| The Creation Myth of Xi Jinping Posted: 20 Oct 2012 12:20 AM PDT At Foreign Policy, John Garnaut digs into the often vague history of China's likely next president, Xi Jinping. If every modern president needs a creation myth, then Xi Jinping's begins on the dusty loess plateau of northwest China. It was here that Xi spent seven formative years, working among the peasants and living in a lice-infested cave dug into the silty clay that extends around the Yellow River. Gradually, the selfless peasants and the unforgiving "Yellow Earth" — a term for China's land that symbolizes relentless toil and noble sacrifice — transformed this pale, skinny, and nervous-looking teenager into the man who in November will take control of the world's second-most powerful country. "When I arrived at the Yellow Earth, at 15, I was anxious and confused," wrote Xi in 1998, by which time he was working his way to the top of the Communist Party hierarchy in the prosperous coastal province of Fujian. "When I left the Yellow Earth, at 22, my life goals were firm and I was filled with confidence." […] The Yellow Earth story matters, says Geremie Barme, director of the Australian National University's Centre on China in the World. "It is … the log cabin of American politics, and Xi Jinping can claim it." It's a narrative that affirms that he "suffered hardship" and "knows what it's like at China's grassroots," says Zhang Musheng, an intellectual whose father was a high official, explaining why Xi and others of his leadership cohort are more qualified than their predecessors to represent the Chinese people.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chinese communist party, Cultural Revolution, Fujian, history, leadership transition, princelings, Xi Jinping, Yellow River
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| Photo: Hall of Friendship, by rajkumar1220 Posted: 19 Oct 2012 09:59 PM PDT |
| Fifty Years On, Sino-Indian Border Still Unsettled Posted: 19 Oct 2012 09:56 PM PDT Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1962 Sino-Indian War on Saturday, The Economist visited the disputed region of Arunachal Pradesh over which it was fought. The area, sometimes known in China as "South Tibet", is considered a candidate for the birthplace of the next Dalai Lama. With the territorial dispute still looming, India has been reluctant to invest in developing the area, apart from improving roads to carry troops to the border. […] "Half a million men are eyeball to eyeball," says Mohan Guruswamy, a China expert in Delhi. He sees diminishing prospects for settling the border dispute. Despite well-established routines between the two sides' infantry patrols to avoid clashes, he worries about a persistent risk of accidental conflict. A deal over the border has for years been self-evident: China gets to keep Aksai Chin in the west and India gets to keep the 80,000 square kilometres of Arunachal Pradesh, which China informally calls "South Tibet". In the past China has signalled a readiness to settle the dispute along just such lines. But Indian leaders and parliament have always balked, saying voters would not tolerate losing an inch of territory, even when no settled populations are involved. […] Broader relations have improved over the past couple of years, though with no progress on the border. Occasional plans for joint military operations are announced and then quickly forgotten. Formal border talks exist—a 16th round is due between special representatives—but no one expects anything to follow from them. As the years slip by, China may grow less interested in a quiet border. Observers in India worry that if either China's generals or its nationalist social-media activists and editors gained sway over border discussions, Chinese diplomats would struggle to propose compromises.
The Economist's Banyan blog includes an account of the two-day journey to Tawang, and explains how the 1962 conflict came about: The war, 50 years ago, was the result in the short-term of Indian assertiveness, especially in the face of Chinese expansion farther to the west, in Kashmir. The mutual border was (and is) a disputed line drawn by colonial authorities with a thick nib, known as the McMahon line, after the Indian foreign secretary of 1914. China refused to recognise India's sovereignty over the territory it drew in. Rather than assuage its northern neighbour, however, India chose to push soldiers—and frontier posts—farther and farther forward, even north of the McMahon border. Yet the longer-term causes of the fighting were messier. China, in the 1950s, had quashed an uprising by Tibetans north of the border. It had also stolen into territory in Jammu and Kashmir state, which India's considered to be its own land. In 1959 the Dalai Lama, Tibetans' spiritual leader, fled into India, taking refuge at the monastery in Tawang. He was greeted warmly by India's politicians and public. Many thousands of other Tibetans followed, forming a government in exile. Arguably the conflict of 1962 was in part a belated, vindictive, reaction by Mao to punish his neighbour for granting asylum to an internal opponent.
