Watching China

BEIJING : Chinese President Hu Jintao has made a fresh call for Communist Party unity in the fight against corruption at a rare public appearance with his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, state press reporte...

By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
October 22, 2006

THE corruption scandal in Shanghai that had already taken down one of China’s most powerful officials claimed two smaller scalps last week: the chief of the national statistics bureau was fired, and an official with the Formula One racing circuit was hauled in for questioning. The contrast between the statistician and the racing executive may have been incidental, but it underscored the perception, fair or not, that official corruption is everywhere in China.

To some extent, the ruling Communist Party does not disagree.

In an economic boom gilded with excess and profiteering, official corruption is so widespread, and increasingly so brazen, that it is almost taken for granted. The latest World Bank governance survey found that China had seriously backslid in the category of “containing corruption” when much of the rest of the world, if not improving, was basically unchanged on the issue.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have warned that corruption threatens the credibility and legitimacy of Communist Party rule and have vowed to stamp it out. But many experts say that truly stamping out corruption would involve the type of broad political reform and a full embrace of the rule of law that the party has long resisted. The current corruption sweep authorized by Mr. Hu in Shanghai and other cities is widely viewed as more of a purge of allies linked to his predecessor, President Jiang Zemin, than an unfettered crackdown.

“The problem with China today is that if you want to pursue corruption, so many people are tainted,” said Minxin Pei, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. As a result, Mr. Pei noted, Mr. Hu could never investigate corruption solely on its merits because it would topple so many of his own political allies.

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Oct. 22, 2006 at 3:23PM Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin visited a military museum in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the Long March. Xinhua news agency said Jiang's Saturday visit to ...

President Hu Jintao of China appealed on Sunday to 70 million members of his ruling Communist Party to show solidarity, almost a month after removing a political ally of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

President Hu Jintao of China appealed on Sunday to 70 million members of his ruling Communist Party to show solidarity, almost a month after removing a political ally of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

President Hu Jintao of China appealed on Sunday to 70 million members of his ruling Communist Party to show solidarity, almost a month after removing a political ally of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin visited a military museum in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the Long March.

Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin visited a military museum in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the Long March.

Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin visited a military museum in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the Long March.

China party chief appeals for unity after purge
Reuters - BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao appealed on Sunday to 70 million members of his ruling Communist Party to show solidarity, almost a month after ousting a political ally of predecessor Jiang Zemin. Hu made the call on Sunday in his

HIV Infection Among Gay Men Rising In China
All Headline News - Beijing, China (AHN) - The HIV infection rate among the gay men in China is rising among the sexually active homosexual men. Zhang Beichuan, a professor with Qingdao University's Medical School, said that the Chinese health authorities have to put

Education the heart of Olympics says Rogge
Reuters - BEIJING (Reuters) - International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge said on Sunday education remained at the heart of the Olympic movement with millions of Chinese youngsters now being introduced to its values. Rogge, who was opening

China party chief appeals for unity after purge
Sunday, October 22 2006 6:23 am GMT

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao appealed on Sunday to 70 million members of his ruling Communist Party to show solidarity, almost a month after ousting a political ally of predecessor Jiang Zemin.

The victory of the Long March was a magnificent undertaking in the Chinese revolution process and of great significance to the final victory of the revolution, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin said Saturday.

10/1/95

1994 eunuchs got vote in India


10/3/95

Br converts to metric w/criminal sanctions. But quarter pounders, 3½ floppies & the pint & the mile left alone. Only the US, Liberia, Burma remain non-metric

SA’s highest court ends debtors’ prison. It had been fading as a practice last couple of yrs

A Russian scientist says that if you think Russia’s nuclear facilities have lax security, the chemical arms ones are worse

The Spaziano execution is on again. Incidentally, Spaziano became Crazy Joe after a truck ran over his hand. When prosecution trying to get their 16-yr old druggie biker wannabe in, they told judge that w/out him they’d have no case. He has recanted & Florida Sup Court has since ruled that testimony helped by hypnosis not admissible. The judge’s overturning the jury’s life imprisonment also no longer possible

Kenneth Dart, who renounced US citizenship to avoid paying taxes (is Prez of a foam cup comp) for Belize wants to return – as Belize consul

Ch. says agreement for a summit meeting Jiang Zemin / Clinton inc promise that any future trips by Taiwan prez to US private only & pol speeches or any public speech be banned. A day later, State Dept still not disavowing

New Romanian law (not yet signed by Prez Iliescu, who is out of country) would sentence journalists to 7 yrs for insulting a pub official – even if story true. 2 journalists on trial for publishing that Iliescu was in KGB. Similar prosecutions, & papers closed in Albania, Slovakia. And old-type defamation laws supported even by Vaclav Havel & used against a critic of Lech Walesa

A new state health system in Tenn. has given it 2nd highest rate of insurance after Hawaii. But a bunch of newly-created comps aggressively signing up people, some working commission-only. Going after the homeless, prisoners (illegally). Started up so quickly it is vastly fraudulent

The ridiculous anti-terrorism bill that followed OK City bombing, inc new wiretap powers, easier deportations, use of military, limiting death row appeals, which passed Senate 91-8, failing because far right

Kenya convicts opposition leader for attempted robbery (guns from a police station) to 4 yrs & 6 lashes. Amnesty Int says fabricated


10/4/95

UN budget problems (guess whose fault?) impairing Bosnian war crimes tribunal

Macedonian prez wounded by car bomb

Labour Conf. Blair wants to create a “youthful” country w/an information superhighway. Reverse privatization of RR. End of hereditary peers in Lords. Lower taxes on home heating fuel, but no other promises. And a min wage at no stated level

Clinton vetoes bill for Congress’s admin expenses, because Congress failed to pass other budget measures

Russian PM Chernomyrdin says will not run for president next yr. This leaves no successor to Yeltsin. And in Volgograd, CP won 22 of 24 seats in regional leg.


10/5/95

Libya, expelling Palestinians (well, into refugee camps mostly) urges other Arab countries to do same to expose weakness of peace plan

Fiji last yr offered to allow Hong Kongese to buy citizenship ($30,000 + $100,000 “investment”), finally uniting Fijians & Indians on one issue... no Chinese.

Macedonian prez car-bombed, replaced by speaker of house, an anti-Albanian. Cause of bomb still not known

Yet another coup in Comoros, yet another led by Fr mercenary Bob Denard, his 3rd there, plus Benin (attempted), elsewhere. Fr sent in the marines & Foreign Legion (it still exists!), freed the prez & re-arrested Denard, mostly to disprove that they were behind it.

Blacks in 20s now 1/3 in jail, probation. 35% arrests for drug possession, 55% convictions for same, 74% prison sentences

Alabama pays lawyers max $1,000 for murder trials w/out death penalty

Iran bans music & esp teaching it to children

Kenya refuses to hand over Rwandans to war crimes tribunal

Labour Conf votes for 1st time to retain Trident

Bosnian cease-fire signed, for Tuesday or whenever electricity restored in Sarajevo

Clinton exec order eases travel restrictions to Cuba for Cuban-Amers w/sick relatives, artists, academics, relief agencies, human rights groups, U. students & news organizs


10/6/95

Like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan will not fulfil Conventional Forces in Eur Treaty when comes into force Nov. 17

Ok ok ok. OJ Simpson acquitted. Blacks jubilant, whites amazed. 107.7m watched it live, I was asleep. The verdict took 3-4 hrs. Manson’s conviction took 9 days. The cops were racist & a case could be made for their having planted evidence. Ben Stein says whites will riot the way whites do: leave the cities, vote for Gingrich, punish blacks by closing dy-care & Medicaid
-The backlash still hasn’t taken on concrete form, exactly what rights will be destroyed. Still, CA’s domestic abuse law changed. Previously, 1st-time spouse abuses could erase their record through counseling (traffic school?). Now, those who plead guilty will also get min 36 mos probation

American oil comps (5) & others will develop Caspian Sea oilfields, sending oil through Russian pipeline only until build their own, not under Russian control, through Georgia & Turkey. US got the Caucasus countries to stop Azerbaijan’s proposal to inc Iran. Russia has been throwing oil weigh around heavy-handedly. Fallout: Chechnya, through which Russian pipeline goes; and possibly the attempted assassination of Georgian prez Sheverdnadze

R’s want to relax regs on nursing homes – no, not relax, eliminate. RR tried to do this, prompting backlash, a study which showed horrors, and detailed rules 1987. Since then, patients have been less subject to sedation, under 20% now physically restrained, from over 40% mid-1980s. Regulation would be turned over to states, which won’t. Will not be made to require, as fed regs now do, actual training, 24-hr nurses, etc. And states could compel adult children to pay for their parents. The theory is that since they won’t pay much in Medicaid, they can’t compel standards. It will also work the other way, since nursing homes have successfully forced more Medicaid in courts to pay for the standards.

Since Clinton elected, 43 state legislators (2/3 since 1994 elections, 2 US senators, 3 Reps, 137 officeholders, have switched D to R. None known the other way. D’s still 52% of state legislators. Most switches at nat level since Whigs broke up 1850s. Party switches since 1994 accounted for 4 state chambers going R (Penn, SC, Tenn, Maine). R’s now have 4 chambers in the 11 Confederate states for 1st time since Reconstruction

Israeli Knesset passes peace plan 61-59. Prez Weizman immediately violated it, refusing to pardon 2 Palestinian women (all women & 1,200 prisoners to be released)
-Arafat working on accord w/Hamas, allowing one newspaper to resume, trying to get them to stop attacking Israelis


10/7/95

A Colombian MP (& former left guerilla) plays tape from bug of DEA head in Colombia suggesting DEA trying to overthrow the gov.

