Surprisingly, it hasn’t. Weibo was only returning a few hundred results for “Neil Robinson” (the British pedophile). A few Chinese

Wesley Lowe and Neil Robinson

outlets reported it – mostly using Xinhua copy – and TV reports appeared to stay very brief, sticking just to the facts and forgoing much commentary.

Compare that to about a year ago when a British man appeared on video to be sexually assaulting a woman in Beijing and, in a separate incident, a Russian cellist had the audacity to put his feet up on the seat in front of him on the train. These two incidents caused a media/Weibo uproar and were the talk of China for a few weeks. Many believe they even precipitated a 100-day crackdown on illegal foreigners in Beijing that followed soon after.

So why did these two events call people to arms and create a xenophobic shitstorm, yet people don’t seem especially bothered now by two cases of verifiable foreign sexual predators infiltrating Chinese schools?

I wondered the same thing back in October when there was another cluster of bad laowai that, on the surface, seemed to be much worse than those that had preceded the 100-day crackdown. There was a drunk Russian who rampaged through Beijing, an American who allegedly raped a 16-year-old Chinese girl in Shenzhen, and a Frenchman who attacked random people in Guilin. Again, very little uproar compared to the British rapist and Russian cellist. Why?

I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but as Apple can now tell you, highly-coordinated media/internet campaigns aimed at riling up anger at a foreign target can, and most certainly do, happen in China.

Anyone in the media can tell you that how much play a certain story receives depends on a lot of factors, many of which are totally random (who happens to see and retweet it, what else is happening in the news, what angle the story is initialy covered from, etc.). So it is possible that, for whatever reason, these pedophiles and the bad laowai cluster in October simply failed to reach that critical mass needed to get wide coverage – a critical mass that the British rapist/Russian cellist somehow managed to attain.

But consider what was going on in the news just prior to when the British rapist video went viral in early May last year. The fallout over Chen Guangcheng’s escape was still going on, and that had come right on the heels of Bo Xilai’s sensational purging – both events that shook the Communist Party hard. There was a lot of talk about how these incidents might disrupt the upcoming power handover. It was a period where a bit of outwardly-directed nationalism would be very convenient.

When the British rapist video came out, it was heavily promoted on major video sharing sites. Then when the Russian cellist video was released, the two events were held up together across many different outlets with an “arrogant laowai” angle. Beijing Morning Post even seemed to believe the Russian cellist warranted front page coverage.

Maybe media were directed to sensationalize these things, or more likely, they were simply allowed to pounce on a topic guaranteed to generate good ratings. I’ve written before on how we probably have censorship to thank for media xenophobia not being as bad as it could be in China. To make a contrast, South Korea last year gave us the much derided “exposé” entitled “The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners.” Then back in 2007, when a single foreign pedophile was discovered to have taught in Korea, there was a media uproar and soon after the country tightened its visa policy.

In China we now have not one, but TWO foreign pedophiles. That constitutes an epidemic in any country’s media, but the fact that the Chinese press has shown so much restraint and not played the foreign menace card in this case suggests to me that it wasn’t necessarily their choice. Xenophobia is useful for the government in small periodic doses, but it definitely has its negative consequences and can easily get out of hand. At this point in time, there doesn’t seem much to be gained from such an uproar.

In many ways though, I’m disappointed these pedophile stories haven’t received more attention.  Foreign sex offenders coming to teach in China are actually a significant problem. And that problem is just the tip of the iceberg of a much greater social epidemic the whole of China faces.

I actually personally knew the Nanjing pedophile involved in the current case when I taught with him a few years ago (I wrote about him here in 2011). When a co-worker discovered he was a sex offender and informed the coordinator of the school, she did nothing for over a week. Only when the co-worker threatened to call the police did she reluctantly fire the man.

The co-worker still ended up tipping off police, who it now appears did absolutely nothing (this was in late 2009 and the pedophile has apparently still been in China the past 3 years).

It may be a bit hasty though to totally blame these authority figures for their reluctance to take action. The concept of pedophilia is largely unknown and willfully ignored in Chinese education, and this has tragic consequences. But the kids I worry about most aren’t the ones in private international schools. They’re the ones in rural Chinese public schools.

Every few years a huge scandal surfaces involving a Chinese teacher sexually abusing his students. In 2005, a teacher raped 26 fourth and fifth graders. In 2009, a Hunan teacher raped 11 students aged 9 to 14. Then just last year, a government official who also taught at a vocational college was arrested after he raped as many as 100 girls – some as young as 11.  You rarely hear about pedophiles in China until they’ve racked up a lot of victims, and that’s pretty telling.

China has the same social stigma attached to sexual abuse that many countries do, which prevents victims and their parents from coming forward. On top of that, China has almost no sexual abuse education for kids or parents, so the concept and frequency of pedophilia isn’t very well understood by the public. It’s totally feasible that even when it’s reported to some kind of school administrator or authority figure, they’re genuinely unsure of what to do. On top of that, in rural areas, many parents leave their kids behind with grandparents while they go out for migrant work, making it even harder to deal with sexual abuse incidents.

But there are also some much more sinister dynamics in play.

The last thing you want to do if you’re a Chinese parent is risk upsetting people who have power over your child’s education. That alone keeps many from pressing the issue. If you do go to the school administration their first inclination is to put a lid on the incident (this is usually what’s found to have happened in the aftermath of these scandals). They’ll pressure you to stay quiet and say they’ll move your child to another teacher or transfer the teacher to another school. Then some hush money seals the deal.

If you’re in a rural area and you go straight to the police, ultimately they’re accountable to the town Party secretary, who may be on cozy terms with the school administration. The last thing he wants is a disruption to “social harmony” or negative attention brought to his town. You’ll probably get the same carrots and sticks there: hush money and pressure to stay quiet, coupled with the implication that your case really has no legal standing anyways. Only if you figure out that other kids have been abused by the same person and you band together with their parents are you likely to ever make the case see the light of day.

These foreign pedophiles probably should have been pounced on harder by the media; not from an angle emphasizing their foreignness, but emphasizing the child abuse epidemic and the conditions that attract creeps like these to China. There are some now calling for mandatory background checks on foreign teachers in China. That’s probably a good start, but that’s just scratching the surface of all that needs to be changed.

• News organizations may not cite foreign media without permission.
• News organizations must file with authorities when setting up an official Weibo account and assign a person to insure that only kosher topics gets tweeted.
• Journalists should offer proper guidance of public opinion under the principle of focusing on positive propaganda.
• People without journalist permits are barred from interviewing or reporting under the name of a news organization.
• Online news sites should not publish any reports from a news source, freelance writer or NGO before the facts are verified.

Nothing too earth-shaking here, and these directives are hardly enforceable. However, they do present a clear message: The Party’s grip on the media will not be loosening one bit. If anything, it will tighten.

For years now there’s been speculation over whether Xi Jinping (and the rest of the new government) will maintain the status quo, be reformist or even head in the opposite direction and roll back reforms. This is an oversimplified debate. These things will happen and are already happening.

These new media directives are one of many recent examples of an overriding principle that’s hardly changed since 1979: Nearly everything is eligible for reform and a Communist Party retreat, except for the “Three Ps” – Propaganda, Personnel and the People’s Liberation Army.

Over the past few months I’ve spoken with a number of experts in fields ranging from gay rights to the environment who are very excited about the new leadership, and with good cause. Everywhere you look in China there seems to be the beginnings of actual reforms, or at least hints that the rigid status quo is going to change for the better.

Measures have been put in place to make leaders less pompous and overindulgent. After 24 years, public discussion has been re-opened on Hu Yaobang. Behemoth state monopolies are being put in check. Homosexuality is moving away from being officially taboo. It appears the model of “GDP growth ahead of all else” is being dismantled. China is improving its environmental transparency. A raft of long-overdue economic reforms are kicking off. The list goes on and on.

It’s still too early to say for sure, but this could very well be a new spring for civil society and long stigmatized groups.

But before we break out the champagne, let’s consider a few other recent signals from our bold new reformers. Last year Xi Jinping ordered more “thought control” in universities. Several times over the past year, Xi has commanded the PLA to remain “absolutely loyal” to the Communist Party above all else. There was the infamous Southern Weekly Incident illustrating an increasingly overbearing propaganda department. In the past year, two foreign correspondents have faced de facto expulsions for the first time since 1998, while new foreign journalists are waiting over a year to get their visas in some cases. And last, but certainly not least, China’s internet censorship apparatus is becoming ever-more sophisticated at weeding out “harmful” content.

So what’s the deal? Are these new leaders reformers or not? Obviously, it’s complicated, but you can make a pretty good prediction on the likelihood of a given reform just by establishing whether it threatens the Party’s absolute control over who educates the public, who holds any kind of political power, and which way the guns would face in the event of an uprising (AKA – Propaganda, Personnel, People’s Liberation Army).

Since the 1990s, China’s communist mandarins have religiously studied the downfall of the Soviet Union. The conclusions they’ve reached are that democratizing, opening the press and losing control over the military opened floodgates that resulted in the regime’s collapse. Xi Jinping gave a private speech to this effect to Party leaders in Guangdong last December on what was supposed to be his nod to Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour.”

Some have contrasted Xi’s private instructions to remember the Soviet Union with his efforts to align himself with Deng Xiaoping’s reformist legacy, but the two are hardly contradictory. Although he was unquestionably a real reformer that forever changed China for the better, Deng was also a firm believer in upholding absolute Party control over the Three Ps.

Xi, like Deng, recognizes that the Three Ps are non-negotiable in order to keep continued Party rule, and by extension (in their minds), a stable environment for other reforms to happen.

In some ways it may seem like the new government is more amenable to opening up the press. Xi has vowed to go after both “the tigers and the flies” (top leaders and low officials who are corrupt) and hinted that this involves more freedom for the press and the online public. But there will always be a cage over the press. If that cage gets bigger (and there’s been no meaningful indication that it actually will), it will be carefully designed to let reporters roam only in areas that serve the Party’s self-preserving interests. These new directives suggest that that the vetting process for those even allowed to roam in that cage is getting stricter.

So this is what we’ll need to get used to. Virtually everything outside the Three Ps is eligible for reform, and that’s good news. There’s still a lot of room for making China a better place within those confines. But the Three Ps will absolutely remain under complete Party control, barring some massive national movement that presents a crisis even greater than Tiananmen.

So far it seems that opening up and reforming in the allowable areas means locking down the three non-negotiables even more tightly so as to ensure the approved reforms don’t bring any unpredictability. So feel free to get your hopes up in many arenas. Just also recognize what’s not likely to ever happen.

As the toll consistently climbs higher, the government just as consistently increases its security presence, locks down certain areas and institutes a raft of Orwellian regulations. The thinking seems to go that more repression will somehow end protests against repression.

It’s natural to stand back from afar and think how ridiculous and self-defeating the government is being. But this is thinking very big, when it’s perhaps more useful to think small.

About a year-and-a-half ago I was speaking with an acquaintance that has a mid-level position in the Communist Party propaganda apparatus (not high, but he has been on speaking terms with Politburo members). At that time there had been a string of Tibetan self-immolations. Naturally, the Party blamed the Dalai Lama, and by extension, his Western anti-China backers. In this routine narrative, the Tibetan people are uniformly happy unless misled by these forces who want nothing but to see China collapse.

I asked my acquaintance if anyone in the Party leadership actually believes this narrative – that there’s really this vast underground conspiracy that’s single-handedly causing all the Tibetan unrest.

He replied, “They believe it because it’s 100% true.”

At the time his response shocked me, but it was incredibly enlightening. This man is very intelligent. I have no qualms about saying he’s much more intelligent than myself. He’s often spoken about the need for transparency and reforms in the Party and harshly criticized nationalists. But on this issue, from the bottom of his heart he bought the Party line.

This, I believe, is because joining the Party in a context where you’ll actually wield power within the government or any of the bodies under its direct control is much like joining a religion. When joining, the key is to be incredibly humble and praise the Party to almost a farcical level (See this music video on joining the Party, which, according to some Party member friends of mine, isn’t much of an exaggeration on what you have to say when applying).

Once you’re a member though, there are many things up for debate; like how much democracy there should be, or how much media freedom. But like religion, there are certain areas where suspending your disbelief is crucial; not only to be accepted within the group, but also to justify membership to yourself. Questioning these fundamental “truths” amounts to blasphemy.

Here are some of these truths for the Communist Party:

• Taiwan, Tibet and every other disputed territory must be an inalienable part of China. Anyone who believes differently simply can’t understand the indisputable evidence in China’s favor, or they have ulterior motives.
• While it may not be absolutely perfect, the Communist Party is the only group capable of leading China’s social development and defending its national honor. Any system that doesn’t involve its overriding authority would lead to chaos and humiliation.
• Minority regions like Xinjiang and Tibet have truly benefited from and been civilized by the Party. Therefore, any opposition to the Party within these regions is the result of a conspiracy of agitators with ulterior motives (usually backed by “hostile outside forces”).

It’s much like people in the West who, in spite of extensive education and otherwise impeccable reasoning capability, can believe dinosaurs and humans co-existed at the dawn of time 6,000 years ago. Believing otherwise would knock down the core pillars of the doctrine they’ve based their lives on. Being part of this group, by definition, requires them to suspend their disbelief on many issues.

There are of course people within the Communist Party’s ranks that have their doubts about the “unquestionable truths,” but they keep those doubts securely locked away in the back of their minds. Letting these doubts venture outside would subject them to severe censure from their peers, or worse.

But unwaveringly believing these things isn’t just a matter of self-preservation within the Party. More importantly, it’s a matter of being able to sleep at night.

Like the heavenly rewards and social circles that religion offers, being a Party member with authority provides many famous benefits. Even those who aren’t corrupt can count on a very comfortable life. But being able to enjoy those benefits (or the promise of them) requires belief in the fundamental truths.

Very few people within the Party will think, “Well, what I’m doing with my authority is evil and wrong, but by going along with the crowd, I’ll get a boatload of money and women!”

No. More likely it’s, “What I’m doing with my authority is absolutely correct and righteous. And because of that, I’m entitled to this boatload of money and women.”

Few people are fundamentally evil and totally embrace the fact that they’re evil. It’s all a matter of rationalizing. Believing in those three fundamental truths is critical for powerful Party members in being able to rationalize their place in life.

So imagine a group of leaders sitting around a table deciding what to do about the Tibet self-immolation issue. The instinct is to double down on security and “stability maintenance.” If anyone disagrees, they’ll find themselves very isolated. But more likely, nobody will disagree. Admitting that the repression is wrong and that it’s government policy leading to the immolations rather than hostile outside forces could be a slippery slope toward all three of those fundamental truths crumbling.  And that would make it a lot harder for the people around that table to rationalize the power and very comfortable lives they’re leading.

Upton Sinclair said it best. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

At first glance I assumed the uproar was because CCTV would devote so much attention to the execution of foreign criminals; attention like Timothy McVeigh and Ted Bundy received when crowds gathered outside their prisons and cameras were rolling to capture the signal that they were dead.

That angle made sense. China devoted no such attention to the executions of its own serial killers like Yang Xinhai and Zhang Yongmin. It seemed to be yet another Opium War allusion to give the impression: “Vigilant CCP shows no mercy to foreign aggressors who attack China’s sovereignty and humiliate its people (especially through the drug trade).”

I soon realized though that that wasn’t what the uproar was about. People thought that “live broadcasting the execution” meant CCTV would literally bring cameras into the chamber and air the lethal injections.

For those familiar with the version of China gossiped about by grannies in Florida getting their hair done, that might seem conceivable. But for those familiar with the actual China, that proposition should sound completely absurd.

Contrary to popular belief, The People’s Republic of China has rarely put their executions out on display (vigilante Cultural Revolution killings aside). Sure, it frequently paraded condemned criminals around town and had execution rallies in stadiums right up through the 1990s. There was even a TV show until last year that interviewed death row inmates, sometimes just minutes before execution. But when it’s time to do the deed itself, criminals have almost always been taken to a secluded location away from public eyes.

In 2004, Boxun did a report on the death penalty in China featuring interviews with law enforcement who’d been involved with executions (Boxun is by no means reliable, but in this case there were very gruesome photos that seem to back up the interviews).

One man who’d been involved in “half a dozen” executions up until 1995 using the traditional bullet to the head method said, “There are no spectators at the scene of the execution.  We maintain three rings of security.  Outsiders are kept far away, such that they cannot even hear the gunshot sounds.  On our way back, nobody says anything because we are overwhelmed by the feeling that life can be so cheap.”

As satisfying as it may be for some to see a foreign aggressor get what’s coming to him, why would authorities regress below something considered too socially risky even by 1995 standards? Chinese censors routinely cut fictional violence from movies and TV – even to the point of disallowing the use of a knife to threaten someone – lest any fragile minds be influenced and disrupt social harmony. So why on Earth would the most viewed channel on the most viewed medium in China show a real person being killed live for millions of children to see?

It wouldn’t. Period.

All this uproar began with a piece in South China Morning Post titled “CCTV ‘to broadcast live execution of Mekong River massacre drug smugglers.’” John Kennedy, who wrote the piece, later said on Twitter: “CCTV said, unambiguously and in plain Chinese, it’s going to live broadcast the execution. I’m not going to put words in its mouth. If it turns out CCTV is deliberately misleading the public to boost viewership (and in a way or two I hope it is), that’s a story in itself.”

Indeed.

In the end, just about everything leading up to the executions was shown – from prepping the prisoners to transporting them – but cameras stopped short of entering the chamber. Doing so would have been socially risky, and therefore impossible; not to mention gratuitously vile on a level that even the Ministry of Public Security wouldn’t stoop to.

Were the bits that were shown morbid, exploitative and inhumane? Sure. Was it all shamelessly done as a political statement with unsettling xenophobic undertones? Absolutely. Was it warranted in order to deter such brutal criminal acts in the future? I’m sure a lot of people will make that argument. And I’m sure you’ll be reading elsewhere about all these things in the coming days, but all I can say is nobody took the enormous leap of showing the execution – something a lot of people who should have known better seemed to think was a real possibility.

[Correction: This previously referred to the Boxun report as being from 1994. It was actually from 2004.]

For the past week I’ve been in my girlfriend’s Shandong hometown staying with her aunt, uncle and 17-year-old cousin Emily.

Emily is a puny 90 pounds with the horrible eyesight common among Chinese youth.  If given the chance, she’ll talk to you for hours about soap operas and schoolyard gossip.

Two-and-a-half years ago she and her family came to visit us in Nanjing. It was a kind of celebration for passing the end of middle school test and getting into the town’s best high school. Since that trip, Emily’s life has been hell.

