Here is the story of today’s China in five brief news items:
Story No. 1: For most of the past two weeks, Xi Jinping(習近平), the man tapped to become the new Chinese Communist Party leader, was totally out of sight. That is right. The man designated to become China’s next leader — in October or early November — had disappeared and only resurfaced on Saturday in two photos taken while he was visiting an agricultural college. They were posted online by the official Xinhua news agency. With the Chinese government refusing to comment on his whereabouts or explain his absence, rumors here were flying. Had he fallen ill? Was there infighting in the Communist Party? I have a theory: Xi started to realize how hard the job of running China will be in the next decade and was hiding under his bed. Who could blame him?
Chinese officials take great pride in how they have used the last 30 years to educate hundreds of millions of their people, men and women, and bring them out of poverty. Yet, among my Chinese interlocutors, I find a growing feeling that what has worked for China for the past 30 years — a huge Communist Party-led mobilization of cheap labor, capital and resources — will not work much longer. There is a lot of hope that Xi will bring long-delayed economic and political reforms needed to make China a real knowledge economy, but there is no consensus on what those reforms should be and there are a lot more voices in the conversation. Whatever top-down monopoly of the conversation the Communist Party had is evaporating. More and more, the Chinese people, from microbloggers to peasants to students, are demanding that their voices be heard — and officials clearly feel the need to respond. China is now a strange hybrid — an autocracy with 400 million bloggers, who are censored, feared and listened to all at the same time.
So Xi is certain to make history. He will be the first leader of modern China who will have to have a two-way conversation with the Chinese people while he tries to implement some huge political and economic reforms. The need is obvious.
Story No. 2: In March, Chinese authorities quickly deleted from the blogosphere photos of a fatal Beijing car crash, believed to involve the son of a close ally of President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). The car was a Ferrari. The driver was killed and two young women with him badly injured.
“Photos of the horrific smash in Beijing were deleted within hours of appearing on microblogs and websites,” the Guardian reported. “Even searches for the word ‘Ferrari’ were blocked on the popular Sina Weibo microblog … unnamed sources have identified the driver of the black sports car as the son of Ling Jihua (令計劃), who was removed as head of the party’s general office of the central committee this weekend.”
It was the latest in a string of incidents spotlighting the lavish lifestyles of the Communist Party elite.
Chinese authorities are so sensitive to these stories because they are the tip of an iceberg — an increasingly corrupt system of interlocking ties between the Communist Party and state-owned banks, industries and monopolies, which allow certain senior officials, their families and “princelings” to become hugely wealthy and to even funnel that wealth out of China.
“Marx said the worst kind of capitalism is a monopolistic capitalism, and Lenin said the worst kind of monopolistic capitalism is state monopolistic capitalism — and we are practicing it to the hilt,” a Chinese Internet executive remarked to me.
As a result, you hear more and more that “the risks of not reforming have become bigger than the risks of reforming.” No one is talking revolution, but a gradual evolution to a more transparent, rule-of-law-based system, with the people having more formal input. However, taking even this first gradual step is proving hard for the Communist Party. It may require a crisis (which is why a lot of middle-class professionals here are looking to get their money or themselves abroad). Meanwhile, the gaps between rich and poor widen.
Story No. 3: Last week, the official Xinhua news agency reported that authorities in the city of Macheng, in Hubei Province in central China, agreed to invest US$1.4 million in new school equipment after photos of students and their parents carrying their own desks and chairs to school, along with their books, “sparked an outcry on the Internet … the education gap in China has become a hot-button issue.”
Story No. 4: Hu suggested that it would be good if the people of Hong Kong learned more about the mainland, so Hong Kong authorities recently announced that they were imposing compulsory “moral and national education” lessons in primary and secondary schools. According to CNN, “the course material had been outlined in a government booklet called ‘The China Model,’ which was distributed to schools in July.” It described China’s Communist Party as “progressive, selfless and united” and “criticized multiparty systems as bringing disaster to countries such as the US.” High-school students from Hong Kong, which enjoys more freedom than the mainland as part of the 1997 handover from Britain, organized a protest against Beijing’s “brainwashing” that quickly spread to parent groups and universities. As a result, on Sept. 8, one day before local elections, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), Beijing’s man there, announced the compulsory education plan was being dropped — to avoid pro-Beijing candidates getting crushed.
Story No. 5: A few weeks ago, Deng Yuwen (鄧育文), a senior editor of The Study Times, which is controlled by the Communist Party, published an analysis on the website of the business magazine Caijing. According to AFP, Deng argued that Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) had “created more problems than achievements” during their 10 years in power … the article highlighted 10 problems facing China that it said were caused by the lack of political reform and had the potential to cause public discontent, including stalled economic restructuring, income disparity and pollution.
“The essence of democracy is how to restrict government power; this is the most important reason why China so badly needs democracy,” Deng wrote. “The overconcentration of government powers without checks and balances is the root cause of so many social problems.” The article has triggered a debate on China’s blogosphere.
This is just a sampler of the China that Xi will be inheriting. This is not his grandfather’s Communist China. After three decades of impressive economic growth, but almost no political reforms, there is “a gathering sense of an approaching moment of transition that will require a different set of conditions for Chinese officials to maintain airspeed,” Orville Schell, a China expert at the Asia Society, observed.
The rules are going to get rewritten here. Exactly how and when is impossible to say. The only thing that is certain is that it will be through a two-way conversation.
China has successfully held its Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, with 53 of 55 countries from the African Union (AU) participating. The two countries that did not participate were Eswatini and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which have no diplomatic relations with China. Twenty-four leaders were reported to have participated. Despite African countries complaining about summit fatigue, with recent summits held with Russia, Italy, South Korea, the US and Indonesia, as well as Japan next month, they still turned up in large numbers in Beijing. China’s ability to attract most of the African leaders to a summit demonstrates that it is still being
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
RSS