Death penalty peaked 1935-6 (199 & 195)
-City that has seen most death sentences since restoration: Houston, followed by Philadelphia (103)


10/8/95

A Tory MP defects to Labour, evidently really appalled at gov viciousness: Alan Howarth had a safe seat (Stratford). This is 1st Tory to Labour conversion ever [Wait, that’s not true: Oswald Mosley]. Tory majority now 7 or 5 (1 MP not under the whip)

Disney news: Tony Blair would rather be called Bambi than Stalin. Disney Co will give health coverage to gay partners. And Disney, now in charge of ABC, fires Jim “I work for a rodent” Hightower from his talk show on 150 radio stations

Uganda new const extends ban on parties 5 yrs

Israeli military join prez, refusing to release 2 ♀ it holds. So 20 of the 21 pardoned ♀ refuse to go (the other was in solitary & didn’t know) or sign promise not to do other stuff in future

Yeltsin fires another atty gen. Did one last yr for refusing to violate Parl amnesty law. Now fires the one he forced to make himself ludicrous by attacking a Spitting Image show. He also may have been corrupt. But mostly he’s taking the blame for Mafias & violence

NJ now has 25,000 fugitives, v. 25,699 inmates in state prisons

Bosnian Serbs cluster bomb a refugee camp, killing 6. And have been flying again & bombing
-Commanders of Croat & Bosnian armies refuse even to meet. And this is supposed to be a federation. Bosnia says was only given 32 hrs warning of W Bosnian offensive. And refusing to allow Bosnian refugees back in areas they control

Honduras filed charges against 10 military officers, some retired 7 of them colonels, for murder & illegal detention. This is Battalion 31b, created by CIA early 1990s to support the Nicaraguan & Salvadoran wars. Baltimore Sun got US docs showing US knew of killings & lied to Congress. Now not helping the Honduran effort. The military are led by Battalion 31b’s former commander, who sent tanks into street after the indictments


10/9/95

July 11 as Serbs surrounding Srebrenica, Gen. Mladic summoned the Dutch UN commander & officers to watch a pig being killed, said that’s how he’d treat people like those protected by Dutch peacekeepers. There is some uproar in Neth. that its troops just watched the atrocities, pretending they saw nothing. July 17 a major certified that the Serbs carried out the evacuation correctly & another denied knowledge of genocide. Dutch troops really disliked the Muslims.

Medicare wants drs to prove cataract removal necessary before it pays

Since 1993, Br has granted refugee status to 4 of the 9,000 applicants


10/10/95

Sam Nunn to retire, the 8th D. Senator of 15 up for reelection ‘96. Much talk of vanishing center.

Still no Bosnia cease-fire, delayed by Russia’s failure to resume gas supplies. Serbs shelling safe areas, Bosnians, while raising more objections – something about a Serb checkpoint – seem to be gearing up for an offensive. NATO hits a Serb command & control bunker

Japanese Justice Minister resigns for not reporting a $2m loan from a Buddhist cult. Opposition had made a deal w/him not to ask questions in Parl about it

John Cairncross, the Fifth Man, dies.

Lord Alec Douglas-Home dies at 92.

May95 Paddy Ashdown abandoned “equidistance,” saying would not keep a minority Tory gov in power after next election


10/11/95

Curtis Le May. Manufactured bomber gap. Air Force banned from flying over USSR from1950, so SAC got RAF to do it. Military commanders from USSR then say didn’t know if they were reconnaissance or attacks. 1953 Pentagon & CIA were interested in preventive war. A cmte led by Doolittle proposed giving Russia a deadline. LeMay wanted to destroy USSR while it was inferior, tried 1950 to get AEC to give SAC the bombs in (if?) Washington nuked. By 1954 had such control. LeMay supported a plan to ring USSR, push them w/reconnaissance, then deliver a pol ultimatum. Seems to have tried to start a nuclear war. 1957 told an adviser that his personal policy was to knock Russian planes on the ground if he thought they were going to attack. During Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay was USAF chief of staff. Protegé head of SAC sent a clear message to SAC planes to be ready. And SAC launched an ICBM from CA to Marshall Islands at height of crisis, on schedule from before. LeMay wanted Cuban missile sites nuked, if not USSR. McNamara says night after crisis over, LeMay said, “We lost! We ought to just go in there today & knock ‘em off!” At height, bombers were flown past their customary turn-around points. LeMay retired 1965, ran as Wallace’s VP 1968.

Some male Palestinians also refuse release.

Early this yr Gingrich threatened another R w/removal from a cmte for not going along w/his ideas, Mark Neumann from Appropriations

AMA backs Gingrich’s Medicare plan. Claim no relation to better deal on fees announced by Gingrich shortly after.

Bosnian cease-fire finally in place. Serbs have been ethnically cleansing Banja Luka, retaining its men...

Sup Court hears arguments on Colorado’s anti-gay measure, its 1st gay rights case in a decade. Scalia suggested there was also no protection for blue-eyed people, bigamists or those w/poorly combed hair. O’Connor & Ginsburg got state lawyer to admit hospitals could keep gays off dialysis or libraries keep them from borrowing books, w/no recourse

Sw’s 1st MEP elections, ruling Soc Dems 28%; ½ seats won by anti-EU parties


10/12/95

The Navy’s former equal-opportunity head facing court-martial for sexual harassment. One complainant agreed not to press charges if Navy told him to stop contacting her & he not be promoted – then he was. He liked giving presents, like gum & old men’s running shorts.

Fr PM Juppé told to get out of his cheap Paris gov-owned apt (& his son from his) or be prosecuted. Juppé lied about having no authority over this when he was deputy mayor. This while civ servs striking over wage freeze

Japan says 1910 annexation of Korea was legal because signed by a puppet PM (after Japan assassinated the queen, dissolved Korean army)

House Judiciary Cmte gets a D. to w/draw amend requiring reimbursing foreigners the $80 processing free for those now on waiting lists for visas who wouldn’t get them under new proposed law. Bait & switch.

And the 1st negative campaign ad: Forbes.

Turkey is charging an Amer. Reuters reporter for reporting attacks on Kurds (as well as hundreds of Turkish journalists)


10/13/95

Libya stops ouster of Palestinians

House Ethics Cmte investigating bulk sales of Gingrich’s book, the issue that Gingrich used to force Speaker Jim Wright to resign 1989

Sen. R’s release plans for a $245b. tax cut over 7 yrs, inc $500/child tax credit, cut in capital gains & corp tax

Bosnians pressing towards Prijedor in n.w., despite cease-fire. Serbs threatening to w/draw from peace talks. Serbs, meanwhile, are taking Bosnian refugees & selling them back to their families – if they can afford it.

UN talks on restricting spread of land mines fail. Ch. killed it, Russia would have. Ch. says land mines are legitimate. US wants expensive ones that self-destruct after a set period. Mines can cost as little as $2.

Dave Grossman’s On Killing suggests 85% of soldiers tried not to kill during wars. After Battle of Gettysburg, 90% of recovered muskets were loaded. Since loading took 20X as long as firing... VN firing rates increased from the 15-20% in WW2 to over 90%, thanks to desensitization training

At Tory conf, John Major wants more cops & an FBI


10/14/95

Ivor Crewe & Anthony King’s book on SDP says reason 26 Labour but only 1 Tory MP est SDP 1981 was that Tory wives dissuaded them, being heavily involved in the party. And lucrative jobs; the lone Tory –> SDP, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (how’s that for a Tory name?) lost his consultancies instantly

Judges order trial of Silvio Berlusconi

And Willy Claes, sec gen of NATO, being indicted for Belgian arms corruption (Socialists took $1.72m in kickbacks form It. aircraft maker 1988 when he was Econ Minister)

Iraq holds its 1st elections, actually a referendum on Hussein – not a secret ballot

Nation of Islam Monday to have a “Million Man March” in Washington, intended to annoy whites & legitimize Farrakhan, who can’t resist making racist comments about Jews & Koreans & such. Women are supposed to stay home & mind the baby, though at last minute they got Rosa Parks & Maya Angelou. Black men are supposed to atone, evidently for failing to take power from black women. Blacks are unwilling, mostly, to denounce Farrakhan, they “support the goals” of the march, whatever that means

Repub. Medicare of Medicaid leg. to weaken laws against kickbacks, fraud & abuse by doctors, allow them to refer patient to medical suppliers & such they have financial interest in, eliminate reg of med labs in doctors’ offices, eliminate requirement that only comps give discounts to pub hospitals, AIDS clinics, community health centers. If a drug comp snuck a drug past FDA, exempt from punitive damages. Doctors won’t have to exercise “reasonable diligence” as now to make accurate Medicare claims, just not deliberately do it. Newtie thinks shouldn’t criminalize behaviour of drs – like fraud


10/15/95

After Pearl Harbor, CP suspended all Japanese-American members

Tory Conf: Major wants to let MI5 & GCHQ fight domestic crime or “internat crime.” And wants 10,000 more closed-circuit cameras in shopping areas. And 5,000 more cops. Michael Portillo said would never join a common Eur army which would “stop our men from fighting for more than 40 hrs a week [and] send ½ of them home on paternity leave – there is no plan for a Eur army

