Now, do a search on “The End of Cheap China” on Google. Unsurprisingly, the book shows up at the top due to Amazon’s, Rein’s, and the publisher’s marketing efforts. However, look at the next five top search results (#2 through #6) from Google (results were at the time of this writing):

1. Amazon.com: The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural …

   www.amazon.com/End-Cheap-China-Economic…/dp/111817206X

   $12.98 - In stock

   China is known for manufacturing cheap products, thanks largely to the country’s vast supply of low-cost workers. But China is changing, and the glut of cheap …

2. The End of Cheap China Is Growing Near – Forbes

   www.forbes.com/sites/…/the-end-of-cheap-china-is-growing-near/

   Dec 13, 2011 – This article is by Shaun Rein, whose book The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World will be …

3. China Watch: Subversive Poem, the End of Cheap, More on Apple …

   blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/…/china-watch-subversive-p… - Hong Kong

   3 days ago – A poem threatens to send another dissident to jail, how to prepare for the end of cheap China, happier headlines for Apple and more.

4. The End Of Cheap China, Part III. How YOU Must Prepare For It …

   www.chinalawblog.com/…/the_end_of_cheap_china_part_iii_how_y…

   4 days ago – We have been writing frequently regarding the end of cheap Chinabecause we are just about every day seeing how this impacts our (mostly …

5. The End Of Cheap China, Part IV. More On How YOU Must Prepare …

   www.chinalawblog.com/…/the_end_of_cheap_china_part_iv_more_…

   2 days ago – In my previous post in this series on the end of cheap China, I noted that the risks relating to purchases from Chinese manufacturers are rising …

6. Book Preview: “The End Of Cheap China” By Shaun Rein « Jing …

   www.jingdaily.com/…/book-preview-the-end-of-cheap-china-by-sha…

   Dec 1, 2011 – The End Of Cheap China: Economic And Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt … Hitting stores in March of next year, The End of Cheap China by …
   
   
   
   

Note that #3 is the WSJ’s China blog linking to one of China Law Blog’s articles.

Is this a coincidence?

As a topic, this is something the China Law blog writes about from time to time for sure. Could the blog use a different title and not obfuscate Rein’s book? Absolutely. Just use your imagination: “China is no longer cheap,” “Rising Chinese labor cost,” “Cheap China labor no more,” and whatever.

For those of us who blog, we think about optimizing our articles for search engines from time to time. So, if I want to ride the popularity of Rein’s book, I put his book in the article title. When someone hears Rein talking about his book on CNBC or some other big network, they might search for it on the Internet. If my article shows up in the search results, then I potentially benefit in gaining more traffic for the blog.

Now consider this. What if Rein and his book are less well known? What if the China Law Blog articles show up higher in the search on Google than the book? That would have a drowning out effect on the book and be damaging to sales prospects.

One may argue the China Law Blog didn’t know about the book. That’d be nonsense. Rein is a “China hand.” They have written against Rein’s views about China in the past.

I am not a lawyer and don’t know about copyright laws. So, legally, perhaps, book titles are just titles and unlike a trademark or service mark where others are precluded from using them.

And, sure, I am catching the popularity wave of Rein’s book, “The End of Cheap China” with this article. At least this article refers to the book!

History has many twists and turns. If not for the United States defeating Japan in WW2, the China today might not be intact. John Woo is now making a new epic film about the Flying Tigers to commemorate this important period when the two countries aided each other.

The United States also has China to thank for – for resisting and bogging down the Japanese army in China’s large land mass.

A twist might have been Japan emerging as the victor in WW2, and in such a case, China might have been usurped under ethnic Japanese rule – a situation not unlike many dynasties that have come to pass in Chinese history. With millions of Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese, not many people would be in the mood to consider this scenario.

Looking at the Treaty of Versailles, the Chinese should be reminded how unjust the world order was only a few decades ago. Without a strong enough nation, it is the plight of 1.3 billion at the whims of stronger powers. It is that lesson that a stronger China must work towards further improving our existing world order for everyone on this planet.

perspectivehere:

I wanted to remind people that tomorrow (Feb 4) will be the 90th anniversary of the date that sovereignty over the Province of Shandong was agreed by Japan to revert back to China pursuant to an agreement with the United States at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922.

Wikipedia describes it thus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong_Problem

“The Shantung Problem (simplified Chinese: 山东问题; traditional Chinese: 山東問題; pinyin: Shāndōng wèntí) refers to the dispute over Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which dealt with the concession of the Shandong peninsula.

During the First World War, China supported the Allies on condition that Germany’s concessions on the Shandong peninsula would be returned to China. In spite of this agreement, the Article transferred the concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than returning sovereign authority to China. Japan was allowed possession of the province because of secret agreements signed with European powers. One of the excuses the Japanese used was that Duan Qirui had borrowed money from Japan to strengthen his army, this now being repaid with the concession of the Shandong peninsula. The Chinese ambassador to Paris, Wellington Koo, stated that the Chinese could not concede Shandong, which was the birthplace of Confucius, a highly important Chinese philosopher, as much as Christians could not concede Jerusalem, and demanded the returning of sovereignty over Shandong, to no avail. Chinese outrage over this provision led to demonstrations and a cultural movement known as the May Fourth Movement and influenced Wellington Koo not to sign the treaty.

China declared the end of its war against Germany in September 1919 and signed a separate treaty with Germany in 1921. The dispute was mediated by the United States in 1922 during the Washington Naval Conference, and the sovereignty of Shandong was agreed to be returned to China on February 4 of that year, while Japanese residents in Shandong were given special rights.”

During this period of history, the United States was one of the few foreign colonial powers that helped China to protect its sovereignty and resist invasion and dismemberment. Although the US was pursuing its own interests, as it would be expected to, its interests did align at that time with protecting Chinese sovereignty.

In my view, this is a fine moment of alignment of interests between the two countries that should be commemorated.

Some more details here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/naval-arms-control-1921.htm

“In addition to the multilateral agreements, several bilateral treaties were completed at the conference. Japan and China also signed a bilateral agreement, the Shangtung (Shandong) Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during World War I, and then it maintained control over the years that followed. The combination of the Shangtung Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. Additionally, Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Siberia and the United States and Japan formed agreement over equal access to cable and radio facilities on the Japanese-controlled island of Yap.”

We should also remember to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Nine-Power Treaty, which was signed on Feb 6, 1922.

The U.S. relationships with these two countries are nothing but complex. When the Philippines was colonized by the Spanish, the U.S. took sides with the Philippines to oust Spain. Little did the Filipinos knew they would have to fight the Americans in yet another attempt to gain freedom. Filipinos estimated 1+ million were killed as a result of that war. The story in Vietnam was not that dissimilar. The Vietnamese were fighting to end French aggression. After the French withdrew, the United States went in on the grounds of stopping Communism from spreading. From the North Vietnamese perspective, it was a new imperialist, and they were fighting yet again for their freedom. Again, with millions dead.

Geopolitics is a funny game, and us mere mortals simply have no idea what the true reality is. In this article, I would like to share two views from inside Philippines; one welcoming U.S. participation and the other oppose. Perhaps the easier way to make sense of the South China Sea dispute is simply this: one set of Filipinos wanting the disputed islands really bad and the other less bad – all the while with two giants tugging the camps apart. Imagine two elephants in a room with a little mouse. Sadly, the reality is it’s much more likely that the little mouse gets stepped on. (Wait, are elephants really afraid of mouse?)

You need an editor and staff with some personal background in China (and I don’t mean expats with Chinese spouses). You need better academic resources. And somehow you must all learn that western values are not universal values, and that all cultures are internally legitimate yet benefit from external contact. To fail in this regard will simply amplify existing cultural misunderstandings and cripple the great impending social and political globalizations that must follow the economic one already in progress.

The Economist’s coverage of China is bigoted, as exemplified by their debut article – which I am rebutting in this post (my rebuttal on the right).  If The Economist is genuinely interested in improving China for the Chinese, they’d be able to discuss the issues and policies specifically – not a wholesale rejection of the China ‘model.’ “The paradox of prosperity“For China’s rise to continue, the country needs to move away from the model that has served it so wellJan 28th 2012 IN THIS issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come. Former U.S. Secretary of State, Brzezinski, recently argued that our world is safer when there is a hegemonic power to enforce a world order.  Sure, so long as that world order is fair and just.Comparing to our world’s past, my personal opinion is our current world order maintained by the U.S.-led West has generally been better.On the point China’s rise is able to ‘agitate,’ the U.S. should be expected to make room for China too.  Our world order should not be rigid, and perhaps even one day to pass the hegemonic baton, to China, India, Russia, or whomever.  The alternative to this arrangement is obviously a multi-polar world or a very strong U.N..Calling China’s “system” as “out of step with global norms” is ridiculous.  What is this ‘global norm’ anyways? Only 20 years ago, China was a long way from being a global superpower. After the protests in Tiananmen Square led to a massacre in 1989, its economic reforms were under threat from conservatives and it faced international isolation. Then in early 1992, like an emperor undertaking a progress, the late Deng Xiaoping set out on a “southern tour” of the most reform-minded provinces. An astonishing endorsement of reform, it was a masterstroke from the man who made modern China. The economy has barely looked back since. China still has a long ways to go from being a superpower.  The Chinese constantly remind themselves of this too.  They have tremendous problems to solve internally – pollution, corruption, food safety, poverty, and wealth inequality.The Economist is clever enough to no longer outright call the 1989 incident a Tiananmen ‘massacre,’ but is careful to say it ‘led to a massacre.’  Leaked U.S. cables of the U.S. government have corroborated with Chinese government official figures of deaths – in the couple of hundreds outside the square involving mostly Chinese worker protesters clashing with the army.Has the Economist call on the British government their NATO bombings of Libya – resulting in thousands of dead Libyans a ‘massacre?’China in fact has legal basis for suppressing the protest, whereas the NATO bombing was against international law – bombing of a foreign country without U.N. authorization.The students and workers protested because by 1989, China had already underwent 10 years of privatization reforms.  The protesters feared their jobs and social safety net would no longer be guaranteed.  They were against corruption too.The Western lead isolation was an “anti-Communist” knee-jerk reaction from the Cold War.

The Chinese are clearly better off with the 1989 protest failed.  Look at where China is today.  As we see in Egypt, a revolution does not guarantee a timely and positive transition towards something ‘better.’ Compared with the rich world’s recent rocky times, China’s progress has been relentless. Yet not far beneath the surface, society is churning. Recent village unrest in Wukan in Guangdong, one province that Deng toured all those years ago; ethnic strife this week in Tibetan areas of Sichuan; the gnawing fear of a house-price crash: all are signs of the centrifugal forces making the Communist Party’s job so hard. China is indeed a society in transition.  The country is undergoing an industrial revolution.  For the first time, there are more urban dwellers than there are farmers.  Hundreds of millions of Chinese are to continue to move into cities.  This phenomenon causes tremendous social stress.China’s progress is overwhelmingly a positive one, though there are certainly problems as I pointed out above.”gnawing fear of a house-price crash” is another stupid narrative.  The Chinese government have actively been combating escalating housing prices by limiting the number of homes a citizen can purchase and tightening lending rules.  The result has been a resounding success – housing prices have dropped by 20%!Again, The Economist is an ignorant fool on this issue.The Economist often likes to repeat this idea that there are “vacant cities” in China in trying to argue a ‘housing collapse.’  That’s rather stupid too.  Let’s suppose there are such cities in China.  Are we talking about 100,000 vacant apartments?  What about the 100 MILLION Chinese who are yet to move into cities in the next few years? The party’s instinct, born out of all those years of success, is to tighten its grip. So dissidents such as Yu Jie, who alleges he was tortured by security agents and has just left China for America, are harassed. Yet that reflex will make the party’s job harder. It needs instead to master the art of letting go. This logic is backwards.  If China becomes more rich and affluent, the trend then is more freedom.  The Chinese Internet is vibrant.  Criticisms of the Chinese government is plenty abound.Compared to few decades ago, China is more open society today.Chinese dissidents get into legal trouble for the most part because they violate Chinese law.  One may argue there are perhaps too many loopholes giving Chinese authorities too much room for abuse. China’s third revolution The argument goes back to Deng’s insight that without economic growth, the Communist Party would be history, like its brethren in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. His reforms replaced a failing political ideology with a new economic legitimacy. The party’s cadres set about remaking China with an energy and single-mindedness that have made some Westerners get in touch with their inner authoritarian. The bureaucrats not only reformed China’s monstrously inefficient state-owned enterprises, but also introduced some meritocracy to appointments. Talking about legitimacy – the West needs more self introspection.  PEW and other reputable organizations consistently showed the Chinese government enjoying popular support, and in contrast broad disappointment in the West.Why must this dichotomy be viewed as a ‘authoritarian’ vs ‘democracy’ issue?Within the Chinese government there are liberals and conservatives too.  The reason they have a plan is because they don’t politicize everything.What is the reason for democracies not being able to compromise and turn economics into politics?So, instead of propagandizing China’s progress as a ‘authoritarianism’ challenge to ‘democracy,’ The Economist should educate its readers that when a society politicizes everything, it bogs down and is unable to solve problems. That mix of political control and market reform has yielded huge benefits. China’s rise over the past two decades has been more impressive than any burst of economic development ever. Annual economic growth has averaged 10% a year and 440m Chinese have lifted themselves out of poverty—the biggest reduction of poverty in history. I really can’t blame the Economist’s ignorance here, but it is still vacillating in its own convoluted thinking.  If we look at China’s history, she’s had dynasties where her economic output dwarfed any other civilization on the planet.China’s rise is also because she is not being invaded and colonized.  Her freedom is giving her a chance to develop. Yet for China’s rise to continue, the model cannot remain the same. That’s because China, and the world, are changing. China’s reform continues for sure, because her society is changing.  She is going through an industrial revolution as I mentioned above.  But this is not what the article had in mind. China is weathering the global crisis well. But to sustain a high growth rate, the economy needs to shift away from investment and exports towards domestic consumption. That transition depends on a fairer division of the spoils of growth. At present, China’s banks shovel workers’ savings into state-owned enterprises, depriving workers of spending power and private companies of capital. As a result, just when some of the other ingredients of China’s boom, such as cheap land and labour, are becoming scarcer, the government is wasting capital on a vast scale. Freeing up the financial system would give consumers more spending power and improve the allocation of capital. This paragraph contradicts itself.  China is weathering the global crisis well, because exports is not the gravy train for China as much as The Economist would like to paint it.  China’s over-all import-export is basically balanced.  (For a discussion of how we think trade actually benefits China, look here.)China needs a lot of investment in infrastructure.  For example, she has to build the highways and rail systems to connect the country.  That is a must.  There is still massive demand for infrastructure.  The Economist has to be blind to not know 200+ million Chinese rode the railway system alone during the Chinese New Year week.  People wait days to buy tickets!In China’s latest 5-year plan, it is certainly calling for more domestic consumption.This narrative that “the model cannot remain the same” is plainly stupid.  Who is telling The Economist China is not changing and not reforming? Even today’s modest slowdown is causing unrest (see article). Many people feel that too little of the country’s spectacular growth is trickling down to them. Migrant workers who seek employment in the city are treated as second-class citizens, with poor access to health care and education. Land grabs by local officials are a huge source of anger. Unrestrained industrialisation is poisoning crops and people. Growing corruption is causing fury. And angry people can talk to each other, as they never could before, through the internet. This paragraph is first of all contradicting few paragraphs above.  440m have been lifted out of poverty.   If that is not trickling down, I don’t know what is!Certainly, Chinese society is more delicate because there are still hundreds of millions of people below the poverty line.Chinese society is still largely unscathed, managing 9% growth in GDP despite the softening in demand from U.S. and Europe.  That is sound governance, and the Chinese government should be applauded.Certainly, there are mistreatment of migrant workers, issues with access to healthcare, pollution, and corruption, income inequality, and so on.  The Chinese are not happy with these problems.  But, the government is also sober about these issues.Again, whats wrong with ‘the model?’  What does The Economist suggest China do instead? Party officials cite growing unrest as evidence of the dangers of liberalisation. Migration, they argue, may be a source of growth, but it is also a cause of instability. Workers’ protests disrupt production and threaten prosperity. The stirrings of civil society contain the seeds of chaos. Officials are particularly alive to these dangers in a year in which a new generation of leaders will take power. The general trend in the current Chinese industrial revolution is that majority of the population will continue to migrate to cities. That bias towards control is understandable, and not merely self-interested. Patriots can plausibly argue that most people have plenty of space to live as individuals and value stability more than rights and freedoms: the Arab spring, after all, had few echoes in China. For once, it acknowledges some truth. Yet there are rights which Chinese people evidently do want. Migrant workers would like to keep their limited rights to education, health and pensions as they move around the country. And freedom to organise can help, not hinder, the country’s economic rise. Labour unions help industrial peace by discouraging wildcat strikes. Pressure groups can keep a check on corruption. Temples, monasteries, churches and mosques can give prosperous Chinese a motive to help provide welfare. Religious and cultural organisations can offer people meaning to life beyond the insatiable hunger for rapid economic growth. Yet, none of these ‘values’ are new to the Chinese.  And to say that there is no organization in labor or freedom to worship in China is ludicrous.  It says The Economist is completely ignorant about China.What China opposes is Vatican trying to exert political control over Christians worshipers in China.Many Westerners in fact lament the power of the church in Western governments.  Freedom from religion is also a value Chinese and Westerners alike share. Our business now China’s bloody past has taught the Communist Party to fear chaos above all. But history’s other lesson is that those who cling to absolute power end up with none. The paradox, as some within the party are coming to realise, is that for China to succeed it must move away from the formula that has served it so well. China’s bloody past was far worse when invaded by Japan and the West.The Chinese lesson is not to let foreign political forces undermine their own government.  When the government is weak, the people are open to foreign exploitation. This is a matter of more than intellectual interest to those outside China. Whether the country continues as an authoritarian colossus, stagnates, disintegrates, or, as we would wish, becomes both freer and more prosperous will not just determine China’s future, but shape the rest of the world’s too. China will certainly continue to evolve and her people become more free.We also hope that China can inject a more humane culture into our current international relations climate. The West has been way too aggressive in bombing and invading foreign countries.A more peaceful world is also a possibility with China’s rise.If The Economist wants to expand coverage of China with more ignorance and bigotry, I guess it’s just nothing new. ]]> http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2012/01/the-economist-it-is-time-for-a-new-editorial-overhaul/feed/ 74 http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2012/01/china-taiwan-america-us-cross-strait-relations-invade-five-reasons/ http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2012/01/china-taiwan-america-us-cross-strait-relations-invade-five-reasons/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:07:48 +0000 Maitreya http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/?p=14066

