended since Tuesday," said Zhou Li, one of the activists. "Every vehicle entering Badong county is being checked. If drivers or passengers are not locals, they are told to turn back." Ms Zhou said hotels in the town had been told not to receive outsiders. Some shops had even been shut since Wednesday. "We've been followed by more than a dozen plain-clothes police since we arrived in Badong. Now, the electricity and water supply to our hotel has been cut off. They are trying to make us give in," said Ms Zhou. "Five Yesanguan officials, including the chief of police, came [on Wednesday night] and asked us to leave. They said they could not guarantee our safety if we stay here. We came here to show support for the powerless and anger at officialdom. We'll be here until the end." The dead official, Deng Guida, the head of a trade promotion department in the town, reportedly demanded "special services" - a euphemism for sex - from Deng at Yesanguan's Xiongfeng hotel on May 10. In the presence of a subordinate, he threw money in her face and pushed her to the sofa several times before she stabbed him with a fruit knife. The subordinate was injured. The reported behaviour of the officials sparked fury among netizens, and this was heightened when local authorities appeared to tone down the description of the officials' activities in a way that could see them avoid charges of demanding sexual services or rape. On Wednesday, Deng was released from custody and placed under house arrest. Commentators said the move would help to address public mistrust in the government. They also said the house arrest could be an indication of official back-pedalling from the earlier murder charges and an attempt to defuse public anger.

China's Military Game Changer?

2009-05-28T22:20:57Z

Proceedings. It depicts a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in flames, smoke billowing from the deck. The headline asks a simple question: Chinese Carrier Killer?

This month's Proceedings magazine cover.

]]> For me, the piece serves as a sobering reminder that despite all this talk of a G2, despite all these signs that Taiwan and China are moving ineluctably closer together, China's military continues to have U.S. forces in their sights. "On the Verge of a Game-Changer" is how the piece begins. It focuses on China's efforts of using land-based missiles to hit sea targets -- in other words, U.S. carrier strike groups. Such a weapon, it reports, would probably be based on a variant of China's 1,500 km-plus range DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile. For guidance it'd be supported by China's "growing family of terrestrial and space-based sensors," the piece says. Now, nobody in the public sphere really knows how advanced China's anti-ship ballistic missile program is. But as the piece points out, "the mere perception that China might have an antiship ballistic missile capability could be a game-changer, with profound consequences for deterrence, military operations, and the balance of power in the Western Pacific." According to the piece, written by Andrew Erickson, a professor at the Naval War College, and David Yang, a Rand Corp. researcher, China's interest in such a weapon can be traced to the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis. That was when the United States dispatched two strike groups toward Taiwan to counter Chinese missile tests in the area. (China was trying to cow Taiwan's population from voting for President Lee Teng-hui. Taiwan's voters weren't cowed.) In 2003, the Second Artillery Corps (which controls China's missiles and nuclear bombs) released a feasibility study for the missile. Other official Chinese outlets have been publishing numerous pieces on the topic as well, including a blogpost by a Chinese military writer who claimed that by 2010, the PLA would have a brigade of antiship ballistic missiles. The missiles are of concern to American strategists because, as the piece says, they would "impose significant restrictions on U.S. naval operations during a Taiwan crisis." In other words, they might be able to blow a carrier out of the water. How could this affect U.S. standing in the Pacific? The writers answer it this way: "Striking a surface vessel or mockup with an ASBM in peacetime, if not met with a proper U.S. response, could undermine Washington's standing by making it appear that ways of war had undergone radical change, to the detriment of U.S. power projection and influence." In the event of war, they continue, "the consequences could be catastrophic."

