It was twenty years ago today . . .

[Cross-posted from GongShangFa]

Well, not quite. We'll have to wait until next month to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall. One group of 'netizens' (a term I have only ever heard used seriously in China), however, aren't waiting, and have hijacked this commemorative site to stage their own protest highlighting the continued division of China from the rest of the world by the Great Fire Wall. Well worth having a look if you have time.

Sentencing in Shishou

[Cross-posted at GongShangFa]


Remember Shishou? It was before Urumqi, but after Lhasa. Well, the five people who the local authorities have accused of "organising and inciting" the riots in which more than 60 police officers were injured have been sentenced, and the sentences seem to have been quite light - 5 years imprisonment being the longest. German Sino-blogger JustRecently has a good round-up of the coverage here. Noteworthy points?

1) Not insubstantial compensation was paid to the family of the man who allegedly committed suicide even after family members were arrested for inciting disturbances.

2) The local party chief was forced to resign.

3) Upwards of ten thousand people took to the streets, dozens of policemen were injured, yet only five people were punished.

What does this tell us? Where ethnic minorities upon which the government is not reliant for support protest they are punished severely as the ultimate cause which they seek is greater autonomy, which severely risks the unity of the Chinese state as it stands. However, where Han protest both the methods of policing deployed against them and the punishments used against those who lead the protest will be much less harsh - why? It is because no Chinese government can afford the kind of loss of prestige that would result from the use of harsh methods against the very people that the Chinese government truly relies on for support and which it truly represents. For the events of 20 years ago to be repeated would mean the death-knell of the Chinese state as it stands.

"No Explosives"

[Cross-Posted at GongShangFa]

This fascinating, if not exactly information-rich account written by a Canadian journalist covering the trial of six dissidents in Vietnam caught my eye:

"Floral bouquets brightened the dark wood. Steaming glasses of tea were poured.

"Good morning," an official said as she walked past. Everyone seemed to be polite and smiling, except the man who delivered the briefing about how we should behave at court.

"No explosives," he reminded us.

No cellphones either.

And don't try to do anything outside of the court, which seemed to mean don't talk to anybody.

He spoke with a white bust of Ho Chi Minh behind him next to a hammer and sickle, and a red banner that said, "Forever the glorious Communist Party of Vietnam.""

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.

- George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

[Video: Chinese militia drill in preparation for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China]

The Taiwan Timewarp

Having worked in mainland China for a firm that required me to keep at least one toe in Taiwan, I am used to contrasting one with the other, and almost always in a way favouring the free and democratic land of Taiwan. This time around, though, I cannot say that the comparison has been quite so favourable to the island across the straits. Going from the break-neck pace of development in Shenzhen to a place where in many areas both wages and prices seem to have been almost at a stand-still since 2001 was quite a surprise. Yes, a high-speed railway has been completed and green energy projects have been undertaken, but even accounting for the fact that Taiwan is an economically developed society in which much less needs doing, in comparison to the mainland Taiwan feels locked in a timewarp in which nothing changes - is this fair?

Two years

[Picture: The view from my hotel widow in Longhua, on the outskirts of Shenzhen, overlooking the as-yet unfinished subway link with Hong Kong]

That's how long I had been away from China when I got back there for a quick visit at the start of last month. The changes?

1) Within 24 hours of crossing the border into Shenzhen I had five people independently and without prompting tell me that they hated the communist party and wanted to be rid of them. Particular ire was directed at ex-president Jiang Zemin. Given the number of campaigns designed to 'increase patriotism' that have occurred over the past two years you would have thought that support for the government would have increased. In the small sample of people who I met in Shenzhen the reality was emphatically the opposite.

2) Following a successful strike (euphemistically labelled 'a collective tea-time') the taxis outside the system of checkpoints which surrounds the centre of Shenzhen now all work off the meter, charging a basic 15 RMB per ride. Let me emphasise here that the metered rate is set by local government, and how unlikely such a strike being successful would have seemed two years ago. I guess I should add that of the five people mentioned above, two were taxi drivers.

3) Development. Everywhere I looked I saw large-scale projects which had not even started two years ago but which had already been completed in the meantime, areas which were dusty and vacant lots two years ago but which are now bustling communities. Longhua, where I formerly lived and worked, is to be the central hub for transportation links in and out of Shenzhen, with a direct connection to the Hong-Kong subway.

