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Truthdig - Warren I. Cohen on China’s Charm Offensive
Review of two books: Pan's "Out of Mao's Shadow" and Kurlantzick's "Charm Offensive." Two different perspectives of China in today's world.
Tags: china on 2008-08-20 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.truthdig.com
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The rule of the Chinese Communist Party has been validated.
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Contrary to promises made to the Olympic Committee, the Chinese government does not appear to be making a serious effort to demonstrate its respect for human rights.
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Two new books— Philip Pan’s “Out of Mao’s Shadow” and Joshua Kurlantzick’s “Charm Offensive”—look at today’s China from very different perspectives.
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Pan, one-time Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, roamed the country collecting tales that provide evidence of the Communist Party’s transgressions, past and present, of its increasing corruption, and of its determination to retain a monopoly on political power
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Kurlantzick, also a journalist, focuses on China’s international achievements, its growing influence in Asia and the world. Lamenting the sullying of America’s image in the world, he conjures up a China overtaking the United States in the affections of mankind.
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Pan demonstrates again and again that China is run by a Leninist party that remains above the law, that denies its people freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear.
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Moreover, Kurlantzick reminds us frequently that the American brand has been tainted by the failure of Americans to live by their principles.
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China: Humiliation & the Olympics - The New York Review of Books
Schell reviews the movie Dark Matter and places it into perspective of the complex relationships of China and the West
Tags: china, olympics on 2008-08-03 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nybooks.com
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But what gives Dark Matter wider significance is the filmmakers' use of the Iowa incident to explore—indirectly—some important psychological dynamics between China and the West:
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China's deeply felt sense of historic injury by foreign nations, and the ways its often thwarted efforts to gain acceptance among leading world powers have exacerbated such sentiments.
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But as the director, China-born Chen Shi-Zheng, explained to me recently, he does see the film's protagonist as expressing, in extreme form, "the complexity of the modern-day relationship of Chinese to the outside world."
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He feels superior, because of the length and depth of the Chinese civilization from which he comes.
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China still lags behind America, he personalizes this reality and feels insecure.
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larger question of China's sensitivity to foreign dominance and criticism. Here the film is masterful in illuminating how any suggestion of foreign superiority, or even condescension, toward Chinese may intersect with their own sense of historical victimization and insecurity to create a volatile chemistry.
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Lu Xun, almost seventy-five years ago. "We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals."
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a new historical narrative to match, arose around the idea of bainian guochi, "100 years of national humiliation."
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Treaty of Versailles in 1919, by which the West cravenly gave Germany's concessions in China to Japan, an expression, wuwang guochi, "Never forget our national humiliation," became a common slogan in China.
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ideological overseers have never ceased to mine China's putative past sufferings "to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present," as the historian Paul Cohen has put it.
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The idea that a nation might restore itself to greatness by emphasizing, even "celebrating," weakness may seem counterintuitive.
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In 2001, the National People's Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official "National Humiliation Day."
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one of the leading candidates is now September 18, the day in 1931
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It is therefore perhaps understandable that a more robust sense of cultural and political self-confidence has remained elusive.
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China's restless search for a more self-confident, less-aggrieved persona has paradoxically been made more complicated by other wounds not directly related to foreign attacks: for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history.
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But, perhaps because they, too, were products of the Party's propaganda, many of them have turned out every bit as nationalistic, perhaps even more so, than their elders.[*
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Xu Guoqi, author of the timely new book Olympic Dreams: China And Sports, 1895–2008, has noted, "Through their coverage and handling of the Beijing torch relay, the West seemed to remind the Chinese they were still not equal and they were still not good enough."
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Now, one is everywhere overwhelmed by new "development," or fazhan, a word that has attained almost sacerdotal overtones in this new China whose leaders have, indeed, sponsored an economic revolution that has transformed their country.
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So, like Liu Xing's Ph.D. orals, the games had come to be anticipated as the cathartic act in a long agonizing historical drama in which China would finally fulfill its almost mythic destiny: its quest for fuqiang, "wealth and power."
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A nation that obsesses over gold medals is not a self-assured nation.
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the political system that the Communist Party has tried to legitimize through sports and other means cannot produce a healthy and strong nation when its citizens have been forced to give up their independence and even personal dignity.
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as we foreigners interact with China, we should become more mindful that much dark matter generated by this history still floats around our common universe.
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Foreign Affairs - China's Olympic Nightmare - Elizabeth C. Economy and Adam Segal
Overview of China and its build-up for the Olympics highlights it achievements and its shortcomings
Tags: china, olympics on 2008-06-22 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.foreignaffairs.org
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Official government spending for the construction bonanza is nearing $40 billion.
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Chinese government excels when it comes to infrastructure projects, its record is poor when it comes to transparency, official accountability, and the rule of law.
