| Grassroots Democracy Challenges New Leaders Posted: 30 Oct 2012 01:14 AM PDT The growing number of mass incidents around China might show people's impatience with the slow pace of top-down political reforms, but the bottom-up approach is not progressing smoothly either. At Reuters, John Ruwitch and James Pomfret look into the development of grassroots democracy movements in China's rural areas, focusing on the cases of Wukan in Guangdong and Huangshan in Zhejiang. Large-scale protests have increased in China, reflecting anger over corruption and the lack of government accountability and transparency – the kind of unrest that experiments in grassroots democracy, like the one Hua Youjuan participated in, were meant to help short-circuit. Instead, Hua said democracy in her home village of Huangshan, in eastern Zhejiang province, was never allowed to fully succeed, thwarted by senior party officials who she accused of resisting her campaign to root out corruption. […] Hua's frustrations are shared in other villages that have been to the ballot box, including China's most famous testing ground for greater democracy, the southern fishing village of Wukan where a violent standoff over government land seizures led last year to the sacking of local leaders and elections. […E]ven in Wukan the new officials have had a tough time achieving their goals – partly, some say, for the same reason Hua is frustrated: higher-ranking party officials are opposed. […] "If after the 18th party congress there isn't further progress in getting back our land, more will quit," said Zhang Jiancheng, another democratically elected member of the new Wukan village administration.
See more on Wukan and village elections in China via CDT.
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Post tags: CCP 5th generation, civil society, democracy, grassroots democracy, Guangdong, leadership transition, mass incidents, village elections, Wukan, Zhejiang
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| Who is Xi Jinping? Good Luck! Posted: 30 Oct 2012 01:08 AM PDT For The Diplomat, A. Greer Meisels feels the pain of China-watchers struggling to figure out what Xi Jinping actually believes and where he may lead China when he assumes power: It is hard to know what a politician really thinks. Even in a country like the United States, which likes to bombard its electorate with an endless stream of campaign ads, when you scrape off their polished veneers, peel back the layers from their stump speeches, turn off their mics, and get right down to it, one would be hard pressed to find too many people who actually know what a politician thinks and feels. Sure people may claim to have deep insight into Candidate X or Candidate Y – the former schoolmates, teachers, employers, and drinking buddies like to come out of the woodwork to pontificate – but at the end of the day, it is hard to know what really makes the man or woman tick. Multiply this phenomenon by a hundred or a thousand. Now you are probably at the starting point when it comes to what we really know about the "would be" next generation leaders in China. In fact, aside from Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, it is hard to say with absolute certainty who will even be handed the reins of power in the upcoming 18th Party Congress.
Meisels suggests looking into Xi's past, and a rare interview from a dozen years ago may provide clues. Xi gave the interview to the Chinese magazine Zhonghua Ernü in August 2000, during which he spoke at length about his upbringing, and Danish newspaper Politiken published the translated version via the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies on Sunday: Yang: Of course I do not know your entire background, but you have had a career as an official for over 20 years. Is it not true that – unlike some officials who have promotion as their ultimate goal – you have a fundamental wish to do something good for society? Xi: That is true. It is a highly relevant question. It is about a decisive choice in life, which I myself – already before I went into politics – thought a lot about. First and foremost over such questions as: Which way do you want to go? What do you want to do with your life? What goals do you want to achieve? Personally I set several goals. One of them was doing something important for society. When that is the goal of your life, you must at the same time be aware that you can't have your cake and eat it. If you go into politics, it mustn't be for money. Sun Yatsen[8] said the same thing, namely that one has to make up one's mind to accomplish something and not go for a high position as an official. If you wish to make money, there are many legal ways of becoming rich. Becoming rich in a legal way is worth all honour and respect. Later the taxation authorities will also respect you because you are contributing to the economic development of the country. But you should not go into politics if you wish to become wealthy. In that case you will inevitably become a corrupt and filthy official. A corrupt official with a bad reputation who will always be afraid of being arrested, and who must envisage having a bad posthumous reputation. If you go into politics to make a career, you must give up any thought of personal advantages. That is out of the question. An official may not through a long career have achieved very great things, but at least he has not put something up his sleeve. He is upright. In a political career you can never go for personal advantages or promotion. It is just like that. It can't be done. These are the rules.