When a superpower is engaging in full hegemonic and supercilious display, another country with slowly increasing economic clout and rising international status can raise apprehension. When countries are used to a bigger country that is settled for some years in a bullying position, someone starting to come close to that bully’s level of power, however remotely, has the potential to raise various concerns.

This rise is often wrongly construed as a zero-sum game – the newcomer challenging the bully’s position. In such a case, the existing bully, in its efforts to manipulate popular conceptions about the comparatively-unknown newcomer, will (hypocritically) spread the myth that the newcomer is, and always has been, overtly aggressive. If this myth-making and spreading is successful, even to a small extent, it can negate the effect that the newcomer might have in compensating for or balancing the bully’s hegemony and its hubris. The newcomer’s assurances about its peaceful rise will then be dismissed as deception. The focal point of the bully’s containment policy will be to encourage and manipulate various types of pawns against the newcomer. If such pawns already exist, then they will be fostered and strengthened, and in case they don’t, new ones will be created (Or as Stephen Walt terms it, “a competition for allies”).

b) The United States is to maintain its capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan

The act also stipulates that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes” is a “grave concern of the United States” (Note: The distance between America and Taiwan is 7000 miles). America has literally surrounded China with its military (see map below). It doesn’t need too much imagination to figure out how the US will react to a multi-billion dollar Chinese arms package to Cuba or a Chinese military base in the Caribbean.

US treaty allies in the South Pacific. Source: CRS report RL33821

 

Whenever a dispute arises anywhere in the world, America, a country that treats war as an instrument of state policy, invariably tries to poke its nose in it. And whenever America becomes involved in a dispute, it inevitably seeks to sell weapons or establish military bases, if possible. The Taiwan dispute is no different. It promised, through the 1972 Shanghai Communique (a textbook example of constructive ambiguity), to gradually reduce weapons sales, but has done exactly the opposite (That China’s military is also increasing in strength is no excuse, since this was known at the time of signing the communique). It recently announced that it will upgrade Taiwan’s fleet of 145 F-16 jet aircraft. Including this deal, the United States, under its “Pacific” president, has sold more than $12 billion worth of arms to Taiwan in just the last two years. This is more than twice the amount sold by the George W. Bush administration in its first term and 75% of the amount sold during Bush’s eight years in office.

It is in US interest to exaggerate and glorify the Chinese threat to Taiwan, which results in everything from Pentagon reports to articles and analyses in the mainstream media parroting the same thing over and over again: accusing China of “assertiveness” (or “aggressiveness”, if one is feeling particularly chauvinistic), “flexing its muscles” and “belligerence”. Weapons companies form one of the largest contributors to party funds; Lockheed Martin (the makers of the F-16) spent $13.7 million for lobbying in 2009 alone.

US weapons sales to Taiwan, in theory at least, are either a) meant to serve as a deterrent against an invasion from the mainland or b) add to the defense arsenal of the island, or both. Counting only the weapons sales in the public domain, Taiwan has received $30.5 billion in U.S. arms from 1950 to 2010. However, whether or not the arms will actually serve to resist an attack from the mainland, and to what extent, remains unclear. Weapons sales to Taiwan have been largely symbolic, serving more as an exercise in American chest-thumping than in helping in the island’s defense. If America was genuinely interested in “defending” Taiwan, it would have supplied it with much more. It is pretending to perform a delicate balancing act between fulfilling its quixotic promise to Taiwan and maintaining steady relations with China. This tactic is then interspersed with regular weapons sales and public statements urging both sides to resolve their differences through negotiations. This is extremely good PR, as it can be done under the pretext of trying to maintain peace and portraying itself as a “guarantor of peace and stability in the region”. Nothing like a couple of Black Hawks to guarantee peace and stability.

In essence, the US is following in the footsteps of its predecessor, Great Britain, and faithfully adopting the “Divide and Rule” policy. This was Britain’s invariable practice when it gave independence to its colonies, including India, Palestine, Ireland and Cyprus. And in all these cases, dividing up the colony invariably lead to civil war. In India’s case, Britain made a show of being neutral, and at the same time did all it could to foster enmity between Hindus and Muslims. This has worked so well in the past that there is no reason to abandon it now. If China and Taiwan do find a way to resolve their dispute peacefully, the US will do whatever is in its power to stop it, because it will lose one of its main levers in the region and a peaceful resolution will cause China’s profile to rise considerably. It is in US interest to see China and Taiwan at loggerheads with each other.

Thus, America’s Taiwan policy and its “constructive ambiguity” can be rightly interpreted as an amalgam of a form of bullshit and hypocrisy. It has no interest in peace (in fact, it has an interest in there not being peace), no interest in the dispute’s resolution, and certainly no interest in explicitly taking sides (at least not publicly). It wants to be able to sell weapons to Taiwan, and it wants (to be seen to) maintain friendly relations with China. All this for an issue that doesn’t make a pennyworth of difference to US national security.

Look Ma, no consistency!

The unique political status of Taiwan and its relationship with the United States and China has created an interestingly ambiguous situation where words are thrown around with different parties having different interpretations of the situation on the ground. Henry Kissinger will die a happy man knowing that the UShas been equivocal about the whole affair, since having a firm policy would rule out its standard tactic of changing sides whenever required. It comes as no surprise that a) The US has indeed changed its approach multiple times and maintained ambiguity about it, most important of all, b) the party that has been the most consistent throughput the entire dispute has been China.China has always claimed Taiwan as part of its territory, regardless of whether it was weak or strong, observes M.Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at MIT. Successive US administrations have tried hard to make people believe that their Taiwan policy is consistent with US interests. Lobby groups and stupid politicians have already started trying to manipulate an issue that they don’t fully understand to their own advantages. And it doesn’t end there. Even the American government has failed to speak with one voice (notwithstanding the childish gaffes). Zhang Qingmin, of the Department of Foreign Affairs at the China Foreign Affairs University, makes the extremely important point of divisions within the US government:

“From a definitional standpoint, however, the bureaucratic politics model states that the US government consists of numerous departments and is not a single, rationally behaving unit. These departments may have different interests and possess divergent policy views on certain problems, including the issue of exporting arms to Taiwan. In opposing US arms sales to Taiwan, and handling other aspects of our relationship with the US, we in China normally approach diplomacy as a form of inter-governmental contact. In past communications with the US, we would often lump all US officials into one. Experience shows this practice to be insufficient and unsound.”

The mainstream US media is more than happy to play lapdog to America’s regular weapons sales to Taiwan. During the latest of such sales last year (amounting to $6.4 billion), China stopped military exchanges with the US and threatened unspecified sanctions against it. The general rhetoric among mainstream western media outlets was that China was overreacting, despite knowing that “the US is obliged to help Taiwan militarily due to the Taiwan Relations Act”, perhaps implying that the act was China’s fault. Following the same twisted logic, if, hypothetically, Taiwan does declare independence, China would also be justified in invading it, and Chinese officials would simply say that they were “obliged” to do so due to the Anti-Secession Law.

Newspapers, for their part, love to write about aggressive postures and war. The Economist brayed recently (it was not the only one) that “abandoning” Taiwan would imply that America would be willing to leave the region’s other democracies at China’s mercy, as though China claimed those countries as renegade provinces as well. Regular readers and fans of the newspaper will no doubt argue that this stance is due to its insistence on avoiding war. And that is indeed true – The Economist has always been opposed to war unless it was carried out by the US or NATO.

Even Taiwan cannot make up its mind about an issue that completely defines its sovereignty. The two main political coalitions have had two opposing views regarding the matter. Fans of democracy will no doubt argue that this is a sign of a “healthy democracy”, and the very vagueness and inconsistency in the Taiwanese political landscape will be used as an excuse for the US to “defend” Taiwan and its democracy. Taiwanese policy and approach keeps changing based on who is in power; the Taiwanese people have, until recently, seemed unable to make up their minds. After future elections, Taiwanese policy and cross-strait relations might undergo yet another reversal.

China, in what has always been a hallmark of its foreign policy, has been largely coherent in its approach to Taiwan’s status since the beginning – that a) There is only one China – the PRC, and b) Taiwan is Chinese territory. The most that China has offered, in the interest of peace and friendly relations, is agree to disagree with Taiwan on what the “China” in  “One-China” actually means, according to the infamous 1992 consensus, which is now the established government policy on both sides of the strait. As far as China is concerned, the One China principle was a stroke of genius. Since it recognizes only one state as legitimate and representing “all” of China (the mainland and Taiwan), it ensures that both China and Taiwan will, at least in theory, always remain united under one government and will not separate, or to use the PRC term – “split”. Under the absurd idea of differing with China over what “One China” means and the equally absurd hope of one day ruling over all China, Taiwan, at least on paper, gave up any hope it had of independence.

The DPP (whose loathing of the ECFA is no secret), if it had won the recent elections, would have risked destroying years of patient diplomacy on both sides. The DPP miscalculated its stance and threatened to rock the boat, and lost the elections.

Both the Greens and the Blues have refused the hugely successful “One Country Two systems” approach which, as in the case of the two SARs, has also served to call the west’s bluff about maintaining “democracy” in those regions (the so -called transgressions of the policy in case of Hong Kong and Macau form the exception rather than the norm). 14 years after the handover, Hong Kong was recently named the world’s freest economy.

In recent times, China and Taiwan have mutually decided not to poach each others’ diplomatic allies. Wikileaks cables reveal that China politely declined an offer from Panama, Taiwan’s most important formal diplomatic ally, to switch diplomatic recognition. This is particularly telling and an extremely significant sacrifice by China, given the important Panama Canal (and Panamanian plans for its expansion) and the PRC ban on Chinese investments in countries that recognize Taiwan.

Five reasons why China will not invade Taiwan

Journalists and analysts never forget to dutifully remind us that China has not “ruled out” the use of force against Taiwan. What they do not remind us with such regularity however, is that the Chinese leadership has regularly stressed that they seek peaceful reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. China has deployed, they say, 1500 missiles targeting Taiwan (or 2000, if one is feeling so inclined), due to which Taiwan should be regularly supplied with US arms to enable it to defend itself. They find the subtle politics of China’s missile deployments beyond the scope of their understanding. What they also fail to address is why China should redeploy or dismantle a major part of its defense arsenal (and one that faces the South China Sea and defends China’s most populated areas) just to placate Taiwan and US hawks. Moreover, even if the missiles were withdrawn, they could be redeployed at any time. These missiles are seen as an important deterrent to Taiwan’s independence and potential US intervention.

Whatever the media wants its readers to believe, the only major reason why China would actually consider an invasion is if Taiwan declares independence. This is in no danger of happening in the near future. Especially given Ma’s recent victory and his pledge of the “Three Nos” – “No independence, No unification, No use of force”. It is reasonable to assume that the majority of the Taiwanese public agree with him, and are happy with the status quo (the latter has been demonstrated by numerous opinion polls as well). Here are five major reasons why a full-fledged Chinese invasion of the island is more suited for a video game rather than reality.

5. Economics:

China has always placed economics at the forefront of most other matters. Despite the often-tumultuous state of Sino-Indian relations (and an unresolved border dispute), trade has touched $63 billion. China is India’s second largest trading partner. In the Senkaku island dispute with Japan, Deng Xiaoping, as soon as he came into power in 1978, proposed that China and Japan jointly explore the oil and gas deposits near the disputed islands without touching on the issue of sovereignty. China has also sought joint exploration in the resource-rich Spratlys, a solution which is the right step forward and is in fact more urgent than sovereignty, which the Philippines and Vietnam and  have so far been reluctant to do.

China doesn’t mind waiting and biding its time until sovereignty issues get resolved. As Deng Xiaoping famously remarked regarding the Senkaku dispute, “It does not matter if this question is shelved for some time, say, 10 years. Our generation is not wise enough to find common language on this question. Our next generation will certainly be wiser. They will certainly find a solution acceptable to all”. Unlike his predecessor Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao has used a softer approach towards Taiwan, promoting stronger economic and cultural ties, high-level official visits and direct flights in order to reduce tensions.

This pragmatic approach is on display even in the Taiwan dispute. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, and Taiwan is China’s seventh largest. Two-thirds of all Taiwanese companies have made investments in China in recent years. In 2010, China (including Hong Kong) accounted for over 29.0% of Taiwan’s total trade and 41.8% of Taiwan’s exports. The ECFA was heavily tilted in Taiwan’s favor. It cut tariffs on 539 Taiwanese exports to China and 267 Chinese products entering Taiwan. Under the agreement, approximately 16.1 % of exports to China and 10.5 % of imports to China will be tariff free by 2013. Taiwanese firms have invested $200 billion in the mainland, and trade between the two sides has exceeded $150 billion.

Taiwanese trade with China. Source: Reuters

Both China and Taiwan have a lot to lose by fighting with each other. Another factor to consider is the incalculable loss that an invasion will have on the Chinese economy, not to mention scaring away potential investors.

4. The Taiwanese public:

China is, quite rightly, obsessed with “stability”, President Hu’s watchword. Analysts agree that this is one of the main reasons why it is not being “tough” on North Korea – that it wants a stable neighbor with no refugee spillover. With hundreds of protests happening in China every year, it most certainly wouldn’t want yet another headache on its hands and alienate the island’s inhabitants (even more than they are at the moment). There is very less support for reunification on the island, and opinion polls make clear that only a tiny minority of Taiwanese identify themselves as “Chinese”.

The Anti-Secession also explicitly states in Article 9:

In the event of employing and executing non-peaceful means and other necessary measures as provided for in this Law, the state shall exert its utmost to protect the lives, property and other legitimate rights and interests of Taiwan civilians and foreign nationals in Taiwan, and to minimize losses. At the same time, the state shall protect the rights and interests of the Taiwan compatriots in other parts of China in accordance with law.

A Chinese invasion might inevitably lead to riots and international condemnation. China would thus risk flushing down the toilet many years’ hard work of patient diplomacy (in convincing other countries of its “peaceful rise”). This would in turn cause them to inch even closer to America, were they would be welcomed with open arms.

3. The threat of American intervention:

The United States of America, the responsible superpower, has been engaged in more military conflicts around this world than any other. Since the Second World War, the US has: 

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

Hence, the plain fact that needs to be realized is that the United States is more prone to violent outbursts than any other country.