4) The future. Two years ago people were still trying to understand the Hu/Wen team. Now people are already looking forward to the new team which will most likely come to power when the current government's term ends in 2012. Xi Jinping remains the front-runner, but to many this by itself may be considered reason enough to dismiss him. Sitting down to dinner with a factory-owning friend of mine along with some other well-heeled Shenzhen-ites (the richest person there? A fortune teller), the consensus was that, given the rise of a politically-conscious middle-class, the next government would simply have to make political concessions, and that these would be the end of communist rule. I take all this with a pinch of salt (the same friend swore blind to me that Ma Yingjiu would never be Taiwanese president), but I can't say that I don't hope it's true.

Malaysia: 52 years of independence, 49 years of the ISA

[Picture: The Malaysian flag flies high over Independence Square, Kuala Lumpur, where I was stopped and questioned by a plain-clothes member of the 'Tourist Police']

Just as an example of how you can sometimes be right in the middle of a big event without even realising that anything is happening, a few weeks back I was in Kuala Lumpur when large-scale demonstrations broke out against the Internal Securities Act - a law passed in 1960 which allows detention without trial for a period of up to two years. The act is itself a continuation of colonial-era legislation brought in during the Malayan Emergency, in which British, colonial, and Malaysian troops successfully defeated a communist insurgency. However the first I knew about it was when I bought the (clearly censored) local English-language papers the next day and saw this headline:



Detention without trial under ordinary circumstances is an offence against human rights if it exceeds a period of even a few days, Britain and other democracies have slipped from that that standard in the war against terror. However, the ISA is a clear example of how, once such powers are granted to the state, they can stay on the books for a very long time - long after their supposed original purpose has ceased to be relevent.

Exodus - movement of Jah people (or "how I became a re-expat")

Yes, the FOARP has given up all hope of getting a job back in the UK in the current climate and is back in the far east. When people of my acquaintance including a former KPMG accountant, a senior city programmer and a former Guardian journalist cannot find jobs in the UK, thinking that I can get a job there seems more than a bit foolish. Yes, I know this makes me the classic expat stereotype of someone going overseas because he couldn't make it back home, but I'd sooner be that than on the dole trying to wait out what, if we are not yet allowed to call it a depression, is certainly the worst recession since the war. My destination right now is Taiwan, but I'm going there by a somewhat circuitous route - more on that later . . . .

GFW Theory

A Chinese internet censor quoted by CDT:

"[certain phenomena] may be true if you take a local perspective, but if you take the perspective of the whole, it is not true. For example, riots occur locally, it is true. But if you take the perspective of the whole country, [the society] is stable and peaceful; therefore to say our country has riots is not true. "

Trouble In Foxconn's Forbidden City

[Picture: A gatehouse in the Nanjing city walls]

From time to time people will ask me why exactly I blog anonymously, believe me when I say this has almost nothing to do with the Chinese government per se, and much more to do with trying to remain employable whilst speaking frankly about previous employers, especially when they include Foxconn. First off, whilst Foxconn have received a lot of bad press in the past, such as this story from the Daily Mail on work/living conditions at the Shenzhen plant, and the subsequent entirely justified outcry when Foxconn went after the Chinese journalists who also covered the story, they are actually quite a bit better than all the other fully certificated and inspected factories I saw during my time in China. Foxconn's Shenzhen factory is one of almost Dr. Evil mega-fortress proportions, the latest estimate of the workforce I heard whilst I was there was in excess of 300,000, with hundreds of new recruits arriving at the factory gates just outside my office every day. It was so big that I was assigned my own go-cart with driver to get around it, so it is quite possible that much went on that I was unaware of. That said, I find today's news of the suicide of an employee who lost a prototype sad but unsurprising.

Firstly, as perhaps the largest and most high-tech manufacturer operating in China, the company is subject to very high levels of corporate espionage. The high number of burglaries of Foxconn employee's residences I noted whilst I was there can perhaps be explained by Shenzhen's position as Crime City PRC, the company was the subject of numerous instances of trade-secret theft during my stay. The man who offered to share a taxi from Shenzhen airport and then promptly offered me a large amount of money for corporate documents certainly wasn't in town for the fresh air. As such the company is highly security conscious, and each employee is asked to sign a (perhaps unenforceable) non-disclosure agreement with strict and severe monetary penalties for non-compliance. All employees were told that possession of any unauthorised device onto which electronic information could be downloaded (including, ironically enough, the very iPods and MP3 players that are the factory's main product) would be grounds for instant dismissal. Cameras were also strictly prohibited, and this extended even to camera-phones (also a big Foxconn product).