See also "The Creation Myth of Xi Jinping", and other recent CDT coverage of China's presumed president-in-waiting.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, CCP 5th generation, leadership transition, Xi Jinping
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| Me and My Censor Posted: 30 Oct 2012 12:43 AM PDT At Foreign Policy, Eveline Chao recalls working with a censor as an English-language magazine editor in Beijing: Our censor, an employee of MOFCOMM, was a nervous, flighty woman in her forties with long, frizzy hair and a high, childlike voice, whose name was Snow. (Snow requested I only use her English name for this article.) In late September of this year, I learned that Snow left the magazine, enabling me to finally write this story without fear that it would affect her job. […] In our December 2007 issue, we had a paragraph saying that the Chinese oil and gas giant PetroChina had been pushing forward aggressively in its overseas acquisitions. Earlier that year it had bought a 67 percent stake in PetroKazakhstan, and it had plans to buy more oil and gas assets in Africa, Northern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Snow wrote, "Better to delete, it is an oral request that the energy sector's overseas acquisition is not encouraged to report." In other words, we wouldn't find any overt directives in writing anywhere, but those in the know understood that this subject was touchy. All of this pointed to the petty human dynamics that underscored the censorship. The things Snow flagged were rarely taboo because of any overt directive from above. More often, it seemed to me that she thought it might offend another government ministry, which would bring retaliation upon her own ministry. Or, if Snow personally didn't find a statement sensitive, she worried that her boss might, or her boss thought that his boss might. Everyone was guessing where the line fell, taking two steps back from it to be extra safe, and self-censoring accordingly.
A similar pattern can be seen ahead of next month's 18th Party Congress in Beijing, where fruit knives have been removed from store shelves and window handles from the rear doors of taxis. Li Dan, of the Dongjen Center for Human Rights Education, told the Los Angeles Times' Barbara Demick that "it has become a habit over the years. At the lower levels, officials are afraid they will be punished if anything goes wrong at a crucial moment. There is always, every year, some big reason they claim they cannot be relaxed."
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Post tags: foreign investment in media, media censorship, media corruption, press freedom, self-censorship
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| CDT Money: Bridging The Great Divide Posted: 30 Oct 2012 12:36 AM PDT During a week in which Xinhua News called out the resentment brewing in China over the country's "yawning wealth gap", and the China Daily reported that Premier Wen Jiabao told a State Council economic conference that the government would press ahead with drafting a "wide-ranging reform of the income distribution system" before the end of the year, The New York Times nabbed control of the weekend's news cycle when it published the findings of David Barboza's year-long investigation into the massive wealth accumulated by Wen's family under his leadership. That the relatives of a powerful Chinese politician have used their connections to enrich themselves probably surprised nobody – the staggering net worth of China's top public servants is well known – but the timing of the report, with the 18th Party Congress just two weeks away, clearly rankled a Communist Party hoping for a smooth path into its once-a-decade leadership transition. Furthermore, Wen had championed himself as a reform-minded man of the people from humble roots. The report also did no favors for a Communist Party trying to distance itself from the fallout of the Bo Xilai scandal, a tale of corruption that the party would like to convey as isolated and not indicative of systemic impropriety at the upper levels of its leadership. And as The Economist points out, Li Keqiang "will be among those squirming" as he gets set to take over for Wen. A recently-published Brookings Institution report claims Li faces a conflict of interest as he pursues healthcare reform while his younger brother maintains an influential role in China's tobacco industry. Chinese censors worked overtime to quash the Wen story over the weekend, and Wen's family lawyers issued a statement challenging its allegations, as the story diverted a fair amount of attention away from the debate over whether China's economy has indeed turned a corner and begun to stabilize heading into year-end. HSBC had published its flash purchasing managers index (PMI) data for October, which showed that China's factory sector had remained in contractionary territory but had shrunk at a slower pace than in previous months. So is the glass half full? The Financial Times' Kate MacKenzie dove into HSBC's summary, which showed falling inventories and rising input and output prices, but also showed a shrinking labor force, and concluded that "it's a little too early to say if manufacturing is truly recovering" on the mainland. Also for The Financial Times, guest contributor Linda Yueh of Bloomberg TV took a step back from the manufacturing data and asked whether China is destined for a cyclical turnaround or whether it has reached a "new normal" as it continues to structurally evolve to suit its next phase of growth: Along with getting closer to the technological frontier, which is associated with a growth slowdown as the "catch up" phase begins to end, another reason for China is demography. RBS's Louis Kuijis, the former Beijing-based World Bank economist, estimates that the working-age population is growing at 0.5 per cent per annum, a third of the previous pace when an 8 per cent growth rate was thought to be necessary to maintain employment. He infers that the trend growth rate may now be around 7.5 per cent. But, it's hard to discern if a slowdown is structural or still predominately cyclical. Another difference with 2008/9 is that the current export slowdown was expected so firms could adjust and there is a more flexible renminbi to help the adjustment in the real economy. It appreciated by a record 4.4 per cent in 2011 alone against the dollar and a wider trading band has helped to better insulate against a balance of payments shock. Export falls require more real adjustment if the currency is less flexible as China's was in 2008/9.