The PLA doctrinal textbook, Zhanyixue, explicitly states that China is not in the same league as “advanced countries” (The entire document never mentions the United States by name), argues Thomas J. Christensen in China’s Revolution in Doctrinal Affairs: Recent Trends in the Operational Art of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (CNA, 2005). He further states,

Moreover, unlike in the heady early days of the Great Leap Forward, PLA strategists do not envision China closing that overall gap anytime soon. There is no stated expectation of short-cuts or leapfrogging to great power military status. In other words, China will have to accept that its relative technological backwardness and weakness in power projection will persist for a long time.

And then goes on to quote the text of Zhanyixue explicitly:

“Our military equipment has gone through major upgrading (很大提高) in comparison with the past, but in comparison to advanced countries, whether it be now or even a relatively long period from now, there will still be a relatively large gap (仍有较 大的差距)…………….The most prominent objective reality that the PLA will face in fighting future campaigns is that in [the area of] military equipment, the enemy will be superior and we will be inferior.”

As is clear, Chinese policy-makers are realists, and thus can be relied upon to heavily weigh the consequences of a possible US intervention.

2. China wants peace:

China is one of the few rising powers in the whole of human history to announce peaceful intentions and no desire to rule or establish hegemony over the world. In what might come as a shock to most people who consider media reports as a textbook for Chinese foreign policy, China has, on the whole, been a peaceful nation and has not engaged in military action unless provoked. And the military action that it has been involved in in its modern history has been extremely limited in its duration and objectives. Barring a misadventure with Vietnam in 1979 (which was also quite limited), China has only used war as a last resort, when it was left with no other alternative.

Resolutions of boundary disputes can be generally considered as a fundamental indication whether a country is pursuing expansionist or peaceful policies (which is one reason why a thorough analysis of China’s border disputes has been neglected by almost all western media outlets and analysts). China has had the highest number of border disputes of any country in the world and with no intention of living in an unfriendly atmosphere over a peace of land, has successfully handled and offered substantial compromises (this is the other reason) in most of them. China borders 14 countries by land; and as a result of territorial dismemberment and unequal treaties, the PRC government, when it came into power, found itself involved in territorial disputes with all of them. The way in which China resolved those disputes stands as testimony to its desire of peace at any cost and serves as an example to other countries. China has, in the interests of peace and stability on its borders, adopted a negotiation tactic favorable to rival claimants that other countries would do well to emulate. Many of these claimants were countries much weaker than China. China was under no obligation to offer such substantial compromises. The portion of land that China received in border settlements with various neighbouring countries is as follows.

Afghanistan  -  0%
Tajikistan  – 4%
Nepal – 6%
Burma – 18%
Kazakhstan – 22%
Mongolia – 29%
Kyrgyzstan – 32%
North Korea – 40%
Laos – 50%
Vietnam – 50%
Russia – 50%
Pakistan – 54%

Some of this land was strategically important (such as the Wakhan corridor that was disputed with Afghanistan) and extremely rich in resources (such as the Pamir mountain range in case of Tajikistan). China has also not reiterated its claims on a majority of the territory which was seized from it by the unequal treaties (even if it meant being cut off from the strategic Sea of Japan). In the map below, the gray area was part of China when the Qing dynasty was at its height, and then was snatched away from it due to unequal treaties. China has pursued claims on no more than 7% of these territories.

China has generally been known to attack when it has been taken advantage of or construed as weak, or when the enemy was at its very doorstep, such as during the Korean war. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 stands as a textbook example of this strategy. Nehru, the then Indian PM, rejecting all Chinese offers for negotiations, constituted a “Forward Policy” of pushing forward to enemy lines and made belligerent statements about China (“I have ordered the army to throw the Chinese out”), implicitly announcing Indian intentions to attack. Some of the Indian outposts established under this policy went even further then Chinese ones. China, correctly interpreting these actions as hostile and viewing India through the prism of British imperialist intentions on Tibet (as India had made itself the British successor in all matters regarding Tibet and China), made multiple diplomatic protests against the Forward Policy, but Nehru ignored them and never thought that China would have the guts to attack. After China finally did attack and occupied the disputed areas, it declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdraw to pre-war status quo borders without occupying an inch of territory. Hence, Chinese intentions were just to just India a lesson. It had no interest in occupying any territory.

Hence, a peaceful South China Sea and Taiwan strait is in China’s interest. As China rises, the last thing it wants to do is anything that might be construed as provocative. It has indicated that it wants a peace treaty with Taiwan, and indeed, negotiating a peace agreement was one of the points that President Hu introduced as a blueprint for cross-strait relations in December 2008. Ma made a campaign promise to sign a peace treaty in the run up to the 2008 elections, but reneged on it after becoming president. Such a treaty will not only assure China’s maritime neighbors (including rival claimants in the South China Sea) of China’s peaceful intentions, but will have the effect of also formally ending the Chinese Civil War.

1. Taiwan is not going to declare independence:

The most important reason why China has not yet considered an invasion. Ma has explicitly declared that he is not seeking independence, and the voters seem to be siding with him and are happy with the status quo. And so is China. Chinese leaders have a penchant for putting issues on the backburner. They adapt to changing situations and are happy to do what they can (business) and leave for future generations what they cannot (reunification).

So what next? Chinese leaders will be happy to admit – they don’t know. As long as both sides are happy with the status quo, there seems to be no reason to fret. As long as Taiwan does not declare independence, there seems to be no reason to worry about a military conflict. And since a majority of the Taiwanese people are happy to be were they are, rocking the boat is the last thing leaders on both sides of the strait would want to do. Both economies are growing, and people are living happily on both sides. Every generation of leaders thus hands over this problem to the next one, with the hope that they might one day either solve it, or preserve the status quo and hand the headache over to their successors.

Hence, discussion of a Chinese invasion serves little purpose other than to be used by various “foreign-policy analysts” to justify their grants and pass their time. There ought to be no doubt that a full-blown invasion would be a nightmare for China, and it simply wouldn’t do it. Or, as Jim Hacker would say, “Not just that it shouldn’t, but it couldn’t, and if it could, it wouldn’t, would it?”

(originally posted at India’s China Blog)

Various ways of writing '爱' - photo by raffiaflower at Huang Shan (黄山)

Every language has a word for love. But Chinese is probably the only language that has so many possible written variations of the emotion. This has been the way, even since before Qinshihuangdi unified China and imposed standardized measures, including the universal script. Yet the writing variations of the old kingdoms are still known today. In a park on the way to Huangshan (one of the five sacred mountains) I came across this stone tablet, with at least 50 versions of the word `love’ 爱! (picture attached) Sure beats Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s: How do I love thee!

What better way to offer Chinese New Year greetings but with plenty of love, in all its written expressions.

With love, comes happiness, peace, good fortune and health!

爱爱爱爱爱爱爱！恭喜发财！

The TV series is “步步惊心” or “步步驚心”loosely translated as “Startling by Each Step”, I know the translation is always so corny. It is about a modern girl who went back through time to the later reign of Qing Kangxi period. If you are familiar with this period, you will know the palace intrigue that took place. Although it is considered science fiction, the costume and cultural aspect is very accurate. The author of the original work is 桐华. She did an awesome work by inter-weaning love and politics into the story.

The series and many other mainland works received rave review in Taiwan and HK. Just do a traditional Chinese search on the title and you can gauge the responses. There are many who commented that due to the control of the government, creativity is dead on the mainland. I strongly disagree with this statement. The censorship is on a certain standard that fall out of the mainstream acceptable norm in the mainland be it political or cultural. In my view this limitation actually spurred even more creativity. If the US already has a Jerry Springer shows and a bunch of other reality TV or show that use controversy, sex or violence to sell, why should China offer a bunch of more of the same? Is violence and sex necessary to tell a captivating story? Another question, why should China become a copy cat of the west or a replica? The series has English subtitles. I feel that watching Chinese TV or movies is also another way of understanding the country and culture.

http://tw.sugoitw.com/startling-by-each-step-episode-01/2/

I also respectfully disagree with Oli about how the more explicit and formal rights framework (the “formalization” of rights in his words) evolved in the west. I believe and will argue that such a framework developed because of the distinct historical forces in the west vis a vis China and not primarily because of technological, educational and communicative advancement. It became an explicit and formal affair in the west because of the historical forces that necessitated it.

Many people in the west and often even in China assume that historical concerns for human rights are strictly a western development and that the explicit rights discourse and formal legal system of the west developed because of western cultural values (such as concerns with autonomy, freedom, individuality, etc).

I believe that this is a self-serving, revisionary rationalization.

The real reason why the west developed explicit and formal framework for human rights is because of its history. China did not develop such a framework because it did not have such a history, and if it had such a history, it would likewise have developed one. The historical trend I am thinking about is the drastically different pasts both major civilizations have had regarding religious, political, social oppression.

Throughout their respective histories, the west has been far more oppressive in regards to religious, political, and social persecution while China has been mostly relatively tolerant. I think that the explicit and formal framework of human rights developed in the west precisely because one was required to protect people from the systematic abuses of their society, their church and their state while no such explicit and formal system was ever required in China because such kinds and degrees of oppression of the many institutions of religion, politics and social practices rarely existed in China. The motivational impetus was simply lacking in the case of China. If necessity is the mother of invention, the explicit and formal framework of protecting human rights was necessitated by a history of systematic oppression that made such a framework inevitable.

That is not to say that the west has always been intolerant towards these institutions nor is it to say that China has always been tolerant towards them. For example, the west during the last 50 years have been the most religiously, politically and socially tolerant in its history while ironically, China, since having adopted a western political system (Marxism) have been its most oppressive regarding those institutions. But the west’s history has intolerance as the norm, not the exception. It was the systematic and brutal oppression of people’s religious and political beliefs and associated social practices that was a causal force. Conversely, however, religious, political and social tolerance has been the norm in China and it was only interspersed with certain periods staining Chinese history with intolerance. For example, the roughly fifteen years of political terror during the Qin Dynasty and in the modern period of the Cultural Revolution.

For most of western history through the last 2000 or so years, one may be burned alive for practicing a religion not sponsored by the state. Indeed, one may even be killed for having thoughts or beliefs not sanctioned by the official state/church doctrine like Socrates and Thomas More were. Hundreds of thousands of people died in brutal religious campaigns all across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance and even the throughout the “Enlightenment” in religious purgings such as the Spanish Inquisition. Millions died in religious wars and religious Crusades.

Thousands of “witches” were tortured, burned or drowned alive for “crimes” of being “spinsters,” or of “gossiping” and of not going to church. Homosexuals were burned alive for what they did in the privacy of their homes. Philosophers and scientists who held views at odds with Biblical interpretation or official church-state doctrines (no separation back then) were also burned alive.

With a sordid history like that the question isn’t Why did an explicit and formal system of rights protection come into existence in the west? but Why didn’t one come into existence much sooner? Much of the rights framework (or Classical Liberal tradition in philosophical jargon) we know today didn’t even come into existence till between 1650-1800 in Europe and the US.

It was not because westerners valued “freedom” or “autonomy” anymore than anyone else. It was because their governments had made people’s lives so intolerable with brutal and intrusive policies that they had to formulate such systems to protect basic freedoms from gross infringement.

There is also a prevailing myth in both the west and in China that Christian values spurred on the Classical Liberal developments. But that is also wrong. One only needs to look at the philosophers who first developed and advocated such a framework. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and the American Founding Fathers were all what we probably would consider either atheists, agnostics or Deists (that is, non religious people who believed in an impersonal Creator). These Fathers of Liberalism lived in a time when almost everyone else was deeply religious. Many of these first Liberals were self-described “Christians” but they only described themselves so to protect themselves against persecution, social ostracization or for political gain. They did not believe in a personal God nor in the divinity of Christ or any number of Biblical claims. Hobbes and Locke had to escape to Holland (which together with Scotland was the only two major European nations that was moderately tolerant regarding religious and political beliefs and certain social practices). They were under threat of death had they stayed in their home country of England. It is no surprise that the creators of the Liberal rights model were the very people that needed such protections from their own societies.

On an interesting note, I have met one philosopher who argued that Locke was inspired to formulate his rights approach because he had read a newly available translation by the Jesuits of Mencius while in Holland. Mencius, being a Confucian, argued against intrusive state power and in favor of the interests of the people more than two thousand years before Locke. In the Confucian tradition, the state’s main responsibility is to provide social welfare (building roads, schools, hospitals, providing security, raising enough food, etc) and not sanctioning religion. The emperor’s basic role is role model and in the performing of rituals, not in the regulation of people’s personal lives.

For most of its history almost all religions, foreign or native were widely tolerated within China. There were no pogroms, no religious wars, no Inquisitions, no Crusades, no witch burnings, etc, etc in Chinese history. Christianity, Islam, Judaism all has had a history in China more than a thousand years old without any coercive state sanctioning or proscription of their practice or belief.

Chinese Christians, Jews and Muslims were made to observe laws other Chinese had to observe. They were never systematically singled out and persecuted like different religious adherents were throughout European history. Even during some periods in the Tang Dynasty when foreigners were expelled from China and foreign religious proselytizing made illegal, no attempt was made to prohibit religious practice by Chinese adherents.

Personal, social practices such as homosexuality was mostly widely tolerated in society. The government rarely if ever intruded in people’s houses or bedrooms. People, especially the Mandarin government officials openly criticized the policies of their government and even the Emperor himself (in fact, it was their jobs to do so).

It is no wonder that China did not develop an explicit and formal conceptual system to protect people’s speech, religious beliefs, and personal/social practices as no need was there to develop one. It is also no wonder that the west did develop one. It’s not that the Chinese don’t value the same things on an intuitive, moral level as westerners; it’s that there was a pressing need to make those basic moral intuitions into a more explicit and formal system so as to better protect people from violations in one society rather than the other.

I will say, however, the Chinese today may emphasize certain rights over others compared to most westerners. Americans, for example, may value the right to freedom of expression highly. While Chinese may value freedom from racism and economic freedoms and rights (access to health care, job security, etc) more than the freedom of expression but Chinese also value the freedom to express their religious and political views as well. The differences is a matter of relative degree in the hierarchy of scheme of values and how society ought to structure the laws so as to take into account those values. Any country that outlaws hate-speech may have a scheme like the Chinese over the Americans, say, valuing the freedom from racism over free speech but that does not mean that they do not value the later, just that when there is conflict, the higher-valued right ought to be the one that is prioritized over the lower-valued one in the law.

The rights framework was not conceived because of European High Mindedness as many westerners who love to engage in self-aggrandizement would like to believe. They are rather conceived by a reaction towards the rape of those rights by the religious, social and state powers that excessively and brutally controlled people’s lives. Many westerners also believe that the Chinese did not develop that tradition because Chinese culture or people do not value things like freedom and autonomy. But that is bigoted. It serves only to dehumanize the Chinese who are some of the most freedom loving people on earth.

It serves as no surprise, also, that Chinese people are now engaged in the discourse and legal codification making explicit what had already been valued such as protecting freedom of expression and so forth. Now the Chinese government is even further instituting the rule of law so as to protect people’s rights from unnecessary intrusion. This is a natural progression from the oppressive regime of the Cultural Revolution to the more relaxed environment most Chinese enjoy today to express themselves. Some westerners would like to take credit seeing this as influence of “western values” but this development is native much as the development of European and American Classical Liberal tradition was native to the west because it was a reaction against their own oppressive trends. China has far to go in this area but so do the west. Cultural centric and ethnocentric arrogance will not further the discourse but only hinder it.

The purpose of the bills is to enable IP owners to target foreign-based websites from selling pirated movies, music and other products in the U.S. The bills have pitted entities with high stakes in IP such as Hollywood studios and drug companies against tech companies that will be target of any new law such as Google and Wikipedia. Earlier this week, the latter staged various forms of high-profile blackouts, with Chris Dodd of the Motion Picture Association of America responding accusing the tactics as

an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services … an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today … [and] a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information.

Without going into the details of the texts of the bills (linked above), here are the biggest political complaints against the SOPA-PIPA:

The biggest complaint by critics of the bills is that the SOPA-PIPA destroys Internet Freedom. IP owners will be able to take down sites that host illicit materials by requiring ISP to redirect DNS queries and search engines to de-list offending sites, the so-called “Internet death penalty” option.  Google’s Brin - among many others - compared  SOPA-PIPA to China’s most draconian Internet practices. IP owners will be able to target many anti-counterfeit circumvention tools (see also this), including tools that  human rights activists often use (see also letter from human rights community). SOPA-PIPA effectively builds for America its own “Great Firewall.”