AZ Gov Fife (“I like Fife”) Symington dec bankruptcy, w/$62,000 assets & $35m debts. He was a real estate developer & his wife an heiress. He bitches about welfare mothers & deadbeat dads

NJ Sup Court upheld “Megan’s Law” mandatory notification of presence of released sex offenders. They are supposed to be able to challenge determinations of their dangerousness, but state has failed to pay for lawyers & lawyers are on strike against doing it free, for some reason


10/16/95

After Rodney King. Christopher Commission on LAPD found 44 problem cops (1991). 27 have since had complaints, 9 promoted


10/17/95

Louisiana’s state legislators can award scholarships to Tulane. One rep gave them to Ted Kennedy’s 2nd wife & her 5 siblings, who all went for free. Mayor of New Orleans & children of Senators, Reps have all been sent

Speaking of pork, Gingrich’s district Cobb Cty gets $9,878 for resident from fed gov 1994 (NYC, home of Gingrich’s “culture of waste”, gets $5,461). For every dollar in fed taxes, Cobb gets $1.80, NYC gets 82¢

Colin Powell is related to the royals (who isn’t?). Burke’s Peerage says he is descended from governor of Jamaica 1807

Hussein wins 99.96%

Sp won’t turn over classified documents to judge investigating anti-Basque death squads

Pakistan secretly arrested 40 army officers last mo., inc a general, for Islamic fundamentalist links. Has also been arresting opposition leaders & constraining papers

A Frenchwoman reaches 120 yrs 38 days, the record. She gave up smoking 3 yrs ago

25 Danish high school students w/anti-nuclear “Chirac, non!” T-shirts were stopped by Fr police, forced to remove the shirts

Latvian parl elections a mess. Governing party 3rd, but top 3 parties got 15% each. #2 was the new “For Latvia” party, led by a Ger facist. Russians born there can’t vote but ethnic Latvians like Joachim Siegerist, who speaks no Latvian & became a citizen 3 yrs ago, plans to run for president. 1968 he est Ger Conservatives, dedicated to fighting Jews & keeping foreigners out. Later campaigned to free Rudolf Hess. Has been fined for slandering Willy Brandt & is currently appealing an 18-mo jail term in Ger for racist statements. In Latvia, he wants law & order, end to labor conflict, etc. His funding is unknown but is thought to be Ger far-right.
-Latvia applies to join EU. W/anti-Russian citizenship laws, 1/3 adult pop couldn’t vote

Kenya admits 800 deaths from disease in its prisons this yr

Dole reverses again, saying it was a mistake to return Log Cabin Repub donation. He blamed his aides, who he has been defending on this for 2 mos. Why now? His donations are about to be released, and he’s afraid of questioning on whether he agrees w/all their agendas. Now says you can take money from people you disagree with


10/18/95

An Estonian interior minister taped conversations, inc w/PM. Estonia police found them in a comp owned by ex-KGB agents & selling weapons illegally. He refused to resign. The PM fired him & dissolved the gov as a matter of... principle! Yes, principle!

Eur Court of Justice rules against affirmative action giving women absolute priority (in N Ger)

Speaking of, Kohl failed to get CDU to intro women’s quota w/in the party

Bosnia Serbs claim the 2 Fr pilots shot down Aug. 30 were POWs, but have since been kidnapped & they don’t know where they are. Must be criminals. Or the Bosnian gov... Fr not amused

Zambia wants to expel Kenneth Kaunda (Prez. 1964-91) as an illegal alien. Born in Zambia, his parents were Malawis. He renounced Malawians nationality 1970 but failed to seek Zambian. Twice this yr he has been arrested for addressing rallies w/out permission under laws he wrote
[update: gov gives this up]

US ambassador-designate to Ch. Jim Sasser says Ch. can ignore elections in Hong Kong – it is just a legal question

Ger losses yet another E Ger treason case, for ex-head of secret service. Markus Wolf, tossed out by Fed Criminal Court. Not that this sort of thing endlessly repeated, now going after 7 Politburo members for the same old stuff

Clinton offhandedly says he raised taxes “too much” is 1st budget, for which now-pissed-off Congresscritters then stuck out their necks

Russia wants to participate in peacekeeping in Bosnia, but not under NATO command – just like US Republicans


10/19/95

Clinton supports a bill against discrim against gays, knowing he’ll never have to sign one. In 41 states, there is no protection. Would not cover the military

Helms resumes blocking ambassadors, treaties & promotions

Yeltsin says will fire foreign min Kozyrev, his last liberal cabinet member, for being too accommodating to West. Yeltsin evidently is running for reelection after all. Backs away from his own “Our Home is Russia” party, which is failing in regional elections. Said he might ban CP candidates for Parl who want to overthrow the regime. Says Russia less corrupt than US or Eur

Navy court-martial exonerates the former equal opportunity officer for improper conduct, like sending women his old running shorts

Br’s policy of not charging women over 60 for prescriptions while charging men dec illegal by Eur Court. Will be equalized at 0 at 60, w/retrospective refunds for last 3 mos – an arbitrary limit by gov

House passes $270b Medicare cuts after limiting debate to 3 hrs ($1.5b/minute).

It. Justice Min loses a confidence vote, for threatening anti-corruption magistrates w/investigations

Despite “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Pentagon has no procedure for protecting victims of gay-bashing from being kicked out if they report


10/20/95

Sen. Larry Pressler presses AT&T to drop ads against his bill deregulating communications industry. And CNN, the #2 cable operator, refuses to carry it – proving the need for it.

Senate welfare bill threatens ed. aid to legal immigrants. Not quite a ban, but making them report the income of their sponsors, even though those are under no obligation to pay. Legal immigrants are 10% of Pell Grant recipients – 32.6% in CA, 26.5% NY.

Willy Claes resigns as Sec-Gen of NATO as Belgian parl removes his immunity from prosecution for bribery

Yeltsin now says he’ll leave his foreign minister there for a while, just with his legs cut out from under him


10/21/95

The U Chicago economist who theorizes about rational expectations must give ½ his Nobel Prize money to his ex-wife of 6 yrs who had a Nobel Prize clause in her divorce settlement. I think he should give the prize back. The deadline was about to run out, too.


10/22/95

House votes 332-83 to retain racist differential in sentencing between crack & powder cocaine.

Next month, Miss. stops paying mothers on welfare the $24/mo Gov Fordice is sure they get preggers to obtain. Has begun an experiment in 6 counties in subsidizing employers who have to pay only $1/hr for min-wage jobs which mothers of children over 3 will have to take

7,000 Hong Kongese of Indian origins are not considered Chinese by China, so will be stateless, since Br doesn’t care either


10/23/95

Clinton’s chief pol strategist Dick Morris works both parties & has severely ridiculed Clinton in priv & has advised candidates to attack him

Br, Fr & US to join the S Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, but Fr won’t stop testing nukes there & US won’t stop shipping nuclear weapons around there

NY again the most unionized state, surpassing – Hawaii?? 29% work force 1994, 3.8% SC, the lowest

Now Chirac’s cheap rent is being questioned. It was frozen 1990, and seems to be a corporate rather than pub subsidy


10/24/95

Wilson backs Dole. Doesn’t want to be VP

Latin Amer corruption scandals: Colombian prez Samper, of course, but Ecuador’s VP fled the country, Peru & Guatemala both trying to extradite former presidents, & ex-prez Salinas of Mexico hiding in US. But none of this has led to coups or coups by the civilian incumbents. Corruption is less fashionable than in 1950s when the governor of Sao Paulo state campaigned w/slogan “he steals, but he gets things done.” These days, drugs have bid up the price of corruption out of the means of the ave person

Fr backing Russia’s desire to have a part in Bosnian peacekeeping, say its one zone, while Chirac thinks we might be there 20 yrs. East and West Germany all over again.


10/25/95

Chile finally gets Gen. Contreras into jail, for assassination fo Orlando Letelier, after building him a special prison, giving pay hike to military & a cutoff date for human rights violations

At UN 50th anniversary, Mayor Giuliani had Arafat thrown out of a concert for world leaders. And didn’t invite Castro – who had complained about potholes.

Croatian Prez Tudjman says will take e. Slavonia by force if negotiations don’t get it back by end Nov. Says Serbs were not cleansed from Krajina, they just didn’t want to be in a demo. state. Blamed atrocities on criminals & drug addicts in army uniforms. Right. And given the chance to repudiate it, repeated that 6m Jews not killed in Holocaust.
-Croatia to allow Croats in Bosnia to vote in Croatian parl elections this weekend. They get 12 of 128 seats, ethnic Serbs 3 seats, down from 13. Hungs, Its, Gers, Ukrainians, Czechs 1 each, Muslims none despite having 2X Its or Hungs

Both houses to vote to move embassy to Jerusalem by 1999 (at $100m), but allow prez to delay it forever. Passes 93-5 & 374-37

Philippines Sup Court lets Imelda Marcos get seat in House of Reps

Silly idea of the week: a “civil rights boot camp” for Greenwich CT high school students who snuck a racist slur into the yearbook

Emil Jonassaint, who Haitian military used as puppet, dies. Not only did he think Haiti would be defended from US invasion by invisible voodoo warriors, believed Haiti to be the lost remnant of Atlantis. US wanted Haiti to steal the Philosopher’s Stone. OK, that part’s probably true.


10/26/95

Salvador is helping its refugees in US w/free aid in filing claims for pol asylum. It doesn’t have jobs & likes the $1b in remittances, but gee doesn’t getting help from the persecuting gov rather invalidate the claim?