This summer she’ll take the Gaokao. So each day she goes to school from 7:30 AM to 10:00 PM with a two hour lunch. She gets Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings off…usually.

Every night at 10:15, her mom waits anxiously at the front door. When Emily arrives on her electric bike, she leans on the horn in annoyance. Her mom bolts out the door to open the courtyard gate. No matter how fast she makes it out, Emily is irritated. She’s running on fumes already and vents at the routine setback of having to wait ten seconds to get in the house.

When she gets in the front door, her mom hustles her over to a warm footbath she’s prepared. Any precious second that’s wasted is a second Emily will lose from study or sleep. But once she sits down to her footbath, she has a few minutes to unwind. It’s the one window where I can talk to her. The topic, of course, is how miserable her day was.

After we chat for about five minutes, her mom hands her a textbook and I take my cue to head off to bed. This is just the beginning of Emily’s night.

The time that she goes to bed varies. On a rare good night, it’ll be a little after midnight. I once woke up to use the bathroom at 2:30 and found her passed out on a book. “I’m just taking a little rest,” she looked up and uttered pathetically, as if she needed to justify the catnap to me.

If she managed to get all her homework done, her mom will rouse her at 6:30 AM – at which point they’ll bargain over whether Emily can have a few more minutes of sleep. Emily never wins this negotiation. Once she’s up, she’ll do a little morning studying, make quick work of her breakfast and be out the door (This is what I’m told anyways. I’ve never actually been awake to see it myself).

Normally, the entire family treats me like a prince. They’ll bend over backwards to make sure I don’t lift a finger while I’m there. Meals are placed before me and trips are made across town to get any little thing they think I might want, no matter how strongly I object (I like to think this is just because I’m a guest, but realistically, I know my foreignness plays a role). All this princely treatment ends abruptly though when it conflicts with the schedule of the Queen.

After subtracting the commute, Emily has an hour-and-a-half at home for lunch. I’ve been told ever so politely (but in no uncertain terms) that I’m to be out of the house during this period. Emily doesn’t have time to be distracted by me. She’ll scarf down lunch in a matter of minutes and then go straight to bed for some precious afternoon Zs…unless of course she still has unfinished homework.

After several more hours of drilling and practice tests, she’ll come home and repeat. As I head to bed I tell her, “Don’t work too hard.” I’m the only one doling out such advice.

My girlfriend has persuaded Emily’s parents that the brain needs time to relax, and now they’re relatively easy on her. During her free Saturday afternoon, she’s allowed to watch soap operas and talk with me for a little while before being directed back to her study desk. Many of her classmates though have their faces stuffed in their books at every waking moment or have an outside tutor arranged during this time.

Teachers and parents are perfectly aware of how much stress this puts on the kids. They try to occasionally organize activities to relieve the pressure and allow some semblance of socializing. But these occasions are too little and too contrived. Recently they had a class dinner to celebrate the New Year, but it was more like being let out of the dungeon to have a nice dinner with the other captives. Yes, the students were happy to have it, but there wasn’t exactly a festive atmosphere. Everyone spent the evening complaining to one another.

Two years ago during the Spring Festival, after Emily’s first semester of high school, she was already feeling the heat. One night while everyone else was visiting a neighbor, she broke down and started sobbing on my shoulder. “There’s so much pressure,” she said. “Everyone wants so much from me. I don’t know if I can pass. If I don’t they’ll be so disappointed in me.”

Considering how high the suicide rate is for Emily’s demographic, I was glad to be the foreigner disconnected from her world that allowed her to uncork what she’d been bottling up.

When I think back to my high school life – the parties, proms, sports, pointless time-killing shenanigans – it kills me that Emily won’t have any of it. She’ll just have memories of soul-crushing routine.

But the lost memories, the stress, the bodily harm – it might be worth it if there were something worthwhile at the end of the tunnel; something truly enriching that sprouted from all that time and sacrifice.

Yesterday, while studying, Emily asked me when you should say “It’s my pleasure” and when you should simply say “My pleasure” in English conversation. It seemed like a pretty pointless question. There may be a very subtle situational difference, depending on who you ask, but in what scenario could that very narrow distinction possibly matter? Sure enough though, there was a “correct” answer to the multiple choice question.

I flipped through the textbook and found pages full of similar hair-splitting drivel that would in no way actually improve someone’s ability to communicate in English. I asked Emily what exactly they teach her in school all day. “We write many passages,” she said. “And then they tell us how we should write it better [for the essay portion of the Gaokao].”

“You know, it’s not like Mo Yan,” she continued. “He tells very interesting stories, but we can’t write anything like that. If I write what I want, I’ll fail.”

Zhongnanhai blog has done a good post saying that China watchers and correspondents have a tendency to over-interpret events like this. The author predicts it will be “a great story for a while until it fizzles out and becomes nothing more than an infrequently-viewed Wikipedia page.”

For the most part, I agree. But there are some aspects I think are pretty significant in the long term. So let’s iron out what this incident is and what it’s not.

What It’s Not
1) A bold stand by Southern Weekend against government censorship
The heart of this issue is that Guangdong’s propaganda head Tuo Zhen allegedly doctored Southern Weekend’s New Year’s editorial and sent it to press without the paper’s editors being informed. This is a highly irregular slap in the face to the paper. It’s one thing to tell editors they can’t print something. It’s very different though to put (highly embarrassing and inaccurate) words in their mouths that they only learn about when they pick up the paper. Southern Weekend is standing up against this disrespect and circumvention of the status quo. It’s not rejecting the idea of government censorship.

2) The first domino toward a mass free speech movement or a Tiananmen-like showdown.
The Telegraph ran a piece saying this “is arguably the most open and widespread display of dissent since the Tiananmen Square protests almost a quarter of a century ago.”

Maybe that’s technically true, but it oversells the significance of where we’re at now. When Wukan residents expelled their local government in late 2011, it was considered a huge deal and people (including myself) were wondering if it was a preview of things to come – either of further uprisings or a model for peaceful government accommodation.

It was neither.

There’s about a 90% chance the Southern Weekend standoff will fizzle out one way or another with a mild one-off solution. Protestors have been tacitly allowed to demonstrate so far, suggesting the government still isn’t entirely sure what to do. Guangdong’s new party secretary Hu Chunhua, as of now, is the favorite to replace Xi Jinping as China’s president in 2022. If he gets blood on his hands or gives an obvious victory to free speech agitators, his hopes could get dashed pretty quickly. It’s very unlikely there will be a violent crackdown or an agreement to ease media controls, but more likely some minor private concession (or effective threat) to the paper that only applies to present circumstances.

Simply firing Tuo Zhen would placate Southern Weekend and end the situation, but the government’s propaganda directives have suggested this isn’t going to happen. It would set an undesirable precedent (though not a disastrous one– as some have suggested. I think it still remains a last resort if the paper refuses to back down or protests strengthen). If and when this event fizzles out with some kind of uninspiring resolution, everyone will go home unsatisfied – but not furious. Then we’ll move on to other issues.

However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be significant takeaways.

What It Is
1) A surprising signal that many of China’s youth are primed to push for change
A few months ago when I was at the massive anti-Japan protests, I looked around and wondered if I’d ever see the day when Chinese would make similar emotional cries in public for something not on the government’s agenda. Seeing how firmly that angst was focused on Japan, I thought it would be at least several years. If you’d told me on that day that within four months, a sizeable crowd would gather to call for press freedom in China, I’d have said no way.

Southern Weekend staff may not be pushing for an outright end to censorship, but their supporters certainly seem to be. You can bet

Via Tea Leaf Nation: “One woman looked fear in the eye, and said, ‘cheese’”

that more than a few parents across the country have been warning their kids to stay the hell away from any hint of subversive activity. Getting involved with something deemed “anti-government” can blot a permanent record and ruin career prospects. Yet, students across the country are voicing support to Southern Weekend online WITH THEIR FACES SHOWN. And even more unbelievably, hundreds showed up to protest IN PERSON against media censorship – one of the most unshakeable government priorities.

This is much different than your routine “mass incidents” over things like land grabs and pollution. These people in Guangzhou have no immediate stake in protesting censorship. They have very little to gain personally and a lot to lose. That indeed takes cojones that have rarely been seen since 1989. These protestors may be a very small, unrepresentative sample of China’s youth, but it’s a sample I didn’t realize existed yet.

But perhaps I should have realized it. When I got to China five years ago and spoke with young educated people about media censorship, some would say they opposed it, but more would voice support. They’d say things like “If the truth were revealed, China would collapse” or “Poor people must support the leaders if we’re to keep developing. They wouldn’t if the media could criticize the leaders.”

These days I hear fewer and fewer people say things like that. Thanks to Weibo, people are realizing that much of the things swept up in the censorship system aren’t just abstract embarrassments. They’re concrete things like poisonous food, pollution, land grabs, railway accidents and flood deaths – things that have a real impact on public safety and well-being; things that could be avoided if publicized.

2) Another sign of “de-facto democratization”
Weibo also probably means a more democratic resolution to the standoff then there would have been a few years ago. In 2003, Southern Metropolis Daily (also from the Southern Media Group), embarrassed Guangdong officials with reports on detention camps and SARS. This ended in a clampdown that saw two editors slapped with lengthy prison sentences on trumped up charges.

This is the traditional way of dealing with such brazen newspapers. But this has become prohibitively risky (perhaps for the first time with the unfolding events). It’s not impossible that a Southern Weekend reporter will end up in jail, but with as many sympathetic eyes as there are on the story, it’s not a realistic possibility. And the fact that the propaganda department is deigning to negotiate with the paper is a sign that it no longer feels able to just unilaterally bring down the hammer.

If the hammer does come down eventually and the paper is shut down or editors are fired, then the government will find itself at an all time credibility low and will meet strong public backlash. I don’t at all rule out this possibility. As stupid and self-defeating as that would be, the government has time and again stubbornly clung to repressive tactics that are 20 years out of date. Doing so here wouldn’t bring the masses to the streets, but it would bring them one step closer to ultimately dropping faith in the system entirely.

So no, this event in all likelihood won’t be a watershed for those hoping to see quick political reform. But it does represent a shift, however slight it may be, in the public’s consciousness and what it’s willing to tolerate. Even if the government is unwilling to engage in meaningful political reform, it’s already being pushed on an irreversible course of de-facto reform.

What’s especially raised eyebrows about the move is that Buckley had nothing to do with the offending report, while David Barboza, the author of the piece, had his visa renewed without issue. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs isn’t commenting on why it denied the visa, so any explanation is pure speculation. However, this is something I’ve thought for months could happen.

This year, without a doubt, has seen more muckraking from foreign journalists than ever before. Besides the NYT piece, Bloomberg reported bombshells like the wealth of Xi Jinping’s family and the enormous power descendants of the Eight Immortals still wield. And of course, western media reporting was integral to the fall of Bo Xilai.

These reports have proven it possible to dig up dirt on leaders at the very top, so one has to imagine other media outlets (or the same ones) are already working on more of these exposés. There are other very high leaders (who will remain nameless here) with rumors of extensive wealth and links to corruption that are likely even more vulnerable than Wen or Xi. It’s probably only a matter of time before somebody unacceptably high gets implicated in actual wrong-doing.

This leaves the Party with two choices: Address the issue systematically and accept the inevitable heightened scrutiny, or chop at the symptoms and try to scare people away from revealing the truth. Chris Buckley’s ouster makes pretty clear which choice is being pursued.

But why Buckley? It’s probably not as random as it seems. To expel David Barboza would be too explicit and make him a martyr. However, ousting someone at NYT unrelated to the damaging report sends a clear signal to the Western press, yet denies it the satisfaction of running headlines like “Journalist Behind Wen Exposé Expelled From China.”

But perhaps an even more compelling reason for ousting Buckley is the classic dissident’s dilemma. When Barboza started working on his Wen story, he must have known that it could result in his expulsion from China…or worse (Mike Forsythe received death threats after his piece on Xi Jinping). Yet he consciously accepted that risk and went ahead anyways. What’s harder to accept though is risking other people’s necks.

This is a technique the Party wholeheartedly embraces. It’s why Liu Xia (Liu Xiaobo’s wife) has been under house arrest for years despite not being charged with any crime. It’s why Chen Guangcheng’s family, right down to his six-year-old daughter, was held with him and virtually starved during his house arrest.

Dissidents and journalists accept (and often relish) the dangers of their work. Were David Barboza to be expelled, he’d have a pretty impressive claim to fame for the rest of his career. It’s much less impressive though to see a colleague pay for it by having to uproot his wife and young daughter from their home of 12 years.

If this is the case though, the CCP has (for the umpteenth time) completely miscalculated western journalists. This type of expulsion is the most it can do to scare them without causing a serious international incident…and it won’t work. Melissa Chan’s expulsion earlier this year obviously had no chilling effect and it’s unlikely Buckley’s will either. Instead, it’s nothing more than another bullet fired by the Party into the foot of its soft-power dreams.

Update:  Buckley was quoted in SCMP saying, “It’s a complicated situation, and I am not sure if you will use the word ‘expel’. I did not. My visa expired today and I did not receive a new visa. The situation is that I was working for Reuters until October, and then I took a new job with the New York Times. The visa that I was on was granted when I was working for Reuters, and I was in Beijing waiting for the Chinese authorities to grant me a new visa and accreditation to work for the New York Times. As of today, there was no word of approval.”

It’s within the realm of possibility that this was a bureaucratic trip up rather than a purposeful expulsion, and some folks at NYT have said they’re optimistic Buckley will be allowed back in. But given that NYT pushed the government to settle the issue before Buckley’s visa expired, the obvious political implications of the situation and the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s refusal to comment, it’s very hard to imagine there wasn’t intent to make Buckley leave.

Washington Post did a great piece on the directive and the context, but I’d recommend also reading the full document. Basically, the government is concerned about Christian missionaries evangelizing on Chinese college campuses.

“Foreign hostile forces have put even greater emphasis on using religion to infiltrate China to carry out their political plot to westernize and divide China,” the document says. “Under the guise of donating funds for education, academic exchanges, studying and teaching in China, extracurricular activities, training, student aid, etc., they ‘market’ their political ideas and values, roping students into becoming religious believers.”

In a nutshell, the second part of that statement is fairly accurate, and the first part is fairly scary. A few months ago I did a piece on foreign evangelists who use English teaching as a means to enter China and proselytize. While researching, I spoke with nearly three dozen people including missionaries, their co-workers and students. I’d also previously encountered these kinds of evangelists personally while teaching.

As the document suggests, there are indeed thousands of these people in China; many of whom conduct activities that would raise legal issues even in Western democracies. I heard stories of teachers requiring students to attend Bible studies in order to pass their class. Many used Christian teaching materials and held English classes based on Biblical themes. I even heard about a teacher requiring his students to put on a play about the seven deadly sins that featured Jesus lugging a crucifix.

But a few things jumped out at me from this document. The first was how the government still fundamentally misunderstands what motivates Christian missionaries. To some degree, this is understandable. Chinese officials tend to be pragmatic worldly people with little exposure to religion. The idea that someone would spend so much time and resources changing others’ beliefs for no tangible reason makes no sense. That these missionaries feel duty-bound to a supernatural deity and believe they’re literally saving their converts just doesn’t register. Clearly, there must be some devious political agenda beneath that pious surface.

There are indeed those like Bob Fu who have explicit regime-change goals, but they seem to be a small minority. Most seem to consciously avoid even mentioning politics. They may expend disproportionate effort on students with political ambitions, but this is more in hopes of getting religious policy relaxed, not overthrowing the entire system.

The second thing that jumped out was how the government still so fundamentally misunderstands youth that might be inclined to convert. The document gives prescriptions for dealing with them, saying:

“Adhere to using the theory of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics to arm students’ minds. Extensively launch activities for the study, teaching, publicizing and popularization of core socialist values. Strengthen propaganda for and education in Marxist views on religion, the Party’s principles and policies for education work, and the relevant laws and regulations of the state.”

If you’re a standard human, you probably barely made it through that paragraph without falling asleep. And that’s just a small taste of the years of Marxist and political education Chinese students are required to take. The thing is, many of the young Christian converts I spoke to specifically cited the emphasis on empty Marxist dogma as something that pushed them to explore religion. So using Marxism to combat evangelism is like using a Ben Stein lecture to convince a kid he should go to school instead of play video games.

But for all the document got wrong about motivations, it did seem to have a firm grasp on the methods missionaries tend to use and where universities go wrong.

It tells schools to offer intriguing activities for students and provide mental health services. It says advisors should hold “extensive heart-to-heart talks” with students, help “guide their emotions” and “dispel confusion.” By doing these things, they won’t be so inclined to “cozy up” to foreign missionaries (who tend to be much better at offering emotional and academic support than the schools).

It then goes on to suggest strategically planning recreational and academic events during religious holidays. Indeed, Christmas and Easter are high season for conversion. Christmas is a perfect opportunity to talk Jesus. And in one case I found, a foreign teacher invited students over to watch an “Easter movie” that turned out to be The Passion of Christ.

It warns of academic exchanges organized by Christian groups. Some of these are set up to get Chinese students overseas for conversion, then returned to spread the gospel at home. Meanwhile, foreign missionary students are the exchanges that come to Chinese schools.

After previously thinking central government leaders were simply clueless about these things, I was surprised to see how much they seem to be aware of. But one thing that struck me while researching this story was that, in spite of China’s inhospitable stance on religion, these things tend to be tolerated even more here than they would be in the West at the local level. And the document seems to tacitly acknowledge that.

It says, “If serious problems arise because responsibilities were not performed or work is not properly done, you shall seriously investigate and look into the matters and call to account the responsible members and relevant leaders.”

The whole document repeatedly admonishes administrators to get off their butts and actively fight off foreign missionaries. The language was very similar to the routine pleas for corrupt officials to get clean. This, I think, is because this issue, like corruption, has a rather large gulf between central government goals and local cadre interests. And it may actually involve corruption.

The way many of these missionary teachers work is through larger organizations or churches based overseas. Working with donations, they take salaries from the schools that are a fraction of what independent teachers would be paid. In addition, they’ll sometimes donate teaching materials, student scholarships and outright cash aid to schools. Two sources I spoke with reported that one organization they know of even sponsors trips to the US for high university and local education officials. The organization wouldn’t confirm or deny this.

Then miraculously, when students or other teachers complain about proselytism to lower administrators, there doesn’t tend to be much action. Whatever vague national threats these “infiltrators” present are subservient to more tangible local interests.