The law also contains provisions that critics say is overly-broad in its reach. IP holders will be able to force payment processors and advertisers to cut off funding sources of alleged infringing websites. IP holders will be able to target websites that contains only a small portion of the content that is actually infringing. Companies who voluntarily cut off suspected infringing websites with virtually no oversight will also gain immunity from law suits arising from their acts. The law also has foreign ramifications, as foreign sites would have to submit to US jurisdiction to contest any blockage, a costly and timely process that will sure to antagonize many abroad.

Supporters of SOPA-PIPA counter that strong IP protection is important for American business and the American economy. The bills can always be amended to addresses particular concerns, but they must offer strong, meaningful protection for IP holders. The threat posed by piracy to American innovation is very real, costing America as many as 100,000 jobs, almost $3 billion in lost wages, and over $12.5 billion loss to the economy. What is at stake is American innovation that drives not only American culture but America’s export economy.

I watched with interest how the bill was ultimately put off the table this week. Between those who felt copyright laws are already over-reaching and broken (see, e.g., this interesting talk by Prof. Lessig) and those who advocated that the current Internet structure represented ultimate in Internet Freedom, the bill simply had no chance.

Because I agree that current copyright laws are too draconian (actually I believe IP law in general, especially IP law that reach internationally such as TRIPs, is too draconian), I am against SOPA-PIPA.  But let’s me be clear: I am celebrating RELIEF not FREEDOM here. I have no false hopes that my interests on the Net can be best guaranteed by the likes of Google or Wikipedia or Facebook.

Currently, the government already has arm-twisted ISPs and other Internet stakeholders to allow content holders to crackdown on copyright violators. Among things ISPs have already agreed to do include taking mitigation efforts such as reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational” landing page for customers accused of copyright infringement. All this was done behind backdoor, in secret, without judicial review (see previous link). Who knows what other agreements will be struck in the future? Rather than relying on behind-the-door power negotiations between government, content holders and Internet companies, would it not be better to formalize this sort of arrangement in law?

In an earlier post about wikileaks, I questioned how freedom from government per se actually means Liberty as in Freedom that enables empowerment. I voice the same question here.

Just because SOPA-PIPA is defeated does not mean ISPs and search engines are open and free. It may just mean that we have outsourced regulation of the Internet from the government to the private sector.

The takedown of wikileaks illustrates a case in point. As I wrote earlier in my wikileaks post:

[D]espite the great pride Americans feel about living in a “free” soceity, within days of the White House pronouncing the Wikileaks publication illegal, several payment sites – including PayPal, Mastercard and Visa – suspended WikiLeaks’s accounts, cutting off Wikileaks primary means of accepting donations. Amazon’s web hosting service dropped its hosting of Wikileaks mirror sites. EveryDNS.net took the drastic step of taking suspending the wikileaks.org domain.

If a shadow network of Internet stakeholders has the power to control flow of information according to its own rules and sense of norms – when the government is still unclear on whether the information should be censored – what is to prevent companies from forming rings outside of government oversight to hemorrhage flow of information for illicit purposes?

How delusional are Americans about the state of the world today? Is it really much better to rely on companies and individuals to manage the flow of information than the government?

According to Assange, founder of Wikileaks, the takedown of Wikileaks represented nothing less than the “privatisation of state censorship.”

You don’t think ISPs have an interest in selectively blocking content on the Net? Comcast had been guilt just of that and it’s only recently that ISPs in general have been told not to discriminate service based on content (e.g., Comcast should not block or slow down voip traffic to force customers to buy Comcast phone service). Critics of FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules however claim that the rules offer little new protection while give traditional ISPs a pretext to discriminate under the guise of “reasonable network management.” They also brush at the fact that wireless networks (i.e. cell phone companies) are for the most part exempt from these new rules. The FCC’s recent neutrality rules passed strictly along party lines and is being challenged in court.

What about Google – that vaunted defender of Freedom? Few are aware that Google – the self-proclaimed defender of transparency, openness, and objectivity on the Internet – is under investigation in the EU for manipulating search result for commercial gain and has in the court of law been observed to “vehemently assert and defend its right to manually and subjectively promote, penalise, or omit whatever it chooses,” no part of the Internet is immune. Should a for-profit company that must under the law hold the interests of its shareholders above all else be trusted to always be open and free on its own?

And even if you trust Google to be “good” now, should you be concerned about the reach Google has? Do the gatekeepers of the Internet such as Google and Wikipedia owe society any duty? People who care about freedom of speech that informs the democratic process might want to worry about the rise of these new gatekeepers and their role in society. Do the high-profile acts committed by Internet companies to further their own interests in the current battle represent an “abuse of power” and a “ dangerous and troubling development”?

The paranoic fervor of anything government to me is very puzzling. We depend on the government for so many things already in our lives. Government runs the courts, maintains the military, polices our neighborhoods, builds our roads, regulates our food and medicine, sets policy on so many things, etc.  Why not let it help us regulate the Internet?

The government already does regulate the Internet in the name of national security. Consider the SHIELD ACT introduced by Lieberman, which would

amend a section of the Espionage Act that already forbids publishing classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence — i.e., wiretapping. The bill would extend that prohibition to information on HUMINT, human intelligence, making it a crime to publish information “concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States,” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.

The defeat of SOPA-PIPA by Internet and social media companies has been cast as a victory of the people. But to me, the defeat only shows the extent of power by which companies with wide Internet reach now has to mobilize and shape people’s opinions. It proves little why they – rather than the government – should be the guardian if the Internet. For all we understand, the SOPA-PIPA battle may be merely a war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley interests, with people pawns being mobilized to wage the war.

I am always extra skeptical when people are urged to take political positions in the name of Freedom. Freedom does not take sides. It’s akin to a football player thanking (with all his heart and soul) God for a touchdown. But would Almighty, all-loving God take sides in a human conflict – and a football game no less?

Freedom – like God – should not be about daily politics. It is about creating an environment where people can actively participate in democratic governance. Freedom is at best a conviction to be tried, practiced, continually demonstrated and validated, not a value or ideology or religion to be preached and imposed.

So while I am happy about the defeat of SOPA-PIPA, I am dismayed at the rhetoric used.  On the International Stage, the U.S. has waved the flag of Internet Freedom to subvert other nations’ sovereignty and waved the flag of political freedom to wage wars on other nations.

Freedom is ultimately about empowerment. This often requires the careful nurture of a government. A norm that blindly distrusts and vilifies governments at all cost is not only a danger but a disservice to humanity.

Following is a snapshot as of today of how Ray‘s recent article, “Debunking Myth of China exploiting Africa Again!,” is being circulated on Twitter. Click on it to read the endorsement for the great discussion.

(Your perspectives distributed - click for larger view)

In the grand scheme of things, this blog’s readership is still relatively small. But as you will see in the profiles of those who tweeted, it is obvious the article and the discussion have a wider reach than just this blog alone.

With the recent SOPA controversy gripping America, Allen’s article, “What does ‘Internet Censorship’ Mean?” got thousands of views yesterday. Google search for “What does Internet censorship mean?” has Allen’s article ranked third in the search result.

Everyone’s contribution here will have an impact. Good job Ray and thank you all.

Paul Fox

[Update 2]
5 of the 7 attackers were Chinese, according to this article:

The worst part of the misinformation posted on the web about this case was the names of the attackers. New updates by the Chicago Police have brought on disturbing surprises about the actual attackers and the details surrounding the beating.

Although once thought that this was a racially charged attack of an Asian boy by six Caucasian boys, the actuality was that there were 7 attackers named in the case. Five of the attackers were of Chinese descent, one of the attackers was a 15-year-old girl and only one was actually Caucasian.

The 15-year-old girl, three 15-year-old boys and two 16-year-old boys were all charged as juveniles and the only Caucasian attacker, 17-year-old Raymond Palomino was charged as an adult.

[Update 3]
In all honestly, when I first saw the video, my initial reaction was perhaps this was a racially motivated attack on Chinese yet again. Just last year, there were a string of attacks targeting Chinese Americans in Silicon Valley. (See my post, “Opinion: Citizens of Chinese heritage in the West to also bear the brunt of Western media bias.”) I recall a Filipino girl attacked on a New York bus few years ago, and later the arrested assailants defended themselves in saying they thought she was Chinese! Unbelievable.

In reaction to Wayne’s initial comments – actually, more precisely on the point about whether this incident is a worthy topic for this blog – Naqshbandiyya left some very insightful comments below which I quote here in their entirety:

To those saying that this site should not cover the video, another popular English-language website which translates Chinese netizen reactions posted it, so enough influential sites are putting their spin on it. An interesting trend can be seen in those comments: “Descendent of corrupt officials, deserves to be beaten.” (贪官之后，该打。) and “If he’s the child of a civil servant [Chinese government official], then he deserves to be beaten!” (如果是 公仆的孩子，该打！) It’s also clear that many Chinese resent the victim for simply emigrating to America. Let’s appreciate for a minute the irony of this man getting no solidarity from the group in whose membership for which he is attacked.

Judging from the children’s accents, mannerisms, and names [i.e., romanized Cantonese surnames vs. pinyin], a clear cleavage can be seen between the native-born American attackers and the recent Chinese immigrant victim. To say that everybody is just “Chinese” is to elide some very important distinctions. Americanized Chinese, growing up with a strongly internalized anti-Communist, anti-Chinese, and broadly anti-Asian ideology, feel that they have to prove themselves loyal to white Americans. That’s why so many Chinatowns in the United States fly the Taiwanese flag, and why after 1949 Chinese Americans cut off ties to the mainland and repeatedly declared themselves to be“good [American-serving] Chinese”, and not “bad [independent] Chinese”. How much self-loathing must you have to say the things that the attackers do in the video, such as “Chinese nigger”, and “Am I speaking Chinese to you, nigger”?

But while we focus on the house negro aspect of the story, let’s note that the ringleader of this crime; the only person whose face was seen in the video; the only person who because of his age can be charged as an adult, was a white man. Calling this a Chinese-on-Chinese crime is as stupid as saying that because the U.S. ambassador to China’s grandparents were born in that country, that his verbal assaults on China are just intra-Chinese fighting. Some nuance, please!

Besides, the details of the specific case are less important than the trends that this crime represents. And no, Wayne, this is not about crimes committed by Asian Americans, it’s about crimes committed against Asian Americans. Especially in schools, where Asians areby far the most bullied racial group. Part of the reason for this disproportionate bullying is that Asians are stereotyped as being “obsequious and meek”, lacking in English schools, and politically impotent. Asking bloggers and writers not to talk about this issue, is, in a sense, putting Asians back in their place, which is to be seen and not heard; to trade material products but not to exchange ideas. In a case that is not black and white, where the hero is not unmistakably Chinese and the villain not unmistakably European, there is more reason to discuss and not less.

I should add, the assailants in the New York bus were African Americans. So, it is absolutely true – the day in and day out vilification of ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ in the Western mainstream press will spill over and cause like minded imbeciles to act. The reason they defend their attacks saying because they thought the Filipino girl was Chinese is because they know that’s a ‘popular’ sentiment.

I have heard Harry Belafonte (one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s confidants in the American Civil Rights Movement) on NPR criticizing the ‘yes’ slaves who got to sleep in their masters houses. His point is one in the same – the ‘yes’ slaves ingratiate to gain favor from their master.

This phenomenon is across the board for us humans. It is not unique to any ethnicity. It’s just human nature. The truth is when there is no equality, there is a lot of ugliness. Slavery is unequal. Constant unjust vilification of ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ is unequal.

Obviously, in this incident in Chicago, every single one of the assailants are at fault. It is important to follow and understand the dynamics within the 7.

I have watched this debate much earlier but caught up in too many things to bring it to your attention. In order to go further it is advisable to watch an earlier talk given by professor Deborah Brautigam earlier on the same subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BZfDYnOLw5w

http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2010/11/africa-china-and-the-western-medias-smearing-campaign/

The debate was hosted by Intelligence Squared at Cadogan Hall in London. And the motion was “Beware the Dragon: Africa Should Not Look to China”

For the motion: Ghanaian intellectual George Ayittey and Ana Maria Gomez, European Parliamentarian from Portugal.  Against the motion: Deborah Brautigam, Professor in the School of International Service  at American University and Stephen Chan, Dean of Arts and Sciences at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies).

What really bugs me was the poor research done by both Ayittey and Gomez. The former when confronted with the fact that China did not colonize any country, retorted that China colonized Tibet and is threatening Taiwan. Both of them obviously got their “facts” from reading mainstream news of the West. Gomez even ended her talk by mentioning Ai Wei Wei. Instead of relying on numbers and stats they filled their talks with empty rhetoric of transparency and human rights.

Stephen Chan mentioned that he was a peacekeeper in Mozambique. He mentioned the good will China has generated in supporting the then rebels to help overthrow colonialism in Africa. Another interesting point of view was given by a member of the audience who is from Sudan, to him, China’s involvement actually brought about improvement in Sudan.

Both Brautigam and Chan actually have to waste some of their valuable speech time to defend issues that are not part of the debate. Namely, since China has such bad environmental and human rights records as reported in the western press, China is by nature bad. However, their research and presentation paid off, the result was that most member of the audience who is undecided  voted for them. (There is a poll taken before the debate. For the Motion: 154. Against 106, and Undecided 126. When the debate was over, the audience was polled again. For the Motion: 149. Against 212 and Undecided 25.) Despite the exemplary performance given by them, those audience who hold the view that China is doing bad things in Africa barely changed from 154 to 149. This clearly showed that those who had made up their mind will not changed even when presented with overwhelming evidence showing otherwise.

The debate will automatically play in segments and is about an hour long.

Dan started out the post by quoting from a MSNBC story on the skyrocketing number of Chinese students applying to study in American schools. But then without analyzing any aspect of the story, he turned around to say - hey, that got me thinking: I’ve heard many bad things about students from China, such as:

• “They don’t come here to learn. They just come here for the grades.” I have heard this one at least a half dozen times.
• “I am convinced that if our teacher asked the class what 2+2 equals, and nobody spoke up who is not from China, not a single student from China would answer.” I have heard some form of this one at least a dozen times.
• “They are killing class discussion. They never contribute.” One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again.
• “I cannot even stand having to listen to them give presentations. Their English is terrible and they don’t even try. Somebody else must have taken the tests for them.”
• “The school is going to regret having admitted them. They will never donate money to the school as alumni. It will be like they were never here at all.”
• “You will never see any of them at any school function. Never ever ever. Unless it can help them with a grade.” I am constantly hearing this one.
• “They never make any effort to talk with anyone other than those who are also from China.”
• “They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate. It isn’t fair.” I hear this one constantly as well and, needless to say, it is the one that causes the most anger.
• “My friend with a 3.8 GPA and 650 SATs didn’t get in and had to go to ______. I know he/she would have contributed far more to the school than these students from China.”
• “I’ve heard that most of them cheated to get in.”
• “The school claims they contribute to diversity. That’s a complete lie. How can someone who never says anything contribute to anything? Everyone knows they are here only because they pay the foreign tuition rate.
• “I tried to speak with some of them, but they clearly had no interest.”
• “This is a great way to ruin relations between China and us.”
• “Why do they even bother? They come here to study, but since they never interact with anyone who is not from China, I don’t even see why they come.”

What amazes me is the level comfort at which Dan seems to in launching broad-stroke generalized attacks at a large of people – a myriad of “bad” things – ALL BAD – that applies generally to all Chinese students  studying in the U.S. - some 157,000 students according to the Washington Post.  But what really ticks me off is the guiltless, arrogant way by which Dan then goes about justifying those attacks.  No – I Dan Harris did not have any firsthand evidence of any of these damning accusations, but I have certainly “heard” about them or “heard” from people who have “heard” about them. I don’t think these are just rumors: I hear these things “often” and “constantly” – maybe even “half a dozen times”! Importantly, the people I hear these things from are not bigoted ”red-necks,” but people who are “sophisticated, intelligent, and well-traveled.”