Why China Won't Do More With North Korea

2009-05-27T14:29:49Z

Reading all the stuff about North Korea's nukes, one thing strikes me: the United States seems to want to outsource not just its jobs to China, but also its diplomacy. "It's up to China!" and "China can do more!" are the operative phrases emerging from DC-think-tanks and the US government. As if.... Here's where those easy exhortations break down and why I think it's naïve of us to expect that China can "do more," or in the words of John Bolton, "end this thing tomorrow." First, there's a silly assumption in Washington that our interests (no nukes in North Korea) are the same as China's. But they're not. China's first interest in North Korea is making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. China's second interest? Making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. From Beijing's perspective, nukes in North Korea rank somewhere around 10th. Why is China so intent on "regime maintenance"? If North Korea collapses a few things happen. First, about 2 million people will rush into China's northeast as refugees. Not fun - and a huge tax on China's already poor infrastructure. (An estimated 250,000 North Korean refugees already move back and forth between the two countries.) Second, China will be faced with a tough decision: dispatch the PLA into North Korea? What happens if the PLA meets up with the South Korean or U.S. armies heading north? Third, remember all that South Korean investment in China? We're talking billions. It would all go home, into building a united country. (China is South Korea's biggest trading partner, by the way.) Fourth, a North Korean collapse means that China can forget about turning North Korea into an economic vassal state. (Talk to any South Korean interested in investing in North Korea. Any mine or industrial facility with any prospects of a profit is already a target of Chinese investment.) If Kim collapses, China's firms are going to lose out to the Korean brothers from the south. Fifth, how would a united Korean peninsula change China's geopolitical position? It definitely wouldn't help it. Right now, Beijing has an (admittedly wacky) Commie buffer state on their border. But at least it's Commie. With a democratic, capitalist, united Korean peninsula, China loses out. (One of the under-reported stories in China is the depth of South Korea's cultural influence in China. In the West, we like to think that China's youth are "Westernized" or even "Americanized." The reality is that they're "South Koreanized." That formulation is definitely unwieldy, but it's closer to the truth.) Six, China's ethnic Korean population along North Korea's border is not known for being restive. But what happens to those folks once the Korean peninsula is united? Greater Korea, anyone? Another broader factor also plays into the problems on the Korean peninsula. And that's this: For decades the United States has assumed that it could mold China into an ally. We had limited success in yanking China into our battle with the Soviet Union. But an exception doesn't prove the rule. There's a lot of hyperventilating in Washington these days about the "G2" and about how the United States and China together will solve the world's problems. On the Korean peninsula - the very peninsula where China and the United States fought a nasty war 59 years ago - those assumptions have run aground. We can't outsource the solution to North Korea's nukes to China because China views its interests a lot differently than we do. Sure, China would rather not see Pyongyang have the bomb. But if given the choice between a nuclear-armed North Korea and no North Korea at all, Beijing will go with the former. So, this is the maw that China is staring into as Washington demands more action from Beijing. So what will Beijing do? My guess is encourage more talks.

Jon Huntsman to China

2009-05-18T19:47:39Z

This is the smartest piece so far that I've read on Obama's pick for ambassador to China.

Will Zhao's Book Shake China? Don't Bet On It

2009-05-15T06:24:14Z

Someone asked me whether I thought Zhao Ziyang's posthumous memoirs -- "Prisoner of the State" -- was going to cause some type of controversy on the mainland or add to the worries of the Chinese Communist Party. My answer? Nothing major and not much. The book's Chinese edition will sell well in Hong Kong. Other than that, the reaction will probably be like this:

100 Flowers morphing into Anti-Rightist campaign; hundreds of thousands of lives ruined. Source? The top.

Great Leap Forward: 30 million dead in famine. Source? The top.

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Millions more dead or ruined. Source? The top.

The Tiananmen Square protest. Hundreds killed and economic reforms set back by years. Source? Again, a leadership struggle at the top.