6 days after Japan surrendered WW2, gov set up brothels for Americans, afraid of rape. So there were c.50,000 Japanese “comfort women.” Gov appealed to them to sacrifice themselves to defend Japanese purity. Soldiers paid 8¢ for a screw & a beer. Only when VD rates up did US dec the brothels off-limits Mar46. At least once, military asked for brothels. American commander in Nagasaki was asked by 7 prostitutes to exempt them from the entertainment tax, since they did not find their work entertaining. The Col. appealed to Finance Min. Japanese gov esp worried about black soldiers. Prostitution was legal in Japan until 1958.

Senate decides not to gut Fed nursing home regs. House still does

Yeltsin back in hospital w/heart problems

Clinton 1996 slogan: never mind!


10/27/95

Croatian military has been advised by a Military Professional Resources Inc which transformed it into an effective force. The comp sent over Gen Vuono, Army chief of staff 1987-92 & Gen Crosbie Saint, commander of US Army in Eur 1988-92. If they gave strategic advise, as opposed to lectures on leadership, they violated the arms embargo. I’d assume they were acting at the behest of the US gov

In Bosnia, Russia to serve in noncombat under the US commander rather than NATO (which Gen. Joulwan also runs there) and, thank God, will not be confined to 1 sector

Gov. Pete Wilson pays Soc Sec taxes on 3 housecleaners

US refuses to respond to Japanese concerns about reports that CIA spied on Jap. negotiators in econ talks earlier this yr

White House, pushing a Sen. plan to screw welfare, suppressed a HHS study that it would push 1.1m children into poverty (House plan 2.1m)

ITN reports violations of arms embargo of Bosnia by US air drops this summer (up till now?). Bosnians now have Stinger rocket launchers, new helmets & uniforms. UN turned blind eye

S Korea’s ex-Prez. Roh Tae Woo admits taking $650m in bribes, well slush fund, but he kept $222m when left office. Both Kims evidently took bribes


10/28/95

Under 3 Strikes in CA, a parolee gets 26 yrs to life for stealing 4 chocolate chip cookies


10/29/95

Srebrenica again. Dutch failed to pass on to UN a threat by Mladic to massacre the Muslims – which he illustrated by having a pig’s throat slit. The US satellite photo of hundreds of Muslims being held at gunpt, & a U-2 photo 2 weeks later showing new graves in the same fields, took weeks to be shown to Clinton. Serbs had been allowed to cut down UN force, allowing Dutch soldiers to rotate out but not in

Russian electoral commission bans Rutskoi’s (speaker of the disbanded Parl) party & Yavlinsky’s Yabloko Party, the leading progressive party, & #2 in opinion polls after the CP, for failing to provide letters from 6 people who decided not to run. There’s no obvious pol reason for this, and Yeltsin in the hospital has the ultimate in plausible deniability. 14 parties have been accepted, inc the Beer Lovers’ Party, so that’s all right

SA indicts 11 military people inc ex-Defense Min Magnus Malan for deaths in Natal 1987

Frank Jordan, running for re-election as mayor of SF, poses for photos naked w/2 DJ’s in his shower


10/30/95

Both of Milosevic’s parents committed suicide


10/31/95

Sup Court to deal w/crack/cocaine disparities in prosecutions (90% black, 3.5% white for crack, 25.9%, white v. 29.7% black for prewar 1994). All 24 crack offenders in LA under fed law 1991 were black. White House says it’s ok because whites were 93.4% of those sentenced for trafficking in LSD, 91.4% porno, 100% antitrust

Elizabeth Dole to step down as head of American Red Cross, but thinks she can take it up again as 1st Lady

Quebec votes 50.6% to 49.4% against secession. Q’s PM Parizeau resigns, after blaming the result on “money & the ethnic vote.” Stronger vote for secession than 1980, and this time got a 60% among Fr speakers. Turnout 93.5%

Leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia arrive in Dayton, Ohio for talks. Milosevic is not arrested for war crimes. Tudjman often says he could do business w/Bosnian Muslim prez. Izetbegovic if he’d sit down & have a drink. The day before, Congress helpfully passed a resolution that the peace talks shouldn’t expect any US troops to enforce a peace, passed House 3:1. And Gingrich refused to return calls from Sec State or nat sec adviser. US says US won’t allow Karadzic or Mladic to run for office in a new Bosnian gov

CIA admits it gave White House & Pentagon info it knew came from people controlled by Moscow during 1980s, crucial to decisions on billion in military spending. CIA decided to protect its compromised sources rather than tell the truth. And since Moscow had Aldrich Ames, could carefully tailor that info

Michigan pushing through plan for what it will do when Gingrich gives them control over welfare. Women would have to work w/in 6 weeks of giving birth or lose benefits. Fathers to lose drivers & pro licenses, etc

Queen Elizabeth in NZ to apologize to Maoris, the 1st such apology to indigenous anyones

CHINA: Wave of legal action leaves writers and activists behind bars

New York, October 17, 2006—A court in northern China’s Hebei province today sentenced Guo Qizhen to four years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion” for writing essays on U.S.-based Web sites that criticized the Communist Party leadership. Guo is one of a number of critics and human rights activists to be jailed recently.

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“We believe the court did not give a just verdict,” Li told Agence France-Presse. “We believe Guo Qizhen’s criticism of the government was within his rights under the constitution.” The Chinese constitution recognizes the right to criticize the government, a guarantee that is qualified by a host of criminal laws and administrative measures.

Guo, 49, is married with a16-year-old son.

In a separate case, authorities notified the wife of writer and prominent China Democracy Party member Chen Shuqing, detained in Hangzhou on September 14, that he was formally arrested on the same charges for articles he posted online, according to Boxun. In addition, writer Zhang Jianhong, who uses the pen name Li Hong, was formally arrested on charges of “inciting subversion” on October 12, and activist Yang Maodong (known as Guo Feixiong) remains jailed on charges of economic crimes related to his independent publishing, according to the Independent Chinese PEN Center.

http://www.cpj.org/news/2006/asia/china17oct06na.html

Made [illegal] in China Pitt screens Sandstorm as part of its International Week

This past weekend, the University of Pittsburgh showed Sandstorm, an influential movie about the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, to the students and residents of the Pittsburgh area as part of Pitt’s International Week.

Sandstorm is a tale about the events occurring in modern China, where people passionate about their beliefs are being persecuted. The story is about a police officer who has witnessed these acts. He has flashbacks as he tries to discern the line between good and evil. It is a movie about compassion and persecution and it serves as a wake up call to the reality of what goes on behind closed doors to our blind eyes.

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The Chinese government declared the practice of Falun Gong illegal in mainland China in 1999. In April of that year, 10,000 people gathered at the headquarters of the People’s Republic of China’s government. Although this dispersed on a peaceful note, it caught the attention of many influential leaders. The fact that there was an organized protest at the headquarters of the Communist Party — despite how peaceful it was — scared leaders such as China’s former president Jiang Zemin. This newfound jealousy and fear of organized protest caused the disturbing prosecution of Falun Gong. As of July 2006, there have been 2878 reported cases of Falun Gong practitioners that have passed away while in the hands of the Chinese police and government. There have been more then 30,000 cases of persecution. There are reports that hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been detained, and over 100,000 have been sentenced to labor camps. Furthermore, there is evidence documented regarding the torture and abuse of those imprisoned.

Sandstorm is a movie that the Chinese government does not want you to see. Despite the dramatic increase in economic growth China has experienced in the past decade, China’s human rights behavior has not improved. China has tried to prevent Sandstorm’s viewing; Chinese embassies and consuls in many countries have demanded that the movie not be shown as scheduled at several film festivals.

In September of 2004, during the Houston Film Commission, the Chinese consul in Houston demanded that Sandstorm not be shown. In November, during a San Francisco showing, the Chinese consul there also tried to sway the festival not to show the movie. In both cases, Sandstorm was shown anyway. Sandstorm won Best Feature Film in both festivals and has gone on to win 29 film festival awards, including the Humanitarian Film Award at the Long Island International Film Expo and the Grand Jury prize at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival.

Annie Gui Qing, a student at Pitt, said, “I can’t describe the feelings of unjust that filled me during the film. I want more people to see this movie; I want more people to care about the not-so-beautiful things in our world.”

http://thetartan.org/2006/10/2/pillbox/sandstorm

China’s New Leftist
By PANKAJ MISHRA

One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the Thinker’s Cafe near Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he teaches. A small, compact man with streaks of gray in his short hair and a pleasant face that always seems ready to break into a smile, he arrived, as he would to all our subsequent meetings, on an old-fashioned bicycle, dressed in dark corduroys, a suede jacket and a black turtleneck that would not be amiss on an American campus.

Co-editor of China’s leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still in his mid-40’s, has emerged as a central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left. New Left intellectuals advocate a “Chinese alternative” to the neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country’s 800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And unlike much of China’s dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist leadership as a likely force for change. Recent events — the purge of party leaders on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing efforts to curb market excesses — suggest that this view is neither utopian nor paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed government policy, their concerns are increasingly amplified by the central leadership.

In the last few years, Wang has reflected eloquently and often on what outsiders see as the central paradox of contemporary China: an authoritarian state fostering a free-market economy while espousing socialism. On this first afternoon, he barely paused for small talk before embarking on an analysis of the country’s problems. He described how the Communist Party, though officially dedicated to egalitarianism, had opened its membership to rich businessmen. Many of its local officials, he said, used their arbitrary power to become successful entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural populations they were meant to serve and joined up with real estate speculators to seize collectively owned land from peasants. (According to Chinese officials, 60 percent of land acquisitions are illegal.) The result has been an alliance of elite political and commercial interests, Wang said, that recalls similar alliances in the United States and many East Asian countries.