Going beyond just the issue of evangelism though, the document also basically proved something I’ve started to realize in recent months, but have had a hard time fully accepting. It’s that the idea of “the US-led Western countries” conspiring to use things like religion to “infiltrate” China so they can “westernize and divide it” isn’t just jingoistic propaganda used for political ends. This is something that A LOT of people in China’s government seem to actually believe.

This document was issued by the United Front Department (a branch of the powerful Central Committee) and given only to senior officials. They were then to communicate it orally to their subordinates in order to hedge against the document being leaked. In other words, this wasn’t propaganda intended for the masses. It was an internal Party memo. That the same jingoistic language you’d see in Global Times was used here shows that the Party actually believes its conspiratorial fear-mongering, and that’s kind of scary.

Not coincidentally, when you ask someone in China what their favorite movie is, they probably won’t name a Chinese film. In fact, most of the time they’ll name one of two movies: Forrest Gump or Shawshank Redemption. The movies depict military defeat, racism, corruption and perversion of justice – some of the darker aspects of 20^th century America. Yet the final products show nuance and complex characters that inspire and win international acclaim. In other words, they’re soft power victories.

But what if the US had had its own SARFT with similar social and political objectives?

I don’t believe Shawshank Redemption could have been made. An innocent man being sent to a prison with officials dabbling in corruption and murder would simply be untenable. However, I do think Forrest Gump could have been made…with some major revisions. So based on leaked censorship instructions and years of watching Chinese movies, here’s hypothetical American SARFT’s verdict on the film:

1. In the beginning it’s revealed that  Forrest is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest – former leader of the illegal terrorist “Ku Klux Klan” organization. This is utterly contrary to the theme of the film.

2. The doctor tells Forrest that his back “is as crooked as a politician.” Remove this statement.

3. When bullies throw rocks and chase Forrest there’s no indication that they were caught and punished for their actions.

4. The bullies’ truck has a Confederate flag license plate. This is an illegal secessionist symbol and must be removed.

5. Forrest is denied from entering a normal school because his IQ is too low, which his mother refuses to accept. This distorts reality. America’s education system wouldn’t allow any student to be placed where they don’t belong. Furthermore, Forrest’s mother sleeps with the principal in order to secure Forrest’s admission. This is vulgar and unrealistic.

6. When African-American students enter the University of Alabama, some white students make remarks like “coon” and “nigger.” This gravely harms America’s image and may have negative social effects.

7. Regarding the scene in Jenny’s dormitory where she places Forrest’s hand on her breast, the effect of the length, imagery and sounds of this bed scene are strong, and bring about strong harmful sensual stimulation to people.

8. When Forrest meets President Kennedy he says that he “has to pee.” This is very offensive and disrespectful toward an American leader. Furthermore, Forrest discovers a picture of Marilyn Monroe in Kennedy’s bathroom. This alludes to false rumors and gravely distorts history.

9. When Bubba is describing his family’s history of serving white people, it alludes to slavery.  This may gravely hurt the feelings of the American people.

10. “Playboy” is an illegal pornographic publication that shows a naked woman. It must be removed from the film.

11. When Forrest arrives to Vietnam, American soldiers are shown drinking beer and barbequing, not taking their duties seriously. This gravely violates history and harms the image of the American military.

12. Forrest exposes his buttocks to President Johnson. This is disrespectful and absurd.

13. The Washington DC anti-government “peace rally” suggests American involvement in the Vietnam War was unjust. The theme and tone of the rally must be revised so that it doesn’t oppose the government. It also depicts convicted criminal Abbie Hoffman. It must be adjusted so that he’s portrayed in a more negative fashion and not wearing an American flag shirt.

14. The “Black Panther Party” is an illegal organization. Its depiction may stir up animosity among ethnic groups and have negative social consequences.

15. The scene after Forrest meets President Nixon alludes to the “Watergate Scandal.” Remove.

16. Filthy words appear repeatedly in the film and should be deleted.

17. The Jenny character is overly-complex and sends mixed messages. On one hand she appears kind and elicits sympathy, but on the other hand she does illegal drugs and has loose virtues. Good and evil must be clearly distinguished.

My mom asked if I’d “seen that”. I had, but it didn’t register what she was referring to.

“See what?” I asked.

“That little boy,” she replied. “He was all alone there without his parents.”

“Oh yeah,” I said dismissively.

“We’d better go back and make sure he’s ok,” she said as she pulled onto the next street to turn around.

“K…” I answered, just starting to realize what the big deal was.

By the time we got to the boy, another woman had also pulled over to see what was up. We all walked around with the child looking for his parents until eventually we called the police. An officer showed up within ten minutes and took the boy to the station.

As soon as I saw that the other woman had pulled over, it immediately sank in what I’d just done…or rather, what I’d failed to do, and it made me sick. Had I been alone in the car, I would have kept on driving. I was ashamed because it’s not something I would have done just a few years earlier. China had desensitized me.

Last week five young Guizhou children were found dead in a dumpster from carbon monoxide poisoning after they’d climbed in and burned coal to stay warm. They’d been missing for three weeks after running away from home. Someone apparently even took a picture of them sitting in a public place the day before their deaths, but still, no social safety net caught them in time.

The five children (maybe) via Sina Weibo user @公民李元龙, via Beijing Cream

I wasn’t the least bit surprised. People wrote heartfelt messages of sorrow and disgust online, but I imagine if they’d walked by the kids sitting alone on the street themselves, most would have just kept walking by. It pains me now to say it, but I’ve done it dozens of times myself.

It’s not that people in China are heartless. The sight of children running around alone is just so depressingly common that it’s barely enough to raise an eyebrow. Sometimes they’re child beggars being exploited by a guardian watching from around the corner. Sometimes they’ve just been left to run about by parents who’ve never been warned by the always-harmonious media about China’s epidemic of child kidnappers.

These unaccompanied children are ubiquitous and there’s been very little done to educate society that this isn’t a normal or acceptable thing. Unfortunately, when I entered this society I gradually forgot this myself.

People have been quick to blame the parents, the school principals and local government officials for letting these kids slip through their fingers. Indeed, they all bear some responsibility, but so do all of us who’ve ever seen a child alone and kept walking. Most of all though, responsibility lies with the system that’s allowed us to become desensitized to something that’s clearly very disturbing.

In each of these golden opportunities, she’s lobbed disappointing softballs like, “Please tell us what policies and plans the Chinese government will be implementing in cooperation with Australia.”

ABC caught up with the reporter, Andrea Yu, and found out that she’s not quite a foreign reporter, but works for the majority Chinese-owned AMG, which “has close links to Chinese government-controlled media organizations and supplies Beijing-friendly radio programs to community stations in Australia.”

So it seems she’s little more than a CCP shill at the congress.

I think this raises some interesting issues about foreigners working for state-sponsored Chinese media. Here were a couple reactions that caught my eye on Twitter:

With a notoriously competitive media landscape in the West, getting a foot in the door through Chinese state media is a route many aspiring journalists take. I’ve been there. Indeed, several fantastic China correspondents have been there.

But when you work for state media, at what point do you cross a line where your journalistic integrity is compromised.

Some people would say it’s the moment you do any kind of work for them. This was certainly the theme of much of the hate mail I got when writing for Global Times (where I was once accused of “prostituting myself to a propaganda rag”). The thinking here goes that foreigners lend legitimacy to these biased and often misleading organizations. Any reporting that they do, whether it’s flattering or critical of China, is strategically used in order to meet broader propaganda objectives.

I completely disagree with this assessment. Despite what a lot of people seem to think, official outlets like China Daily, Global Times, CRI and even CCTV push the envelope quite often and are full of great journalists. Having foreigners in these organizations makes that envelope get pushed even further and improves the entire industry. And if a foreigner, from the bottom of their heart, believes they’re being completely honest in their reporting – whether it’s flattering or criticizing the party line – then I can’t see a problem with that.

It’s true that if you print something supporting the party line in Global Times, it’ll inevitably be held to a completely different standard than if it were in New York Times, but that’s the breaks. I don’t think journalistic integrity has been damaged in the least.

But Andrea Yu seems to have gone beyond that as a complacent party shill. Her role was to give the appearance that officials were bold enough to take a foreign reporter’s questions, when in fact, they knew they’d be getting a chance to flatter themselves. In this sense, Yu caused people to be misled – especially the Chinese who will never learn about her connection to the government. This is the opposite of what journalism is supposed to be.

Yu seems to be aware of her role. She told Wall Street Journal, “[Officials] know my questions are safe … I’m representing a Chinese-Australian company, so I need to ask questions they want me to ask. Believe me, I would have other questions to ask if I could.”

So she’s laid down her sense of journalistic duty and restrained herself from asking what she and her viewers would actually like answered. She’s too eagerly fallen into her role as a stooge, and thus, compromised her credibility.

But it’s easy to sit and condemn from afar. Being in her shoes is undoubtedly a much stickier situation than it seems. Here’s an excerpt from her interview with ABC:

STEPHEN MCDONNELL: But what do you think about it though? Do you feel that you’re being used in that way?

ANDREA YU: Well, it’s been a bit difficult because there are layers. When I first entered my company, there’s only a certain amount of understanding I have about its connections to the government. I didn’t know it had any, for example. So I find out more and more as time goes on. It’s quite difficult as a foreigner, when you first, at least for me in the last month, to know exactly because you get told things not all at the beginning, so that side of it is challenging.

This comes off as kind of air-headed and oblivious, but I understand the point she’s making. Some of my experiences and those of several acquaintances at Chinese companies (not just media) were just like this. It’s not as if you’re told up front what your real job and unethical responsibilities will be. It comes in ways that aren’t immediately obvious and in steps so small that it’s easy to descend into something you’d never intended. What seem like opportunities (ie – covering the biggest political event in China) are in fact situations where you’re being exploited. By the time you look around and realize what you’re doing, you’re in too deep and it’s hard to climb back out without seriously disrupting your life.

Yu could put her foot down with her bosses and go with her journalistic instincts (like the intrepid reporters over at Chinese Teenagers News), or better yet, take her services to another outlet. But that’s much easier said than done. Imagine doing that with your own job. And then imagine it’s in an ultra-competitive industry where you’re not sure you’ll get another break.

As Tom Hancock pointed out, Yu is in the state media coal mines. I doubt she ever made a conscious decision to head down the especially dark tunnel she ended up in. Unfortunately, she did end up there and compromised her credibility. But I think more than anything else she’s a victim of a cold system that’s all too happy to push people around like pawns in order to mislead the country and the world.

What do you think? At what point does a state media job become a liability for budding foreign journalists rather than an asset?

I’m always disappointed when this happens; not only because of the eagerness to jump on a largely bogus narrative, but also because it overshadows what I think are the much more interesting nuances of factory life in China. Yes, the hours are long, life is hard and conditions aren’t enviable, but there are deeper issues than that.

Last week I recorded a podcast (listen here) with Liu Zhiyi, a former intern from Southern Weekend, who got a job at Foxconn’s Longhua factory for 28 days in 2010 in order to do undercover reports.

One of the big misconceptions resulting from the sweatshop narrative is that workers are routinely forced to work ungodly hours. In fact, the workers themselves usually demand as much overtime as they can get. While at Foxconn, Liu described this saying, “For the workers desperate for making money, overtime is like ‘a pain that can breathe.’ Without it, the days without money make them ‘suffocate.’”

They’ve travelled so far from their hometowns to work that any idle time not spent making money is seen as a waste.

The conditions are another misconception. At Foxconn, they’re pretty good – especially compared to other factories. (James Fallows recently posted some photos from the same factory Liu worked at – here, here, here and here).

Liu said about the factory, “I have entered a system, and the system can provide everything that I need for my body. We have gymnastics, swimming pool, exercise room… The only thing they don’t provide is time.”

Because of the long hours (which remember, the workers desperately want and will seek elsewhere if they don’t get), it’s easy to lose touch with some simple human needs. Liu explained how roommates are always turning over or working different shifts, so it’s hard to make friends (or even learn people’s names). And because different departments are usually skewed one way or the other toward a single gender, it’s even harder to find a lover. He said the resulting emotional imbalance and conflicts over girls are often what spark fights in the factory.

The thing that surprised Liu most though, and what he sees as the biggest problem, is how workers seem completely puzzled about their futures. Earlier he wrote: “They often dream, but also repeatedly tear apart their dreams, like a miserable painter who keeps tearing up his drafts. ‘If we keep working like this, we might as well quit dreaming for the rest of our lives.’”

He says they’re almost all focused foremost on making a lot of money, but they don’t know how much is enough or what the next step is after making the money. They hope to move up in the world through their hard work, but they often don’t know where the path is, or if there even is a path. This, he says, could be a major problem in the future if society and the government can’t address it.

Anyways, Liu was very insightful about his time in the factory. I hope you’ll listen to the full podcast.

If one word could sum up Hu’s presidency, it would be stability. In policy and in character Hu has remained ever-wary of deviating from a steady, low-key approach to leadership. He lacks the cultish devotion enjoyed by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and the charisma of his predecessor Jiang Zemin. Hu’s approach has seen a near quadrupling of per-capita income in China, but little in the way of political reform.

“Without stability, nothing could be done, and even the achievements already made could be lost.” –Speech on the CCP’s 90^th anniversary, July, 2011

Earlier this year, Hu’s comparatively liberal faction of the Communist Party seemingly won a victory with the fall of left-wing icon Bo Xilai. Hu has tended to keep Mao Zedong’s legacy and the more socialist tendencies of the Party at arm’s length. But he still pays homage to the ideology that the communist government was founded on.

“We never take Marxism as an empty, rigid, and stereotyped dogma.” –Speech on the CCP’s 90^th anniversary, July, 2011

However, “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” – perhaps more accurately known as authoritarian capitalism – has seen major side-effects come along with economic growth. Foremost among them is official corruption. Under a system that bars deep scrutiny of leaders through media or free speech, Hu has repeatedly pleaded with party members to keep themselves clean.

“Leading cadres at all levels should always maintain a spirit of moral character and be aware of the temptations of power, money and beautiful women.” April, 2010 in keynote speech wrapping up campaign aimed at educating officials.

Reigning in the excesses of economic development was the theme of Hu’s signature “Harmonious Society” socio-economic doctrine, which aimed to make Chinese society more balanced and just. However, wealth inequality has soared under Hu to its highest levels in PRC history.

“Without a common ideological aspiration or high moral standard, a harmonious society will be a mansion built on sand.” -Speech to high-level party members June, 2005

Another worry of the Hu administration has been that foreign culture and ideology may be usurping the domestic agenda. On several occasions he’s called for China to promote its own values and push for greater soft power at home and abroad through “cultural reform.” Earlier this year he wrote a strongly-worded essay on the issue, which was critically received by many foreign observers.

“Hostile international powers are strengthening their efforts to westernize and divide us. We must be aware of the seriousness and complexity of the struggles and take powerful measures to prevent and deal with them.”– January, 2012 – in the Communist Party’s magazine, Seeking the Truth

When speaking to foreign audiences though, Hu is always careful to downplay the threat of China’s rise and stresses that the nation is only interested in “peaceful development.”

“China’s development will neither obstruct nor threaten anyone but will only be conducive to world peace, stability and prosperity.” – November, 2005 to Vietnamese National Assembly

As the commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military, Hu has increased China’s defense budget by double-digits nearly every year he’s been in charge. Some have speculated that this is simply to keep the guardians of China’s authoritarian rule happy. Others have worried this may be part of a greater effort to exert military influence in Asia and enforce claims over long-disputed territories.

“[The navy should] accelerate its transformation and modernization in a sturdy way, and make extended preparations for military combat in order to make greater contributions to safeguard national security and world peace” –December, 2011 in speech to  Central Military Commission

For the entirety of PRC history, the most significant territorial conflict for China has been Taiwan. When the pro-mainland KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou became president of the island, Hu redirected cross-straits relations from a course of tense provocation to one of engagement. Much to the consternation of hawks within the Communist Party and army, Hu opened more economic and people-to-people exchanges with Taiwan. The move tacitly took a military-enforced re-unification off the table for the foreseeable future.

“I sincerely hope that our two parties (KMT and CCP) can work together to continue to promote the peaceful and steady development of cross-strait relations, and make efforts for the bright future of the Chinese nation,” –Congratulatory remarks to Ma Ying-jeou on his election as chairman of the Kuomintang , July, 2005.

Beyond his professional life, little is known about Hu as a person. His image is meticulously crafted as a tireless servant of the people who devotes his life to conducting field inspections, speaking with peasants and meeting with foreign diplomats. A leaked US embassy cable from 2009 opened a window into the choreographed world of Hu by recounting how a seemingly spontaneous chat with a rural farmer was actually planned days in advance – with the farmer being told not to shave so as to appear more rustic. Under a heavily controlled media, going off-script is rare and details about leaders’ personal lives are scant. A journalist was once even fired for revealing that Hu is diabetic.

“We must adhere to the principle of party spirit in journalism, holding firmly to correct guidance of public opinion” –June, 2008 in speech dealing with news media

However, in 2011, one on-camera encounter was received a bit differently than planned. A recipient of subsidized housing told Hu that she paid only 77 yuan each month for her two bedroom home in Beijing – a city where rapid inflation sees even the humblest of homes now fetching thousands of yuan in rent. Hu replied by saying:

 “77 yuan each month – are you able to cope with the rent?”

Skeptical audiences mocked the obviously-scripted conversation, asking where they too could find such unbelievably cheap housing.

Perhaps the closest Hu ever came to making an actual gaffe though was in 2010 when a Japanese elementary school student asked why Hu wanted to become chairman. His answer raised eyebrows with those familiar with China’s power structure:

“Let me tell you. I have never wanted to become chairman. All the people of China chose me to be the chairman, so I could not afford to let them down.”

My girlfriend and I were riding our bikes past a group of four women and one man in their early-50s. As we went by, they stopped talking and just stared at us until we’d gone about 20 meters past. We then heard the man loudly say, “Look at the two guizi.”

Guizi, meaning “devil” or “ghost,” is a derogatory term for foreigners. It was a popular fixture at the recent anti-Japanese protests. I’ve read about foreigners (especially in the 80s and 90s) frequently being called this but I’d never actually heard it directed at me. I’ve experienced hostile comments that were racially-motivated before, but never been called a guizi…at least not to my face.

I turned my bike around and confirmed with my girlfriend that she’d heard it too. I can’t say I really felt hurt or offended, but surprising people with the fact that I’ve understood them talking about me is one of my guilty pleasures in China. In this instance, it could be especially interesting.

I pulled up to the group and asked in Chinese, “Who called us guizi?!”