Secondly, Foxconn's corporate structure is highly regimented. The most commonly used way to explain it amongst my colleagues was simply to describe each line-manager as a warlord manoeuvring for greater influence under the leadership of company president Terry Guo (郭台铭). As such even minor disobedience on the part of a subordinate brought high levels of pressure from the almost entirely Taiwanese upper-management. This extremely hierarchical structure is re-enforced from the very beginning of a mainland Chinese Foxconn worker's career by military-style drill (something that Taiwanese need not do, although most mainland Foxconn employees believe that this is simply how things are done in Taiwanese companies). One Taiwanese manager explained this to me in terms which could have come right out of the colonial play-book: "you have to shout orders at the mainlanders, you have to threaten them, it's what they are used to". My one brush with authority whilst I was there, a veritable chewing out I received for suggesting that I might help the publicity department improve the content on the lamentably bad Foxconn website during a particularly dry spell for my office, was simply a response to my infringement of this corporate warlordism.

My guess is that Sun Danyong (judging from his name probably a mainlander - most of the Taiwanese staff for some reason preferred to use their English names even in 100% Chinese-speaking offices) came up against the the heavy-handedness of the management as a result of his either accidental or intentional disposal of the prototype. This suicide has already led to calls for Apple to abandon Foxconn as a supplier, but this would be deeply wrong. You do not help 300,000 people by putting them out of work, you do not encourage better working conditions and practices by taking business away from what is probably among the most generous employers in Shenzhen and giving it to another China-based firm which may actually be worse. The people who work for Foxconn do so voluntarily, the workers are almost entirely fresh high-school and university graduates from provinces in the Chinese interior who send whatever money they can save to their families in an effort to improve their lot. They mainly look on the chance to work there as a great opportunity to gain experience - and many of them do gain valuable experience which they then take to other potentially better paying companies like Huawei.

China: an ideolological alternative?

[Cross-posted from Accumulating Peripherals]

A couple of weeks back Matt wrote a piece asking whether the Chinese political/economic system (i.e., a single-party dictatorship combined with relative economic freedom) should be considered an alternative to liberal democracy and the free market which might appeal to people in other countries in the third world where democratisation has seemingly brought little benefit. I have a few problems with this.

First off the current Chinese political/economic system is one that has been formed pretty much accidentally after the death of Mao. There is no way that any sane person would wish to put their country through the various stages of political oppression, strife, and brainwashing, merely to arrive where China is now. Basically only countries which have already suffered under a single-party system can hope to reproduce China's current system. The Chinese Communist Party even tacitly admitted this in its recently promulgated "6 Whys" saying (in what is also obviously a classic expression of the Marxist dialectic) that:

"The guiding role of Marxism in China has not been decided by any certain person or by the will of one party, rather it is a choice and circumstance of history"

The whole point of the Chinese system is that it is supposed to be suited to China and not transferable to other places, and that examples from other countries are not applicable to China. The Chinese leadership has long abandoned support for communist rebel groups in other countries using this exact excuse. The current Chinese system is in fact an increasingly-obvious anachronism rather than a new and revolutionary development.

Secondly, whilst it is fashionable to talk of China as almost a former-communist country now under a new system of its own devising, this ignores the way in which communism is both an economic system and a political system. Essentially whilst socialism has been abandoned, Marx-Leninism is still the basis of the political system. China is still run by the 'democratic centralism' of the 'revolutionary vanguard party', or, in plain speak, a single-party dictatorship. As such there is nothing new about China's political system, and for this reason it is unlikely to be attractive to people who have not grown up under such a system.

Thirdly, this ignores the essential glue that holds together the Chinese state under circumstances not dissimilar to those which tore Yugoslavia and the USSR apart: nationalism. Firstly under the nationalists and now under the communists China has been subject to the greatest and most successful program of nation-building ever seen. Whilst in India there are reportedly still whole villages in which nobody has ever heard of the country 'India', since 1912 the Chinese nation has steadily been built up, with ethnic and regional loyalties largely subsumed into the Chinese identity or race (中华民族). Whilst it is generally believed in China that this identity has existed for thousands of years, it is in fact an invention of nineteenth century theorists like Liang Qichao (梁啟超), intended to replace an imperial system fairly similar to the one that existed in the Austro-Hungarian or Russian empires. This has largely succeeded, and it is only in those areas with ethnic identities so entirely different to that of the majority as to be incompatible (such as Tibet and Xinjiang) that it has failed. The high level of nationalism in China (Australian China-hand Ross Terrill described it as "the nearest thing China has to a national religion") has allowed the Chinese state to survive pressures which would shatter other countries, as such the Chinese model cannot simply be transplanted to countries with strong regional identities.