Newly unearthed official documents shed additional light on the start of the war. From The Hindu's Ananth Krishnan: Three months before China launched its offensive against India on October 20, 1962, a top Chinese official warned at a meeting with an Indian diplomat that China would take military action if India did not cease its continuing troop advancements in the west — a warning that went unheeded — according to recently declassified Chinese documents. The documents, which include internal memos sent from Chinese officials in New Delhi to Beijing and notes of negotiations from 1950 to 1962, provide fresh insights into Chinese decision-making in the decade leading up to 1962 and shed light on missed opportunities to resolve the boundary issue — both during the ill-fated visit by Premier Zhou Enlai to New Delhi in 1960 and in the last-ditch talks held just three months before the war started.
At TIME, discussing Tibet's place in Sino-Indian relations, Nilanjana Bhowmick argues that a repeat of the 1962 war is now unlikely: While the dispute remains frozen over glacial passes and rounds of border talks yield pitiful results, the narrative of India-China ties has moved on. The last ten years have been shaped by growing, significant economic links. In 2005, the two countries agreed to a "strategic and cooperative partnership" after a meeting between Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and Indian PM Manmohan Singh. Last June, Chinese vice premier Li Keqiang proclaimed Sino-Indian ties to be the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century. "India and China are not in competition," Singh said in 2009. "There is enough economic space for us both." […] Given the political and economic stakes, both sides are likely to grudgingly preserve the status quo, at least for now. "There is a certain trend of animosity [in China] towards India, which is continuous," Mohan Guruswamy of the Observer Research Foundation says. "And we have to live with that just the way they have to live with our growing friendship with other countries and the Tibet issue. 1962, however, will never happen again."
But a recent Pew survey previously covered on CDT shows a deepening mutual wariness between the Chinese and Indian publics, reports Tom Wright at India Real Time: […] The Pew Research Center report, released Tuesday, shows that two-thirds of Chinese respondents viewed India unfavorably and 23% favorably. By comparison, 43% of Chinese involved in the survey said they viewed the U.S. favorably. […] What's perhaps most notable in the report is that only 39% of respondents said they viewed Beijing's relationship with India as one of cooperation, down significantly from 53% in 2010. Only 23% of Indians term their nation's relationship with China as one of cooperation; only 24% think China's growing economy is a good thing, Pew research shows. These negative attitudes mean it'll be hard for China and India to take bold measures needed to forge a long-lasting thaw in relations.
Meanwhile, writes Rajat Pandit at The Times of India, Indian military officers eye China with suspicion, claiming that lessons have been learned from 1962, and that "we can punch back now": Pakistan has always been the more in-your-face threat for India, stoking militancies, launching incursions and rattling its nuclear sabre. "But Pakistan can be managed," says a senior military officer. "China is the actual long-term threat. Its strategic intentions remain unclear. We have to constructively engage with Beijing but also keep our powder dry for all eventualities," he adds. […] China has systematically built military infrastructure all along the unresolved 4,056-km Line of Actual Control (LAC), with five airbases, an extensive rail network and over 58,000-km of roads in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Apart from deploying medium-range ballistic missiles and fighters on the Tibetan plateau, People's Liberation Army (PLA) has now also taken to holding a series of high-end air and ground combat exercises near the Indian borders. Beijing also continues to systematically widen its arc of influence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) by forging extensive maritime linkages with eastern Africa, Seychelles, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan, among others. "China may be doing all this to protect its sea lanes supplying energy but it also strategically encircles India," says a naval officer.
This latter arena, complicated by energy supplies and trade routes, may play a more central role in future than the two countries' Himalayan border. From Rajeev Sharma at China's Global Times: […] China is not an Indian Ocean power and yet it is investing a lot of diplomatic and military capital into becoming one. In retaliation, India, which is not a power in the South China Sea or East China Sea, is working overtime to project itself as one. This is the crux of Sino-Indian strategic rivalries. […] In many ways, the South China Sea and Indian Ocean are strategically interrelated. The presence of a maritime power in one international water body inevitably increases its leverage in the other international water body. While China has been arguing that, despite the name, the Indian Ocean doesn't belong to India alone, India and other countries can equally contend that South China Sea too does not belong to China alone.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Arunachal Pradesh, Dalai Lama, east china sea, Himalayas, history, India, India border, Indian Ocean, Indian relations, Kashmir, Pakistan, South China Sea, Tibet, Tibetan exiles
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| Power Brokers Agree on Leadership? (Updated) Posted: 19 Oct 2012 03:25 PM PDT For months, Zhongnanhai watchers have speculated over who will take over the powerful Politburo Standing Committee in the upcoming once-a-decade leadership transition, and whether the current nine members will be reduced to seven. The scandal surrounding disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai has thrown a wrench in the succession plans, as he was widely expected to take a place on the Standing Committee. Reuters is now reporting that the decision about the makeup of the Standing Committee has already been made, quoting three sources close to the top leadership, ahead of the November 8 start of the 18th Party Congress: They said former President Jiang Zemin, current President Hu Jintao and Hu's likely successor, Xi Jinping, have forged a consensus on candidates for the top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee – a move that could pave the way for a smooth selection process after months of political tumult. Their list – still subject to opposition and change by other party elders – envisages a Standing Committee cut to seven from nine and headed by Xi and Premier-designate Li Keqiang, 57, who is considered the only other certainty to make the top team. A smaller committee would make it easier for Xi, 59, to establish his authority and push through badly needed reforms, the sources said. They noted that the preferred list would include Vice Premier Wang Qishan, 64, a darling of foreign investors who currently runs the finance portfolio. However, the ticket omits one of the party's most outspoken political reformers, Wang Yang, 57, party boss of southern Guangdong province. A contender, he is viewed by many in the West as a beacon of political reform due to his relative tolerance of freer speech and grassroots civil rights.