Everyone looked to the man (confirming to us that it had indeed been him) and burst into the laughter that’s typical when people realize that the monkey can speak.

I got louder, showing I wasn’t amused, and zeroed in on the man.

“Did you call us guizi?!”

He held an uncomfortable smile and looked to the other women as a few other neighbors stuck their heads out to see what was happening. I softened my tone and stayed straddled on my bike a good five meters away so as to avoid the appearance of physically intimidating him.

“I heard you call us guizi. Would you like to call me that directly now?”

“You didn’t hear clearly,” he said, still with the uncomfortable smile.

“Ah, now that you realize we understood you, you’re afraid to directly call me that?” I said.

“Where are you guys from?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

“Nevermind that, we both heard you say guizi. You all heard it too right?” I asked, looking to the women.

They came to his aid, repeating his line that we just didn’t hear clearly.

“Then what did you say?”

“I should call you sir and madam,” he replied.

“Oh, now you become very polite. You should say that, but you didn’t.”

“You didn’t hear clearly.”

“Whatever. You should be careful. We guizi aren’t stupid.”

I rode away, satisfied that his cowering had been sufficiently highlighted to his neighbors.

As a white American male born to a middle-class family, I can’t pretend like prejudice (or anything else for that matter) has disadvantaged me in any way. Pushing the issue and purposely making a man lose face who likely has been disadvantaged was probably immature and unnecessary. And I probably came off just as badly as he did to the other villagers, reinforcing the foreign bully stereotype.

But still, I’m having a hard time regretting it. After being surrounded by racist bile at the anti-Japanese protests recently, it was very enlightening to see how quickly this man changed his tune when confronted face-to-face by the butt of his racism.

Two things were especially reinforced on this trip. The first was the second-class feeling that farmers have, and seem to mostly accept.

It’s a bit cliché now to talk about “the diversity of China” but when you spend even a little bit of time in the countryside – which still comprises about half the country’s population – you get a feel for how there really are (at least) two Chinas. This isn’t simply a natural cultural occurrence. It’s cemented into law.

Every Chinese citizen must have a Hukou (household registration) that ties them to their place of birth. It affects opportunities in everything from education and healthcare to employment and it’s divided into two distinct categories: urban and rural. Obviously, those with urban Hukou are at a much greater advantage.

Traveling around these villages, it was apparent that there’s often an inferiority complex among rural farmers when meeting urban dwellers. At one point my (Chinese) girlfriend and I stopped to rest alongside a group of farmers harvesting corn. We heard someone say, “Ah, look at their skin. They must be urban citizens.” (They then debated as to whether I was urban Chinese or foreign. They eventually came to the correct consensus).

In conversations, the farmers were very deferential to both of us, sometimes almost in awe. One young woman told my girlfriend how smart she must be. She lamented that she didn’t know anything.  In several instances, even when I wasn’t with my girlfriend, she’d ask people where the cheapest hotel was. They’d tell her things like, “The hotels here are really too poor for you. You should go to [the nearest city].”

The obvious gap in urban-rural incomes is of course a big part of this. But the mere existence of separate rural and urban hukou wreaks of the “separate but equal” American segregation policies of the early 20^th century. The 1954 Supreme Court decision abolishing it correctly stated that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal. When one group is obviously disadvantaged compared to the other, separating them through law resigns them to a self-fulfilling expectation of social inferiority.

The second thing I felt on the trip is how separated these rural farmers tend to be from the items that typically dominate the news cycle about China. I met several who had either faint ideas or no idea about things like Bo Xilai and the Diaoyu Island dispute.

This was the height of corn harvesting season, so farmers were especially busy, but I got the sense that the average rural farmer’s daily schedule goes something like this:

Sunrise-noon: Farm work
Noon-2:00: Afternoon Siesta
2:00-Sunset: Farm work
6:00: Dinner
7:00: Watch provincial dance/singing/dating program
8:00: Bed

You’ll notice nowhere on that schedule is anything like “debate one another on the merits of Communist Party rule” or “scour Weibo for juicy tales of official corruption.” Most have simple lives that focus on extracting the most they can from their two-acres of land. Political developments outside those two-acres are non-issues.

Most young people in their 20s and 30s go out to do migrant work and undoubtedly have more complex lives than that. What I found interesting about this trip was that there were a lot more of these people helping with farm work than I’d seen in the past. I’m not sure how much that has to do with it being the holiday and peak harvest season and how much is a result of the economic slowdown.

We made a point of talking to several of these young people, but none expressed too much concern. Even if the economy stagnates and jobs are hard to find, eventually something will come along. They can help out their older parents with the farm work until then. At least that’s what they seem to believe.

These are just some simple observations from one rural corner of Shandong. I don’t mean to generalize them completely to all of rural China, but they come from the type of area foreigners don’t tend to go to. When pondering China’s social/political/economic future, it’s important to remember that nearly half of China lives in areas very similar to this.

There are plenty of good reasons why China hasn’t invoked its military: The economic implications, the possibility of US military involvement, being perceived internationally as a belligerent bully. But there may be an even more compelling reason than any of these: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might not be up to the task.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that without US-backing, militaries from Japan, Vietnam or Taiwan would fall swiftly to the overwhelming might of the world’s largest army. China’s military spending routinely increases by the double-digits, far outpacing its GDP growth. Last year that spending amounted to $91 billion – a 12.7% increase over the previous year. It’s expected to be $106 billion this year.

Now I’m not a military expert by any means, but I have seen how major government monopolies tend to function in China. This might give us a better idea of the PLA’s capabilities than the raw numbers do. So let’s look at another major state monopoly: The Ministry of Railways.

This is a fiefdom if there ever was one. The opaque ministry has its hand in everything vaguely related to or surrounding railways, from construction and manufacturing to hospitals and schools. Corruption and nepotism thrive. There was the $2.9 million promotional film where funds were funneled away, the SINGLE official who was able to embezzle $121 million, and the series of photos showing absurdly marked up bullet train items that resulted from government procurement.

This week the ministry is back in the news as its $52 million online ticketing system continues to be worthless on the eve of another busy holiday. Netizens have demanded to know why the system cost so much, yet is worse than actually standing in line at the train station.

If I may throw out some wild speculation (based on overwhelming precedent): Perhaps a chain of railway officials outsourced the site design to increasingly cheaper (AKA – decreasingly qualified) designers while pocketing the difference and/or gave contracts to personal connections for wildly inflated prices.

Now shift back to the PLA, which is larger, more powerful and more secretive than the Ministry of Railways. So powerful and secret in fact that it operates as an entirely separate entity from civilian government and laws.

People tend to see the huge annual PLA budget increases as a threat to China’s neighbors, but to a large extent it’s a way to quell the PLA’s danger to the Communist Party.  Fear of a military coup has always weighed heavy on the party leadership and big budgets are one way of buying the military’s continued loyalty. It doesn’t take a big leap of faith to guess that a lot of that money is lost to corruption.

In spite of its many scandals, the Ministry of Railways gets its job done for the most part…horrible inefficiency and occasional disasters aside. The public can see many of its failings, which keeps it a bit more honest and efficient than it otherwise might be. And if Hu Jintao decides to seriously clean house of corrupt railways officials, he doesn’t need to worry about tanks rolling up to his office the next day.

With the PLA though, these things are all question marks.

John Garnaut did a great article earlier this year based on inside sources trying to explain how pervasive and destructive corruption is in the PLA. The problem is that because of its enormous power and complete secrecy, it’s impossible for outsiders (and insiders for that matter) to appreciate the true scale and what it means for battle capability.

With a naval/aerial engagement – which is what most potential conflicts would entail – victory would be decided more by hardware than troop numbers. It’s possible that even in the absence of US involvement, China’s military apparatus could falter when facing a presumably weaker opponent like Japan, or even Taiwan (See this in-depth analysis of a possible Sino-Japanese naval war).

If that were to happen, the Chinese government would have a tough choice. It could try to convince people that the US military was actually secretly involved and mitigate its failing, or it could try to answer directly as to why, in spite of a much better funded and staffed military, China got beaten by “little Japan.”

Neither option is very palatable, and the mere possibility of having to make that choice might be a major hedge against an all-out war.

From now on I’ll be hosting a regular podcast at Economic Observer where I chat with people doing interesting work in China.

It will be a bit different than the content on this blog. In keeping with EO’s general content, most guests will be business-related; from execs at multinational corporations down to mom and pop startups (whom I find equally interesting).  But I’ll certainly have occasional politically and socially-oriented guests. For instance, I’ve already recorded an episode with Daniel Bell, where I ask what was up with those recent op-eds in NYT and CSM.

The premise will usually be to explore how these people ended up in China and how they’ve tried to navigate China’s consistently inconsistent market. But it’s also meant to look at the wider industries/fields that the guests are part of; altogether lasting about 15-20 minutes.

In the first episode I speak with an internet security consultant turned Beijing’s first microbrewer. We talk about the countless roadblocks involved with setting up shop, whether the dream is dead for young people trying to do business in China’s increasingly foreigner-unfriendly market, and finally discuss China’s wider alcohol industry. That episode and all future ones can be downloaded here.

Some of the other tentative guests I’ve lined up are a green urban planner, a film director who’s done a US-China co-production, the man who oversaw the NBA’s expansion in China from 2003-2008 and is now trying to bring Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to the country, and a guy who started a magazine, a guitar shop and plays in a Beijing Beatles cover band on the side.

As you might imagine, I’m not an expert in any of these fields. I don’t intend to make podcasts that are figure-heavy or full of content that would only interest businessmen. I’ll try to make them smart, but accessible and story-oriented.

As I mentioned, I’m also in the early stages of another big China project, but I’m a LONG ways away from announcing that one. As far as this blog goes, I’d love to pretend like the frequency of updates won’t be affected, but it already has been. This is a one man operation, so I hope you’ll understand if there’s a slightly less steady stream of updates for a while.

Anyways, thanks for reading (and hopefully listening). Now back to your regular sociopolitical speculation…

I got to the embassy at about 1:00 this afternoon. The roads around it were all closed off to traffic with a few hundred riot police, regular police, public security volunteers and lord knows how many plain clothes officers. I estimate there were at least 2,000 people while I was there, although it’s unclear how many actively came to protest and how many were just curious onlookers.

In the middle of the street there was a partition with police directing people to parade around it in long circles. People had huge Chinese flags and banners saying things like “Fuck little Japan.” What I was most surprised by were the number of Chairman Mao posters floating around. I asked a few people about this and the consensus was “Mao would never let Japan get away with this.”

As the crowds paraded around, they sang patriotic songs, chanted “Little Japan, fuck your mother,” “Chairman Mao 10,000 years,” “China 10,000 years” and most significantly “Communist Party 10,000 years.” (“10,000 years” basically means “Long live…”)

This mass outpouring obviously had official sanction. The police’s presence was to direct the protests rather than try to hamper them in any way.

Later things started to get a bit more intense. While the crowds circled around they were allowed to stop briefly in front of the Japanese embassy itself. It was guarded by hundreds of riot police with helmets and shields. At first protestors threw water bottles and eggs at the embassy, which police made no attempt to stop. But gradually rocks and (I assume Japanese) cell phones started to be thrown. Many of them hit the Chinese police, who were covering themselves with shields.

One man brought a bucket full of rocks, which police came and confiscated somewhat violently. After a man chucked a rock, an officer wrestled him away and said, “Enough, they’re Chinese.” He then let him go. I caught up with the man and asked him what had happened. He said, “I just wanted to fuck Japan.”

Finally I went to interview a man on the side of the road holding a sign. As I was speaking with him a police officer grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. “What are you doing,” he asked forcefully in English.

I said I was just talking with people and taking pictures. He pulled me toward a small police post on the side of the road and demanded my passport. He looked at the visa page, handed it back and then seemed to get distracted with something else. I slowly but steadily walked away.

It was very strange. It seemed like coverage was being encouraged. I didn’t notice any of the other foreigners who were taking video/pictures being hassled. I’m not sure why I was singled out.

That was about the time I headed home.  If you didn’t understand what the people were chanting, the whole atmosphere of the protests seemed very festive. People chanted things, others laughed. Families with little kids were out, young people, old people. It kind of felt like a 4^th of July parade…until things began to be thrown at the embassy.

This whole uproar is a godsend for the Communist Party. I never imagined I’d see people marching down the street with pictures of Mao Zedong chanting “Long live Mao, Long live the Communist Party.” It was a bit surreal. (Though several people were chastising the government for sitting by too idly)

It’s interesting to speculate on how much of this was deliberately egged on by the CCP. The whole thing erupted when the Japanese government bought some of the islands from a private owner. The move was intended to put the islands under national control so Japanese activists could be prevented from planting flags on the island and stirring up tensions. But it seems that was a huge miscalculation by Japan on the eve of China’s 18^th Party Congress.

The Chinese media could have lauded the move as an attempt to ease tensions and work toward a peaceful solution, but it went hard in the opposite direction, portraying it as an illegitimate slap in China’s face. It’s no wonder so many are riled up.

It is important to note that when you see Mao posters being paraded, it’s probably a pretty poor representation of Chinese people. And it’s hard to say how many people present at the protest were active nationalists, how many came because they thought it’d be cool or interesting, and how many just happened to walk by and stuck around.

But there was a lot of intensity. Whenever someone started a chant, most joined in. This is clearly the most serious clash between China and Japan in a long time, and it could be far from over. A few days from now will be September 18^th, the anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. Unless there’s a police clampdown, the protests are likely to continue through at least that day.

With Xi Jinping back and all this intense anger directed toward Japan, I predict China’s leadership transfer can now go off without a hitch.

[Update: Below is a video I threw together of the protests with subtitles. See the rock chucker and hear a "Fuck the USA" chant]

 Pictures

“Angry eggs, free to take (everyone take 2)”

Notice the egg stains on the embassy

[If you want to use any of these pictures for anything, please either leave the watermark on or contact me to send you the original]

China’s president-in-waiting Xi Jinping has been MIA since September 1^st. In typical Communist Party fashion, the government is pretending like nothing is amiss.  Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said, “We have told everybody everything” – which of course means they’ve told nobody anything.

The Chinese government also recently asked that a Taiwan/Tibet Independence symbol be taken down…in Oregon. The Chinese consulate in San Francisco asked the Corvallis local government to force a Taiwanese-American to take down the mural he’d painted. It would have otherwise been shrugged off by the handful of people that happened to drive past it. Instead, the Chinese government has made yet another cringe-worthy soft power fail.

Both cases show the CCP’s go-to response for unpalatable events: Suppression. It’s hardly changed throughout its 63 year tenure.

It’s wholly delusional about the time it lives in now though – a time where a hefty hunk of the world’s population holds in their pockets the ability to take photos and video and then spread them and whatever other information they wish for the world to see. After a steady stream of unsuccessful attempts at covering up damaging events over the past few years, the CCP still hasn’t learned that sometimes transparency is in its own interest.

Take Xi Jinping’s mysterious absence. 10 years ago if anyone in the public happened to notice, they’d hardly have the capability to inform others. Suppression made sense. But today we all know something is up. And by trying to keep the lid on it completely, the government is egging on absurd rumors that are much worse than whatever it is they’re trying to hide. (Could whatever actually happened really be any worse than rumors of a double assassination attempt by Bo Xilai loyalists?)

In trying to hide things that are already partially or completely public knowledge, the party is highlighting its own insecurity and weakness, which is never good for authoritarian rulers.

10 years ago if I tried to spread pictures of a forced abortion or take part in a village uprising over illegal land grabs, I’d be disappeared and my family scared into silence. 99 times out of 100 nobody would ever be the wiser. The officials responsible and the greater system that enabled their actions would be left unscathed.

But in today’s world, the government – after trying vainly to cover them up – had to capitulate completely in cases like those of Feng Jianmei and Wukan. If I’m an activist in today’s China, I’m a lot less frightened to speak out against government injustices than I would have been even three years ago. If I protest and am hauled off, I know there’s a good chance somebody will catch it on video or can alert the weibosphere, ensuring my safety. The government’s attempts to hide these things used to be terrifying. Now they’re just pathetic.

For nearly the entirety of the CCP’s rule, it’s projected the image of an all-powerful monolith that’s not to be fucked with. Refusing to acknowledge that top leaders are encumbered by personal lives or bodily functions like the rest of us is part of this image. This probably explains the instinctive suppression of what could be no more than a back injury.

But today’s China is showing (much to the chagrin of the CCP) many of the features of a transparent democratic society where leaders must bend to the public will – even if it’s not in their own interest. They could jump on the inevitable wave of democratization, but officials who’ve enjoyed an elevated status in society for decades are loathe to do so. So we still see this instant inclination toward suppression.

I’m reminded of the scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her pals are confronted by the enormous “great and powerful Oz.” But they eventually discover that it’s just a weak man pulling levers as he pathetically implores the gang to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

When you peak behind the CCP curtain, it’s full of scared and vulnerable people, wondering what badly-needed moves toward transparency will mean for them and the way they’ve lived their lives.

But things are changing. Just about every economic indicator for China is headed downward. Mass factory layoffs/closures, sharply declining steel production, a pile up of unsold cars…you name it. Serious questions are being raised over the “superiority” of China’s command and control economy, which pushed down interest rates, forced excessive loans (MANY of which are starting to go bad) and created what could be the biggest real estate bubble in history.

Over the next few months we should start to see an answer to the “hard vs. soft landing” question. Since talk of a possible hard landing began, I’ve often wondered how China’s propaganda apparatus would respond if and when China’s economy takes a sharp turn south.  The party can’t exactly just say, “Oops. I guess our system is deeply flawed and not as superior as we led you to believe.” Its legitimacy lies almost completely in the idea that efficient economic growth is a result of its authoritarian model.

A few weeks ago People’s Daily gave a little clue as to how the party might be planning to address this issue. Unsurprisingly, it looks like it will go with the standard approach of “It’s not that bad; and anyways, it’s the West’s fault.”  The piece said:

The Chinese economy is slowing down due to both international and domestic factors.

Internationally speaking, the weak growth in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis has had a marked negative impact on the Chinese economy. China’s trade surplus rebounded greatly in the second quarter, but not due to the acceleration of export growth or slowing down of imports. In fact, the growth of China’s exports to the United States, Japan, and Europe has slowed down markedly, becoming a major constraint on economic development in the eastern regions.

Domestically speaking, China’s economic slowdown is a legacy of the global financial crisis. In order to resist the crisis, China introduced a large-scale economic stimulus package, which created objective conditions for subsequent inflation and soaring housing prices. The country then adopted a series of macro control measures to curb the inflation and cool the overheated property market, when the contribution of consumption to its GDP growth failed to increase markedly. This countercyclical action has inevitably caused a slowdown in domestic demand.