As he spoke about how market reforms have widened the gap between rich and poor, between rural and urban areas, smartly dressed students browsed through a highbrow collection (Leo Strauss, Jürgen Habermas), checked their e-mail and sipped their mochas. At the privately owned Thinker’s Cafe and the adjoining All Sages bookshop, Wang seemed to be famous. Students greeted him reverentially; the staff was extra attentive. Yet Wang still belongs to a minority. Recoiling from the excesses of Maoism and the failures of the old planned economy, most Chinese intellectuals, even those with no connection to the state, see the market economy as indispensable to China’s modernization and revival. Zhu Xueqin, a history professor at Shanghai University who is one of China’s best-known liberal intellectuals, told me that he wants more, not fewer, market reforms. For him, China’s present instability is caused not by economic forces but by a politically repressive regime that has prevented the emergence of a representative democracy and a constitutional government.

Wang readily acknowledges that China’s efforts at economic reform have not been without great benefits. He applauds the first phase, which lasted from 1978 to 1985, for improving agricultural output and the rural standard of living. It is the central government’s more recent obsession with creating wealth in urban areas — and its decision to hand over political authority to local party bosses, who often explicitly disregard central government directives — that has led, he said, to deep inequalities within China. The embrace of a neoliberal market economy has meant the dismantling of welfare systems, a widening income gap between rich and poor and deepening environmental crises not only in China but in the United States and other developed countries. For Wang, it is the task of intellectuals to remind the state of its old, unfulfilled obligations to peasants and workers.

Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to tell me that he dislikes the New Left label, even though he has used it himself. “Intellectuals reacted against ‘leftism’ in the 80’s, blaming it for all of China’s problems,” he said, “and right-wing radicals use the words ‘New Left’ to discredit us, make us look like remnants from the Maoist days.” Wang also doesn’t care to be identified with the radical intellectuals of the 60’s in America and Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally applied. Many of them, he said, had passion and slogans but very little practical politics, and not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with the neoconservatives, supporting “fantasy projects” like democracy in Iraq.

Wang prefers the term “critical intellectual” for himself and like-minded colleagues, some of whom are also part of China’s nascent activist movement in the countryside, working to alleviate rural poverty and environmental damage. Though broadly left wing, Dushu publishes writing from across the ideological spectrum. Wang’s own work draws on a broad range of Western thinkers, from the French historian Fernand Braudel to the globalization theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. “Intellectual quality is important to me,” Wang said. “I don’t want to run just any left-wing garbage.” The magazine has carried abstract debates on postcolonial theory as well as, he claims, some of the most interesting analyses in China of how the government’s urban-oriented reforms have damaged rural society. There are restrictions on what Dushu can publish, of course, and Wang is frank about them. As with all intellectual journals in mainland China, authors and editors at Dushu have to exercise a degree of self-censorship. Articles cannot directly criticize the leadership or deviate much from the official line on subjects that the Chinese government considers most sensitive — Taiwan or restive Muslim and Buddhist minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.

“I get asked in Western countries, ‘How do you define your position?”’ Wang said. “‘Are you a dissident?’ I say no. What is a dissident? It is a cold-war category. And it has no meaning now. Many of the Chinese dissidents in America can return to China. But they don’t want to. They are doing well in the U.S. To people who ask me if we are dissidents, I say, we are critical intellectuals. Some government policies we support. Others, we oppose. It really depends on the content of the policy.”

Born in Yangzhou in the southeast province of Jiangsu, Wang was just 7 and entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The decade-long chaos, which traumatized older generations, seems to have left benign memories for Wang. He remembers being taken by his school to work in the villages for a week or two during the school year. “My generation of urban intellectuals,” he said, with a hint of pride, “is the last to have firsthand experience of conditions in the countryside.”

He counts the 20 months he spent working in factories around Yangzhou after middle school as a valuable experience. In 1977, he took the first university entrance exams to be held after the Cultural Revolution, during which many universities were either shut or would admit only peasants, workers and soldiers. “Thousands of aspiring students,” he reminisced, “were competing for a single place.”

When he moved from Yangzhou to Beijing to begin his doctoral studies in the mid-80’s, Wang found himself part of an even more privileged class. “Intellectuals,” he said, “had been targeted during Mao’s time; now, post-Mao, they were the elite again.” And by then, Wang said, they all agreed on what needed to be done: China had to abandon its “feudal” and socialist traditions and catch up with the capitalist West. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals saw socialism in China as a failure. Consequently, they had, Wang argues, no real debate on whether a Western-style consumerist society could be successfully recreated or was environmentally sustainable in China. The West, especially the United States, was idealized.

Wang first began to develop his own views on contemporary China while working on a dissertation about one of the most admired of modern Chinese writers, Lu Xun (1881 1936). Lu Xun, Wang explained to me, was a writer of the left, but he was very critical of left-wing writers and activists. He criticized Chinese tradition, but was also an excellent classical scholar. He welcomed the Western idea of progress, but was also skeptical of it. The paradoxes in Lu Xun helped Wang to see that Chinese modernity could not be a simple matter of abandoning the old and embracing the new — as it had been for both Maoists and free-market capitalists.

For Wang, the problems associated with China’s uneven development were first identified by the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Wang himself was one of the last protesters to leave the square on the morning of June 4, 1989, as the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army closed in. Normally rather brisk and matter-of-fact, he grew animated as he described in fluent, if occasionally idiosyncratic, English how a “broad social movement” began to grow out of the distress caused by the shock therapy of market reforms. The students demanding freedom of speech and assembly were certainly the most visible. But there were, he said, many more Chinese in the cities — workers, government officials and small businessmen — demanding that the government control corruption and inflation, which had shot up to 30 percent after price controls on basic commodities were lifted.

In the spring of 1989, Wang was a fellow at the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Wang told me that he saw “democratic potential” in the protests and felt obliged to participate even though he had reservations about the students’ lack of “theoretical or methodological coherence.” For Wang, the student leaders recalled the Chinese intellectuals of the early 20th century, who were never more united than when they radically rejected everything in the past. Nevertheless, after the government sought to crush dissent by declaring martial law on May 20, 1989, Wang was drawn deeper into the movement. On the night of June 3, when the tanks and armored cars charged through Beijing, killing hundreds of unarmed resisters and injuring thousands more, Wang was among those assembled in the center of Tiananmen Square. He could hear the gunfire, but some of the more radical among the students still refused to leave.

Wang decided to stay and to try to persuade the students not to sacrifice their lives. “I knew,” he said, “that if the result was violence, it would be disastrous for the whole country.” Wang said that his fears were proved right: violence shrank the space for political debate, and the Chinese government used the period of intellectual silence that followed to begin dismantling more aspects of the welfare state, like the state-owned enterprises, that had long offered cradle-to-grave benefits to workers.

Eventually, the students advocating peaceful retreat prevailed and persuaded the People’s Liberation Army to give them safe passage in the southeast corner of the square. Just before dawn, hundreds of students left the square through a narrow corridor, jostled and taunted by hostile soldiers. Within minutes, the students dispersed. Some of them were arrested and sentenced to long prison spells; others fled to Hong Kong and eventually to the West; many others, like Wang, disappeared for a few weeks.

When Wang returned to Beijing in late 1989, the authorities were waiting for him. “That was the most difficult time for me,” he said. He was asked repeatedly: “What was your organization? Who were your associates?” After interrogations lasting for many months, he was sent to the northwestern province of Shaanxi, where dozens of other young scholars from Beijing were already undergoing — in the uniquely Chinese way — “re-education” by exposure to rural conditions.

In Wang’s case, punishment by pedagogy seems to have been more successful than Chinese authorities could have anticipated. He dates his “real education” to the time he spent in Shaanxi, one of the poorest regions of China. He was shocked by the obvious disparity between the coastal cities, then enjoying the first fruits of economic reform, and the provinces. He was shocked, too, by his own ignorance and that of his colleagues in the 1989 social movement. “We had no idea that the old order in much of rural China was in deep crisis,” he said.

The commune system in Shaanxi was dismantled as part of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and land was redistributed. But the area produced nothing of much value, not even enough food. Deepening poverty led to a sharp increase in crime and social problems; violent conflicts broke out over land; men took to gambling, beating up, even selling, their wives and daughters. Wang lived in a low-lying village where his dormitory was frequently flooded while he slept. Much of his daily work consisted of writing didactic pamphlets warning peasants against gambling and crime; he also worked on the reconstruction of a primary school that had been destroyed by floodwaters. “It was during that year,” Wang said, “that I realized how important a welfare system and cooperative network remained for many people in China. This is not a socialist idea. Even the imperial dynasties that ruled China kept a balance between rich and poor areas through taxes and almsgiving.

“People confine China’s experience to the Communist dictatorship and failures of the planned economy and think that the market will now do everything. They don’t see how many things in the past worked and were popular with ordinary people, like cooperative medical insurance in rural areas, where people organized themselves to help each other. That might be useful today, since the state doesn’t invest in health care in rural areas anymore.”

Many poor people Wang met during his year in Shaanxi saw him as the educated man from Beijing who would tell the mandarins of the central government to send them some help. “I felt burdened by this role,” Wang said. “I couldn’t tell them that I was in no position to do anything.” Wang returned, he told me, from his 10-month exile with a keen sense of the gap between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary people.