Elsewhere, The New York Times had more on the reaction to the data among the foreign analyst community: Analysts said the improvement in the October reading reflected the effect of a steady drip of stimulus measures introduced by Beijing. A gradual improvement in overseas demand in recent months also has helped. A subindex measuring new export orders, for example, rose to a five-month high of 47.3 points as orders for the Christmas season came in. The reading provided a "positive sign," and "further evidence of a pickup for the fourth quarter," economists at Australia & New Zealand Bank in Hong Kong wrote in a research note. At the same time, however, the October number was still below 50 points — the level that separates expansion from contraction, showing that the companies polled in the survey still faced considerable challenges.
Analysts on the mainland also maintained an optimistic tone and suggested that the central government would retain a cautious stance with regards to any near-term fiscal or monetary policy action. Their comments echo a recent front page article from the People's Bank of China's self-published newspaper, which argued that policymakers have "no grounds for further loosening of monetary policy" to spur growth. And a Bloomberg survey conducted from October 18-22 predicted that China's central bank would likely forego any further cuts to benchmark interest rates or the reserve requirement ratio: With growth momentum improving and inflation picking up toward the end of the year, "the likelihood of further interest-rate cuts in the rest of 2012 is diminishing," JPMorgan's Zhu said in an Oct. 18 research note. "In addition, the busy political agenda going ahead also implies that the prospect of meaningful monetary policy easing in the near term becomes more remote," Zhu wrote.
Finally, reform has become as big a buzzword as any as the state propaganda machine churns its way toward next month's party congress. A China Daily piece over the weekend argued that the government should pursue reform to seek new sources of growth, and Xinhua cited a senior official as pledging reforms for state-owned enterprises, from railway, telecom, power and natural sectors as well as others, to lower the barriers to entry in such industries. A key focus for investors will also be the extent of reform in China's securities industry. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) is eyeing new regulations governing credit ratings of bonds traded in the inter-bank market, according to Reuters, and The Global Times reports that the CSRC is also considering a new dividend tax scheme intended to discourage short-selling. Last month, vice premier Wang Qishan spoke of reform in a meeting with the CSRC's International Advisory Council. From The China Daily: Despite the rapid development and huge changes achieved by the country's capital market in recent years, it still appears comparatively immature, he told the 20-strong delegation. Wang said China's capital market would learn from successful international capital markets, accelerate institutional innovation, strengthen market regulation and take active and steady steps to open up further to the outside world. He also called for the protection of investors' interests.
Other News:
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Post tags: 18th party congress, Bo Xilai, corruption, economic reform, fiscal policy, income distribution, Li Keqiang, manufacturing, monetary policy, PMI, securities law, state-owned enterprises, Wen Jiabao
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| Xiaomi, “The Real Fake” Apple Posted: 29 Oct 2012 11:18 PM PDT The New York Times' Sue-Lin Wong profiles Chinese cell phone manufacturer Xiaomi and its flamboyant founder Lei Jun. Less than three years since it was founded, Xiaomi, meaning "little rice," has become a rising star in the Chinese smartphone market. The company predicts that by the end of 2012, sales will reach nearly seven million phones and revenue will be at 10 billion renminbi — impressive for a company that sold its first smartphone in August 2011. The scene at a Xiaomi event in August of this year was reminiscent of Apple's typical product introduction under Mr. Jobs, who died last October. Mr. Lei strode onto a stage in the trendy 798 art district in Beijing to show off the Mi-Two to a roomful of cheering fans. He was dressed in a black polo shirt, jeans and black converse shoes, not much different from Mr. Jobs's trademark outfit. Xiaomi's marketing strategy has been to ride on the back of the "cult of Apple" and of its creator, said Wei Wuhui, a technology industry expert at Shanghai Jiaotong University. […] "Xiaomi is the real fake," Oliver Jin, a university student in Shanghai who hopes to buy a Xiaomi, said approvingly.