So whether it’s domestic or international problems, no fault lies with China itself. The rest of the piece downplayed the idea that China’s economy is in serious trouble anyways, with a touch of “look on the bright side” (inflation is falling). It seems a likely double-pronged approach: Pretend that a hard landing isn’t happening and blame foreign countries for the minor economic hiccup that has to be acknowledged.

Many of the points the piece raises are valid. If it wasn’t for the US-created 2008 financial crisis, China wouldn’t have injected its $586 billion stimulus (which has largely gone into fruitless projects) or required banks to give out a ludicrous $2.7 trillion in loans (ditto). So in that sense, a fair amount of blame does belong to the US for setting the stage for China’s potential hard landing. Europe certainly hasn’t done anything to help matters either.

But the mismanagement of the economy by the Chinese government is where the lion’s share of the blame rests for China’s economic woes. When faced with an economic crisis and potential unrest, the government opted (as always) to secure short-term stability at the cost of long-term sustainability by throwing cheap money at the problem and trying to guide the invisible hand of the market too forcefully.  “The debt-ridden western countries are to blame” argument can only stretch so far.

But accepting blame and owning up to deep systematic flaws with its economic model aren’t in the CCP playbook. So it’s likely we’ll see that argument stretched to its very limit.  The question is, will people buy it?

Let’s say for instance that Mr. Li runs a widget factory. One day he receives an invitation to the wedding of Mr. Guo’s daughter. “How nice,” you might think. Mr. Li hardly knows Mr. Guo and he’s never met the daughter. But Mr. Li isn’t too pleased. It so happens that Mr. Guo is one of the official regulators responsible for Mr. Li’s factory.

When he arrives at the wedding, Mr. Li brings a hongbao (red envelope) full of cash, as is the custom at Chinese weddings. Normally for a casual acquaintance Like Mr. Guo’s daughter, the amount could be as low as 100-200 yuan ($16-$31). If it were a close friend, several hundred. If it were immediate family, maybe one or two thousand.

But Mr. Li’s hongbao contains 10,000 yuan, maybe more. When he enters the wedding hall he hands it off to someone specially designated to collect them along with dozens of other guests doing the same. Later, after the ceremony, Mr. Guo comes to Mr. Li’s table, gives him a cheery drunken pat on the back and toasts him. Mr. Li’s factory continues to churn out widgets without problem – regardless of what regulations he might be breaking. Not a single word was explicitly spoken about the transaction that just occurred.

Nobody besides Mr. Li and the Guo family will ever know how much was in the hongbao. Even if they did, what could they do? It was a simply a “wedding gift” that Mr. Guo never even asked for.

Perhaps it wasn’t his daughter’s wedding. Maybe Mr. Guo had a party celebrating the hundredth day since his nephew was born, or a birthday party for his mother.  And perhaps it wasn’t so high level. Maybe Mr. Li just runs a small shop and instead of giving Mr. Guo a pile of cash, it was a 500 yuan pack of cigarettes (which Mr. Guo won’t actually smoke, but use later as a gift for his superiors).

Whatever the “special occasion” and whatever the amount involved, from the moment Mr. Guo made the announcement and Mr. Li received it, both sides knew what it was about.

When we think of corruption in China we tend to think of handing over huge briefcases of cash in tense, shady backroom deals. But this is what’s far more common and far harder to do anything about. As much as genuine systematic reform would accomplish in stamping out the major corruption cases, these low-level “understandings” are much more engrained in the culture and will take much longer to get rid of.

In this case, China is starting a new five-year plan to tackle corruption, Bloomberg reports.

It isn’t immediately clear what this new plan will include, but it sounds awfully familiar to an earlier pronouncement (via Austin Ramsey) entitled “China to Rein in Corruption within 5 Years,” which said:

An official from China’s top discipline watchdog reiterated in Beijing that the country will effectively curb corruption cases within 5 years as effective legal and structural measures become more perfect.

China’s heavier clampdown on corrupt officials during the past several years, including the execution of deputy legislative speaker Cheng Kejie, is preventing officials from thinking of corruption.

That was from January 2001. In case you haven’t noticed, more than a handful of officials have thought about corruption since that five year deadline expired.

So why does corruption persist in spite of all these measures? In my affinity for dumbing things down to very crude analogies, this is China’s anti-corruption apparatus:

“We admit that the whole thing doesn’t quite fly and there are still problems to address,” the government says. “But we’re initiating some bold new reforms over the next five years to effectively curb these problems once and for all”:

Trying to stop corruption but refusing to allow for the rule of law through truly independent police, courts AND real public oversight through a free media is like trying to build a functional airplane but refusing to entertain the concept of lift.

Bloomberg quoted Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore saying, “In the past ten years, the more they fight corruption, the more plans and agencies they set up, the worse the corruption gets.”

By now this should be patently obvious. Anti-corruption initiatives usually consist of two things: parading harsh punishments of the few that are caught and touting greater oversight through some new anti-corruption authority. But the basic systematic framework is still in place, so these agencies just get in on the corruption themselves. The problem now involves more people and more money.

So this looks like the latest in a long long line of nearly identical initiatives meant to appease the public and quell calls for real reform.

He Guoqiang, head of the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and #8 man on the Politburo said, “The work of constructing a system of punishing and preventing corruption has shown to be effective.”

The day that ranking officials up to and including himself can be criticized, investigated and indicted by the public is the day we can believe him.

But who will reign at the top in the Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) and determine the course of the world’s biggest nation?

You tell me.

This is a contest to see which of my dear readers can correctly predict the 9 (or 7, or 11?) leaders that will make up the new PBSC. The winner will receive a $20 Amazon gift card, but more importantly, they’ll forever be immortalized here as Sino-Political Dork Guru!

Rules

1. Write out the names of who you think will make up the PBSC and rank them. For instance, the current order is:

1. Hu Jintao
2. Wu Bangguo
3. Wen Jiabao
4. Jia Qinglin
5. Li Changchun
6. Xi Jinping
7. Li Keqiang
8. He Guoqiang
9. Zhou Yongkang

To win, you need only guess the correct makeup, not the correct order. The ranking will just be used as a tie-breaker (or to show how incredibly brilliant you are). However, you must get the number of people right. So if you guess 7 correctly and there ends up being 9 people on the PBSC, tough luck.

2. Put down your guess and your name and send it to sinostand@gmail.com with the subject line “Politburo Projection” by September 1^st .

3. Obviously, winners will be announced whenever we find out – which could be anytime from September to November. If you win I’ll contact you about what info you’d like published here (ie – name, blog, organization, twitter name, etc.).

4. If there are multiple winners, I’ll post whoever’s right, but the ranking will break a tie for the gift card. If there are multiple correct rankings, only the first submission I received will get the gift card (which will be sent electronically).

5. Only one guess per person. Yes, you could hypothetically submit several guesses under different emails and names, but this is for fun, so don’t be an asshole.

Will the first woman ever make the cut? Will Bo Xilai make the comeback of the century? Do some digging and make your guess. Nobody but me will ever know you tried unless you’re right, so take a shot and perhaps build your China credentials.

In this particular case, Chinese activists went to plant flags on Diaoyu Island rocks and Japan opted to create martyrs by arresting them.

I don’t have an opinion on ownership of the Diaoyu Islands, nor do I care to form one. But I always take interest in the consistently childish and baffling reactions by the concerned governments and nationalistic citizens.

This also happened in 2010 when Japan arrested a Chinese ship captain who ventured into Diaoyu territory. As it was unfolding, I got on my renren (Chinese Facebook) account and noticed one of my old students had posted a picture of people burning a home-made Japanese flag.

I left a comment on it saying, “Still so much stupidity in the world.”

He responded saying, “Not stupidity. Attitude.”

I’d originally just glanced at the picture and assumed it was something he’d found online, but after he said that, I noticed that he and a few more of my old students were actually in the picture.

I pushed further: “An attitude of ignorance?”

“No. We’re showing them our attitude,” he replied. “About the fisherman and for what they did to us in Nanjing. You’d feel the same way if Japan attacked your country [the US].”

I mulled how to explain all the things that were twisted about that statement, but at that point in my China life I had the sense to realize it was pointless. So instead, over a long series of posts, I basically said this:

Let’s say you’re 100% right on the fisherman issue. Diaoyu 100% belongs to China and it’s the Japanese who are 100% out of line. Let’s ponder what you’ve just accomplished in burning that flag (or for that matter, screaming obscenities, waving hateful banners or throwing things at embassies).

In your mind, do you imagine people in Japan see that and think, “Golly gee wilikers! The Chinese sure are serious about those islands belonging to them… even though we’ve been led to believe our whole lives that they belong to us. Now that they’ve burned the symbol of our nation, let’s capitulate!”

Outside Japanese embassy in Beijing, September, 2010

Imagine seeing them burn the Chinese flag. Of course you wouldn’t think that and neither do they. Seeing their flag in flames only makes them angrier, strengthens their resolve and drives them to take more extreme measures to get their way. No one likes to feel defeated. And if there were any Japanese who didn’t care about the issue before, they’ve now been given reason to care and support leaders who oppose your cause.

Now let’s think about the rest of the world. TV cameras don’t tend to focus on the 99.99% that just stay home and don’t do anything antagonistic. They focus on you flag-burning, banner-waving nationalists because it’s an exciting image. So you’ve just become prominent representatives of China.

Like me, most people outside the two concerned countries couldn’t care less about the Diaoyu Islands. But after they see you hatefully burning a national symbol, those who are indifferent or unknowledgeable about the issue now sympathize with Japan and get the impression that China is a bunch of ignorant crazies. To those who know better, you’ve at least made yourself look incredibly stupid.

So why don’t you try something that requires a bit more intelligence than painting a red circle and setting it on fire? For instance, you could write a calm and well-reasoned commentary, then submit it to outlets where it will be read by Japanese. Then the pressure would be off your own leaders and they too could take a calmer, more peaceful approach.

But no. You took the lazy mindless route and call yourself a patriot for it. Patriots think things through and do things that actually SERVE their country’s interests. People who blindly do things that HARM the interests they claim to fight for are called idiots.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit two of the four monuments like this in existence: Those of Mao Zedong in Beijing and Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang. Since photography of any kind is barred at both, I thought I’d try to re-create the experience of each and then let you decide which is more deserving of UNESCO status.

Mao

Situated in the middle of Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Mausoleum has been called a rip-off of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s surrounded by picture-snapping tourists from all over the country at any given time. They line up in their t-shirts, mini-skirts, skull caps or whatever they happen to be wearing at the time.

*Yawn*

When you first enter the building there’s a statue of Mao sitting. Many people buy flowers to put at the foot of this statue and some rural tourists even bow down to it.

Next the line splits in two directions to walk around either side of the viewing room. Mao’s body lies draped in the Communist Party flag in a glass coffin surrounded by a few PLA guards. Outside of them are another set of glass walls that tourists stay behind – keeping you a good 30 feet away from the man himself. Between the distance, the dozens of people crammed in around you, and the speed with which guards shuffle you through, you can’t quite decide if that waxy little face sticking out is real or a Madame Tussauds recreation.

Just as quickly as you came in, you sift out, disappointed with the ratio of time spent in line to the time you were allowed comprehend that that guy killed tens of millions of people.

Kim

From the outside, Kim’s marble palace mausoleum (which actually was Kim’s mansion while he was alive) makes Mao’s look like a peasant’s hut. When you go inside, it’s even more impressive. But you’re not getting in looking like some punk kid or loose capitalist floozy. No sir, you best look like a respectable gentleman:

It’s not too often you decide a tie with a polo is your best dress option.

Ties, pants and shoes are required for the gents; something elegant and not too leggy for the gals. If you’re Korean, you dress like this:

You enter the building and go on a seemingly endless maze of moving sidewalks; passing Koreans on their way out. In my case this included a group of army guys who looked about 14. Finally, you get to a room with Kim’s statue. Unlike with Mao’s statue, bowing is obligatory and it’s accompanied by appropriately solemn music.

Next you proceed to the mourning room, which tops any Disney haunted house or Universal Studios experience in terms of over the top drama. If you’re foreign, you’re given a headset to listen to and directed to some statues depicting North Koreans weeping as they heard Kim had died.

“Look at them,” a voice reminiscent of Vincent Price comes on to say, stretching out every syllable for chilling effect. “Inconsolable with the loss of the Great Leader that was sent to us from heaven. The whole world mourned when Kim Il Sung died in 1994.”

You’re directed to an area where little glass shards have been embedded into the floor. “How piercing hot their tears must have been that they burned here into the ground forever,” Vincent Price continues. “The people wouldn’t let him go. So our dear Kim Jong Il built this hall of mourning so that the people could always cling to the bosom of their Great Leader.”

If you’re fortunate enough to speak Korean, there’s a woman who will give that narration live. She makes South Korean soap opera stars look subdued in their weepy melodrama by comparison.

Finally, you enter the body viewing room. You walk through a doorway of about 20 turbo air jets to blow away any gunk on you that might soil the Great Leader’s resting chamber. His glass coffin sits in the middle of the room with nothing but a velvet rope between it and you.

Four at a time approach the head of the coffin and bow down in unison. You walk around and do the same at the other three sides. You’re almost close enough to touch the glass and you can easily make out Kim’s facial features. It almost sinks in that you’re looking at a man regarded as God to 23 million people.

When you walk out you’re treated to a museum of portraits with Kim and a who’s who of world leaders including Muammar Gaddaffi, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. In the middle sits the train car that Kim jetted around in during his reign.

As you head back out, you see the scores of Koreans dressed in their Sunday best. They’re waiting to complete their pilgrimage to meeting the Great Leader who merely killed people by the single digit millions.

This was a year ago. If you go now, you have the chance to see not one, but TWO pickled Communist dictators for the price of one.

Now you tell me…who should really be applying for UNESCO World Heritage status?

When asked what their happiest day was, those Hong Kongers I talked to said things like when the day they graduated college, the first time they went out drinking with friends, and a Dragon Boat Festival. Unsurprisingly, not a single person mentioned the territory’s handover to China. The more interesting part however was what they said next. I’d tell them I was asking because many young mainland people would say Hong Kong coming to China was their happiest day. When I said this, there was uniform laughter. Here’s a few of the responses:

Of course they say that. It’s like if you give someone a diamond necklace. It’s the happiest day for them maybe, but not really for you.

We remember that as the day dark clouds came over Hong Kong [Note: The day of the handover was literally very cloudy and rainy].

That’s ridiculous.

It doesn’t mean anything to us.

England, China – there’s not much difference. We’re still just Hong Kong.

Ha, more like the worst day of my life.

I just talked to about two dozen people at bars and my hotel and they were all under 35, so this is by no means a fair representation of greater public opinion. But I think it’s pretty telling that not a single person had positive things to say, even after I tried to nudge a few in that direction. Just more to suggest Beijing has a very long way to go in winning the hearts and minds of Hong Kong.

Whenever you go to a train station to buy tickets in China, you can almost always count on at least 1 or 2 people for every ten standing in line to just cut right to the front. This gets even worse in lower tier cities or when there’s abnormally long lines. This week though when I went to buy my ticket to Hong Kong I found this:

It’s a one-way turnstile with surrounding guardrails that allow people in line to get through, but prevent cutters from getting close enough to the teller to slap down their dirty dirty money. Sure enough, as I neared the front, one confident jerk approached the front out of nowhere, only to be thwarted by the device. He tried to reach his money over the turnstile and yell to the clerk, but alas, he was out of reach. He sighed in exasperation, looked around for a few seconds mulling his options, and then begrudgingly walked to the back of the line. I had to restrain myself from applauding as a slight tear formed in my eye.

I’d never been to this particular train station before so I can’t say whether or not this device is new, but I’d never seen one before. A few months ago I wrote about an equally impressive customer service rating machine that could revolutionize the country’s economy. I can only hope potentially game-changing innovations like these will continue to emerge in China and spread to every train station, hospital, post office and bureaucratic institution. A thousand pieces of flowery propaganda can’t come close to achieving the same sense of satisfaction and renewed appreciation for China’s development that these simple, yet tangible, measures bring about.

The most important group to focus on in the leadership turnover is the nine-man Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) – which is part of the greater 25-man Politburo. These nine men (and they’ve always been men) have the lion’s share of control in how China is governed. This post will break down who the contenders are for the PBSC and how they may proceed in shaping China.

(Patrick Covanec has done a great primer on the mechanics of exactly how the turnover process will work – which I highly recommend)

For the past year there’s been a lot of talk about Wang Yang’s “Guangdong Model” vs. Bo Xilai’s “Chongqing Model.” The Guangdong model uses democratic reform and greater freedoms to address the CCP’s growing legitimacy crisis, while the “Chongqing Model” uses a strong-authoritarian hand to crackdown on corruption and organized crime while instituting egalitarian measures like low-income housing assistance. Obviously, Bo Xilai no longer has a prayer’s chance in administrative detention of ascending  to the PBSC, but his ideology isn’t necessarily as dead as he is. No other leader is likely to replicate his red song gatherings and throwback to the Cultural Revolution, but his focus on authoritarian-directed crime-busting and redistribution of wealth still has a wide audience. So these two models still represent plausible directions the party could go.

To get a sense of what China’s ideological spectrum is like, let’s look at the ideologies of perhaps China’s most prominent left-winger vs. its most prominent right-winger – both now considered radicals:

I give Liu Xiaobo a +1 and Mao a -1 to represent China’s political extremes. So an absolute moderate would be 0. I’ve attempted to put the contenders for the PBSC on this chart to indicate their rough ideological leanings. Yes, this is a gross oversimplification and very imperfect. Some leaders are very economically liberal while at the same time politically conservative, which makes it hard to place them on this one-dimensional scale. It is very unscientific but thus is the nature of Chinese politics. Chinese leaders are notoriously secretive and it’s usually a mystery how much individual responsibility they have for a given policy. But I’ve tried to give them incremental ticks to the left or right based on past actions and statements, as well as supposed political allies. I think this gives a general idea of where these people fall politically, but a big disclaimer: Some of these scores (especially a few of the wild cards) are fairly arbitrary and tenuously based on just a few factors. So take it with every appropriate grain of salt.

Of course, anyone who has any kind of chance at reaching the highest echelons of power today will be nowhere near the extremes of either Mao or Liu Xiaobo. The top contenders still mostly hover around either the Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao factions.