I wonder what people would think if I were to write a racist post like this:

I read today a report on how more and more African Americans are enrolling in college. Oh yes – that got me thinking (unrelated really, but so what), I’ve heard many bad things about African Americans attending college. I warn you: it’s bad out there. For example, many students and their parents believe the following:

• “A large majority of black students cheat to get in to my school. I mean once they get on campus, they get private tutors, and many still fail! I don’t see how any of these people can get in without cheating.” I’ve heard this at least half a dozen times.
• “Most black students don’t care about learning. They only want to get the grades needed for athletic or some other affirmative action scholarships. They do the minimum in class to get the grades they need.”
• “I have heard that black students cheat all the time at school. I am not talking about a few sporadic cases, but everyone I know say it. It’s really bad out there.” I also have heard this many times.
• “Black students are different from us. They don’t mingle with us.  What the f__k? Why should we make space for you if you don’t make any effort. What’s the point if you are going to enforce segregation yourself?”
• “Black students kill class discussions. They don’t seem as inquisitive as us about Shakespeare, European history, and Western civilization. They only care about studying about race and slavery. I don’t see why they should take up space that my friend – who was recently rejected – could have put to better use.”
• ” I don’t understand why my school keep admitting black students. Most black students won’t be that successful. They will never donate money back to the school once they graduate. It’s all a waste of resources to teach them anything.”

I have heard the above often, consistently and constantly from many people. Everyone seems to have heard something or know people who have heard something. These things about black students are all consistent. Before you accuse my sources of being racist, note that the people I hear from are not “red-necks” by any means. They are sophisticated, intelligent, and well-traveled.

Any thoughts people on what can be done to fix the problem –  to bridge the disconnect between white and black?

Do people see the problem with my hypothetical rant above?

Dan might want to think he can insulate himself from being called a racist by couching his remarks in third-party narrative. But when you offer no defense on what are clearly over generalization – generalization that all lean one way – you reveal your true colors. That color further shines through when you try to augment, justify or otherwise  rationalize these generalizations by noting how consistent they are and how rational the holders of these prejudice are.

Now I have never been one for political correctness. Humans are wired up to live by stereotypes. Thus I had written in a comment some time ago:

[W]e make generalizations all the time. People form first impressions based on people’s height, the firmness of their handshakes, how they walk, whether people slouch or not, the style (or quantity, as the case may be) of their hair, smell of cosmetic, sense of humor, how much money they make, etc., etc.

A friend once noted that since I was from Taiwan, a tropical island, I must have really enjoyed the sweltering 100 degree heat we had been getting. I explained to my friend that was an incorrect misconception, that many people I know from Taiwan hated heat. He was at first surprised but readily accepted that information and corrected his misconception.

But what Dan exhibited appears to be a different beast altogether. It’s not just some sort of random insensitive rant touching upon race (see UCLA girl rant). It’s what I called political racism in this earlier post.

Whenever people selectively choose – even make up – what they want to see, promote what are clearly gross generalizations to make one specific group of people look bad, and advocate stereotypes that are politically motivated or that has the effect of disenfranchising whole groups of people – I have a problem.  That is pure political hate speech of which racism is but a type.

Dan may think intelligence is a shield against being accused of making political hate speech, but history clearly refutes that to be the case. Throughout history, the intelligentsia have been mired with some of the worst types of racist bigotry. For example, the  U.S. Constitution – with its emphasis on the individual – for all intents and purposes outlawed slavery from the very beginning, yet with many founders supporting and owning slaves, slavery managed to persist for almost a century further.  Hitler’s most notorious and racist ideologies involving Aryan superiority grew not out of the mind of a madman, but out of the works of Mainstream German intellectuals.

But Allen – what if Dan’s student and parent informants are actually right? What if Chinese students are uniquely bad? There is a saying that where there is smoke, there is probably fire. Just because some evils happen fall upon a specific nationality – along nationality lines – should not make render such evils ok and out-of-bounds as topics of discussion, should it? Besides, are you Allen so confident – without conducting scientific and thorough surveys yourself – that Chinese students are saints beyond scrutiny?

Obviously not. Students are students. Some will cheat. The problem with Dan’s approach is that by framing the issues in terms of race and nationality, the discussion is biased to start out with. If you view the world with prejudice, you obtain facts that suit your prejudice.

According to recent statics, some 75-98% of all students in American colleges cheat. I am sure Chinese students studying in America also cheat. But if you focus only on Chinese students, you’d think it’s only a Chinese issue. You could easily conclude (falsely) that cheating is a uniquely Chinese problem – or that Chinese students are disproportionately cheating.

As to the stereotype that Chinese students do not participate in class as much as typical American students – to Dan’s credit, he did add a disclaimer later at the bottom of his post that in his experience, Chinese students are just as proactive in class. But Dan still mouth-offed in broad strokes this stereotype and backed it up by his trademarked qualification that he has heard this often and from smart, well-traveled people.

My perspective is that Chinese students probably do not express themselves as elegantly or forcefully as American students. Chinese students are after all foreign students. In addition to language barriers (learning sufficient English to pass the TOFEL or GRE is one thing; mastering English to articulate controversial, complex ideas on the spur of the comment is quite another), Chinese students also have to overcome cultural, social, and perhaps ideological barriers as well.

That does not mean that the burdens of furthering class discussions lie entirely with Chinese students however. The American classroom can also be a very politically divisive and intensely ideological place. An article titled “Conservatives say it’s hard to speak up in class*Life Among Liberals*,” noted that “[m]any students feel that conservative students’ ideas are accorded little respect in academic discussions….” If American students of different political persuasions can feel that type of pressure in voicing their perspectives in class, imagine how a Chinese student – with additional linguistic, cultural, social and ideological barriers – might feel!

American universities must work to make classrooms a more conducive place for discussion. In the mean time, if any reader is truly interested in what Chinese students think, invite them to coffee or tea sometimes. If you are patient and open-minded, I think you will find your efforts amply awarded.

As for the stereotype that Chinese students don’t mingle too much with non-Chinese students, some context is also in order. While diversity in institutions of higher learning is a noble pursuit, getting people of diverse grounds to truly come together is easier said than done in general, colleges and universities included.  A student in a recent study on the state of diversity across several college campuses summarizes the typical experience this way: “The campus is a diverse campus. There are all types of people, but they don’t mingle. Whatever type of person you are you associate with those type of people.”

The problem of students of diverse backgrounds not reaching out to each other  would thus appear to be a general problem, not a problem that is unique to Chinese students. True multiculturalism is hard. It is the responsibility of all to reach out to each other.

If you see a Chinese student (or any foreign student) that appears aloof, rather than just walk away and sulk, take that initiative to reach out yourself. These students have traveled long distances to study and learn and experience the world. They may be a little out of their comfort zone. You are on your home turf: do some reaching out yourself…  and help to break the ice….

Now to some political issues underlying Dan’s post. Underneath Dan’s complaints and hearsay is what I sense to be a political insecurity. China is rising. The West may be in decline. Chinese students are studying en mass in the West. They are fast learners, and many do plan to return to China after graduation (although many also plan to stay in the West). What should the West demand in return for educating China’s next generation?

I don’t think the Western universities should demand as a prerequisite to attending American colleges an ability or propensity to acquire “Western values.”  Western universities and colleges should not be made into some sort of Ayatollah U. or narcissistic institutions that worship Western culture. Americans go to school to learn to think, not to be expected to follow specific ideologies or schools of thoughts. Foreign students should not be treated differently. If the West is so confident of its “values,” it is sufficient for its Universities to train students to think freely and allow them to freely decide for themselves what path they wish to follow.

I also don’t think that universities should admit students based on their ability to contribute to the school’s endowment. It’s not that Chinese nationals don’t gift to their alma maters in America (see, e.g., Zhang Lei’s recent controversial gift to Yale). It’s just that the purpose of universities should be to educate and create next generation of leaders to make an impact.  Endowments should be a secondary result that flows from a school’s success, not the primary goal or metric by which schools should be judged.

Now back to the million dollar question: is Dan Harris a bigot or racist? I prefer not to make a judgement here, if only because those terms are so politically and emotionally charged. The point is not to put Dan Harris on trial, but to learn from his post. His writing certainly causes concerns. But I hope with many voicing their concerns, people will learn to spot bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and hate speech more readily.

Finally, to put a context to the phenomenon of Chinese seeking Western education abroad: I believe that the trend is important and will in the long-term promote better understanding between the peoples of China and the West. But we must not lose sight of the fact, however heated the discussions of the political, social and economic implications of this phenomenon may get, that each student that travels abroad to study brings with him or her an individual story. The typical Chinese student come from families with meager means. Each has surmounted many challenges and made untold sacrifices to be where they are; each carries individual hopes and dreams.

To fellow American students I suggest that you welcome each as individual colleagues to your school in the best tradition of openness and free thinking. Mutual appreciation and understanding will surely follow. I have that much faith in the liberal education system…

Personally, I have actually been quite surprised that the election has been as close as it has been the last month or so (nevertheless it still resulted in a resounding enough of a loss to compel Tsai to step down as DDP Chair). While few believes Tsai could or would do much to damage Mainland relations had she been elected, I am still glad Ma won because I see, as a bottom line, Ma focusing on continuing to forge boldly tighter relations across the strait and working for a better future for the people of Taiwan while Tsai trying her best to prey on people’s fears and the uncertainties of the times.

Here is a Bloomberg report of the election results.

Ma Wins Second Term in Taiwan as Voters Back Ties With China

By Tim Culpan, Chinmei Sung and Michael Forsythe
(Updates with comment from the U.S., China in seventh paragraph. For more Taiwan election coverage, see EXT5)

Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) — President Ma Ying-jeou was elected to a second term as Taiwan’s president, giving him a renewed mandate to press for closer ties with China that have eased decades-old tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

Ma, the 61-year-old leader of the ruling Kuomintang Party, defeated challenger Tsai Ing-wen, the Democratic Progressive Party candidate, by 51.6 percent to 45.7 percent, with more than 99 percent of precincts reporting, the Central Election Commission said. James Soong, the People First Party chairman, received 2.8 percent of the vote. Taiwan has 18 million eligible voters.

“This isn’t a personal victory, this is a victory for the Taiwan people,” Ma said at a rain-soaked victory rally in Taipei tonight. “The people have approved our efforts to shelve disputes and strive for peace across the Taiwan Strait.”

Ma’s victory is an affirmation of his effort to improve Taiwan’s relationship with China after years of strained ties under his DPP predecessor and previous Kuomintang governments. Former U.S. officials said members of the Obama administration viewed a Ma victory as more conducive to maintaining good relations with China, as the U.S. seeks help from the leadership in Beijing in containing the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.

Smoother Relations

People in the U.S. administration “will feel the victory of President Ma will be advantageous to maintaining smoother relations with China,” Bruce Jacobs, a professor of Asian languages and studies at Monash University in Melbourne, who was in Taipei for the election, said by phone. “The Chinese will also be pleased.”

The U.S. welcomed efforts by Taiwan and China to improve ties in recent years, the White House press office said in a statement that congratulated Ma on his victory.

“We hope the impressive efforts that both sides have undertaken in recent years to build cross-Strait ties continue,” the White House said, according to the statement. “Such ties and stability in cross-Strait relations have also benefitted U.S.-Taiwan relations.”

‘Taiwanese Compatriots’

A statement from the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs office in China said Ma’s victory shows that better cross-strait ties are the “correct path and have the support of the Taiwanese compatriots.” The statement was released via the Xinhua News Agency.

Ma was backed by executives of Taiwan’s biggest companies, who said his policies, including a 2010 trade agreement with China, have boosted investment and helped the island’s economy grow.

“The stock market will rally on Monday,” Terry Gou, chairman of Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn Technology Group, said in an interview with local television station TVBS in predicting a Ma victory earlier today.

Markets may have assumed a Ma victory. Option traders placed increasingly bullish bets earlier this month on an exchange-traded fund tracking Taiwan stocks. The ratio of calls to buy the iShares MSCI Taiwan Index Fund versus puts to sell rose on Jan. 6 to the highest level since March 2008, two months before Ma was sworn in for his first term.

Let People Down

“We’re very sorry that we let the public down,” Tsai, 55, said in a concession speech, where she also offered her resignation as head of the DPP. “The cross-strait relations is a complicated matter and cannot be treated in the naive way that the KMT is doing now or it will become a source of conflict for Taiwan people later.”

In his first term, Ma ended a six-decade ban on direct air, sea and postal links and signed 16 trade agreements with China, arguing that better ties with the mainland would create stability attractive to investors who feared the political risk was too high to put their money into Taiwan.

Jacobs said some members of Ma’s KMT were concerned that Taiwan was too dependent on China. In his victory speech, Ma pledged to “strengthen ties with the international community.”

Ma, who has law degrees from New York University and Harvard University, soothed Chinese leaders when he came into office in 2008 with his vow of “no unification, no independence, and no use of force.” China had criticized a push by the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian to seek sovereignty during his 2000-08 tenure as president. Chinese officials had warned that relations would suffer if Tsai had won.

Criticizing Others

“You can argue Ma overlooked some of the domestic issues, but it’s easy to criticize others,” said graphic designer Eric Wang, 27, who voted for Ma in 2008 and this year. “I don’t think Tsai can do a better job than Ma given such challenging global conditions.”

The Chinese government, which itself will undergo a leadership change later this year, has never ruled out the use of force to reunite with the island. Taiwan has been governed separately since 1949 after KMT forces were defeated on the mainland by the Communists in a civil war. China had as many as 1,200 short-range missiles deployed opposite Taiwan as of December 2010, according to an annual review by the U.S. Defense Department.

“I will use my life to protect the Republic of China’s sovereignty and dignity,” Ma said, using the formal name for Taiwan. “This is my solemn vow.”

Taiwan’s Legislature

Taiwan’s voters also elected members of the Legislative Yuan, the island’s parliament. The Kuomintang Party won 64 of 113 seats, the Central Election Commission said in a faxed statement, 17 fewer seats than the party won in 2008. The DPP won 40 seats, a gain of 13, while the nine remaining seats went to three other parties and an independent candidate.

Turnout for the presidential election was 74.4 percent, the commission said in a separate statement.

Taiwan’s economy will slow to 4.05 percent this year from 4.5 percent in 2011 and 10.7 percent in 2010, according to economists’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. China’s economy grew at a 9.2 percent rate in 2011 and its expansion will slow to 8.5 percent this year, the data show.

Ma vowed to learn from the criticism leveled at him during the campaign by Tsai, who said Taiwan was losing jobs to China and that the gap between rich and poor was increasing.

“I hope in the next four years the wealth gap will narrow and we will take care of the underprivileged,” Ma said. “I want Taiwan to continue to have a stable environment for growth.”

–With assistance from Andrea Wong, Yu-Huay Sun, Janet Ong and Adela Lin in Taipei. Editors: Nicholas Wadhams, Peter Hirschberg

On the exaggerated troop numbers, he wrote:

The seriousness of information laundering is evident throughout the Georgetown study. Glancing through the slides of the presentation, one claim caught my eye: that the Second Artillery had 12 launch brigades facing India, including eight in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. This was curious for two reasons. First, the Second Artillery has only about thirty brigades, the majority of which are located in either China’s hinterland or coastal provinces, not near India. Second, there are no confirmed reports of Second Artillery brigades inside Tibet.

After recounting the dubious sources, he made this important conclusion:

Open-source information holds great promise for the study of China’s rapidly changing military. But they must be used with great care, especially if the data comes from unofficial outlets such as blog posts and online forums. Just because a piece of information about the PLA is available on the Internet in Chinese doesn’t endow it with authoritativeness in the absence of verification and corroboration.

For those of us who actively blog, this is a useful reminder too of materials we try to obtain on the Internet on any other topic.

The Washington Post article is an example of what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn his fellow Americans of back in 1961, as he departed the Oval Office:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
. . .
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

This warning is not all lost in the American public though. In fact, the most popular comment in that Washington Post article said:

ticked
11/29/2011 6:51 PM PST

From the article: “The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.”

REALLY? You mean like ours….why don’t you do a study on the DC area (MD, DC, VA, PA) and Colorado Springs (CO, NM, AZ, CA)……..or even our ever present navy patrolling the world like no other country in the world (more details below).

BTW- their arsenal pales in comparison to ours….just as every country in the world does.

Let’s take a look at the US Navy versus other Navies- (previous post)

Just to provide some details of how out of control our defense, security forces and intel is …..our navy has 11 carrier attack groups with approx. 20 support vessels in each group….all rest of world combined has four carrier attack groups- one each for russia, great britain, france and china ( bought & refurb’d russia’s second carrier) and NOT ONE of these can hold a candle to the firepower of one of ours and none has 20 support vessels….

And as if that isn’t bad enough- our navy presently has under construction THREE NEW AIRCRAFT CARRIERS and many support vessels …….. and 55 pirate catcher ships which if I recall correctly cost approx. $255 million each…..and now with overruns approx. $445 million each and that’s with no crew, provisions and munitions and fuel…..= a ridiculous waste of taxpayer dollars!!!!!!