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it has now become impossible to separate the competing narratives of China's awe-inspiring development and its poor record on human rights and the environment
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"By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights." François Carrard, director general of the International Olympic Committee, warily supported such a sentiment: acknowledging the seriousness of China's human rights violations, he nonetheless explained, "We are taking the bet that seven years from now ... we shall see many changes."
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has responded with a traditional mix of intimidation, imprisonment, and violent repression.
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A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority.
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The Architecture Issue - The New, New City - Life in an Instant City - Shenzhen, China - Dubai, United Arab Emirates - NYTimes.com
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20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s
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The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here.”
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Holl has reason to be exhilarated. His Beijing project, “Linked Hybrid,” is one of the most innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world: eight asymmetrical towers joined by a network of enclosed bridges that create a pedestrian zone in the sky.
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Because of this density, cities like Beijing have few of the features we associate with a traditional metropolis. They do not radiate from a historic center as Paris and New York do. Instead, their vast size means that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods, something closer in spirit to Los Angeles.
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We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”
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create something where there was nothing
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World Affairs Journal - The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt
Provides a perspective from his conversations with Chinese during his month of travels in 2006.
Tags: china on 2008-05-25 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.worldaffairsjournal.org
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Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.
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mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will.
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Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.
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Freedom and democracy are abstract
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what I have is a survey of “the tacit consent of the governed.”
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I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it.
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listen to what they don’t say.
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That’s no surprise,” Tom said. “Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It’s where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It’s where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don’t go all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ‘Here we go again.’”
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Far Eastern Economic Review | China's Holistic Censorship Regime
Overview of how censorship works and its power over society, and how it is 'almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think."
Tags: china, censorship on 2008-05-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.feer.com
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can only loosely be termed censorship
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There are no facts that exist independently of their significance in the social contract.
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Thus, residence in China is not unlike working at a strongly cultured company, e.g., a Disney or Starbucks.
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China insists that both individuals and organizations conflate their social, economic and political roles, creating significant inefficiencies and distortions for businesses.
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almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think.
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key principle that makes the whole system work is uncertainty
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authorities’ legal tools are surveillance, arrest and imprisonment.
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often the “legal” apparatus is deployed as a form of intimidation
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government uses processes like approval of business licenses to keep information channels within trusted hands.
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In print, the government controls the bar codes that printers must have in order to print legally, and nothing may go to press without the bar code. Nor may any book or periodical be distributed without the CN or ISBN code owned by a government agency
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Internet has posed a particular challenge
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a bias toward technical means of control.
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fall into three broad categories:
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blocking and redirects
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filtering,
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covert attacks on specific sites, groups, or individuals
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interference are propagated across a four-tier structure
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Tier 1, are the telecommunication operators that control the main interconnection points between China’s backbone networks and the gateways to the international communications system
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Tier 2 are somewhere between 15 to 20 large data centers operated by telecom operators
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Tier 3 include the licensed service providers, of which there are hundreds
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Tier 4 is all the local office and housing networks and Internet cafes, numbering in the hundreds of thousands
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What tends to create Internet delays in China,
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information control commands a higher priority than commercial efficiency.
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incompetence
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extravagant amount of human intervention required to implement all the rules boosts costs for China’s Internet. This partly explains why telecommunications costs roughly 10 times the amount it does in the United States and Europe.
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most fascinating layer of the propaganda system is the political one.
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operates something like a fraternity,
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suggestion that Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang or another ethnically differentiated region might be better served by more autonomy from China proper is the cardinal, excommunicable sin.
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government leaders’ personal lives is next
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Growth opportunities are given to companies in accordance with their willingness to cooperate.
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must provide coverage of China
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“soft” inducements added over time
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As we know from our political catechism, continuing one-party rule and maintaining social stability are really exactly the same thing.
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The dragon awakens: China, how did it happen? - Asia, World - The Independent
overview of China
concludes with a list of statistics--numbers
Tags: china on 2008-05-12 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.independent.co.uk
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Thunder from Tibet - The New York Review of Books
Review of Pico Iyer's book under the current circumstances
Tags: china, tibet on 2008-05-08 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.nybooks.com
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events occur that change the ways it can be read.
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March 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the failed uprising
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three hundred or more monks from Drepung Monastery began an orderly march toward the center of Lhasa,
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made specific demands such as the release of five monks detained the previous October for celebrating the award in Washington of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama
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Some fifty of the monks were arrested straightaway and their colleagues staged a sit-down in the street
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In 1990 the police were ordered to switch from what Jiang Zemin, then Chinese Party secretary, called "passive" to "active" policing, the former meaning (crudely) that you beat or shoot protesters once they start
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average prison sentence was 6.5 years for each participant, and upward of three thousand were detained during this period for peaceful protests or possession of forbidden documents and videos.