Read more about the 5th generation of Party leaders and the 18th Party Congress, via CDT. Updated at 21:20 PST: The New York Times' Keith Bradsher reports that Wang Qishan may land in a nominally superior but less powerful role than the executive vice premiership for which he has previously been tipped: While the responsibilities of China's new leadership team have not yet been finalized — and are not expected to be announced until the end of the Party Congress — the emerging consensus is that Mr. Wang is likely to be promoted to a position on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China's top decision-making body, but not to have day-to-day control of the bureaucracy that oversees China's still largely state-driven economy. Insiders say they now expect that economic policy will be left mostly in the hands of Li Keqiang, who is set to replace Wen Jiabao as prime minister next year. Mr. Li, 57, is a highly educated official with an almost professorial style who is said to read voluminous economic policy reports in often minute detail. […] One [insider] said that there had been a push in late summer by some party elders for Mr. Wang to be named prime minister instead of Mr. Li. But that push appears not only to have fallen short but possibly backfired by hurting relations between them, the insider said.
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Post tags: 18th party congress, Jiang Zemin, leadership transition, Li Keqiang, Politburo Standing Committee, Wang Qishan, Wang Yang, Xi Jinping
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| Stumbling at the First Hurdle Posted: 19 Oct 2012 02:48 PM PDT In a flashback to the London Olympics, one netizen compared track star Liu Xiang's Olympic defeat to China's 20th century history: binfensuiyue: Today is the 101st anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. In the past, we were at the head of Asia's race towards democratic society. And then, and then, at the first hurdle, we hurt our foot. 缤纷岁月：今天是辛亥革命101周年纪念，我们曾经是亚洲第一个起跑，冲向民主社会的国家。后来，后来，在第一个栏杆的时候，我们的脚受伤了。
October 10th, when this was first posted, marks the beginning of the Xinhai Revolution, which ousted the Qing Dynasty and ushered in China's brief experiment with democracy under the Republic of China (ROC) and the Kuomintang (KMT). The republic quickly succumbed to warlordism and was sundered even further by the Japanese occupation during WWII. The KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cooperated in fighting the Japanese, but found themselves locked into civil war after 1945. The KMT was defeated in 1949 and the ROC government fled to Taiwan, where it survives today.
Hurdler Liu Xiang has long been China's most famous athlete and Olympic hopeful, but injury has kept him from finishing events at both the Beijing and London Olympics. Weeks after a dramatic fall at this year's 100-meter hurdle event, the Nanjing newspaper Oriental Guardian revealed that Liu and CCTV knew he was likely to re-injure his long-suffering Achilles tendon. CCTV approved four scripts in preparation, eventually using the "choked up" version on air. Willingly or not, mainland China failed in its first attempt at democracy. Will it pick itself and try again? If it does, will it clear the hurdle? Via AmazeNews. Translation by Irene Hsiao.
© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AmazeNews, CCP, chinese communist party, KMT, Kuomintang, Liu Xiang, London Olympics, Republic of China, ROC, Taiwan, wwII
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| Sensitive Words: Luzhou Riots, Liao Yiwu and More Posted: 19 Oct 2012 08:02 AM PDT As of October 19, the following search terms are blocked on Sina Weibo (not including the "search for user" function): Rioting in Luzhou, Sichuan Province: Crowds jammed the streets and overturned police vehicles after a truck was reportedly beaten to death by police. - Luzhou traffic police (泸州交警)
- Luzhou + public anger (泸州+民愤)
- Luzhou + riot (泸州+骚乱)
- riot (暴乱): retested Liao Yiwu: In his acceptance speech for the German Book Trade Peace Prize, the writer in exile stated of China that "this empire must break apart." - Liao Yiwu (廖亦武): retested
- empire + break apart (帝国+分裂) Other: - defend Sibada (保卫斯巴达): 斯巴达 Sībādá sounds like 十八大 Shíbā Dà, an abbreviation for the 18th Party Congress 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: 18th party congress, censorship, Internet censorship, Liao Yiwu, literature, Luzhou, sensitive words, Sichuan, weibo
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| Ai Weiwei: “China Must Recognize Itself” Posted: 19 Oct 2012 01:10 AM PDT 
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei served as guest editor and appears on cover of the latest issue of British magazine New Statesman, in which he leads with a challenge for China to re-evaluate and recognize its position in the world as it seeks answers to the many problems it faces: The future of China is uncertain. I believe that the world is becoming a better place, largely thanks to advances in technology which help us to address so many of the problems that we face. The expanding use of social media and the internet will help China become a more conscious and intelligent country, but the future remains uncertain. There are problems ahead which we can't even identify yet, and it is vital to be prepared and to meet these challenges in every way we can. Whatever the future problems are, I believe that, both as an international society and as an individual, you have to see the human problem as one. We share this planet and we have been divided for too long, for ridiculous reasons. Now, we have to come together and say, as one, that we share the same values, that we can respect differences and that, together, we can create the best possible solutions. If I have one message for you, the readers of the New Statesman magazine, whether you are reading this in English or in Mandarin, on the page or online, it is this: the only way we can be successful, in China and in life, is through greater communication and wider awareness, in constantly questioning our standards and our conditions. You, as readers, are part of this, you are active members of this family, and you can be proud of that.
Ai, who placed third in ArtReview's 2012 ranking of the most powerful figures in the art world, becomes the eighth guest to edit the New Statesman. The magazine's features editor, Sophie Elmhirst, details the story behind Ai Weiwei's role: Ai Weiwei agreed to guest edit the New Statesman in April this year. We had sent the invitation to him six months earlier via his London representatives, the Lisson Gallery, but, understandably, it took him a little while to respond. Last year, Ai spent 81 days in detention. An artist already renowned for his work and fearless irreverence towards the Chinese authorities became a global cause when he was arrested at Beijing Capital Airport and detained in a secret location. Given the level of international attention and the ongoing pressure on Ai even after he was released (he was quickly filed with a £1.5m fine for tax evasion), it seemed unlikely that we would hear back from him. But then, suddenly, he said yes. Looking back, that out-of-nowhere yes makes more sense than it did at the time. After spending a week with Ai at his studio in Beijing, I learned that he likes to do things on instinct. The more unexpected an opportunity, the more attractive it is to him, especially if it offers a platform for challenging the Chinese government. And when he says yes, he means yes. … Over a week in Beijing I met with Ai almost every day and his team – a group of highly talented and motivated photographers, organisers and writers in their own right – pitched a stream of ideas. We could have made a book: the challenge was to edit down the material into a series of pieces that could fit into a magazine. And there was another test too: language. The vast majority of this issue of the New Statesman – for the first time in its history – was written originally in Chinese by Chinese writers, activists, academics and artists. After I returned from Beijing and had firmed up with Ai and his team which article commissions, photography essays and interviews were going to be included, we started, slowly but surely, to receive the copy, which had to be translated into English and then edited in both languages. The plan from the start was to produce the issue in both Chinese and English (see deputy editor Helen Lewis's account of distributing the Chinese version behind the "great firewall"). Usually we produce one magazine a week; this time it was two, with one version in a language that no one in the New Statesman office could speak, read or write. But with the help of translators, Chinese friends, Ai Weiwei and his team we got there in the end.
New Statesman also produced a digital PDF version of this week's issue in Chinese, which it uploaded to file-sharing sites in order to circumvent a censorship regime that has "tried to obliterate the existence of Ai Weiwei from the internet". From an essay about censorship by former newspaper editor and secret detainment victim Cheng Yizhong, to an interview Ai conducted with a paid internet troll charged with disrupting netizen debates, deputy editor Helen Lewis promises Chinese readers they will find "a story very different from the one they are told by the state-controlled press". See also previous CDT coverage of Ai Weiwei, including an interview he gave to German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, Cheng Yizhong, dissidents, Great Firewall of China, netizens, New Statesman, online public opinion
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