End these endless and senseless wars and the killing and maiming of over 500,000 since 9/11 and helping to ruin our economy- there is NO WAY to justify the out of control taxpayer dollars wasted on military spending. STOP THE MILITARY MADNESS NOW!

In this post, I’d like to address those complaints. Before I get into it though, I’d like to make several observations.

First of all, I believe Harris did this with sincerity, and as he said in his article, he hopes for a constructive discussion and asked what can be done about the situation. After reading the complaints, I think something ought to be done too. Those complaints are genuine (rightfully or wrongfully) – and I believe the situation can be improved.

Secondly, I think this is one of the posts symptomatic of the English language ‘China’ blogs that is often plagued by the dominant narratives in American mainstream thinking. America is often arrogant and doesn’t seem to be able to find fault within itself.

Harris could have found a few Mainland Chinese students and get their take. Why doesn’t Harris have some Mainland Chinese students at University of Washington who he can readily talk to as he did others – after-all, his firm specializes in doing business in China. You’d expect his firm smart enough to have Mainland Chinese students who understands Chinese law and studying international law (or something related) at University of Washington to intern for his firm. Without balance from the Mainland Chinese students perspective, the article panders to the nasty views in America towards ‘China.’ The complaints read a lot like the China bashing that exists in the mainstream American press; ignorant, some truths, and some lies.

In fact, he later says he observes these complaints not only in the U.S. but also in the U.K. and Australia. What do I make of that? I guess bogeyman ‘China’ is most prevalent in the Anglo-saxon countries?

So, with an eye towards constructively improving the situation at University of Washington, this is my take:

“They don’t come here to learn. They just come here for the grades.” I have heard this one at least a half dozen times.

One should ask how do you get the grades without the learning? I think a ‘better’ criticism would be they are too intensely after good grades. These students parents having to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars (incredible sums by Chinese standards), they expect their kids to have learned something. The only way to show that is by having good grades.

Robert Compton in his “2 Million Minutes” film in fact tries to argue why the pursuit of academics need to happen more in America. There is a huge segment of America who would actually encourage pursuing good grades.

“I am convinced that if our teacher asked the class what 2+2 equals, and nobody spoke up who is not from China, not a single student from China would answer.” I have heard some form of this one at least a dozen times.

I can sympathize with this criticism. I think Americans would find the China students take on issues interesting, and perhaps even enlightening. That is the reason for diversity at the university. The exchanges deepen understanding. So, I find it rather shameful the atmosphere at University of Washington isn’t one where those students are actively speaking out in class.

Since I have first hand experience about MIT, I will use that school as an example in contrast. MIT’s international student population is a bit over 33% of the entire student body. Those international students, the ‘China’ ones included, thrive there. Why is that? I am sure the phenomenon at University of Washington exists at some other schools across America, but I don’t think that’s always the case.

I think a lot of factors contribute to that atmosphere, including the sentiment expressed in this next criticism:

“They are killing class discussion. They never contribute.” One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again.

- is the attitude of the ‘host’ students.

Harris should have asked those University of Washington students whether they did anything to welcome the China students or to make them feel comfortable at these discussions. I don’t think it is very hard. If one is interested in their take on issues, one could simply solicit. How about, “hey, so and so, Chinese society might be different, could you tell us what you think about this and that.”

What this group of students did to confront the situation is mean. A more mature way to go about it is to bring it up with the professor and try to find some ways to engage.

For this lack of participation phenomenon, I put the blame at thirds each for University of Washington, the China students, and the disrespectful students.

“I cannot even stand having to listen to them give presentations. Their English is terrible and they don’t even try. Somebody else must have taken the tests for them.”

I deal with ‘terrible English’ on a daily basis and work across four time zones. The students who complain about bad English will have a rude awakening in our modern world. The meat is in the idea and the substance of what others are trying to say. We are in a interconnected world, and Americans should learn to look beyond ‘bad English.’ The fact that everyone has to communicate so much in the English language is already an incredible perk for native speakers.

The students not trying is certainly the students fault. I can’t believe all the students are that way. For allowing this phenomenon to fester, I would put some blame on University of Washington.

“The school is going to regret having admitted them. They will never donate money to the school as alumni. It will be like they were never here at all.”

I would say the data shows otherwise. This is a racist view. People who become successful and are generous donate, doesn’t matter what ethnicity they are or what country they come from.

“You will never see any of them at any school function. Never ever ever. Unless it can help them with a grade.” I am constantly hearing this one.

President Obama few years ago launched the 100,000 Strong initiative to encourage more American students studying in China. For those students, I wonder if the Chinese students end up making the same type of complaints. So, the question here is what can be done to encourage participation?

The China students should find ways to participate more. As hosts, the American students should make participation welcoming. This situation requires the both to tangle. There is no other way.

“They never make any effort to talk with anyone other than those who are also from China.”

I agree with this criticism mostly. China students should try to engage. At the same time I think Americans should realize it is hard for them due to the language and cultural barrier. But, to expect all initiative lies on the China students part is the wrong attitude.

“They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate. It isn’t fair.” I hear this one constantly as well and, needless to say, it is the one that causes the most anger.

Students of all colors and shapes and sizes cheat. University of Washington has to tackle this issue like any other educational institution. Expel the cheaters. The urge to pin this on ‘China’ is a racist impulse. Nothing intelligent about this complaint at all.

“My friend with a 3.8 GPA and 650 SATs didn’t get in and had to go to ______. I know he/she would have contributed far more to the school than these students from China.”

University of Washington has limited spots, so I think this is a legitimate concern to be followed up with the school. Perhaps the schools has rational reasons for not accepting those 3.8 GAP and 650 SATs students. But it is not a zero sum admissions process with only the China students. There are other local students as well those from other countries. Perhaps there are ‘worse’ ones who shouldn’t been admitted instead. Not fair to single out students from China.

“I’ve heard that most of them cheated to get in.”

How?

“The school claims they contribute to diversity. That’s a complete lie. How can someone who never says anything contribute to anything? Everyone knows they are here only because they pay the foreign tuition rate.

This is partly addressed above, and I sympathize with this criticism on the lack of participation part. If the full tuition part is indeed the only reason the students are at the University of Washington, then shame on the school. The parents paying the tuitions are also being scammed.

“I tried to speak with some of them, but they clearly had no interest.”

And I applaud the students who try to engage. I am willing to bet if American students genuinely try to befriend the China students, the vast majority of them would want to befriend back. Don’t give up.

“This is a great way to ruin relations between China and us.”

I disagree. I think the steady diet in the American press about China being bad has created a very negative image of everything from China. It is the personal contacts (apparently lacking in the University of Washington) that is helping to buttress the damage being done.

This is why I applaud President Obama’s 100,000 strong initiative in encouraging more Americans to study in China.

“Why do they even bother? They come here to study, but since they never interact with anyone who is not from China, I don’t even see why they come.”

It is because they and their parents believe there is a lot to learn in America. They believe American colleges and universities offer excellent education. An American college degree is highly respected in China.

Not engaging with American society and do things outside the classroom is indeed squandering opportunity to learn so much more.

So, in summary, I think there’s clearly much more the China students at University of Washington can do to engage. But the blame is not entirely on them. The complaints list also tells me many of these students are ignorant and even mean. The school has much to do too.

And the steps are actually super simple:
1. The China students, the university, and some students who have complained – all needs to sit down and come up with ideas to ENGAGE!

2. Foreign students should go through orientation on what their fellow American students expect of them.

3. American student should go through orientation on how to make their fellow foreign classmates more at ease.

DeWang:2011 was another eventful year for China. Just when her bullet train seems unstoppable, a fatal collision left the whole country in doubt. China achieved space docking, something only the U.S. and Russia have managed. Then there was Tiger Mom.

I have invited a real China expert to weigh in on these events and other events that mattered to China. What were the Chinese narratives? How did the Chinese feel about them? I couldn’t have found a better person to do this with. He actually lives in China. And his firm provides strategic market intelligence to Fortune 500 firms. He is the founder and Managing Director of the China Market Research Group. Public sentiments and consumer sentiments are his firm’s forte.

Shaun Rein from CMR. Welcome to Hidden Harmonies, Shaun.

Shaun:Very nice to see you DeWang. [Video was too laggy, so we soon opted for audio only.] Thanks for inviting me.

Tiger Mom

DeWang:Sure. And I should add, Shaun is the author of the upcoming book, “The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World.”

Okay, Shaun, here we go.

Tiger Mom. She certainly created a storm in the U.S.. She did too in China, didn’t she? So, ah, was it about Chinese moms beating American moms as how the Wall Street Journal framed it?

Shaun:Well, the Tiger Mom phenomenon hit the entire world. You know, a lot of people were wondering the “Chinese way” as defined by Amy Chua is better. But, actually I really want to break it down, DeWang, from two points. The first side, actually, Tiger Mom is not something that you run into that much in China anymore. I think part of it is you have this whole generation of parents who were raised during the Cultural Revolution, and because of the horrors of those times, they were unable to go to school, choose who they wanted to marry, and to get the types of jobs they wanted. So, you have created this generation of parents who really coddled their children. So you have 22, 23-year old’s who really are immature. They are unable to overcome challenges and difficulties. One of the things we find when we talk to human resources executives is as soon as they start to do constructive criticisms with the young employee, the young employee often gets angry, then quits the job then and there.

It’s very common for 25 year-old people still living at home and have their parents cook and clean for them, and even to do their laundry. So, you know, one of the issues with Tiger Mom is that it doesn’t actually really exist in China in the same way it does in the overseas Chinese communities. And just from a standpoint within China, it’s a problem because you have a lot of very spoiled younger executives that have never really had to deal with challenges and overcome hardships. So, that’s one bucket that I am concerned about, DeWang.

But the second point that sorts of pop up, and I talk a lot about this in chapter 9 in my upcoming book, “The End of Cheap China,” is that the educational system in China is a complete mess. And that is sort of what Amy Chua is looking at; is how do you train people to think analytically. And I think in China right now, the education system is doing a disservice to young people and not training them to think creatively, how to think analytically. There is too much rote memorization in the classrooms. Class sizes are just too large. And that’s why you have Xi Jinping’s daughter studying in Harvard right now. Xi Jinping is most likely the next president of China.

So, going forward in 2012, I hope you are going to see more reforms in the education system because they are really needed. And you are going to have a little more of Tiger Mom within China and little less spoiling of younger generations.

Food Safety

DeWang:Food safety. 2011 we saw stories after stories of fake meat, contaiminated drinks, and even gutter oil. When will we see an end to such kind of stories in China?

Shaun:Unfortunately, DeWang, I see this madness recurring. I am not sure if you are scared of the “Made in China” label when it comes to food. But I am. And so are most Chinese. And most people here know that I am very supportive of the Chinese government at the central level. But there are a lot of problems at the local level at oversight of food safety; a lot of corrupt officials; a lot of unsavory businessmen that are willing to cut corners.

In fact, DeWang, my firm interviewed 5000 Chinese consumers in 15 cities and the number one biggest concern in life, ahead of concern for being able to pay for healthcare for families or educaton for the kids, was food and product safety. Everybody here is really nervous about eating a toxic bun or fake meat and then die. And that’s why actually another chapter of my book is just on food safety, because it’s such a critical problem and the government needs to address better.

On the good side, for Western brands, there is lot more trust for foreign multinational FMB companies, and so they really have an opportunity to create trust with the consumer; to charge a premium for ensuring healthy and safe food. And really being able to capture more market share. Frankly in the last year, my firm’s food and beverages business has really been soaring because it is really clear that the Chinese companies are trying to move towards the up-market dining destinations.

Food safety is a serious issue. No one can really deny that it is a major problem, and that it needs to be addressed better by local governments and by the central government that needs to get more buy-in from local corrupt officials.

DeWang:Any specific steps the government took to combat this issue.

Shaun:Oh yeah, I guess what you saw in 2011, the government shut 50% of the nation’s dairies. And that was one of the reasons why you saw soaring dairy prices. In 2011 dairy prices went up 25% year-on-year. And so the government is really trying to consolidate that part of the sector. They are really trying to get more state owned ownerships. So you see like COFGO, the big state owned giant in food, acquire a massive stake in Mengniu Dairy. You are seeing a lot more investments going into Bright Foods, which is the owner of Bright Dairy, one of the largest fresh milk producers in the country.

So, the government is really trying to get better oversight that way. They have shut and arrested several thousand businesses and people I believe over the summer of 2011. And I believe they are trying to send a strong message that they are not going to tolerate corruption in the food sector anymore. There has to be a better system in place for the supply chain.

You know, you can take a look at Walmart. I think a lot of Americans, like John Bussey who is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, saying that China shutting 13 Walmart outlets in Chongqing last year was more protectionism. And, that is just BS. I mean, basically, China was saying here is Walmart that is intentionally labeling meat products wrong, and this is one of the largest hypermarket chains in the country. The government naturally has to shut it down.

They weren’t targetting foreign businesses specifically and trying to be more protectionist. What they were trying to do was to save the health of the everyday Chinese, because that is what Mainland Chinese people want.

I think a lot of the fear-mongering that you get from John Bussey and a lot of these analysts you get from the United States is really misguided when it comes to food.

Walmart

DeWang:And Walmart China is in a mess. Their China president has recently resigned.

Shaun:Yeah, Chen stepped down. They had major management turn-over aside from the president. They also lost the COO, the head of human resources, and they are really trying to get their mojo back in the country. I think frankly its going to be very difficult. If you look, their market-share dropped from 8% to 5.5% over the last three years. Not, even before the food scandal, really because they are facing a difficult, more competitive environment as prices rise for real-estate and as very fast-moving and aggressive domestic Chinese in the retail sector move up the value chain. And compete head to head with the Walmarts and Carrefours.

DeWang:Shaun, we often hear a housing bubble in China. How real is it? And, is there an imminent collapse of the housing market?

Shaun:I think there’s been a lot of fear about a collapse of the real-estate sector here. I think fears are far exaggerated. We are going into a slow period and maybe prices are going to drop, maybe even 20%. But, that’s actually healthy for the market. And, it’s been caused by the government, because they have been trying to reign in some of the froth in the marketplace. And the reason why I am not overly concerned is that there are still a lot of pent-up demand.

We interviewed several hundred consumers in different cities recently about their house buying habits and whether or not they would sell. We found there is massive pent-up demand. The majority of families told us that they would like to buy a house as soon as some of the restrictions on buying a home ease.

You know in 2009 the government made it very difficult to get loans, to buy multiple properties in many cities.

So I think what you are going to see moving forward is prices are going to drop. You are not going to see panick selling, because most home owners’ mortgages are not under water. Even if prices drop 10%, most of the consumers told us they wouldn’t sell their homes. They really didn’t care. They are just going to hold and wait it off.

So the proof in my point you seen housing prices have dropped – you seen 20% – 30% discounts in certain properties – that’s really coming from sales made by developers directly. When you take a look at the second home market, prices have remained very stable, because people are just not panick selling. There is a lot of pent-up demand there.

I am lot more concerned about the commercial sector. You are seeing a lot of stupid developments that are being launched by developers – you don’t need 60, 80-story buildings, you know, in basically farmland.

There’s too many luxury malls that are sprouting up across the country that are trying to have Louis Vuitton sell. You know, Louis Vuitton is very popular here, but there are only so many consumers who can afford a Louis Vuitton handbag.

So, I think you are going to see a wash-out in the commercial sector. I hope you are going to see some major realestate developers go bankrupt and go bust. Because I think you need lot healthy of a market.

So, will it be a weak real-estate sector in 2012? Absolutely. Is there going to be a systemic risk? Absolutely not. You just don’t have the same debt problems you have in the United States. And you just see a lot of pent-up demand here.

Sports and Li Na

DeWang:What would you say about sports, Shaun? For example, Li Na won the French Open. I suppose when a country grows more economically, it can build more tennis courts. What’s your take?

Shaun:Yes, sports are getting much bigger here. When I first came to China in the 90′s, a lot of people were very skinny, and part of it was just that people didn’t have very good nourishment. What you see in the last 10 to 15 years increase of food has really made a much healthier population. And now that people aren’t worried about starving and shelters over their heads, they are starting to spend lot more time on sports leasure. And you see basketball and tennis is really popular.