Jiang’s group favors breakneck economic growth that focuses on China’s coastal provinces. This involves a great deal of reforms in the market, but not in politics. Essentially, it keeps the rich getting richer with the hope that some of that will trickle west and down the economic ladder. Hu’s group favors a more restrained economic growth model that focuses on inner regions and social ills like income inequality and corruption. However, it also emphasizes social stability and, as we’ve seen under Hu, that means little political liberalization or new freedoms. There is however an offshoot of this faction that’s gaining more influence. This group favors democratic reform in addition to economic liberalization. We might call this the Wen Jiabao/Wang Yang group. Over the past 10 years we’ve seen the bulge of influence slowly shift from the left to right, where it now hovers over Hu’s group with Jiang and his cronies steadily losing ground. So let’s look at those thought to be the top players for the next generation of leaders and get a sense of where that bulge is headed.

The Shoo-ins

Barring some insane unexpected incident, these two will remain on the PBSC and be promoted to President and Premier.

Xi Jinping

Xi will end up in the top post because he falls nearly in the middle of the ideological spectrum and has offended the fewest number of party elders. In Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai he oversaw steady economic growth while managing to steer clear of any scandal or any incident that would put him in a negative light. But he certainly never did anything spectacular or reformist.

However, while Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were purposely avoiding Chongqing and Bo Xilai, Xi was visiting the city and praising Bo (although this was during the pinnacle of Bo’s popularity and the visit was probably a mere political miscalculation). I put Xi’s score slightly to the left, mostly because of calls for “thought control” in universities earlier this year – suggesting he intends to keep the “stability” mentality. He could be a closet reformer simply biding his time, but by most predictions, he’ll straddle the middle of the see-saw and try to balance opposing factions.

• Political Score: -.05
• Odds of promotion: All but certain

Li Keqiang

Li is thought to be a very close protégé to Hu Jintao, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s likely to take the same “stable” path. In fact, Hu himself might be more reformist were he to hold power during a period where he couldn’t just coast on the economy.

Li went to college right after Reform & Opening Up at Peking University – perhaps the greatest forum for liberal thought in China at the time – where he reportedly ran around with some zealous pro-democracy advocates and diligently studied English. If he was influenced by this period, he’s been rather subdued about it in his official capacity. He’s never called for political reform outright (as his predecessor Wen Jiabao often has) but has on numerous occasions called for financial reform – which he’ll be in charge of as Premier. I give him a fairly liberal score for his background and lack of anything to suggest he’s a hardliner.

• Political Score: +0.30
• Odds of Promotion: All but certain

The Favorites

These contenders are pretty safe bets. There’s a good chance you’ll see all of them promoted to the PBSC.

Wang Qishan

Wang is known by foreign counterparts as being a charming straight-talker. In 2003 he was called in as Beijing’s mayor to clean up the SARS mess that his predecessor had tried to conceal.  Like Li Keqiang, he has a background in economics and has even written in foreign newspapers like New York Times calling for free trade and market liberalization. In the late 90s, he was credited for an economic restructuring in Guangdong that may have averted a major financial crisis. Wall Street Journal quoted a long time foreign associate of Wang’s as saying, “[In those cases], he was doing something unorthodox, bold, or difficult — something that had a lot of potential personal downside. And in each case, he did it well.” For his bold moves to the right, I give him a fairly liberal score.

• Political Score: +0.30
• Odds of Promotion: Excellent. A party elder with no blemishes and a record of bold and successful initiatives, there’s little reason to suspect he won’t be promoted. He’s a likely candidate for Chairman of the National People’s Congress – the number 2 spot on the PBSC.

Zhang Dejiang

Like the previous two men, Zhang has an economics education, with one very notable difference: It was in North Korea. He is essentially everything that Wang Qishan is not. As head of Guangdong he suppressed news of the SARS outbreak and led numerous attacks on the southern media group, which saw a few top editors imprisoned. He managed to dodge culpability for a number of other debacles in Guangdong and did manage to oversee (what the party would call) stable growth. This is likely why he got called in to take over Chongqing when Bo Xilai was sacked. Zhang is the classic communist leader: Quiet, firm and secretive, but he gets things done, no matter who he has to step on.

• Political Score: -0.40
• Odds at Promotion: Very good. He’ll likely be the left-wing’s compromise for Wang Qishan. He’s a party elder very experienced in stability maintenance on the provincial level and thought to be an ally of Jiang Zemin (who still exerts influence – both directly and through his cronies).

Li Yuanchao

Another economist and graduate of Peking University – where he studied from 1988-1991 amidst the democracy protests. He later shielded some members of the Communist Party Youth League that had shown sympathy to the protestors. As head of Jiangsu he instituted some seemingly democratic reforms that made leaders more accountable to the people. But as BBC notes, “He still seems to believe in the supremacy of the party and its right to rule China. At a speech given at Harvard University a few years ago he said the party’s ability to ‘pool resources’ had helped the country deal with the financial crisis.”

• Political Score: +0.20
• Odds at Promotion: Very Good. Like Li Keqiang, Li Yuanchao is rumored to be an ally of Hu Jintao, but not too offensive to the conservative faction. He currently heads the Communist Party’s Organization Department. This is the same position He Guoqiang held before becoming Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – the number 8 slot on the PBSC.  

Liu Yunshan

Former Xinhua reporter, Liu is now a Politburo member and director of the Propaganda Department. This position, almost by definition, means he has few liberal tendencies. He’s been at the helm over internet crackdowns, has called for there to be greater control over the web, and overseen a gamut of obnoxious measures neutering entertainment shows. Don’t look to Liu for much reform.

• Political score: -0.30
• Odds at Promotion: Excellent. It’s expected he’ll take over Li Changchun’s number 5 spot on the PBSC as the main director of propaganda and ideology. It’s a natural move.

The Wild Cards

This is where things get interesting. Who the remaining PBSC spots will go to is anyone’s guess. These are the people thought to be in the running.

Liu Yandong

Liu is playing the game well by keeping her cards very close to her chest. She could be the first woman to ever join the ranks of the PBSC and she presumably knows joining this boy’s club takes some tactical cunning. As such, we don’t know much about her. She allegedly has close ties to both Hu Jintao AND Jiang Zemin – a political anomaly that suggests she’s moderate and well positioned for promotion. Other than that, she reportedly gets on well with foreign contacts, has given token support for many mild reforms (ie – education), wants a greater role for NGOs, and is very economically competent.

• Political Score: +0.10
• Odds at promotion: Pretty good, given her connections. And promoting her would be great PR for a government that’s increasingly trying to stop sex-selective abortions and pretend women have an equal shot at success in China. When Liu Yang blasted off to become the first Chinese woman in space, Liu Yandong was there to read Hu Jintao’s remarks. It was perhaps a not-so-subtle hint that there will be another big “first” for Chinese women this year.

Meng Jianzhu

If Meng were to be promoted to the PBSC, it would almost certainly be to the number 9 spot atop China’s state security and police apparatus. He’s currently minister of public security which, again, by definition doesn’t allow for much liberal thinking. Not too much is known about his political philosophies, except that he loves stability and has little tolerance for drug addicts. The good news though is that it would be very hard to top Zhou Yongkang in taking a hardline. In fact, it’s rumored Zhou endorsed Bo Xilai as his successor rather than Meng, suggesting Meng is softer than either. Indeed, he recently launched a “three inquiries, three assessments” campaign that aims to put a human face on the police force and transform its image from that of a tool of corruption to a guardian of the people.

• Political score: -0.20
• Odds at promotion: Pretty good. Meng Jianzhu may prove to be the greatest beneficiary of Bo Xilai’s fall. He’s one of the few contenders for the PBSC that’s not currently on the 25-man Politburo, so a promotion would entail a leap frog, but he holds the same position Zhou Yongkang did before his promotion. Completely unsubstantiated reports have even suggested Zhou has already (involuntarily) handed most of his power over to Meng.

Zhang Gaoli

Another economist and Jiang Zemin loyalist. He’s credited for much of the development of Shenzhen and Guangdong in the late 90s. He was then moved to Tianjin in 2007 to clean up after a series of corruption scandals. His philosophy is pretty much in line with Jiang Zemin’s: Economy ahead of anything else.

• Political score: -0.15
• Odds at promotion: Meh. There’s hasn’t been much buzz to suggest he’s destined for higher office. He might sneak his way into the PBSC if the conservatives ultimately win out in the horse-trading.  

Yu Zhengsheng

Yu took over control of Shanghai in 2007 succeeding Xi Jinping. He’s reportedly on ok terms with both the Jiang and Hu factions, but looks to be more on Jiang’s side of the fence. He also has strong ties with Deng Xiaoping’s family, which is likely what saved his political career when his brother (who was the director of the Beijing National Security Bureau) defected to the United States in 1985. He has advocated developing the legal system and enforcing the rule of law which, if true, would seemingly put him more in the liberal camp. Not so sure though.

• Political Score: +0.05
• Odds at promotion: Fair. Some analysts have given Yu pretty good odds since he holds the same Shanghai party secretary position Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin did before rising to the PBSC. But his brother’s defection to the US is a red mark. It may not have stopped him from making the top 25, but the issue will almost certainly be noticed by the masses if he’s in the top 9. That could be a problem. He would make a good compromise candidate though, so I’d give him better odds than Zhang Gaoli.

Hu Chunhua

In 2008 Hu went to Henan to became China’s youngest governor and now is the head of Inner Mongolia. His policies there have painted him as a proponent of more official accountability and wealth equality over rapid GDP growth. He has taken a hardline on unrest though in the province and in Tibet (where he was previously a lower level official). A definite Hu protégé, he’s even been nicknamed “Little Hu” because of their similar backgrounds and ideologies.

• Political Score: +0.20
• Odds at Promotion (to PBSC): Not good…yet. He’s not yet even in the 25-man Politburo but he almost certainly will be this year. At just 49-years old it’s unlikely he’ll leapfrog into the top 9 but, barring some unfortunate political incident, he probably will in 2017. There’ve even been whispers that he’s being groomed to become China’s president after Xi Jinping retires in 2022. He’s definitely someone to keep an eye on.

Ling Jihua

You probably first heard this name from the completely unsubstantiated rumors that it was his son who died in a Bejing Ferrari crash earlier this year. He’s currently secretary of the Central Secretariat of the Communist Party and thought to be a close aide to Hu Jintao and proponent of his policies.

• Political Score: 0.00
• Odds at Promotion: Bad. He’s not in the Politburo and really doesn’t have much to his name except some reports that he has impressed the Central Committee – the roughly 350-person body that makes the Politburo selection. He might get promoted to the Politburo, but I’m not really sure why his name is being tossed around to join the PBSC.

Wang Yang

Sinophiles are undoubtedly familiar with this name. He’s the Guangzhou party secretary/Politburo member that peacefully quelled the Wukan uprising. He’s an outspoken proponent of democratic reform, free speech and liberalization of the media. Those hopeful for a major reformer to join the PBSC have their fingers crossed for Wang Yang.

• Political Score: +0.50
• Odds at Promotion: Not great. When Bo Xilai fell, most seemed to think it cleared the path for Wang’s assent to the PBSC. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt they were ever competitors for a single position. In fact, I think Wang may have been hurt by Bo’s fall. The two are completely at odds ideologically, so perhaps they both could have entered the PBSC as a compromise. But for just one of them to make it would require the opposing faction to bite a major bullet. Besides that, Wang might just be too liberal and unpredictable for the time being. His calls for democratic reform and a freer press threaten to unwind many of the officials who themselves may be guilty of Bo-like transgressions. So I give Wang a long-shot at this point. The good news for his fans though is that he’s young enough to still be eligible for the PBSC in five years if he doesn’t make it this time.

How do they stack up?

To give some perspective, here’s where I’d put the current PBSC:

• Hu Jintao: 0.00
• Wu Bangguo: -0.10
• Wen Jiabao: +0.50
• Jia Qinglin: -0.30
• Li Changchun: -0.25
• Xi Jinping: -0.05
• Li Keqiang: +0.30
• He Guoqiang: -0.10
• Zhou Yongkang: -0.60

And two others worth noting:

• Jiang Zemin: -0.30
• Bo Xilai: -0.50

So let’s put the current PBSC on the chart next to the contenders for the next PBSC:

You’ll notice the current PBSC is tipped to the conservatives with Hu balancing out the middle. With the next PBSC however, it looks like the balance might tip ever so slightly toward the liberals.

What does it all mean?

This is NOT scientific by any means, so it may not mean much. Also, this is based on the assumption that the next PBSC will have 9 members and be ordered in the same way the current one is. It’s very possible that it won’t be. There have been some intriguing rumors that the standing committee will either be whittled down to 7 members (restoring the pre-2002 level) or be expanded to 11. If cut down to 7, many are assuming the two spots to be demoted off the standing committee would be the propaganda chief and the state security czar.

If this happened, it would shake up this whole analysis and probably be a net gain for the liberals – as Meng Jianzhu and Liu Yunshan (both conservatives) might find themselves promoted, but without PBSC seats. Expanding the committee to 11 could also be good for liberals since the wild cards overall seem to lean more toward that camp. This is probably why Hu Jintao is rumored to be pushing for a re-sizing.

Projection

In one way or another, the liberals look poised to take greater influence, but remember, that’s “liberal” by Chinese standards. Nobody (not even Wang Yang) is going to want to do anything too quickly. In fact, Xi Jinping and the whole Politburo will probably play it safe for the first year with the “stability first” status quo while they consolidate their power.

After that, we’ll probably see the reforms that effectively halted before the Olympics slowly pick up again, liberalizing intra-party democracy, speech and press freedoms. This may happen concurrently with left-wing initiatives attempting to redistribute wealth. However, many of China’s problems are becoming worse and more visible at a speed that will likely outpace any reforms the new leadership is able to agree on. And the current leadership looks to be just running out the clock on their reign by clamping down hard on discontent, which will only fan it further in the long-term.

Then there are a lot of other wild-cards that make any prediction largely meaningless. Chief among them is the economy. That can easily falter or some other unexpected event could happen (remember, no one saw Tiananmen coming a mile away). So even if the new leaders do start to liberalize and restore CCP legitimacy, time probably isn’t on their side.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A full revolution is VERY unlikely and it would almost certainly be contained if it started. BUT, it is entirely possible that some catalyst (disaster, major revelation, serious economic blow, etc.) could create a Tiananmen-like shock that forces accelerated reform. That may in fact be the only thing capable of jump-starting the serious measures needed to address China’s growing problems. I’m becoming less and less convinced that either the current or future PBSC will reform enough in time to prevent such a catalyst.

Notes

Danovic, J. (n.d.). China politburo 2012 leadership change: Everything you need to know. Policymic

Mauldin, J. Looking to 2012: China’s next generation of leaders. InvestorsInsight.com.

Miller, A. The 18th central committee politburo: A quixotic, foolhardy, rashly speculative, but nonetheless ruthlessly reasoned projection. China Leadership Moniter,

“I am deeply touched and proud of being a Chinese,” People’s Daily reported one netizen saying about Hu’s bending over two feet to the ground, as China’s first female astronaut continued orbiting hundreds of miles overhead unnoticed.

The fawning over this incident reminded me of this lesson that Chinese children are taught in school. Perhaps there’s a connection:

In 1990, UNICEF invited Beijing middle school students to visit the Netherlands in order to participate in “Children of the World for Peace” activities. Liang Fan flew to the Netherlands to represent Chinese children. She stayed in a comfortable hotel and met many little brothers and sisters from all around the world. It was a very happy time!

As the activities began, banners of more than 50 countries were raised in front of the hotel.  Liang Fan looked for the Chinese flag, but couldn’t find it. So Liang Fan immediately went to the organizer and solemnly demanded, “The Chinese national flag must be raised since I’m here representing China.”

Later, it was almost lunch time and the Chinese flag still hadn’t been raised yet. So Liang Fan brought the organizer to the table, pointed at the pink tablecloth, and said, “If you cannot find a Chinese national flag, it’s ok. I am going to paint this red and make it into a flag!” Liang Fan’s patriotism touched the organizer deeply and the news spread quickly, which caught the organizing committee’s attention. They ordered somebody to find a national flag for the People’s Republic of China and raise it in front of the hotel. Liang Fan was admired by representatives from the other countries who praised her as a qualified representative of the People’s Republic of China.

What can we learn from this?

Then BBC asked me to discuss the story on-air along with some other guests including Chai Ling - Tiananmen Square protest leader turned crusader against the one-child policy. She basically ignored the host’s questions, opting instead to give a detailed description of the incident’s brutality and go on a rant about how evil China’s government and the one-child policy are. That seems to be the prevailing reaction to this whole thing, but I think this misses the greater significance – which is what ultimately got me interested in this story.

As awful as this incident was, the overall situation has been getting better. China has been gradually relaxing the one-child policy for years by chipping away at the number of people subject to it. In 2007, one official estimated that less than 40% of China’s people are currently bound by it.

The central government could cease using population quotas as a basis for promotion of local officials – which would definitely reduce incidents of forced abortion. Other than that though, the gradual relaxation of the one-child policy over many years (as we’re seeing now) is probably the best anyone can hope for. Ending it outright all at once could cause a baby boom with demographic consequences down the road just as bad as those that resulted from the policy in the first place.

So for most intents and purposes, the forced abortion problem is probably better than it was 10 or 20 years ago and improving slowly but surely. The takeaway from this latest incident though is that, as far as public opinion is concerned, none of that matters.

For most Chinese, the one-child policy’s unpopularity comes simply from the fact that they can’t have as many kids as they’d like. Social side-effects like forced abortions have been largely non-issues because the censorship apparatus doesn’t allow them to be issues. For Chinese, unless you personally know of someone who experienced brutality in the name of population control, you probably don’t appreciate the seriousness and ubiquity of the problem. That is, until last week.

The nauseating images of the dead baby spread like wildfire – drawing over a million comments on Weibo. In almost the snap of a finger, masses of people (numbering at least in the seven digits) were slapped across the face with an issue the government has pretty successfully kept under the rug for decades. Thanks to the growing prevalence of cameras and microblog users, the brutal side-effects of the one-child policy have almost instantly entered public consciousness and debate.

Over the past two years or so a string of equally captivating images have gone viral sparking awareness and debate most unwelcome by the government; ranging from a petitioner crushed under a truck (possibly murdered) to the attempted cover up of the Wenzhou train crash. The government is losing control of public discourse and any sense of credibility. Decades of secrecy and censorship is coming back to bite it hard. Before people can even digest and get over one shocking image, another one pops up that confronts them with some new horrible issue. So even if things are actually getting better, they appear to be quickly getting much worse.