One of Zhao's main accusations in the book is that then-premier Li Peng and his acolytes basically used the demonstrations as an excuse to attack and defeat Zhao. (Zhao might have been thinking he'd use the demonstration the same way, to attack and defeat Li Peng. And we haven't heard Li Peng's side of the story. Yet.) But right now the top echelon of the party in China is generally united. It's pretty much been that way since since 1995 when then-General Secretary Jiang Zemin jailed his rival Chen Xitong of Beijing. (Current party boss Hu Jintao did the same thing with another big city leader -- Chen Liangyu of Shanghai in 2006.) As long as there's semi-unity among China's leadership and a generally quiescent elite, things will probably go well for the CCP.]]>

China's Changing Views on June 4th

2009-05-14T17:36:05Z

Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of what the Chinese government has said about the June 4th crackdown. Over time, the government's tone has morphed into something a bit less strident. In the early '90s, the PRC called it "counter-revolutionary turmoil" or just "turmoil" for short. Then it modified that to "the Tiananmen incident." In a 2003 interview with the Post, Premier Wen Jiabao gave what I thought to be the most illuminating answer, framing the "incident" as something that occurred "in the last century" with the clear implication that it was irrelevant to today's China. Compiled by Nicholas Bequelin: June 1989 Zhang Gong, spokesman of the army Nobody was killed in the Tiananmen Square, and there was nobody crushed by tanks in the Square. June 6, 1989 Yuan Mu, spokesperson of the State Council During the "clearing" of Tiananmen Square, 5,000 soldiers were injured, and 2,000 civilians and "rebels" were also injured, 300 soldiers and "law-breaking criminals" died, including 23 university students. June 16, 1989 Yuan Mu(interviewed by the U.S. news station ABC) The news clips shot by ABC depicting troops entering the Square killing civilians and students were actually created by "advance technology" with the aim of twisting the facts. 1990, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary Dismissed international condemnation of the Tiananmen Massacre as "much ado about nothing." January 2001, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao Defended the use of deadly force against unarmed civilians in June 1989 as "...timely and resolute measures...extremely necessary for the stability and development of the country." November 22, 2003 Interview with Premier Wen Jiabao with The Washington Post "In the last century, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, drastic changes took place in the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe. In China, a political disturbance occurred. At that time, the party and government of China adopted resolute measures in a timely fashion to safeguard social stability and became more determined to press ahead with China's reform and opening up. Our development over the past years has proven that stability is of vital importance for China. As premier of this country, I think the most important issue for me is to ensure stability and development. This is because China has 1.3 billion people." 2008 Qin Gang, spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry Regarding the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s, there is already a clear conclusion. 2009 Zhao Qizheng, spokeperson of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference The government has already reached the verdict on "June Fourth", and the stability of the country was the foremost priority.

Are Zhao's Memoirs Real? Seems So.

2009-05-14T14:21:31Z

Here's what we know about the authenticity of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs,which will be published in English on May 19 (20 years to the day when he was removed from his post as general secretary of the Communist Party). Zhao's editors say the following: 1) They liaised with people whom they knew to be close to Zhao. (Bao Pu was one of the editors and his father, Bao Tong, was Zhao's political aide. If Bao Pu didn't know the people personally, his father did.) 2) The memoirs were dictated by Zhao into tapes. Zhao numbered them in his own hand. His voice on the tapes sounds exactly like his voice on other tapes of him speaking, although you do have to take age into account. 3) Other sources close to Zhao knew of the tapes. 4) A transcript of one of the tapes has already been cited in an appendix to a book in Chinese by the author Yang Jisheng. (The tapes, however, apparently have no relation to "Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations," a book by Zhao's longtime friend Zong Fengming.)