See Tech in Asia's coverage of the August event. Lei—or 'Leibusi', a play on Jobs' Chinese name 'Qiaobusi'—has said that he was originally "very annoyed" by comparisons with the Apple founder but seems, to say the least, to have come to terms with them. In 2011, he lamented that no one else in the industry would be able to emerge from Jobs' shadow while he was still alive. From Charles Custer's translation at Tech in Asia: I believe Jobs is one of the great men of this age. He's a Hollywood blockbuster. […] But Jobs will die someday, so there are still opportunities for us. The meaning of our existence is just waiting for him to kick the bucket. Of course, on the one hand, we wish him a long life, but on the other hand, we don't want the world to be blinded by his light; we'd rather live in a more colorful world.
See more on Lei Jun at CDT.
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Post tags: Apple, cell phones, Lei Jun, mobile technology, steve jobs, Xiaomi
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| Cartoon: Grandpa Wen’s Nightmare, by Hexie Farm (蟹农场) Posted: 29 Oct 2012 06:54 PM PDT |
| Ningbo Protests Point to Middle Class Discontent Posted: 29 Oct 2012 03:29 PM PDT Over the weekend, residents took to the streets in Ningbo, Zhejiang, to protest plans to expand a paraxylene (PX) plant in their city. Following the protests, which lasted three days and sometimes turned violent, the local government announced it would not go ahead with the planned expansion. By Monday, calm seemed to be restored to the city. But following similar protests in other cities (see: Xiamen, Dalian, Shifang) followed by concessions from the government which were not always implemented, some residents are skeptical of the government claims. From the Financial Times (via the Washington Post): That concession largely emptied the streets of demonstrators in the eastern port city, leaving only small groups of curious onlookers outside the Ningbo government offices, where a large police presence prevented crowds from forming. At the Zhenhai chemical industrial area, where a foul odor hung in the air, a handful of angry young men manned a makeshift barricade complaining that the local government had never followed through on a 10-year-old promise to pay a subsidy to local residents because of pollution. "It's too smelly here," says a young man wearing a white face mask over his nose and mouth. "We are here to protect people's rights," he says, declining to give his name. His complaint is only tangential to the main protest about the paraxylene plant, but it highlights how unhappiness over an environmental issue can easily spark broader grievances about issues like inequality of income.
In Business Week, Christina Larson looks at the similarities between the Ningbo protests and those elsewhere in China: In the past 15 months, similar protests against large chemical plants have taken place in other big Chinese cities: In the northeastern port of Dalian, an estimated 12,000 people packed the central People's Square one Sunday in August 2011 to demand that a PX plant located near the coast—and presumably vulnerable in the event of a typhoon grazing the shore—be shuttered and relocated. This summer, hundreds of protesters in the central Chinese city of Shifang demonstrated against the construction of a copper plant, partly due to fears that the earthquake-prone region was an unsuitable location. Earlier this month, residents of a town on the southern island of Hainan, sometimes known as "China's Hawaii," protested a proposed coal-fired power plant. The results of these protests are mixed: Officials in Dalian pledged to shut down the PX plant, but local reports say operations were later resumed. In Shifang, construction on the new copper plant was stopped. In Ningbo, protests continued even after the authorities pledged to halt the PX project, in part because suspicion of the government runs so high. "We don't trust them at all; we think [their promise] is a stalling tactic," as one 30-year-old protester in Ningbo wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg Businessweek on Monday. "We'll still keep our eyes on them."
The Ningbo protest is notable because – like Xiamen and Dalian – it is a prosperous area and the protesters were largely middle-class, urban residents. AP looks at the challenges for the government in managing this particular segment of the population when they take to the streets: It's far from a revolution. China's nascent middle class, the product of the past decade's economic boom, is looking for better government, not a different one. They're especially concerned about issues like health, education and property values and often resist the growth-at-all-costs model Beijing has pushed. The past week's chemical-plant protests reached an unruly crescendo over the weekend, when thousands of people marched through prosperous Ningbo city, clashing with police at times. The city government gave in Sunday and agreed to halt the plant's expansion. Even so, the protesters did not back down, staying outside city government offices hours after the concession. About 200 protesters, many of them retirees, returned Monday to make sure the government keeps its word on the oil and ethylene refinery run by a subsidiary of Sinopec, the state-owned petrochemical giant. "In yesterday's protest, the ordinary people let their voices be heard," a 40-year-old businessman who would give only his surname, Bao, said on the protest line Monday. Government officials, he said, "should say they are completely canceling the project. They should state clearly that they will stop doing these projects in Ningbo and the rest of China."