During his time in Shaanxi, the influential Journal of Literary Review denounced his research on Lu Xun as an example of “bourgeois liberalization.” Nevertheless, Wang had no trouble returning to academic life.

Wang doesn’t like to talk much about 1989. He complains about the “stereotype” of China in the Western media conjured by Tiananmen. Nonetheless, our conversation about Tiananmen was unusual. While traveling through Chinese cities, I had found it hard to get people to talk about it. When Deng Xiaoping sought to bury the ghosts of Tiananmen for good by calling for speedy market reforms in 1992, he may well have calculated that the prospect of personal wealth — and access to Western brand-name goods — would compensate many newly enriched people for the lack of political democracy. If so, he seems to have been proved right. The largest public disturbance in China since Tiananmen occurred in August 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese tried to buy shares in the newly opened stock exchange of Shenzen.

The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries — part of the “let some get rich first” policy announced by Deng Xiaoping and affirmed by his successors — has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world’s poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs. More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world’s highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials. Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the “right-wing radicals” or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s) and who argue for China’s integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.

Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. Wang, who helped found an academic journal called Xueren (The Scholar) after returning from exile in 1991, was well placed to observe those intellectuals. As they came into greater contact with Western academics and scholars, they became more aware of problems not just in European and American societies but also in post-Communist countries that were trying to bring their planned economies closer to neoliberal models. China’s intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: “Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism.” Which is not to say that the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese — of what Wang dubbed “consumer nationalism.” That, Wang said, was the same kind of globalization that America advocates: “It is really a form of hypernationalism, which is why you hear talk of tariffs and penalties on China when American economic interests are hurt.”

Wang paused and then added: “Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India.”

In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from the southern city of Shenzen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses. In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.

Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. He had spent time working in a nearby factory before college and this, he said, made him feel a particular connection to them. He remembered that his pay had been low — less than $2 a month by current exchange rates — but, he said, what was crucial was that the workers he knew then felt secure in their jobs. “People claim,” he said, “that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants.”

Wang’s story about Yangzhou is not unique. There are many accounts of how local government officials controlling public property have amassed fortunes by privatizing state assets. According to a recent report by the activist Liu Xiaobo, more than 90 percent of the 20,000 richest people in China are related to senior government or Communist Party officials.

For Wang, democracy is not just a simple matter of expanding political freedom for the middle class or creating legal and constitutional rights for a minority already substantially empowered by market reforms. Democracy in China, he said, has to be based upon the active consent and mobilization of the majority of its population, and be able to ensure social and economic justice for them.

Yet for some New Left intellectuals, like Cui Zhiyuan, a close friend and collaborator of Wang’s who teaches political science at Tsinghua University, there is opportunity in the collision of capitalism and socialism. “There is more space here for new ideas,” Cui told me as he described why he had returned to China after many years in the United States. “The capitalist system is fixed in the West, but things are still in flux in places like China and India. We have a historic opportunity to build a better, more just society than the West.” For Cui, it is important to clarify the concepts first. “It is not helpful,” he said, “to see socialism and capitalism as opposed and separate. Both have traveled together in the 20th century. Not just European welfare states, even American capitalism has a socialist component, which was arrived at after compromise with the trade unions.”

In recent years, Cui has found a receptive and powerful audience on an issue that lies at the very foundation of the Chinese socialist state: the collective ownership of property. Liberal Chinese economists argue that private property is sacred and inviolable in a market economy, a radical idea in the Chinese context. In an article he published in Dushu in 2004, Cui challenged this notion, emphasizing the essentially communal nature of property ownership. He cited Thomas Jefferson’s decision to reword John Locke’s principles of life, liberty and property with life, liberty and happiness in the Declaration of Independence.

“Jefferson recognized,” he said, “that property rights emanate from society, not from nature. That’s why there was no specific article on property rights in the U.S. Constitution and it had to be brought in later through the Fifth Amendment.” Cui went on to relate with something close to glee that his article had circulated widely among legislators in the National People’s Congress, China’s Parliament, in 2004. It had helped, he said, to provoke a debate that led the Congress to adopt a compromise amendment to the constitution, similar in wording to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which simply states that no person “be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

This spring it began to become clear that the New Left’s advocacy of a welfare state is being echoed within the Communist leadership, which is fearful of social instability and is keen to consolidate its power and legitimacy. In March, a few weeks before I met with Wang, the National People’s Congress convened in Beijing and unexpectedly became a forum for the first open ideological debate within the party for years. Legislators accused government officials of selling out China’s interests to market forces. Such was the antimarket mood that a bill to defend private property and grant land titles to farmers — one that both foreign investors in China and Chinese businessmen had been lobbying for — was not even discussed. Describing major new investments in rural areas, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, emphasized that “building a socialist countryside” was a “major historic task” before the Communist Party. He also outlined steps to balance economic growth with environmental protection.

A German journalist told me that it was the most left-wing speech he had heard from a senior Chinese leader during his eight years in Beijing: “Even American and European politicians don’t talk about achieving a Green G.D.P.” Wang agreed. He said that he was also pleased to see President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao focusing on relations with Asian countries. “We were too obsessed with the United States during Jiang Zemin’s time,” he said. “We really need to improve our relations with Japan and India. We belong to such old and distinguished civilizations, and we cannot just be simple followers and imitators of America.

“It is a huge achievement,” he added, a smile on his face, “that the premier should openly admit that health care and education is a failure. It has never happened before.” Wang said he thought that the government was sincere about eradicating rural poverty. But he was still cautious. “There has been so much decentralization in China,” he said, “that it is not easy to translate central government policy into action.” Last month, in the first purge of a high-ranking party member since 1995, the central leadership removed the Shanghai party chief on corruption charges, leading to speculation that there would be a reconfiguring of relations between the central government and provincial leaders and perhaps a shift in policy toward shoring up social-welfare systems and stemming pollution. Wang remained skeptical. “The Shanghai case is encouraging at least,” Wang said in a recent e-mail message. “I think there will be some political results from it, but they are results rather than reasons.”

The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: “If we don’t improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable.”

In attacking corrupt local governments, the New Left often seems to want to institute big-brotherly government of the kind authoritarian politicians like. Certainly the growing accord between the central government’s socialist rhetoric and New Left ideas makes many uneasy. Lung Yingtai, a well-known Taiwanese writer and democracy advocate, told me earlier this year that she was wary of the New Left intellectuals, who, she said, appear too close ideologically to the Communist regime. Taking this view one step further, Liu Junning, a popular liberal political theorist who left China in 1999 after being blacklisted by the Chinese government but has since returned, claimed that the New Left was another name for the nationalistic old guard of the Communist Party, which was inspired by hatred of the West.

While this seems an exaggeration, Wen Tiejun, a former government official who runs rural reconstruction projects and is identified as New Left, had attended what he called “brainstorming sessions” with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Typically, intellectuals in Communist countries (Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik, for example) have gained moral authority by assuming a critical stance toward the all-powerful state. How do New Left thinkers in China calibrate their relationship with a state that has imprisoned many of their colleagues and generally shown little tolerance for criticism of the party?

When I posed this question to Cui, he momentarily lost his exuberant manner. “It is a very important question,” he said. “How to deal with the government, both morally and intellectually. This is a big challenge for us.”

Cui does not regard the Communist regime as a “totality.” There were, he said, many different aspects of it, at both the local and central levels. “Almost every day,” Cui said, “The New York Times carries reports of peasants agitating against the Communist government, but if you listen to what the peasants are saying, they are telling the central government that the local government has violated their rights. So even the peasants can see the different aspects of the state, who supports them and who doesn’t.”

Wang Xiaoming, professor of cultural studies at Shanghai University, positions himself to the right of Wang Hui but says that he sympathizes with the New Left’s pragmatic attitude toward the Communist regime. “Civil society is very weak in China,” he said, “and since the government is the most active agent of change, we have to push the government to do what it should do besides pushing the government to give up some of its powers.”

When I met with Wang Hui for the last time, he dismissed any claims about increased New Left influence over the regime. “What we have tried to do is create an intellectual situation in which new policies can be explored,” he said. “I know that many leaders read Wen Tiejun’s article; they also read Cui’s article on property rights. There have been other articles in Dushu that have been equally influential, and I am pleased about this. But we have no other connection with the regime.”

Wang also seems to have no anxiety that ideological convergence with the regime will turn New Left intellectuals into pro-government policy wonks and hacks, part of an old Chinese tradition of intellectuals advising the state. “We look at things from a Chinese perspective naturally, but we also try to think beyond the framework of the nation-state,” he said. “People ask in the West, How could China develop capitalism with an authoritarian state? But that’s ignoring how modern capitalism grew in the West, without much democracy and with the help of imperialism and colonialism. You have to ask whether this unique economic model of the West can be globalized without great wars and destruction of the environment. This is not an abstract issue. China has stopped felling its forests, most of which have disappeared, but some country still has to produce wood for Chinese consumption.”

At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a subject Cui had brought up with me: how the rise of China and India throws up new challenges and possibilities with profound implications for the world at large. “Western societies have been on top for the last two centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made,” he said. “China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the ‘consumer nationalists’ are already saying, ‘America was on top; now we are on top.”’

Wang laughed, and added, “This is not interesting.”

Pankaj Mishra last wrote for the magazine about Tibetan exiles. His most recent book is “Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”

Over one year ago, I met with a tour group from China. What surprised me a bit was that the language they used when they talked about Jiang Zemin was all from Falun Gong truth-clarification materia...