Nobody can say whether something like this forced abortion photo will ever push the nation past a tipping point, but what is certain is that these images are forcing leaders to take unprecedented measures – like actually enforcing laws that aren’t in their own self-interest. You might say a kind of de-facto democratic reform is unfolding.

I’m hardly the first to note the similarities between the problems Chinese soccer faces and those of China’s government. In a nutshell, the organization of people indulging in the bribery and corruption is the same one charged with policing and disciplining itself. It seems just about everyone can see the inherent problem with this arrangement – except those on the inside.

Much like the government does when faced with endemic official corruption, Chinese soccer is tackling the problem with a one-off crackdown and parading the stiff prison sentences that the prosecuted receive. This is essentially like deploying a Kleenex to battle pneumonia and then showing off the huge snot-wad it removes. It temporarily takes care of the most obvious symptom and looks impressive, but there’s a lot more snot inside that didn’t make itself so obvious. And since the systematic problem hasn’t been addressed, the body will remain a perpetual snot, cough and phlegm-producing machine.

In both the government and soccer league there’s obviously a fair amount of self-delusion from those who genuinely do want to clean things up but think they can do so without giving up any power. “If only we can find the right recipe of role-models, stern warnings, harsh punishments, guilt-tripping, gimmicks and (non-independent toothless) anti-corruption commissions, then we won’t need truly independent watchdogs keeping us in check and slowing down our grand vision,” they imagine.

Now we’ll get to watch what happens in the aftermath of this soccer crackdown and perhaps make some wider conclusions about where China’s authoritarian system as a whole is headed. Some bold democratic reforms have been proposed for the league, so we’ll see if there’s enough support to actually get any enacted and enforced. Either way, if this relatively small corner of Chinese governance can’t be cleaned up, what chance does the greater national system have? If rampant corruption seeps back into the league and the country remains awful at soccer, then it’s probably safe to conclude that the long-term prospects of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” in its current form are equally grim.

The story shows one of the peculiarities of China’s legal rationale that’s presumably a remnant of socialism, or perhaps even Confucianism. Several years ago I read a very similar case (which I can’t find now) where a woman was hit by a falling plant vase and sustained nearly 100,000 yuan’s ($15,749) worth of injuries. But investigators could only narrow down the origin of the plant to 30 balconies, so, you guessed it, the residents were all ordered to share the burden at about 3,300 yuan ($520) a piece.

Over the years whenever I’ve gotten on legal topics with Chinese friends, I’ve mentioned this case. To my surprise, more often than not, they support the verdict. When I ask how they can justify punishing 29 completely innocent people, they’ve basically said “100,000 is so much money for that one innocent woman to pay, but 3,300 is relatively little for the others.” They admit that they’d be very upset if they were one of the 29 innocents, but in the end 3,300 yuan would merely inconvenience their life, whereas 100,000 yuan on top of debilitating injuries could very well ruin the victim’s life.

I can’t say I agree with this rationale at all, but it is intriguing. It’s especially interesting imagining what other circumstances are influenced by this collectivist mindset – where suffering is spread equitably and manageably at the expense of complete fairness.

These outlets cited a single source: Want China Times – a Taiwanese agency which routinely prints stories based on single, unreliable sources (here, here and here, for instance). In this case, WCT cited Molihua – a democracy and human rights advocacy group. Of course, claims that there were 1,000 rioters had to come with evidence. This is it:

Most of the media reporting this story and netizens on Weibo have included this picture with reports of the violence. If you can spot a riot here, you have much better eyes than I do. A couple searches for “Foxconn riots” also bring up this picture:

I can almost hear the crickets chirping.

Bloomberg TV however managed to obtain a much more sensational picture depicting a fire and people in surgical masks:

…but it turns out that picture actually came from an explosion that happened at Foxconn’s Chengdu plant over a year ago.

It’s now been three days since this supposed riot started and this is all we have. No other pictures, no videos, no interviews from rioters. That’s pretty amazing considering “Foxconn riot” is NOT blocked on Weibo and there were allegedly 1,000 people involved.

I got in touch with Foxconn Technology Group and they sent this press release:

We were informed by local law enforcement authorities that late Monday night, several employees of our facility in Chengdu had a disagreement with the owner of a restaurant located in that city. We were also informed that the employees subsequently returned to their off-campus residence, owned and managed by third-party companies, at which time a number of other residents also became involved in the disagreement and local police were called to the scene to restore order. Foxconn is cooperating with local law enforcement authorities on their investigation into this incident.

They didn’t list any numbers, but this seems a far cry from what’s been previously reported.

It’s too early to say definitively that the original Want China Times report (and all those that based their reports entirely on it) were completely wrong, but I think it is safe to say they jumped the gun. Some outlets even tied the alleged violence to poor working conditions, which is completely unsubstantiated. Huffington Post went so far as to title one piece “Foxconn Workers Riot In Chengdu Over Minor Incident, Leads To Massive Uprising” and listed several unrelated conditions at the factory (They’ve since printed a retraction).

Foxconn has been the whipping boy of the media for quite some time now. In 2010 some outlets were ticking off suicides as they happened at the company. The estimated 14 suicides that year do indeed sound bad…until you consider there are over 800,000 employees and that that suicide rate is well below China’s national average (and the US’s for that matter). Both the suicide and rioting over poor working conditions angles fit nicely into the pre-established narrative that Foxconn and its Apple overlord run a repressive sweatshop. Unfortunately for those outlets that perpetuate these angles, there’s just not much evidence to support them.

Update 6/8: Reuters published a story this morning which said:

Seven workers at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu went to a restaurant near their dormitory, but began making a ruckus after an argument between the eatery’s owner and his wife “affected their meal”, said a statement on the Sichuan government website (www.scol.com.cn) released on Thursday.

After the restaurant owner called the police, the workers ran back to their dormitory shouting “they are beating us”, upon which around 100 of their colleagues came in and joined the disturbance, throwing bottles, the statement added.

Recently Korea’s MBC ran a program called “The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners” (Link has the full 5-minute segment with subtitles). The piece presents itself as an exposé on how foreign expats easily seduce Korean women, only to taint, abuse, rob them and leave them with AIDS. It completely forgoes any sense of journalistic integrity by using hidden cameras and adding wholly unsubstantiated commentary. At one point, a Korean girl is cold-called by the producer and asked if she was “a victim of a foreigner.” When the girl replies that she doesn’t know what the producer is talking about, the narrator jumps in to say, “Most victims avoid telling the truth.”

For all the times the Chinese media has hyped the non-newsworthy transgressions of foreigners in China, I’ve never heard of any newscast being this despicably ignorant and unprofessional. As much as it pains me to say it, we probably have China’s censorship apparatus to thank for that.

The Chinese government (and ergo the state media) needs a healthy dose of nationalism, but the key is moderation. In 2010, when anti-Japanese sentiment flared up over a Chinese fisherman being detained in disputed waters, I saw a first-hand manifestation of how the government tries to channel nationalism. At the Japanese embassy in Beijing, protestors were allowed to congregate – but only at a distance from the entrance. Periodically, police would let a handful of the most vocal protestors go right up to the gate and media were allowed to film it. But when the crowd gained a certain mass, it was broken up and told to leave – only to re-form again slowly with tacit police approval.

This push and pull-back of nationalism has become the rule after some past debacles. Some 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations were gleefully allowed by the government…until they turned violent and Japanese businesses (many of which were Chinese owned) were destroyed. Back further in 1988, anti-Africans protests  broke out in Nanjing, which unexpectedly shifted to calls for the Chinese government to reform. The incident was one of the preludes to the Tiananmen uprising. Today, nationalism is still crucial and encouraged, but only to the point that it doesn’t affect stability and support for the authoritarian government.

Korea and China have similar histories of being subjugated by foreigners, and Korean leaders have likewise relied on nationalism in the past to achieve political goals. The difference now is that Korea has some lingering xenophobia combined with a free media wholly dependent on ratings for revenue. The result is this highly sensational and populist program targeting foreigners. If China’s (state subsidized) media wasn’t on its current leash, we’d probably see much more of the same here.

This is far far FAR from an endorsement of China’s media restrictions. The harm is much more compelling than any redeeming factors. But for this very narrow issue, expats can probably begrudgingly thank China’s censors.

But then I did the best thing I could have done: I turned off my computer and actually walked outside. For the last two weeks I’ve barely looked at a computer screen, and it’s made a big difference.

I traveled to Sichuan and Shandong, meeting nothing but kindness and curiosity from locals. Nobody seemed the least bit influenced by the supposed anti-foreign atmosphere. (This blogger illustrates a similar experience with nice pictures).

On one bus ride I did encounter a middle-aged Chinese man who, as soon as I told him I was American, proceeded to rattle off every Chinese grievance with the United States from the past 60 years. Touching on everything from the Belgrade embassy bombing to interference in Libya, he said things like “America tries to rule the world. It’s really evil!” After several minutes, he got louder and inadvertently started replacing “America” with “you all” in his rant. When the rest of the bus started laughing at him though, he became self-aware, laughed along, grabbed my hand, and said, “…But you and I are just normal people. It has nothing to do with us. We’re friends.”

I’ve had dozens of similar conversations in China. Some expats get annoyed by them, but I find them quite endearing. Fiercely opinionated nationalists eagerly shotgun blast me with their political beliefs because I’m their first relevant audience. In the end though, they almost always delineate the difference between me and my government.

After that bus ride, I tried to think of the times I’ve actually met real life incarnations of the xenophobic vitriol I see on Weibo. There have probably been around ten instances where my foreignness entered the equation AFTER a dispute had already begun with a Chinese person. But I could only come up with two incidents where I encountered completely unprovoked hostility simply because I was foreign…and they were pretty mild. Not too bad for five years in China.

Several days ago I returned back home to Beijing– the epicenter of the recent xenophobia – and made the rounds with my father all over town. I still didn’t notice so much as a dirty look from locals, let alone open hostility.

Of course, this is anecdotal and I am a white foreigner – pretty different from being black or Asian. I have heard some secondhand chatter of expats in the capitol being accosted verbally or physically, but I’ve still never felt the need to keep my head down and avoid the outdoors for fear of being spit on – that is, after I lowered my intake of Chinese microblogs and media coverage of them.

This has illustrated that, for better or worse, Weibo is a pretty shotty gauge of Chinese public opinion. Roughly 250 million Chinese are microbloggers, which means over a billion are not. And that gets whittled down much further when you consider how few have an interest in politics (Yang Rui, a prolific political commentator, has only 800,000 followers), and many fewer still have enough passion to post comments or their own original content  (there were 1,600 comments on Yang’s infamous post). And then you have to consider what motivates those comments. Tea Leaf Nation recently did a great piece on how xenophobic Weibo tweets often perpetuate themselves in an echo chamber where dissenters flee, the foreign “punching bag” is mute and commenters engage in one-upsmanship to get noticed.

To be sure, diatribic Weibo commenters are an important demographic to pay attention to – no matter how relatively few their numbers are. They’re presumably the most likely people to take their grievances to the streets and push for change (whereas public opinion polls of voters are a better way to predict the political future of democracies).

But anecdotal evidence suggests that even that minority of nationalists screaming online is far more benign than their commentary would suggest. In 2008, an intensely nationalistic (and pretty scary) video was released as retaliation for a number of grievances with the West at the time. The New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos arranged an interview with the maker of the video expecting to meet a bully. Instead, he met a gracious young man who even offered to pay Osnos’ cab fare.

I personally knew a girl around the same time who railed against the “French bastards” online because of disruptions to the Paris torch relay. Several months later though, she had a French boyfriend. For xenophobic nationalists in China, I often get the feeling there’s some double-think stemming from conflicting ideas they’ve been brought up with.

Plural “foreigners” can be hated and scapegoated when they remain as disconnected abstract bogeymen.  But when Chinese nationalist meets singular foreigner face-to-face, the reality that this is a flesh and blood person kicks in and basic human decency takes over. After being exposed to several real foreigners, some will abandon the bogeyman outlook altogether, and some will just keeping flipping the switch between abstract enemy and individual foreign friend.

Like with any country, China has plenty of unmitigated racists. But at least for me, they’ve never amounted to anything more than a very rare nuisance in my day-to-day life. So if you’re not in China, don’t get the impression from recent events that the country is a cesspool of xenophobia and hatred. And if you are in China, try not to let the recent coverage of online opinion skew the way you see things. The status quo for Chinese opinion about foreigners has been and will be for a long time more or less the same: Somewhat ignorant, but good-natured and curious.

Another story has made waves recently on the Chinese internet about a Russian cellist who put his legs up on a Chinese woman’s train seat and cursed her when she complained about it (He later apologized). Unlike the rape incident, this is not a crime; nor is it newsworthy. But that didn’t stop Beijing Morning Post from splashing the whole story on their front page this morning:

Then there was CCTV anchor Yang Rui, who made this tragically hilarious statement on Weibo. Here’s a blurb:

The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash right now, arresting foreign scum and protecting innocent Chinese girls from them. […]Foreigners who can’t find a job in their home country come to China and get involved in illegal business activities such as human trafficking and espionage; they also like to distribute lies which discredit China to persuade locals to move abroad. A lot of them look for Chinese women to live with as a disguise to further their espionage efforts.

Then finally, People’s Daily reported today that Baidu and mop.com have launched a campaign with Sina Weibo, “calling on internet users to expose bad behavior by foreigners in China.”

[Update: Kaiser Kuo, Baidu's director of international communications, said this:  "The People’s Daily story is erroneous. Baidu has launched no such campaign. It was something done originally on Baidu PostBar but not under official auspices and we have now removed it."]

A lot of people do bad things and break the law in China, regardless of their nationality. But this campaign intends to put the magnifying glass squarely over bad behavior – whether or not it’s anything remarkable – so long as the perpetrator is foreign. It implicitly calls on Chinese to look at foreigners with a suspicious eye while holstering a smart phone.

Recently I discussed how the Communist Party uses the “Century of Humiliation” as the cornerstone of its legitimacy. Foreigners invaded and defiled China for a hundred years until the CCP rescued the country from them – so the story goes. The government stays in the people’s good graces by constantly reminding them of this period and implying that the country still isn’t safe from the foreign menace.

I also predicted in that post that, as the increasingly complicated power transition draws near, “we can probably expect to see even more international events covered in China from an angle that harkens back to the humiliating century. And we might even see an uptick in coverage of scarcely-newsworthy events that portray foreigners in China as exploiters or aggressors.”

Trying to consolidate political support by taking a hard-line on foreigners in the country is hardly unique to China. It works the same almost everywhere. Foreigners make a perfect “them” to unite “us” against. They can be scapegoated and harassed without political liability because they’re too few, too vulnerable and, well, too foreign to defend themselves. In China, this tactic is a matter of survival for the authoritarian government.

These recent cases shining the spotlight on bad foreigners aren’t necessarily direct examples of this tactic though. After all, it was common citizens who first disseminated the British pervert and the Russian cellist stories. But both cases raise the “did the chicken or the egg come first” dilemma. Why did netizens frame the stories as a “bad foreigner attacking good Chinese” in the first place?

The subsequent actions by players like Beijing Morning Post and Yang Rui showed that they have every intention of making sure this cycle continues. They perpetuate the implicit anti-foreign angle, thereby assuring future incidents will continue to be framed as “peaceful Chinese vs. arrogant imperialistic foreigners.” That’s pretty good for creating very shallow Chinese unity and government support, but pretty awful for humanity.

For our last trip, I brought along a video camera and have put together this short documentary with the footage. So watch as we ride through Shandong’s countryside, meet old farmers, chat with Catholic peasants, and get an up close look at China’s housing bubble:

Chan was often accused of only showing the negative side of China, which, if you line up all the reports she did, might seem true. Shan Renping from Global Times admonished her this week saying, “Foreign media should reflect on China’s complexity, which is well-known to almost all foreigners in China. However, some media are only keen to show the wickedness of China to the world.”

This implies a willful bias with the aim of slandering the country – a common accusation leveled against “Western” reporters who don’t play cheerleader to China’s re-emergence on the world stage.

But if you read Chan’s farewell message, it’s quite clear she understands the complexity of China more than people like Shan Renping ever will. She describes one of her best and worst experiences in China, which happened to both fall on the same day. In the morning she drove through a festive village where the unusual degree happiness compelled her to pull over. “You could somehow sense that everyone was excited for the future, that things were changing, and that this was the little town that could,” she said.

Later that day, she met a fisherman who had shared their optimism and recently found his own success. But a local gang had had other plans. It paid local officials to turn their heads as it violently stole the man’s property, killing his son in the process.

For me, that story summed up perfectly the kind of outlook you develop after living in China for so long – especially if you do reporting on it. You meet people that put you to shame with their determination and ability to “eat bitterness.” People that work twice as hard as you just for the chance at getting one-tenth of what you have. People that just want to live a peaceful life and make an honest living.

But then you meet those who’ve taken advantage of the political situation to exploit these people at every turn. You meet others who want to be good, but the system won’t let them. You meet brilliant people who have the capacity to do amazing things, but never will because their fate was decided before they were even born. You see innocence punished and evil rewarded so often that it begins to turn your conception of the world upside down.

So yes, there is good and bad in China, but they’re inexorably linked. When you begin to form an emotional attachment with the country and develop relationships with people inside it, you become inclined to report the bad in order to protect the good.

There are of course reporters who sensationalize the bad in China in order to boon their own careers, but Melissa Chan was not one of those people. The work she did was fair and significant; and I’m sure far from enjoyable at times. I can only imagine the emotional toll it takes on you to spend so much time with the disenfranchised people Chan gave voice to – which ultimately got her booted from the country. But China needs people to shine light on the injustices that undermine its ascent to greatness and its opportunities for happiness. What Chan got expelled for, Chinese reporters would be imprisoned for, or worse.

It’s a terrible shame the powers that be saw fit to make Melissa Chan leave. China is worse off for it.

The others listed plenty of reasons for their support: Saddam was a mad man, he was building weapons of mass destruction, he’d killed his own people and he may have had a hand in 9/11. I wouldn’t have been so bothered if I’d felt those were the real motives for nearly the entire class wanting war. But the flimsy and uninformed way many of them made their arguments suggested those reasons were just convenient excuses they were all too happy to latch on to. Quite simply, we had a badass military and it feels good to watch your country flex its muscles – especially when you have almost no chance of being personally affected by the collateral damage.

A few weeks ago I felt déjà vu from that day when I was speaking to a class of 20 Chinese grad students in Beijing. We got on the topic of the South China Sea and I expressed concern that a military conflict would break out there someday soon. One girl replied by saying, “I would welcome that.”