Throughout China, environmental protests were up 120% from 2010 to 2011. How the Chinese government will manage such conflicts between economic growth and environmental concerns was the topic of an Al Jazeera in depth report:
Read more about environmental protests in China, via CDT.
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: environmental protests, industrial pollution, Ningbo, ningbo px, protests
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| Sensitive Words: Ningbo Protests and Wen Jiabao Posted: 29 Oct 2012 12:16 PM PDT The following search terms are blocked on Sina Weibo (not including the "search for user" function):  Flower wreaths for a college student who was allegedly beaten to death by Ningbo police. Ningbo Protests: More blocked terms have accumulated over the weekend and Monday, even as the city government has postponed the planned expansion of a local petrochemical plant. See also Sensitive Words: Ningbo Protests and More and Weibo Blocks Photo Uploading in Ningbo. Blocked as of October 28:
- Mayor Liu Ji (市长刘奇): Protesters have called for the Ningbo mayor to step down [zh].
- Tianyi Square (天一广场): One of the locations of protests.
- demonstration (游行): Re-tested.
Blocked as of October 29: - Liu Ji (刘奇)
- Wang Huizhong (王辉忠): The Ningbo Party Secretary,
- Ningbo + college student (宁波+大学生): Ningbo authorities vehemently deny the rumor that a college student was beaten to death by police during the protests. The official effort to dispel this rumor has had little effect.
- Ningbo + memorial service (宁波+追悼会): Netizens have circulated photos of what they claim was a memorial service for the slain student.
- Ningbo + Public Security Bureau + Wang Weibiao (宁波+公安局+王伟标): Netizens also attest that Wang Weibiao, Deputy Director of the Ningbo Public Security Bureau, shouted at protesters that anyone singing the national anthem would be arrested. Read more about the protests here. Wen Jiabao's Family Wealth: The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs states the New York Times report on the Wen family's personal wealth "blackens China's name and has ulterior motives." The Wen family lawyers issued a statement published in the South China Morning Post, claiming "the so-called 'hidden riches' of Wen Jiabao's family members in The New York Times' report does not exist." See also Sensitive Words: Wen Jiabao's Family Wealth.  "PX is not okay!" (PX BX: PX不行！ PX bù xíng!) Blocked as of October 28:
- wen + hundred million (wen+亿)
- wen + family (wen+家人)
- wen + New York (wen+纽约)
- wen + assets (wen+财产)
- wen + wealth (wen+财富)
- prime minister + family (总理+家人)
- prime minister + family (总理+家族)
- prime minister + assets (总理+财产)
- prime minister + wealth (总理+财富)
- Wen general (温总): 总 zǒng is the first part of "prime minister" (总理 zǒnglǐ).
- Zhang Beili (张蓓莉): Alternate writing of Zhang Beili, the name of Wen Jiabao's wife. Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results. CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese's latest sensitive words post.
© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, environmental protests, Internet censorship, Liu Ji, new york times, Ningbo, protests, sensitive words, sina weibo, Wang Huizhong, Wang Weibiao, weibo, Wen Jiabao, Zhang Beili
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| Hexie Farm (蟹农场): Grandpa Wen’s Nightmare Posted: 29 Oct 2012 10:31 AM PDT For his latest installment of the Hexie Farm CDT series, cartoonist Crazy Crab illustrates an imagined nightmare of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao. At the upcoming 18th Party Congress, during which Wen is expected to cede his position to Li Keqiang, Wen is delivering a work report. However, in this nightmare, he instead finds in his hands a copy of the New York Times exposé of his family's vast wealth, and he is naked. In the background, the other representatives are laughing at Wen, but they are also naked. "Naked officials," a term that denotes cadres whose ill-gotten wealth (and family) has been shipped overseas, appear frequently in Crazy Crab's cartoons. Grandpa Wen's Nightmare, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT: 
Read more about Hexie Farm's CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.
[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, corruption, hexie farm, naked officials, political cartoons, Wen Jiabao
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