Nothing lasts forever. Empires come and go. Two hundred years ago, China had the largest economy in the world, accounting for maybe 30% of all economic activity . The Chinese economy was 18 times bigger than that of the young United States of America and one and a half larger than Western Europe’s. But the collapse of the Middle Kingdom’s well-organised, bureaucratic world into the anarchy of internecine fighting between warlords and repeated sinister foreign interventions meant that by 1950 this vast country produced only about 4.5% of the world’s gross domestic product and that its own GDP had not grown at all. It was the same as it had been 150 years previously.
It is no wonder that in the face of such a long term, deeply entrenched decline and after the brutal carnage of the Japanese invasion of the country, Mao Zedong encountered no prolonged difficulty as he led his Red Army of communists on the Long March to seize control of the country in 1949.
Mao was a true revolutionary in the worst senses of that word. He developed an iron grip on power by encouraging a cult of personality while engineering frequent revolutions of the emerging social order in which potential pretenders to his throne were flung on the scrap heap. So while there were some years of encouraging economic growth under Mao, there were also several disastrous ones that set the country back. His Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 saw widespread famine, during which some 30 million people died, and three years of a shrinking economy. In 1961 the economy shrank by almost a third . At this level of upheaval economic statistics can be meaningless, but it was as bleak as the worst years of the 1930s Great Depression in the West. Four years later he launched the Cultural Revolution that lasted for a decade at a time when the rest of the world was growing strongly. Its impact was less dramatic but it still seriously eroded the economy and hampered good administration by sending many able bureaucrats to labour camps for re-education.
Eventually the permanent state of revolution took its toll on society more generally. By the end of the Mao era, the Communist Party’s claims to power were looking shaky, noted Australian sinologist Ross Terrill has argued . The serial political gymnastics had so exhausted people that they no longer responded to exhortations to “fight to the end!” The Party was seen to have missed economic opportunities, especially as the rest of the East Asian region had taken off economically after the Vietnam War. The Asian Tigers, as these rampant economies were called, left behind China. As Terrill says: “No patriot could put up with that.”
So China should have celebrated when Chairman Mao finally died as an ailing 83 year old in 1976. Certainly the ruling elite seemed to surreptitiously raise its glasses in a grateful toast to his passing because all his significant allies were quickly arrested and neutralised.
And a new mythology was launched. The Army, in the hope he could galvanise China, brought the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, who had been banished to a farm in the far west by a distrusting Mao, back to power. Over the next two years he consolidated his control, culminating in the now famous Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978 when some limited deregulation of the agricultural sector was agreed to. It started the rapid ditching of Mao’s discredited hotchpotch of an economic programme.
But this was still a communist regime and its Orwellian newspeak rhetoric reflected that. Deng launched the “Four Modernisations” (of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence), which were to be carried out with the “Four Cardinal Principals” of the socialist path, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the CCP and Marxist-Leninist-Mao thought.
Wing Thye Woo in a particularly shrewd OECD paper has argued that this theme was designed to send three messages to the Party rank and file. First, the absence of any mention of political modernisation meant the political legitimacy of the party was to be earned only through economic performance. Second it implied that the leadership of the party should be in the hands of those who deliver economic performance. Third, that the economic reform programme would not only maintain the ideological purity of the party but also its political supremacy in the country.
And since then, Deng and his successors have produced an economic miracle. Never in human history have so many been lifted out of poverty - the World Bank estimates it has been 300 million people, others say 400 million - in such a short time.
Since 1980, China’s economy has grown by 10% a year, a figure unmatched by any other substantial economy over such a period of time. Between 1980 and 1990 per capita GDP doubled, and then it doubled again by 2000. Exports rose from US$18 billion in 1980 to US$591 billion in 2004, a staggering 30-fold increase in 25 years.
Still, there is some dissension about just what China has actually achieved. Some analysts downplay the success, pointing, as former Indian Finance Ministry official K. Subramanian reports, to “fault lines in China’s terrain – corruption, pollution, energy shortage, unemployment, growing inequality and the fragility of the financial system and state-owned enterprises. Some accuse China of making exaggerated claims of high growth, FDI (foreign direct investment) and so on, on fudged data” .
But the suspicion is that these sceptics are motivated by the fact that China’s development does not fit their view of how the world should operate. Many of these sceptics are in the US. In 2003 they accused China of exporting deflation and manipulating its exchange rate, when perhaps they should have been offering thanks and praise for China’s help in keeping US prices low and inflation benign. It was this that enabled the US to push interests very low while the economy took longer than expected from the soaring excesses of the 1990’s dotcom boom. A year later the critics charged that China was ‘overheating’ and might be headed for a crash landing.
Nevertheless, as Subramanian so aptly puts it: “Doomsayers notwithstanding, multinational corporations … are moving into China like locusts from Saudi deserts into the plains of Rajasthan and Delhi.”
It is, sadly, further unnecessary proof that economics is not an exact science.
In reality China’s ruling elite might not be too deserving of fulsome praise because it has probably done no better than muddle through since Deng’s early liberalisations. Muddling through is a political strategy applied universally to satisfy conflicting interest and groups, and indeed is not unheard of in Canberra, London or Washington. In China’s case, some say the muddling through approach is a direct legacy of Deng’s personality. He had witnessed first hand the disasters visited on the country by Mao’s heavy handed, convulsive, centralised planning. He also saw foreign investment as something that could be harnessed to the needs of the party by more quickly lifting living standards and lifting China’s global profile. But he had no “grand design” . In a widely quoted, memorable phrase, he described the ad-hoc approach as “crossing the river by feeling the stones” underfoot.
Another way of describing this approach is that it is gradual, incremental and often experimental. And it is pragmatic, not at all ideological.
It is a radical departure from what has in recent years been characterised as The Washington Consensus – the approach to driving economic development that emerged from within the World Bank in the early 1990s initially as a remedy for the acute debt crisis in Latin America. It was a stringent framework that included fiscal discipline, deregulation, openness to foreign investment and competitive exchange rates. It ignored the social costs of transition, assuming that people would benefit as the economy recovered.
When the International Monetary Fund sought to apply it to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 the model was found wanting. Amongst the developing world of Latin America, Africa and Asia it is discredited. Argues former Time magazine roving editor Joshua Ramo, the reason the Washington Consensus, “seemed sexy and useful at the time was that it was a perfect guide to making an economy attractive to foreign capital. It was exactly what it was written to be, a banker’s list of dream conditions for development” , and, at least in the short term, it had little to do with directly improving people’s lives.
Now the developing world has a singularly successful economy to use as a role model that has ignored the Washington Consensus and determinedly gone its own way. They are increasingly drawn to the Chinese example: what Ramo has labelled, with a touch of management consultant-hype, “the Beijing Consensus”. After more than a hundred off-the-record discussions with people in Chinese universities, think thanks and government, he developed a framework to explain the Chinese approach to economic development.
It’s based on three concepts. First, is that developing countries should by-pass older technologies and get to the leading edge. To date, conventional theory has suggested developing countries kick-start their economies using ‘trailing edge’ (such as copper wires) technology. China insists on the latest innovation (such as fibre optic cables) to create change that “moves faster than the problems change creates”. And it recognises that it cannot bring the newest technologies to the whole country at the same time so it concentrates on establishing clusters.
Secondly, the Beijing Consensus has it that since chaos is impossible to control from the top a new set of tools is needed. Ramo says it looks beyond measures like per-capita GDP and focuses instead on quality-of-life, “the only way to manage the massive contradictions of Chinese development”. This demands a development model where sustainability and equality become first considerations, not luxuries. This is one reason why academic disciplines like sociology and crisis management are the vogue of the Communist Party think tanks at the moment, he argues.
Finally, the Beijing Consensus contains a theory of self-determination, one that stresses using leverage to move the world’s really big economies that may be tempted to tread on your toes. In application, it seems to be represented by a rush of trade activity that will cement ties with a wide range of countries and thus make it difficult for a single power, such as the US, to isolate China.
To economists, the Beijing Consensus sounds threadbare because it leaves far too much unsaid about how to manage the economy. Perhaps Ramo tacitly accepts its limitations when he says, “If it makes you feel any better, the Chinese themselves are often confused” - the leadership as much as the peasantry. “In fact, the single thing that is most characteristic of China right now is that it is changing so fast that it is impossible to keep track of what is underway” .
He notes that Jiang Zemin, in his farewell to the 16th Party Congress in the autumn of 2002, used the word “new” 90 times in a 90-minute speech. Jiang argued it was likely that what people think they know about China is wrong or over-simplified to the point of irrelevance, blasted away by the shock of the new.
Ramo’s schema also hints at looking at the Chinese leadership through rose coloured glasses. Nevertheless there is no gainsaying that China has fashioned its own approach to development that seems at sharp odds with the Washington Consensus, even if we can’t quite yet put our finger on how it has all worked. Such an evaluation will have to await a more open government that will allow access to all records and historical documents. Then, much like what has happened in Russia since President Boris Yeltsin opened the state’s archives, we will have a better idea of who decided what, when and how.
But as leading management consultant McKinseys have said: “Finding fault with China’s approach to economic development is easy: cyclical overcapacity, state-influenced resource allocation, and growing social inequalities are just a few of its shortcomings. But it’s hard to see how any other model could have given the economy such a powerful kick start.”
What Beijing has achieved particularly impresses Indians, who have been searching for their own route to drag millions upon millions out of poverty.
“Signs of extraordinary growth dazzle tourists, especially Indians, visiting China”, Subramanian says , and what astonishes the visitor from the Indian subcontinent is that it has all been accomplished in the last two decades. And what strikes them as being central to the phenomenal growth is “the extraordinary emphasis on investment in infrastructure”.
And that admiration has sifted through to the top echelons of Indian society. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in early 2005 his country should look to China as a role model as it tries to step up economic growth rates and grab a greater share of global trade.
"When we look at a country like China, what it has achieved in the last 20 years, I think that's the role model that we have to look at," Singh, a Cambridge-educated economist-turned-politician, said. "We must move away from the paradigm of incremental growth to a paradigm of exponential growth and growth into uncharted territory." It was in many ways a remarkable statement from a leader of the Congress Party, which for so much of its history has believed a socialist path to growth was more appropriate.
Yet it is too early to talk of a Beijing Consensus or at least any such talk is wildly overstated. There might more likely be an emerging Beijing Way. There is no “model” to follow because there is no underlying theory unifying what has been done. Terrill says “Deng’s Way” was to achieve a desired result “without regard to image, theory or elegance”.
Wing quotes an illustrative joke doing the rounds in Deng’s heyday about how he managed the politics of his reform agenda. Hu Yoabang [Mao’s chosen successor] and Zhao Ziyang [Deng’s choice, at least until he was sacrificed after the Tiananmen Square massacre] accompanied Deng to a summit meeting with US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The three groups decided to go for a drive in the country, each group in its own bus. When the buses reached a fork in the road, the leading American bus turned right and the Soviet one turned left. Hu, the driver of the Chinese bus, asked Deng (the fabled backseat driver) for instructions.
Replied Deng: “Put the left indicator on and turn to the right.”
A fly, nicknamed ‘spiritual revolution’ [an allusion to one of Deng’s earlier aphorisms about reform that ‘When you open the window, flies will fly in’], flew in through the open window and into Hu’s eye, causing him to break suddenly and hit his head against the steering wheel – killing him instantly. Deng immediately ordered Zhao into the driver’s seat, to get rid of the dead weight of Hu and to catch up with the American bus.
The story supposedly illustrates Deng’s wisdom: the consequences of accidents are borne by the driver at the wheel not the one in the backseat. Policy mistakes committed by the backseat driver are passed over as implementation mistakes by the one at the wheel.
The OECD has argued convincingly that the overriding characteristic of the Beijing Way until recently was compromise between two competing views on how the economy should be run amongst the ruling Chinese elite. The two key factions with the opposing views realised that any repeat of the intense, damaging brawling of the Cultural Revolution would threaten the Party’s legitimacy. Thus initially Deng and then Jiang oversaw economic policy that drew on elements of both programmes.
The two main factions have been described as the conservative reformers and the liberal reformers. They had vastly different ideas on how the economy should be organised. The conservatives could be generally be summed up to favour a ‘bird cage’ economy – an analogy used by long-standing politburo member Chen Yun (a wily politician who in 1962 escaped the consequences of Mao’s wrath by being conveniently sick and who died in 1995 at age 90) – in which the bird represented the economy and the cage the central plan. The liberal reformers saw the chief barriers to economic development to be the suppression of the market and isolation from the international economy.
The debate between the two factions had to be conducted within the confines of Marxist ideology, since it would be politically difficult for the Party to drop its long-standing commitment to it. It would have been a damaging and perhaps fatal admission of error, amounting to an acknowledgement of 30 years of economic incompetence by the ruling party. Thus the liberals argued (as today’s leaders still argue), perhaps disingenuously, that the economy was at the primary stages of socialism in which the economy is mobilised out of a feudal phase.
Deng used his back seat driving skills to forge compromises between the two groups to drive the economy forward. He would typically attack “bourgeois liberalism” and “feudalism” in the same speech while pushing economic deregulation without fanfare. But while Deng was keen on economic reform he was strongly opposed to “spiritual pollution” of the body politic, even though he accepted a few flies might get in through the window opened to economic reform.
Thus China’s path to robust economic growth drew on elements of both groups’ programmes. So, for instance, farmers were given land to work as they pleased, but the land was to be redistributed after 15 years. Deep integration into the world economy was initialled allowed only for firms in the four Special Economic Zones – all of which were in the south, far away from ideologically pure Beijing. Rural residents could establish industrial enterprises outside the central plan but they had to be collectively owned. Dual track pricing was set for many goods. Firms had to deliver a set quota to the state at predetermined prices, but anything extra could be sold on open markets. They had to sell a quota of foreign earnings to the government but could sell anything above that on the open market; and so on.
Whenever political circumstances allowed, economic deregulation was broadened. The exchange rate was unified in 1994; prices controls have now largely been dumped.
Most recent impressions are that the country has moved on from this economic policy waltz of two steps forward, one step back. The hard-liners have lost their influence. Unlike Deng, current leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao – known as the fourth generation of leaders - played no part in the Long March nor were they prominent in the Mao-era ructions, so they do not have the weight of communist history on their shoulders. And there are fewer and fewer Chinese people of Deng’s and Mao’s vintage to recall the earlier blunders.
With the principles of the market now accepted, much emphasis is placed on more balanced development. And China is pushing with all its force in the international arena, signing trade deals with anyone who will have them, it seems. The compromises they are now forced to make in economic policy would find resonance in Canberra, London or Washington. They are grappling with how to balance growth and the environment; how to keep pace with and fund infrastructure requirements; how to deal with the social issues of rapid economic change and an aging population.
And the most pressing issue in mid 2004 was the need to slow down growth. The rapid expansion has strained infrastructure. Premier Wen Jiabao put in place administrative measures to put a lid on how much credit was available. This drew some loud squeals from provincial officials indicating managing the growth will be the current leadership’s most immediate economic challenge. Too little and momentum is lost, causing resentment in the vast numbers of people who have their feet on the first rungs of a better material life. Too much growth would threaten the whole edifice as the economy hit an infrastructure brick wall through, for instance, more widespread power blackouts, water shortages and transport gridlock.