And what I like about Li Na specifically is Nike is now her sponsor and is really doing an excellent job in using home-grown celebrities to promote their products. And I think that’s going to be one of the keys going forward for Western brands is that they can no longer just use some blond haired blue eye-ed girl to pitch their products in China. They have to create local celebrities and by doing so they will create more emotional connections with everyday Chinese.

Steve Jobs and Apple

DeWang:Apple is huge in China. With the passing of Steve Jobs, I think there was a lot of outpouring of sadness from Chinese consumers.

Shaun:Yeah, Steve Jobs is one of those guys that you know even if he may not be one of those nicest guys according to rumors, he is beloved by Mainland Chinese. He created innovative products that made life better and happier for just about everyone who touched it. What you have seen more specifically towards Apple is Apple is not just looking at China as the market to produce in but a market to sell in. And in my upcoming book, “The End of Cheap China,” I talk a lot about Apple actually in how they are selling so well here.

Their sales quadrupled from 3 billion to 12 billion (USD) in the last 13 months. It’s now become their second largest market. In the book I talked about Apple and some of the strength they have and some of the mistakes they also made. Because I actually think they can sell a lot better here than they currently are. But that is something that is exciting.

Traffic safety

DeWang:Ok, Shaun, last year there were tons and tons of traffic accidents. And the story I remember the most is in Gansu province they had a van carrying 19 kindergartners, and that van crashed with a truck. And these 19 children died, including the driver and another adult on the bus. I saw the picture of that van. I mean – my gosh – I mean with U.S. standards that van is for probably 8 or 9 people max. They jammed all these kids in there. It is just terrible and sad.

Shaun:I actually drive myself, DeWang, and it scares me every day. I don’t have a chauffeur. I drive myself, and almost every day I feel like I almost get into a car accident. Because the road system is absolutely chaotic. A lot of it comes from the scooters and mopeds. When you are driving down the street, you can get a guy on a bicycle, or a guy with chickens, a guy on a motorcycle, a scooter, a truck, or a car. There are just too many different types of vehicles and nobody is obeying the laws.

You saw Shenzhen just announced they are gonna fine cars 500 RMB if they don’t allow pedestrians to cross in cross-walks. They are going to charge pedestrians 100 RMB for jaywalking. I hope that people are actually going to adhere to these new regulations, and that the police actually enforces them. Frankly, not sure if that’s gonna happen.

DeWang:Yeah, and every time I see a picture of a moped with a whole family on it just makes me cringe. What more can the government do?

Shaun:I think everybody knows that it’s a problem. It’s scary out there. Part of it is the rules. When I took my driver’s test, it said, when you are turning: do you, A, let pedestrians go first in a cross-walk, B, do you just keep driving, or, C, do you make sure you don’t hit them. Now, the answer is C, something to that effect, just make sure you don’t hit them. But there is too much leeway to what exactly that means. I think they need more definite laws. Like, no turning or they have the right of way.

Wenzhou bullet train crash

DeWang:The Wenzhou bullet train crash. I guess the back drop, you know, China in this past decade has been building out railroad infrastructure at a really fast pace. Chinese companies are building rail road and bullet train systems around the world. So, the stake is really high. Anyways, the Wenzhou train crash left 40 people dead. And I remember watching CCTV, and as the rescue and investigation was going on, panelist were really critical of the Ministry of Rail in how they handle the situation. So it was a really big news.

Shaun:Sure. The railway disaster was a disaster. It’s aweful. I think what comes from that clearly is the government needs to do a far better job of policing some of the local officials. And officials within the ministry are just corrupt. I mean the head of the ministry got into trouble for stealing, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Just some ludicrous number. So, there obviously has to be much better oversight. I think the government has done a OK job at being able to crack down on this disaster and investigate the 54 people as you mentioned. But it becomes an issue of credibility.

I think going forward in the next ten years you are going to see a lot more social instability with Chinese who are angry, seriously angry at corrupt local officials. And I think the central government, who generally garners the support of most Mainland Chinese really needs to do a better job at fixing problems at local level before they emerge like the train disaster.

Once the problem happens they need to make it very clear the process of arresting and investigating people is very transparent. We need to do a better job of knowing what the punishments are, because there is going to be a credibility issue, especially at the local levels.

The second part of this though, DeWang, you know, a lot of people say the bullet trains are not good for China and that it’s going to be something that loose a lot of money for the country and will end up causing the country to be like Japan. You know, creating a lot of infrastructure projects that are not needed.

That is just not true. I think when you really analyze, most of these railroad programs are not boondoggles. These are legitimate, very good infrastructure investments that are not only going to create jobs in the short term but they are also going to create more business efficiencies over the next ten years.

You know, taking a train ride in Shanghai, where I am based, to Wuhan, only takes several hours. You know, three years ago, it took 11 or 12 hours. So what you are seeing is lot more business trade and productivity taking place throughout the country because of the rail system. It’s not like bridges to nowhere where you had in Japan, where you have Tokyo building up multi-billion dollar train tracks to prop up a hamlet of people in the middle of nowhere. These investments are really quite good.

In general we need to take a step back. Fix the problems in the government system. Fix the corruption at the local level; lack of oversight and lack of transparency.

But we really shouldn’t let some terrible tragedies stopping us from investing in high speed trains and other rail networks which we really need as the country continues to urbanize.

DeWang:What about the criticism that the Ministry of Rail is pushing forward bullet train systems too fast?

Shaun:I think it’s valid to say that maybe it is spending too fast and we need to take a step back and look and make sure. You know it’s never bad to cross all your t’s and dot all your i’s to make sure that the spending is as efficient as possible. And to root out the corruption.

But, you know, China if anything is actually under-investing in infrastructure. And you know, this is where I totally disagree with people like Nouriel Roubini. Right now the country is at about 50% urbanization rate. That’s up from 30%, you know, just 15 years ago. And that’s going to continue. And so in order to relief congestion in cities, in order to have good living environments for people, you need to have better trains, you need to have better subways and roads. You can really open up the country better.

Because right now if you look at it, Shanghai for instance, has one of the densest city population in the world. You got 24 million people who are crammed together. If you are someone who aregue China doesn’t need to have a more spread-out Shanghai, I don’t understand what planet you are living on. You really need these investments.

But again, I think it is criticism the government needs to double-check, tripple-check, and quadrupple-check are very valid. We need to make sure that this clear demand and construction doesn’t go so fast that we put public safety at risk.

Pollution

DeWang:Ok, Shaun, on pollution. Last year one big story that broke – I guess in Beijing, the local government has been publishing air quality reports since around the time of the 2008 Olympics. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing publishes one too. A Chinese Weibo, microblog, user took the U.S. Embassy results and published it on his microblog. And that created a stir because the U.S. Embassy result showed it much worse than the Beijing local government’s version. So, as a result, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, I guess the ministry responsible for publishing such reports, they are now going to revise their monitoring system. Anyways, Shaun, give us your take on what is going on in terms of dealing with air pollution.

Shaun:Yeah, you know, it’s one of – pollution is a serious problem here. It’s ridiculous for anyone to say it is not. It’s ridiculous for anyone to say it is getting better. You know, when I talk to wealthy Chinese, a lot of them are trying to get foreign passports right now because they are worried about health-care and pollutions for their families. And they are worried about getting access to better education for their kids. And they also just want to have more ability to just move around. You know, if you have an American passport, you can travel more easily and pretty much do anything while Chinese passport there are still a lot of restrictions of traveling into other countries.

So when you take a look at this big concern in the Western media about rich Chinese going abroad is really not because they dislike the government. It is because they are very uphappy with pollution and some of the quality of life issues.

But there is one key point, DeWang, I want to highlight here. We interviewed these wealthy Chinese. Most of them are remaining in China. Or at least the husbands are staying here, the fathers, in order to continue their business. But they are putting their kids and their families abroad because of worries about pollution and the health-care system. You know, pollution is really bad.

Whenever I travel abroad, my face feels better. My eyes feel better. My lungs. And then when I come back to China I get rashes, start to cough right away until my body adjusts.

DeWang:And pollutions impact to society is increasingly more measurable isn’t it?

Shaun:Yeah. It’s really a serious issue that is starting, actually, just from a political standpoint, it’s becoming a problem. There are still so many Chinese who are still covered by the state-owned health-care system, pollution is starting to affect budgets of hospitals. What you see now is – in the 1950′s – only about 10-12% of deaths were due to heart disease and brain disease. That number has topped 40% in 2011, because of the pollution and fattier diet. So what’s happening is the state-owned health-care system is starting to creek under the increased expenditures needed to take care of pollution related illnesses. It’s something the government need to do a much better job at addressing.

The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of people are saying the Chinese leaders somehow have clean air. You know, that is just ridiculous. They are breathing the same air that everybody else is. And I can assure you they don’t like the pollution either.

DeWang:What do you think the government is doing to combat this pollution issue. I mean do you see China moving the more polluting industries to outside China to poorer countries?

Shaun:Well, it’s starting to happen. You are seeing the government over the last 5 years has made it very difficult for high polluting high water-usage industries to get business licenses in China. You know, even in the height of the great recession, I have a client in the chemical sector that was trying to invest in a 1 billion USD factory, but the government wouldn’t give it the permits, because they said it was too high polluting.

So what you are starting to see are a lot of light industry and other high polluting sectors are starting to move out of China to go into markets like Vietnam and Indonesia that is willing to take little bit more pollution right now because they need more of the capital.

There are far more needs to be done, and you know, I am not a pollution expert, and I don’t quite understand why there are so much pollution here. I don’t know if it’s because of the cars, which I tend to doubt, because it’s been bad for 10, 15 years when there weren’t even a lot of cars here. If it is factories, if it is just even peasants burning, or if it just all of the massive construction. I have heard reasons for all of it. I don’t know.

I think the government needs to make it #1 on the national agenda, and they need to get the best scientists coming together to figure out what needs to be done.

Bailing out Europe

DeWang:There were talks about China possibly bailing out Europe.

Shaun:No. I don’t think China should be Europe’s white knight. You know, I don’t think bailing out Europe is even possible by buying few Italian bonds. I think the problems within Europe are far more serious than China alone can help fix. The problems in Europe really needs to be fixed by Europe. The governments there need to come together to cut down the size of bureaucracies, cut down on the social welfare benefits that are strangling the future of the countries.

Within China, you know, politically, a lot of Chinese say, why on earth should China, which is still a relatively poor nation on a per capita basis bail out much wealthier nations like Italy and Greece? It’s just doesn’t make sense to pour Chinese farmers tax money to do that. And I think politically it would be very difficult for the government to be able to do it.

What I do see happening is two things. The government is going to use the weakness in Europe to buy more hardcore assets. You know, machinery, you know, maybe airplanes from Airbus that China needs in the long term. And I think they will ultimately give more money to the IMF and other multilateral organizations like that. But I really don’t see them doing too much by buying bonds, or shouldn’t they.

Rule of law

DeWang:Okay, Shaun, this next one involves China’s Got Talent judge, Gao Xiaosong. So, he was in a car accident. Actually, he was drunk, and he caused a four car pile-up. So, as a result, he was put in jail for 6 months. Celebrities definitely help build awareness about crime and punishment, don’t they?

Shaun:And just like the Li Gang incident, DeWang, and I think what’s critical here is a lot of people say Mainland Chinese hate rich people. That is just not true. I mean they idolize people like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Or Robin Li, the founder of Baidu. They actually like rich people, but those, there is a difference, these people seen they have build their businesses and worked hard and did it from talent and skill.

The issue that is sort of bubbling up is a lot of discontent towards people who they feel make their riches by being corrupt and by cheating people and by feeling they are above the law. And that’s one of the issue you run into when you get, say, the son or a daughter of a local official who sort of misbehaves. And that’s something that can cause confraglations very quickly because there is a lot of anger. And probably truthfully these people are probably corrupt. You know, it always amazes me when you deal with a vice mayor of a small village or a small city and he is driving a Mercedes or even a Bentley. You know, where does he get the money?

So, something I think the government needs to address better is ensuring punishments that are metted out to these corrupt people are transparent and they are harsh. And that there is no feeling that just because you are wealthy or well-connected that you are above the law.

So I think in this specific case of the judge, that was a good thing. You know, it was good that Gao was caught and put in jail just like everyday people would. Because it shows that we need to move toward more rule of law rather than rule of brute power.

DeWang:And more than just the ordinary public, the traffic police and the police officers themselves need to be fully aware that everybody is equal under the law.

Shaun:Yeah. Exactly. I think it’s very clear that police officers need to know there is a law for the whole country, not a law for the everyday Chinese and then a law for the well-connected wealthy people.

The one time I was at Pudong, sorry, at the Hongqiao Airport, and there was a truck parked right in front of the terminal blocking everybody. And a policeman came by and said, “sir, you can’t park there.” And the driver said, “I can park anywhere I want, because my boss is a high military official.” That is just an inappropriate behavior and needs to stop. The police officer, I have to give him credit, said, no, these are the rules; you need to leave. And pretty soon hundreds of people came by and really crowded around this driver. And the police, actually, I gotta give him gumption, he had a tow truck come and say that they were gonna tow the truck away, oh, the car away. Because it was just inappropriate behavior.

So it needs to be very clear there needs to be more of a rule of law that fits the entire country.

Weibo, China’s microblogging phenomenon

DeWang:Weibo, China’s microblogging platform has become an integral part of Chinese society. 2011 we saw more signs of that.

Shaun:The platform, DeWang, is incredibly important. You know, when I talk to a lot of Westerners, they feel that China is an Internet blackhole. Because everybody knows Facebook and Twitter are blocked. And it’s really not true. The online community in China is extremely vibrant, and especially Sina. And I think with Weibo, it’s very vibrant, because a lot of people are using it for gathering news information. And I think because of the restrictions in traditional media, a lot of younger Chinese look to Sina to get their more first accounts of what’s really going on. And it’s a blooming area.

People are talking about news. Joining friends. And they are looking for jobs. They are trying to share information about products.

It’s a very vibrant community, and contrary to what a lot of Westerners think, China’s government is also quite supportive of it so far. They have been trying to get public security bureaus and other government officials to use it to be able to communicate directly with everyday Chinese citizens. It’s a market that is important from a political standpoint, one from society and also business. You need to have a Sina or other social media networking strategy in place if you are a Western business trying to reach out to younger Chinese.

When you take a look at it, Chinese under the age of 30 on average spend about 22 hours a week online. On the United States, the number is less than 12 hours. So, it’s a much more Internet savvy community here than really in most other markets in the world.

DeWang:It has become a way for ordinary citizens to feedback to the government.

Shaun:Yeah. It’s one major new way. I applaud it. And I think there needs to be lot more. Part of the problem is when some times when people have grievances, they don’t know how to express them. And I think Weibo talking directly, appropriately, with the public security bureau is a good thing.

I support the idea for real name registration. I don’t like a lot of the anonymity, a lot of the, you know, massive attacks on people. And you know, you see like human flesh search engine which have appeared can be a double-edged sword. I mean some time you see a corrupt person and you have this human flesh search engine going after them, that’s great. That helps to right a wrong. But you also get a lot of people who are innocent getting caught up by that by accident. Or by malicious people.

You know, I think there should be a lack of anonymity. There is no need for that. There needs to be a continued support for online spheres. It’s clear that microblogging and social media sites far outweigh any negatives.

DeWang:I was really moved by this story of this veteran journalist. His name is Deng Fei. He launched on Weibo a movement to provide free lunch, free meals, to impoverished children in China. More than 500 journalists joined him. By September of last year, he raised more than 17 million yuan in donations, and they were able to provide free lunches to 10,000 kids in 77 schools. That was an awesome story.

Shaun:It’s great. I mean, initiatives like what he did are absolutely amazing and show the power of microblogging and why the government needs to continue to support it. Because you are able to rally support from Chinese people throughout the whole country to a good cause. Helping impoverished people. Helping child beggars. Helping to expose society’s problems. I think its really great we have such a vibrant online community

Again with the caveate that we need to make sure that we don’t allow for too much rumors to be spread because they can go very quickly and cause a lot of anger, unrest, and social disturbances.

DeWang:What is your take on the Guo Meimei story involving Red Cross China?

Shaun:That was a good one. It’s a mix. Red Cross China seems to have gotten hit. You know there are still questions how closely related she was with Red Cross China specifically. And I think that’s a problem for donations for Red Cross China.

Guo Meimei just goes to show there is a lot of sensitivity by everyday Chinese that people who are in positions of power are abusing them through corruption. You know, making a lot of money for themselves and spending lavishly on girls or luxury products in cars and houses when they really shouldn’t be. It’s a mixed bag. Guo Meimei shows some real issues within society and cleavages that needs to be better addressed by reducing the GINI coefficient and ensuring more income parity.