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include campaigns forcing Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama
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ban on pictures or worship of him
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prohibition on the construction of new monasteries and on any increase in the number of monk
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ban on students and government employees having religious possessions or carrying out religious practices
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forced relocation of 250,000 farmers to roadside houses
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opening in 2006 of the Chinese railway line connecting Tibet to neighboring Qinghai
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plan for the settlement of 100,000 Tibetan nomads.
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on March 10 were clearly under orders to use restraint.
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Early that evening things got tougher in Barkor Square, in the center of Lhasa, when fifteen monks carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag and called for independence: all were dragged away and were later charged with "gathering to create a disturbance by shouting reactionary slogans" and "premeditatedly carrying homemade reactionary flags" (they are currently in detention awaiting trial)
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ive hundred monks marched from Sera Monastery the following day on behalf of those fifteen arrested monks, the PAP used tear gas briefly, but did not open fire and the monks succeeded in holding a seven-hour sit-down in the street.
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midday on Friday, March 14
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group of monks at Ramoche,
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Ramoche is in the heart of Lhasa, and opens onto a busy market street
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began to attack the police and a small squad of PAP sent in to support
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Tibetans turned from attacking police to attacking the next available symbol of Chinese governance, the Chinese migrant population.
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About a thousand Chinese-owned shops were set on fire by rioters who were seen by foreign tourists igniting cooking gas cylinders or dousing shops in gasoline
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events of March 14 challenged any assumption that Tibetan Buddhists are necessarily nonviolent or that their political actions are limited to what Deepak Chopra has called "inert pacifism."
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the 3/14 incident
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four days following the March 14 riot in Lhasa, Tibetans staged sixty-three protests throughout the Tibetan areas within China, and the number has since risen to ninety-six,
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, while 85 percent of Tibetans live in the countryside, where their average annual income, despite a 14.5 percent increase, reached only 2,788 yuan ($398) last year
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overlooks the fact that Tibet was never a Chinese province and was never under direct Chinese rule apart from a few months in 1910–1911, and that Tibet declared independence in 1913.
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priest–patron" relationship
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is partly about the difficulties of intellectual engagement with an extremely mild-mannered subject
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offers a modernist view of Buddhism as a form of rational analysis that aims to "explore the world closely, so as to make out its laws, and then to see what can and cannot be done within those laws.
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show the Dalai Lama as a man who is both committed to his belief in human tolerance and unpredictable possibilities,
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pay attention to the cleavages t
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Tibetan youths who "will use Tibet whenever it suits them"
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suggests that Tibetans have "paid a high price at times for being associated with movie stars
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often as much a victim as a maker of the system
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can a leader who aims to serve the spiritual yearnings of a world community deal with the specific needs of his nation
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difficulty that most of us face in addressing such questions is that a pathway through them requires detailed knowledge of the Dalai Lama's constituency, its language, religion, and history.
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slips stem from a worthy concern for the accessible, but they also hint at an absence in the story.
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nternational pressure on China, are seen by China as provocations and thus are used as an excuse not to meet with him.
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he events of the past two months have changed the political terrain significantly
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Estimates of the number of Tibetans detained range from 2,200 to 5,700, and Tibetans of all ages are being required to write formal denunciations of the Dalai Lama
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protests means that Tibetans
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have now become important elements of regional strategy and a political priority for Western leaders
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Inside the Great Firewall - Print Version - International Herald Tribune
Good overview of the moral dilemmas/compromises of living in China when dealing with the interent.
Tags: china, internet, firewall on 2008-05-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.iht.com
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China's Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
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made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China - within the "Great Firewall" of government censorship, as it is called - with searches performed from outside.
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aw firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like "Tiananmen Square" or "Falun Gong."
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transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.
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Let's be clear: Freedom of speech, freedom of political choice and the rule of law are not relative values; they are absolutes.
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China's regime of Internet censorship is, without question, a crime against individual liberty on a mass scale.
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China's leaders maintain censorship solely to maintain their monopoly on political power.
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create a fear that is far more effective than direct regulation.
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are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government.
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Western Internet companies doing business in China should, for starters, acknowledge the extent of their self-censorship, not hide it or rationalize it or pretend that it is something other than the intensely unpleasant compromise that it is.
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t helps for companies to admit their complicity - to clarify that all is not as it should be or appears to be, to openly assert their disagreement with Chinese government policies
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should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers from the surveillance (and worse) of Chinese authorities.
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If off-shoring of confidential user information is not feasible, companies must take steps to warn their customers about the risks of using their service.
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barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn't want to hear.
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The companies that choose to participate must learn to be both honest with themselves, and honest with their customers.
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