Death Tolls and Press Controls on Quake's Anniversary

2009-05-08T14:21:32Z

A year after the horrible earthquake in Sichuan province, China released statistics that said 5,335 school-aged children died in the quake. Many of them died in shoddily-built schools. About 70,000 people altogether died in the quake. Parents of the dead children have lobbied the government for reparations and to punish corrupt officials who built the lousy schools. Covering the quake's aftermath isn't easy. Here's an example from the Financial Times. ]]> report on China's attitude toward the press during the quake: News openness in the early stages of the earthquake relief effort was something to which we all bore witness. Controls were relaxed even on the issue of school collapse in the very early stages, and we saw party media like Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily Online jumping into the fray. Early on, Chinese authorities also indicated that there would certainly be investigations into problems in school construction. The environment steadily tightened, however, and there were three principal reasons for this. First and foremost, news reports on school collapses were implicating more and more officials. Many officials who previously served in areas impacted by the quake had now moved on to higher positions in the official hierarchy. In one of the more outstanding examples, Sichuan's provincial propaganda chief, the very man whose responsibility it was to control media in the quake region, had served previously as the party secretary of Dujiangyan. Former Sichuan officials were also now serving within the central party leadership in Beijing. [Eds. note: Zhou Yongkang, a Politburo member and China's top law enforcement official, was Sichuan's party secretary when most of the school's were built.] News reports touching on official negligence were clearly disadvantageous to their "political survival." And so the tangled fabric of power within the vast bureaucracy quickly knotted together in a recognition of mutual interests, and this force worked against the resolve at the center to get behind the problem of school collapses. Secondly, the collapse of schools in the quake zone quickly set off a massive grassroots rights defense movement. And thirdly, the school collapse issue touched on even deeper and more sensitive nerves -- the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games and China's international reputation. A top Sichuan education official, Lin Qiang, even resigned his role as an Olympic torch bearer, saying in an interview with Southern Weekend on May 23, 2008, that "the truth is more important than glory." In the official response to reporting on the Sichuan earthquake, we also saw signs of emerging changes to media control and censorship in China, what we have called at the China Media Project "Control 2.0." It is fair to say that media controls in mainland China have never slackened, but "control" has undergone many changes, not just in methods and tactics but also in the standards applied to control -- What should be controlled and what not? What should be controlled more strictly? What areas can be loosened?

Talk about a Peace Dividend. Get Ready for PRC Investments in Taiwan

2009-05-06T20:17:56Z

This is a really smart op-ed by Dan Rosen on the new hope in the economic relations between China and Taiwan. The operative graph for me is this: Until now, Taiwan has blocked inward investment from China -- despite WTO obligations -- ostensibly out of national security concerns. While unofficial estimates of Taiwanese investment in mainland China range from $200 billion to $400 billion, reciprocal Chinese investment in Taiwan stands near zero. During the most recent round of direct China-Taiwan talks in Nanjing, agreement was reached to resolve this asymmetry. As a result, many sectors of Taiwan's economy stand to benefit from new inflows from across the Strait, including real estate, information and communications technology, areas of financial and business facilitation services, biotechnology and other sectors.

China's Little Election That Could(n't)

2009-05-06T19:11:23Z

There's a lot of talk these days in China about anniversaries. This year marks the 90th since the May 4th student movement that introduced Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science to China. The 60th since the founding of the PRC. The 20th since the Tiananmen Square crackdown. article published this month in China Elections and Governance Review: "Wen's description of the path of China's political reform seemed to be designed purely for foreign consumption." Liu's proof? Two months before Thornton met with Wen, another senior Chinese official - writing in Chinese - had already closed the door to that type of reform. In an article that appeared on Aug. 30, 2006, in Seeking Truth, one of the most authoritative of the Party's publications, Sheng Huaren, secretary general of the Standing Committee of the NPC, stated that the direct elections of township leaders violated the constitution and that in upcoming elections such practices would be prohibited. Sheng nodded to the "Color Revolutions" then roiling Central Asia and noted that, "Internationally, the enemy from the West is intensifying its strategic scheme to westernize and divide China. They make a big fuss about 'democracy' and 'human rights' and attempt to penetrate China through grassroots elections. These are new issues and new problems that are out there, unavoidable, that should not be neglected and must be handled with the utmost attention." There's been talk in the last year that the party is again interested in political reform. Citing a speech last December by China's president Hu Jintao, some experts have predicted that the party is interested in "intra-party" democracy first, meaning it's willing to experiment with letting party members vote in real elections for seats on powerful party committees that control townships and elsewhere. Like Buyun, there have been a few experiments. And like Buyun, Chinese officials have been talking them up to foreign friends. So, let's take a shot of maotai to commemorate the Buyun vote. And remind ourselves that when we deal with China, it's important not just to listen but also to watch.]]>