CNN making news assisting Christian Bale confronting Chinese police

DeWang:Shaun, this is something you have actually written about in your Forbes column. And I hope you don’t mind us revisiting it. And, this is Christian Bale and CNN confronting local police in wanting to see a blind activist who is currently under house-arrest.

Shaun:I think the problem with the situation is not with what Bale did. Ok, you know, in general, I am a firm believer in freedom of speech. And I am a big believer in having the news go around countries and shed light on dark areas and try to right wrongs.

The problem with what happened in this specific case was CNN actually creating the news.

You know, they drove Christian Bale to confront police. They translated for him. And it really made it appear they are not objective any more. The issues is CNN and all Western media outlets when they try to shed light on dark areas in China, I think a lot of people are going to question whether or not they are trying to contain China. Whether or not they are agents or influenced by the CIA. So it was really shameful what CNN did.

Now, in terms of the the specific case with this activist, I don’t have an idea. Okay. Obviously I know what’s happening according to the Western press. But again, how objective is it. I haven’t spoken to any government officials about the issue and not really what I am interested in doing.

What’s key here, and at the end of the day is that the Western media needs to maintain journalistic integrity. They need to follow the news, not create news. So I think it would be far better in case if they had just sent a news team to that city and went on their own, rather than translating and creating the news for Christian Bale. I think they are on very slippery slope. And they are not going to win a lot of support from Mainland Chinese who think they are just going to be a tool of the CIA.

DeWang:Shaun, how do you respond to the criticism from some that the government is simply wrong?

Shaun:If the government is wrong, well, then we will have to figure out who is wrong there. [local vs central, specific official, etc.] I think, you know, we need to shed light on that. I am not saying media shouldn’t cover the story of the activist. That is absolutely something that they can do. And if there is dirt, if there is something illegal that is going on that is everybody’s moral obligation to sort of uncover that. But it needs to be done responsibly and in the right manner.

I think Reuters has covered this subject lot better by giving a lot more background info than what CNN did. What CNN did was a celebrity stunt. You know, I think at the end of the day, reforming China needs to be done in the right way. And I think no matter how well intentioned you are as Christian Bale might have been, you know, the way he goes about it might be counter-productive.

You know, I have gotten a lot of criticism for my view on this. It’s clear that I am not saying Bale is wrong. And the issue is not about the activist specifically. It is really about journalistic integrity. All the power go to media outlets that want to go around and cover this activist and to see if he as been wronged. But if they are going to do that, they need to get the two sides of the story, and make sure they are objective in how they cover that.

I think a lot of people has misread what I wrote. And they really didn’t quite understand it. And I have gottened attacked by people who I think very unfairly, in part they don’t understand how to fix things in China.

You see guys like Richard Burger and Charlie Custer who just hate the Chinese government so much. You see Richard Burger liken it to tentacles and afraid and evil. When you start to deal with critics like that you really can’t rationalize with them how to fix things in China, because they start off at a point that China’s government is evil. Anybody who doesn’t say that is a dimwit, ignorant, or cowered into submission. And for somebody like me who is generally supportive of the government, as I might add, most Chinese are, according to independent research firms like the PEW Research Center and the World Health Organization, that, um, I am evil.

DeWang:Well, the main reason I started blogging was actually CNN. Back in 2008, during the Lhasa riot, CNN took this image and cropped it to completely flip the story. Chinese troops were arriving in their trucks and a group of rioters were on the street pelting rocks and bricks at these trucks. CNN ignored first hand accounts of Western tourists of the rampage by these rioters. They cropped that image and took out the rioters. So, when you see that picture, you see a street with debris all over. CNN wanted to paint a picture of a heavy-handed crack down. CNN woke me up to what the Western media were doing – it’s propaganda. I want a better relationship between the Chinese and Westerners.

Shaun:There is very clearly bias in the Western media about China. I think anybody who argues against that is just not thinking logically what a lot of Western media outlets are doing. Again, CNN made mistakes with that. CNN also at some point was using police and label them as “China is cracking down on rioters” when it was really, I can’t remember it was Nepali or Indian police. But, you know, they are using pictures from different countries and they call brutalizing everyday people and then they say that is Chinese.

I think CNN really needs an editorial overhaul. And, again, I want to be very clear, not saying that CNN shouldn’t go and probe for and uncover truths and probe into dark areas. That’s really what a media organization should do. But they need to do it objectively and maintain journalistic integrity. Otherwise you are going to give fodder to dark areas.

Osama bin Laden

DeWang:Last year we saw the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden. I know China is aligned with the U.S. in countering this idea of terrorism. Can you give us a sense of how the Chinese feel about Osama bin Laden’s death?

Shaun:In general, the Chinese people really were very sympathetic to Americans for 9/11. You know, because it was a terrorist attack. And a lot of innocent Americans died. So I think most Chinese were fairly pleased that Osama bin Ladan had justice given to him. That was just something people here were sympathetic with the United States on.

I think there are questions and those questions are very rightful about what the United States did post-9/11. And I think a lot of what Bush did under his administration like Guantanamo and what has continued on with the United States in Guantanamo under President Obama has really hurt American prestige.

A lot of Chinese view America as somewhat hypocritical pushing for human rights but at the same time not adhering to the highest values of honor, morality, in Guantanamo and other cases.

I think there are sympathy about 9/11. There was certainly happiness that Osama bin Laden was brought to justice. But I also think there is a wish within the Chinese leadership and within the everyday people here that America would start to look after its own problems a little bit more. Because there are serious issues.

America has really lost its standing as the beacon of light. Which is too bad, because the world is really dark in certain areas. And it was always great to see America do the right thing. And I am not sure it is always doing the right thing anymore.

Gadhafi and Lybia

DeWang:Shaun, can you weigh in on Gadhafi and Libya? It was kind of interesting. China along with the BRICS abstained from U.N. resolution 1973. I should add Germany too. China has a big stake in Libya with so many workers there and had to evacuate right before the bombing. Can you shed some light on what was happening there?

Shaun:I really don’t know. I haven’t been privy to senior discussions in the Chinese government about this. I don’t know enough about Gadhafi and Libya specifically to comment too well on those specific situations.

What I can say, though, is that the United States needs to be very careful about what it is promoting in the Middle East right now. I think the Arab Spring uprising could be good in certain areas. I am also worried about what is going to fill the vacuum of the leadership changes. We need to make sure the new governments are friendly towards the United States. And, are actually better than what they replaced. I am not convinced they are always going to be.

The Middle East is still a major friction area, and what I am concerned about is in the last year or two United States has started to pivot its focus in looking at the Middle East back into Asia Pacific. There is a worry that they are starting to create enemies and look for bogeymen where there really aren’t any.

You know, I don’t think China is definitely going to be an enemy of the United States. But far too many people in the West seems to see it as a major threat. I do think the threat in the Middle East is still very serious. And even though you are toppling some of these regimes, I am not convinced that the new leaderships are necessarily going to be better for American security.

China embracing existing world order

DeWang:In 2011 we saw crisys in the IMF and the World Bank. Looks like China is working hard within these organizations. China is not trying to create alternatives and compete with them head-on. We continue to see China essentially embracing the existing world order that’s been dominated by the West.

Shaun:China is very interested in working within the existing system and world order, as you said. You know, giving money to the IMF and working through the United Nations and WTO and these types of multilateral organizations.

And I think what you also gonna see is China’s leaderships, they are looking to make money. You know, I think everybody here wants to get rich. It makes more sense to focus on peace and stability so your families can put up buildings, or factories, or sell more products to Chinese consumers.

I think everybody here wants to make money right now, and they are not that militant. That might not be the case if America continues to provoke a response from China, like Secretary of State Clinton’s misguided statements in the South China Sea last year.

DeWang:In 2011 we also saw the successful launch of China’s space module, Tiangong-1. That is going to eventually become part of China’s space station. They also demonstrated few days later with the successful space docking. To date, only the United States and Russia have achieved this techonolgy.

We often think of space in the military context. But people should bear in mind, I guess, just like NASA, for example, few years ago in their Chang’e lunar probe, a lot of the data they collected, they made them freely available to scientists around the world. And this is something that NASA has done, and I think it is a cause for celebration.

Sure, anyways, there is a military context. You know, from China, with this advancement I guess, what’s the take from within China? I know from the U.S. media, they look at all these success stories with a lot of suspicion.

Shaun:Ah, that’s a very loaded question, DeWang, in a subject.

I think in general, China is not as warmongering as a lot of the Anglo-saxon nations; missionary based like the United Kingdom and the United States. Historically, China doesn’t like to go beyond its borders. Now with borders, there are some definition issues with that. With India, Taiwan and Tibet. In general, what China considers its sort of area, it really stays to that. I don’t think you are going to see China taking a war-like aggressive stance by sending soldiers and setting up bases throughout the entire world like the United States.

Now, that said, I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that China is going to remain weak, timid, and meek. You know, I think as threats from the internal side sort of disappear, and threats from outside rise, I think you are going to see more militarization in China.

I think a lot of people here believe that the United States is trying to contain China’s rise, and that the best thing for China to do is to be friendly with other nations. Promote economic interdependence. Push for more soft power. But at the same time in the background really modernize the military to be able to withstand security risks.

My hope is that you are gonna have cooler minds prevail. You know, I am very concerned about the risk for trade war in 2012. You saw after President Obama announced he was going to rotate 2500 marines in Australia, the Chinese government responded by slapping more tariffs on American-made SUV’s. My hope is that it is not going to spiral out of control, because increased trade tension, and certainly obviously military tension doesn’t really help anybody in China or the United States except for people with vested interests in selling more weapons.

Foreign policy with missionary zeal

DeWang:Kissinger in his book, “On China,” essentially acknowledged this idea that the U.S. pushes her values with missionary zeal.

Shaun:China is clearly a much friendlier nation to the Western world than the Western world is to China. I mean that is very obvious. You know, you have most of the senior leaders in China have sent their kids or grand kids to the United States to study. They are embracing American culture and American ideas, and then tweaking it or taking the best of it to come back to China.

My concern is that no matter how friendly China is, they are always getting bashed by American politicians. You know, a lot of the China bashing has become far to mainstream. And, at some point, my fear is that people within China are gonna take massive umbridge. And, say, you know what, let’s not allow for American hegemony anymore. And, let’s take a much more muscular diplomacy in the coming decade. I could see that happening. I think that calmer mind will certainly prevail in China. I can’t say the same is true in the United States where the political system right now seems far too rancorous to have rational thought and decision making at most of the levels.

DeWang:And that’s all the time we have. You have incredible insights, Shaun. Thank you very much.

Shaun:Thank you so much. Happy New Year! Bye bye.

You can find the text here.  http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s1619/text

The action hints at Racism at its core, buried under layers of political procedural jargons.  A few points for thoughts.

UPDATE: 2 graphs, Gold-Dollar price history vs. Gold-RMB price history:

Gold-USD:  1982:  ~$400/ounce, 2012:  ~$1700/ounce.  (4.25 times increase)

Gold-RMB:  1982:  ~25Yuan/g, 2012:  ~380Yuan/g.  (12.34 times increase)

Which makes RMB having depreciated about 3X against the USD since 1982.  Which if you look at http://www.businessinsider.com/yuan-dollar-conflict-2010-4, is close to what the RMB have depreciated in exchange rate against the USD.

(1) Technically the bill isn’t even called “China currency manipulation bill”.  It has a long benign sounding title, “S.1619 - Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011″.  Note:  No mention of China anywhere in the bill.

But, even more oddly enough, the bill only generally and vaguely describes its purpose as “To provide for identification of misaligned currency, require action to correct the misalignment, and for other purposes.”  YES, for “other purposes” as in including every thing, thus the purpose is unstated.  ”Misaligned currency”??  My dollar is cheaper than it was 5 years ago.  It doesn’t mean that the US government intends to compensate me for the loss of value.

What’s odd about it is, generally, all US laws contain the “intent”/problem statements, which describe the problem that the law is designed to fix, as specifically as possible, to allow proper interpretation of law later on.

But this bill only has 1 little sentence of the “other purposes” that it does not mention.  And it uses the label “fundamentally misaligned”, to the same vague effect.  Which country is really “fundamentally misaligned”?

Why is it being so vague, because wink/wink, it is really targeting China, and so, you don’t need a definition, a problem statement, or any objective standards, when you already know who is the intended target.  (Oh yes, the bill also contains no details of any kind about what the effect was or going to be before and after the correction).

So to describe what the Bill says, it directs Political appointee A to issue a report, Congress edits, issues to White House, force it and the Commerce department to impose duties, ON CHINA.  AKA, let’s tar and feather China Bill.

(2) The history of “Currency Manipulation”, as I have already commented, traces back to the label of “money manipulator”, a racist label used by Europeans against the Jewish People, as payment for lending money to European Kings/Queens, such as Edward I, (Edward Longshank), in the use of conquering other people, such as the Welsh (Edward I killed off Welsh royalties) and the Scottish (yes, Braveheart).

Similar to the current day, when European Kings/queens found themselves unable to repay their debts to the Jewish people, they called them “money manipulators” (but on top, then kicked them out of their countries.)

Shakespeare wrote in Merchant of Venice, a stereotypical devious money manipulator, Shylock, as wanting to extract the “pound of flesh” from decent Christians who only wanted to find true love and get married, (and of course, lawyers saved the day in the end).

Even in American history, anti-Semites attributed the American Independence War as due in part to the Rothchild’s bank in England for “money manipulation”.

Far fetched connection perhaps?  Read on.

(3) the China currency manipulation Bill itself gives a clue to its true origin.  At its end, it reads,

SEC. 15. REPEAL OF THE EXCHANGE RATES AND ECONOMIC POLICY COORDINATION ACT OF 1988.

The Exchange Rates and International Economic Policy Coordination Act of 1988 (22 U.S.C. 5301 et seq.) is repealed.

What it this other law of 1988, which is now apparently being repealed, or replaced by the “China currency manipulation bill”, you might ask?

Well, You can call it the “Anti-Japan Trade law” of 1988.  http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/22C62.txt

This law, actually named Japan, as an unfair trade manipulator.

Now, you see the pattern of racism and sore loser-ship, in 2nd act.

But why wasn’t that 1988 law good enough to be applied to China, as well?  Because it actually contained a problem statement, that stated, “currency volatility” was a problem in 1988, and US wanted more stable currency.

Hint, hint:  by having the 1988, US is actually admitting that itself was engaging in “currency manipulation” from 1988, at least against Japan.

(4) Here is the kicker:  Who is the “currency manipulator”?  Not China.

By definition, China’s currency “PEG” is a “currency stabilizer”, not a manipulator.  China rarely changed its currency peg, and in the last few changes, it was nearly always moving toward in favor of other nations.  It was also widely acknowledged that China’s stable currency prevented wider damages during the Asian currency crisis.

No, the true “currency manipulators” are in the banks, they want to “buy low”, “sell high” with the Chinese currency.  China is actually preventing them from “manipulating” RMB to make money, so China’s peg is the “Anti-Manipulation law”.

In truth, “free market” that US touts, is the true “manipulator”.  Ask Americans, most would say that their own banks are profiting by manipulating the market.  So how “free” is this market?  Not very.  US government itself imposes all kinds of restrictions in “manipulation” by the banks, and European nations even investigate credit rating companies for unfavorable reports.  If that’s not “thumbs” on the scale in their own favor of stability, I don’t know what is.

(5) The bottom line is, this Bill, like most acts of racism, is rooted in irrationality, disguised as rational action, buried under layers of political vagueness (disguised political correctness).

It would be obvious to any one that it would be racist, if the Bill had actually mentioned China by name.

but it didn’t.  Yet, the US government doesn’t even have to wink, they openly call it “China currency manipulation bill” to the media.

Why?  It’s basically akin to burning a cross, and everyone knows who is supposed to get the message.

Yes, calling China the “currency manipulator”, well rich with the historical context of that label, should be also clear, despite the vagueness of the Bill itself, what is to be done to “China”.

(the Bill, in that spirit, has provisions to stop all banks, public or private, within reach of US, including IMF, from lending money to any projects in China.  NOT just companies that supposedly might be profiting from “manipulation”, but EVERY THING, including aid projects.)

Call it what you will, it is NOT some proportional rational response to specific definable problems or policies, but simply collective punishment on all of China, tar and feathering, and racist.