It has used joining the World Trade Organisation in December 2001 as a key driver of internal economic reform and in the past twelve months has been pushing for bilateral trade deals with other countries and regions.
In 2004, Beijing launched “peaceful rise” as the foundation of it foreign policy. Its essence is to convince the world that China’s ascent does not threaten peace and then to cement trade ties, treaties and investments.
By early 2005, China was in talks with 27 countries across the world exploring the possibility of signing bilateral free trade deals. Chinese officials say they expect these to “open new horizons for China’s economic growth.” In general, bilateral trade agreements offer lower tariffs, fewer non-tariff barriers and better market access for services and capital than available under the umbrella membership of the World Trade Organization.
China and the ten-member ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and the Philippines) have agreed to sign an FTA by 2010 with its six more advanced economies and by 2015 with the rest. It has started talks with the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), the five-member South African Customs Union (South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia), with Chile and New Zealand. Feasibility studies for possible free trade deals are under way with Pakistan, with East Asian neighbours Japan and South Korea and with Australia.
China’s drive to secure special trade relations in undoubtedly strategic. The more integrated into the world economy China becomes, the more it needs to be sure it can secure raw materials. It also sees these deals smoothing the path for further foreign investment in both directions. It has recently been buying stakes in resource projects as a key strand of the policy.
It also sees the trade deals as a way of bypassing trade disputes, most often in the form of foreign companies accusing Chinese exporters of dumping. Vulnerable companies complain that Chinese exporters get state aid that effectively subsidizes the prices they charge. Under WTO rules dumping – selling goods below true cost - is not allowed. The Chinese believe that granting of ‘market economy’ status by trade partners would remove the legal basis of many of the formal complaints of dumping by recognising that the Chinese economy had transformed itself into one driven by market conditions. Though as we shall see later, they may be wrong about this. Alternatively, they may see granting of such status as an important symbolic point in their journey to modernisation.
Whatever the motivation, getting its trading partners to grant it market economy status now seems to be the Holy Grail for China’s trade negotiators.
The principal reason that so few dumping allegations have succeeded is that it is cheaper to produce in China. For example, about 750 million pairs of sunglasses a year are produced in the southern city of Wenzhou, seven hours south of Shanghai, at an average price of 50 cents each. It exports eight billion pens a year, some for as little as one cent each. It makes electric razors that export at $3 each.
Chinese officials claim these prices are not subsidised by the state and indeed that may be so. Whatever the precise role of the state, it is certainly the case that cheap labour keeps these costs low. The Australian Financial Review quotes an example of the Tiger lighter company in Wenzhou in which skilled workers assemble 100 lighters or more a day for an average wage of between $140 and $170 a month. That translates into a labour cost for each lighter of about 5 cents, maybe about a tenth of what an Australian or other western company could do it for.
As China develops, wages will rise and this cost advantage will erode. But even given China’s meteoric growth and the kick on this has given to commodity and oil prices, it will surely take at least a generation for labour costs to get close to Australian levels.
But right now it is driving large sections of the economy and is behind the remarkable surge in exports and it seems likely to be a key factor in trade discussions, just as it seems to permeate nearly all discussions about China in the US.
And China will continue to pursue market-based enterprise reforms, Ma Kai, Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission told the World Economic Forum in late 2004 . Chief among these are improvement of corporate governance, the promotion of the non-state sector and the protection of property rights. It will also put into practice regulatory reforms to tighten the supervision of markets and credit.