A far more important question to ask, therefore, is what system will be adopted once the anachronism of communist rule is finally done away with?

Vietnam: "The student has gone ahead of the teacher"

[Cross-posted from Accumulating peripherals]

I recently came across this interesting article by a Chinese author with the pen name 云淡水暖 (roughly "Pale Clouds and Warm Water") on the economic and political reforms in Vietnam, a country whose development mirrors that of China, but where inflation has been breaking double figures for some time now. Before Vietnamese inflation became a problem some in China were minded to find lessons in Vietnam's reforms which have created a slightly more liberal political system than that currently existing in China. Writing in the The Observer-Star, in an article called “Vietnam’s Reform is Worthy of Attention” Zhou Yanjin (周瑞金) went so far as to say:

“. . . we can see that the Vietnamese Communist Party’s political reforms are on the right track, produce results, have effect. The student is already ahead of the master. At a time when Vietnam is ever more courageously and determinedly turning towards broad, open minded, and total reform, China’s reform is entrapped in backward thinking and disorder. From this can’t we see that Vietnam’s reforms are deserving of our attention?”

However, since inflation took off, hitting a year-on-year consumer price high of 28% last August, Chinese observers have been inclined to deduce a different lesson - that Vietnam went too far. Here's Guo Zhongxiao (呙中校) in an article in Southern Metropolis Daily entitled "Who took Vietnam from heaven to hell?":

“Since the implementation of reform and opening in 1986, economic reforms have been effective. From the system of agricultural contracts and national planning reform, to the socialist market structure of the economy, it was not hard to see the deep imprint of China. However, Vietnam’s reforms have been quicker than China’s, and steps were taken ahead of China’s reforms, no matter whether the reforms were economic or political in nature.”

It would seem that even the moderate political reforms introduced by Vietnam (such as multiple candidate elections for communist party chief as opposed to single-candidate rubber-stamping) are now firmly off the drawing board in China.

Me! I Disconnect From You

[Cross-posted from Accumulating Peripherals, title explained here]

Despite weeks during which hashtags consisting of various expletives follow by the acronym GFW (or Great Fire Wall) first topped the trending charts on Twitter as a sign of protest against the Chinese government's blocking of various website, and were then, ironically, censored by Twitter for profanity, the Chinese government is not likely to pay much heed to China's Twitterati. Of course, the wave of blockings that have taken place since February this year, including at various times Google, Hotmail, and Twitter, and still covering all the main blogging services as well as Youtube. Particularly noteworthy has been the blocking of two very prominent China blogs: Danwei.org and PekingDuck.org. Both of these blogs are written by long-term China expats who have only rarely and seemingly accidentally been blocked in the past but who are now both subject to purposeful and permanent blocks, whilst both are in their own way critical of the Chinese government, both are also amongst the most objectively sympathetic monitors of modern China. The writer of Peking Duck, for example, was previously an editor for the Global Times, a state-owned publication. This appears even more illogical when you consider that foreign media such as the BBC and the Wall Street Journal remain available in English.

However, this may not be as illogical as it seems, and may indicate a definite strategy. Last year's disturbances in Weng'an, to the surprise of many, relatively uncensored discussion of the incident was allowed on government-run websites whilst being suppressed on other websites. The reasoning behind this is not hard to grasp - fulfil the people's need for discussion whilst maintaining and directing the flow of the argument. Hence rather than the patchy and easily avoided blocking of the past in the future the government will allow access to foreign media sites up to a point whilst indoctrinating the Chinese public to thoroughly distrust them as weapons of foreign powers (a line now generally accepted in China), and simultaneously block any fora in which people might discuss Chinese issues but which are beyond Chinese government control. The objective has switched from the mere blocking of information to the control of discussion so as to run along lines favourable to the government.

Even More Bizarre . . .

[Cross-posted from Accumulating Peripherals]

Remember that evil robot computer attack on South Korean and US government websites which we thought was launched by North Korea? Apparently it was launched from my home town.