Other students chimed in, agreeing that they’d like to see China attack Vietnam or the Philippines. Some wanted to solidify territorial claims; others just wanted to “teach them a lesson” without specifying what exactly that lesson would be. If there were any dissenters in the class, they didn’t speak up.

Over the past few days tension has been rising between China and the Philippines over a disputed island. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has expressed its readiness for battle, and a slew of editorials have said things like “peace will be a miracle if [Filipino] provocation lasts.”

This is nothing new. Brinksmanship over Chinese territorial claims happens pretty regularly. But after speaking with that class and looking at other current events, this time feels especially dangerous. Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re the Chinese government and weigh the pros and cons of going to war with the Philippines – ordered from least to most compelling.

Cons

• Loss of Chinese soldiers.
• International condemnation – would seriously undermine China’s claim of a “Peaceful Rise.”
• This would push China’s other neighbors (Vietnam, Japan, India, Korea) further into the arms of the US and encourage them to increase their defense capability.
• Possibility of a direct US military intervention.

Pros

• China would control the disputed island and surrounding waters.
• It would send a message to other neighbors that China is serious about enforcing its territorial claims.
• It would end the impression that China will back down from potential conflict with the US. This would be useful internationally – especially with regards to Taiwan – but even more so domestically, to show the people that the government has the backbone to confront the US.
• It would greatly please the hawks in the military – a base which is absolutely essential for the CCP, as they’re the only real guarantors of continued authoritarian rule.
• As with most any war, it would consolidate nationalistic support from the people firmly behind the party, which would be a godsend amidst turbulent domestic issues (ie – economic turndown, rough leadership transition).

China probably won’t act militarily in this particular situation, but if I’m in charge of the country right now, that pros list is looking more attractive by the day. As wild as this year has already been with the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng incidents, it’s possible that we ain’t seen nothing yet. If any more destabilizing events take place in the lead-up to the power handover, it may become very tempting to finally step over the line from saber-rattling to actual military action in the South China Sea – a line many Chinese have been pressuring the government to cross for years.

All over China you see slogans like “Happy Guangdong” or “Civilized Chaoyang” that call attention directly to what leaders feel those places are lacking. And chengguan – the city management officers responsible for stopping illegal street vendors – have an often-deserved reputation as being thugs who use their little power to terrorize poor migrants. So all over Beijing we see signs like this:

“People’s City, People’s Administration” (A play on the word “Chengguan” )

With this principle in mind, I’ve been watching Xinwen Lianbo over the past few weeks. This is CCTV’s flagship news program that runs simultaneously on most channels every evening at 7:00. This program most consistently reaches the largest viewership throughout China, so it’s perfect for gauging the government’s biggest insecurities.

The program’s traditional schedule is widely recognized and mocked by Chinese. It consists of three segments: The leaders are busy, the people are happy, and foreign countries are in chaos.  I vaguely recall when I first got to China in 2007, you could almost set your watch to it most days. When images of top leaders shaking hands with foreign diplomats or doing countryside field inspections shifted into minorities and peasants enjoying favorable government policies, it must be 7:10. When those happy faces faded into American gun violence or Middle-East bombings, it must be about 7:20.

These three segments can be seen as compensation for the Communist Party’s three biggest fears: That the leaders might be seen as illegitimate, corrupt and self-indulgent; that the peasants and minorities might feel exploited or repressed; and that countries under different political systems might be viewed as preferable alternatives.

What I’ve found interesting from watching the program over the past few weeks – and ticking off the kinds of stories that are shown – is that the traditional format has been shaken up. To its credit, individual stories are now more diverse and often contain news without apparent political aims. However, the “leaders are busy” portion now often stretches out 15-20 minutes of the 30 minute newscast, with an average of 5 separate stories each program. This might suggest the leadership is REALLY keen on proving its legitimacy as the power handover draws near.

The “people are happy” and “foreign countries are in chaos” segments are also still cornerstones, with an average of 2.3 and 3.6 stories respectively each night. But two other segments seem to have become regular additions: “China is innovative” and “the economy is looking good.”

Each have been averaging one story per night. Chinese innovations like an aerospace medical lab and the world’s quietest washing machine are shown; as are detailed explications (often digressing into virtual PowerPoint presentations) leading you to feel that China’s economy is strong and will stay strong.

China is facing some major economic bubbles, coupled with bleak growth prospects if its businesses can’t move up the value chain while wages increase. The Chinese education system’s failure to produce the creativity needed to do so has been a concern for years. If, and how badly the bubbles will burst, and whether or not China can get creative, remain to be seen. But if Xinwen Lianbo is any indication, they’re things the government is pretty worried about.

The past few weeks have been especially embarrassing for the “rule-of-law” touting Communist Party as a blind activist (not actually charged with any crime) escaped house arrest. Well now Global Times has released a new narrative on what’s happened in Chen Guangcheng’s village over the past few years that puts the situation in a very different light.

In an op-ed entitled “Chen trump for US in human rights game,” Sima Pingbang, a “blogger and grass-roots intellectual” claims that he actually visited Chen successfully last December. This is a pretty bold claim since we were previously under the impression that no journalist had successfully broken through Chen’s guards to see him. It’s also quite strange that we haven’t heard anything of this visit until now – at a time when finding some actual wrong-doing by Chen would be very convenient for the party – which brings us to the even bolder claims of the article:

According to other villagers, Chen’s imprisonment a few years ago had nothing to do with his work. It was actually a pretty common local conflict.  They told me that Chen built a deep well using funds he received from a British source. But that well sucked out water from other wells in the village, which meant Chen effectively controlled the village’s water.

They claimed that Chen charged high fees for the water and caused discontent from villagers, some of them then openly voiced their unhappiness and that angered Chen. So he asked his family members to attack the village committee and blocked public roads in order to vent his anger.

So rather than being a feeble human rights defender, the piece says Chen is a water-hoarding, price-gouging, vengeful rabble-rouser.  For some reason, a British source funded a blind man’s water monopoly on a random village in Shandong.

[Update 1: Another article today from The Daily Beast mentions that there was in fact a British-funded well. It says, "After his environmental fight against the paper mill (in the late 1990s), Chen contacted Western media, diplomats, and NGOs in an effort to help improve villagers’ access to clean water. When the British Embassy agreed to bankroll a new 180-meter-deep well, Chen was proud of what his little hamlet of Dongshigu had achieved."] 

Sima Pingbang, the author of the GT piece, is a somewhat famous left-wing Maoist who last year penned an essay entitled “Support American People’s Great Wall Street Revolution,” which said events in the US will herald a global revolution that will bury capitalism. It inspired some short-lived protests in support of the movement in China.

On scouring over Sima Pingbang’s Weibo tweets from the month of December, I found nothing about a visit to Chen Guangcheng’s village. When contacted about how the claims were verified for print in Global Times, op-ed section reporter Gao Lei explained that Sima Pingbang did indeed visit Dongshigu in December with two others named Liu Yang 刘仰 and Yi Qing 一清 from a “blogger association.” Gao said that the group was approved by local authorities for the visit because they said they were “not there to cause any trouble, but looking for a peaceful solution.”  They then related this all to Gao Lei with some others from the association over dinner sometime after their return.

It seems that the “blogger association” (which Gao didn’t name) these men belong to is April Media 四月传媒 at m4.cn - formerly Anti-CNN.com – a nationalistic site that’s railed against Western media distortions of China since 2008.  It has an English sister site called the 4th Media. All three men have written op-eds on Chen Guangcheng in the past three days (here, here and here). Yi Qing backs up the trip to Dongshigu, but Liu Yang just talks about how Chen is a sympathetic figure who’s been exploited by the West. It’s not quite in line with the conniving water baron Sima Pingbang’s article portrays.

Gao Lei also said that these men have written about their trip before, but I wasn’t able to find anything about it dated before the past few days – which is odd if they did in fact go last December.

So it seems Sima Pingbang either A) Really found a story that the entire foreign press has somehow missed, B) went to Dongshigu, actually talked with villagers and Chen Guangcheng, but was lied to – perhaps by the thugs guarding Chen – and swallowed it all wholesale, or C) made things up.  Since Chen Guangcheng is gone now anyways and these new revelations, if true, would neutralize the government’s supposed wrongdoing, surely Dongshigu authorities will want these things independently verified by journalists – like those from CNN –  who might try to visit the town.

[Update 2: Yaxue Cao from Seeing Red in China, who first broke the news on Chen Kegui's altercation with thugs, has informed me that Sima did go to Dongshigu with Liu and Yi, as well as Politburo member Li Yuanchao, to convince Chen to reach some kind of compromise - which he refused. This site shows that Li was in Linyi at the time, though it naturally doesn't mention anything about Chen. The presence of a Politburo member would be nothing short of incredible and would explain the others not writing about the trip earlier.

Yaxue also adeptly pointed out that, while there was indeed a British-funded well, the idea of Chen siphoning the water away from the rest of the village is stupid because of (among other things) the principle of communicating vessels.]

[Update 3: He Peirong, Chen's rescuer, has told me that Li Yuanchao never met Chen. So if Li did have any involvement with Chen, it wasn't direct.]

1. Show restraint. Acknowledge, but downplay the story as best it can until it blows over. Perhaps even allow a few commentaries that aren’t hyper-critical of the event to show that the leadership isn’t so insecure.
2. Actively retaliate with the full extent of police and media power.

It’s now become pretty apparent that they learned nothing from The Liu Xiaobo Nobel PR debacle and have decided to go all in on option 2.

Many of Chen’s extended family and rescuers are still unaccounted for, have been interrogated, beaten, or been placed under soft detention. And several journalists have been blocked from reporting.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Weimin whipped out the one-size fits all response to international disputes saying, “The US move is an interference in China’s internal affairs.”

The Chinese media is now on the offensive as well, using pretty much every official cliche you can imagine for responding to dissent and foreign involvement in China.  Here’s a few rough translations from recent Chinese media commentaries:

Beijing Daily:

Chen Guangcheng has become a tool and a pawn of the U.S. politicians to discredit China.

Chen doesn’t represent the interests of the majority of people, just the interests of his boss: The Western Anti-China forces.

Chen has been made famous and labeled as a “hero” and a “freedom fighter” by the US and western media – An anti-society, anti-establishment figure.

Paraphrase [kind of an awkward translation]: Chen and the people supporting him are very naïve to think they can use this event to interfere with and blackmail China. It won’t get any response from the 1.3 billion Chinese people, who are mature enough to realize it’s a conspiracy.

Just think if other countries’ embassies became highly interested in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, giving support to the people to revolt and reinvent the image of America. How would the US respond?

Ambassador Locke, since taking office, has used his duties to strain relations between China and the US instead of being devoted to the development of Sino-US relations. He rode economy class on his plane ride, he carried his bags himself, and used coupons to buy coffee – all as a show. Then he monitored Beijing air quality and published readings at the embassy, creating debate in Beijing city administration. Now he dares to bring Chen – a Chinese citizen – into the US embassy. These things are not in line with Locke’s role as an ambassador, but are meant to stir up contradictions in the whirlpool and it’s very obvious what motive is behind his behavior. [Loosely paraphrased from Chinese parable]: This farce directed by the US embassy gives a lesson to Chinese citizens: The US has ill intentions toward China.

Beijing News:

Diplomats from foreign governments stationed in other countries have the obligation to comply with the laws and respect the culture of the host country. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations does not give ambassadors the right to intervene in domestic issues and doesn’t give them “extraterritoriality” to flagrantly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

Since World War II, marks of colonial rule like “extraterritoriality” and “consular jurisdiction” have been thrown in the trash bin of history.

When exploring the new power between China and the United States, one cannot simply use the Cold War mentality to look at how to deal with the differences between the two countries.

Beijing Youth Daily:

Chen Guangcheng left the US embassy in China on May 2^nd, Ambassador Locke sent him to the hospital in person, pushing the wheelchair under the foreign media’s spotlight. He went beyond his duties as an American ambassador. Under normal circumstances it’s understandable that American officials give help to ordinary Chinese citizens, but Locke used American values to judge Chinese society and forced China to accept American values. His actions were a “show” and “performance” to attract attention, which is typical Western politician behavior. It’s impulsive and hypocritical. It’s not only offensive to Chinese, but the American media also criticizes such behavior.

In recent years, human rights has been relegated to a very secondary position in Sino-US relations. The era in which the US finds fault with China’s human rights should belong to the past. We are willing to make concessions to the relationship with sincerity and goodwill to maintain the overall situation of Sino-US relations. Any behavior that damages the overall situation of Sino-US relations has no future.

Beijing Times

The US is already stretched too wide and too thin in other countries, but it still shows too much concern about Chinese domestic issues. Under the flag of humanitarianism it interferes with other countries’ issues showing its intention of being the master of the world. This kind of behavior totally betrays international law and the principle of non-interference. But if other countries interfere with American internal affairs then the US will retaliate. This kind of logic is pure hegemonic logic.

The countries who have such logic always deliberately look for some tools to flaunt their own rights and the mistakes of others. In this case Chen Guangcheng is their new tool. When he was at the US embassy, he couldn’t find justice but only found himself being used by the US, which left him only frustration and disappointment. Any country during the period of transition and reform will face a lot of conflicts and contradictions. But during the past 30 years after Reform & Opening Up, China has not passed on its problems or contradictions to other countries, but rather it solved a lot of problems on its own and achieved great accomplishments and progress. But some individuals and countries with ulterior motives intend to exaggerate Chinese domestic contradictions in an attempt to discredit China. But this one of the contradictions that Chinese can solve on its own as it did in previous years without the need of others to intervene.

Recently I went biking through Shandong – where Chen Guangcheng fought these practices. When going from cities to villages, there’s a pretty obvious inverse correlation between the income of local people and the number of signs urging them to only have one child (and not to abort if that one child is female). These signs range from the spray-painted and depressing to the fancy and poetic. Some are so absurd I figured they must all just be made up on the spot by desperate local officials (ie – “Plant more trees, have less children and you’ll become rich”).

Well it turns out many of these slogans come directly from the National Population and Family Planning Commission – a State Council agency. In 2007 the commission worried that many local slogans were “cold and tough, lacking humane care and people-oriented thinking” and may “lead to ambiguity.” Then there were some slogans which “have content that isn’t wrong, but are too blunt and indifferent. They not only fail to warn and educate, but also can easily lead to resentment of the masses, leading to conflicts and disputes.”

Getting them right is important because “even with today’s highly developed mass media, slogans still inspire, guide and unite the people on the principles and policies of population and family planning.”

So the commission took the liberty of putting together this list of 190 recommended slogans.

Many go beyond just birth control. They touch on issues indirectly related to the one child policy; like discouraging aborting girls, encouraging care for the elderly (implying that you won’t need a bunch of kids to take care of you when you get old) and discouraging anything that might cause birth defects (which would prompt you to have more kids).

Here are some choice translations:

16. Do everything possible to solve the population problem, focus on building a harmonious society.

30. Mother Earth is too tired. She can’t bear too many children.

34. Control the population, protect the environment and cherish the planet.

40. Advocate the scientific premarital examination and the prevention of birth defects.

55. In nature there are mountains and water. In human society there men and women – balanced and harmonious.

61. Maintain a balanced sex ratio at birth and build a socialist harmonious society.

66. It is strictly prohibited to drown, abandon or abuse baby girls. According to the law protect the rights and interests of women and children.

72. Migrant workers, do not forget family planning and health services are always with you.

78. Respecting, caring for and helping the elderly are virtues of the Chinese nation.

80. Children are the flowers of the motherland. The elderly are the wealth of society.

96. Bare fewer children and run faster toward a moderately well-off life. Build a harmonious new countryside.

104. Break the thousands of years of old feudal customs. Set up new marriage and reproduction culture.

124. Girls and boys are the hope of the nation.

146. Family planning services send sincere emotions. Law-based administration warms hearts.

155. Family is a boat, love is the sail, and reproductive health is the harbor of your happiness.

157. Contraception, informed choices, and reproductive health warm you and me.

173. Family is a boat, love is the sail. A healthy husband and wife will reach the other shore.

181. Citizens have the right to reproduction, but also the obligation to practice family planning according to law.

184. No inter-family marriage. Premarital check is essential.

I should add that the more poetic slogans aren’t even done justice through the English translation, but you get the idea.

Now, five years later, it seems these suggestions have indeed found their way down to the villages. Here’s some of what I saw on my trip:

Give fewer and better births, be happy the whole life.

Ban non-medical sex determinations and sex-selective abortions.

Delivering girls is just as good as delivering boys. Girls are descendants too.

When going out for migrant work, don't forget your birth control.

Men should also participate in the family planning. Both husband and wife build a harmonious society.

One town even thought it prudent to add English translation themselves:

Strictly control the population growth. Accelerate the social economic development.

This comes at a terrible time for the Chinese government. The Communist Party has been trying desperately to parade Bo Xilai’s arrest as evidence that China is under the rule of law. People’s Daily recently mentioned “the law” 23 times in a single editorial. There’s perhaps nobody that makes a mockery of this more than Chen Guangcheng.

Chen spent four years in prison on trumped up charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.” In the 18 months since his release he’s been under house arrest despite never being charged with any additional crimes. His family – including his 6-year old daughter – has also been detained.

Over the past few years Chen has become a folk-hero among activists in China, perhaps only second to Ai Weiwei in fame. The Shawshank-like escape of the blind dissident through dozens of state thugs is a metaphor that won’t be lost on his supporters

What happens next will be very interesting. The most comparable event in recent memory is when Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in late 2010. Then and now there’s really no positive way the government can spin it. And the Party now basically has the same choices it did then:

1. Show restraint. Acknowledge, but downplay the story as best it can until it blows over. Perhaps even allow a few commentaries that aren’t hyper-critical of the event to show that the leadership isn’t so insecure.
2. Actively retaliate with the full extent of police and media power.

You’ll notice there isn’t a third option of officially ignoring the event and trying to block out any mention of it. We’ll probably see that for several days, but the internet has made it an impossible long-term strategy for a story as sensational as this.

In Liu Xiaobo’s case the second option was taken. Liu’s wife and several activists were detained, people were stopped from leaving the country, and we got a daily barrage of inflammatory editorials portraying the prize as a farce concocted by the West to keep China down.

The episode was a PR disaster. The official response only reinforced everything that the award was criticizing. Had the Chinese government taken the first option, it still would have been embarrassing, but some semblance of dignity and face would have been saved. Now we get to see if anything was learned from the Nobel affair.

If the same strategy is used now, it’ll face some big challenges. In this case, the government has no foreigners to blame. As belligerent as it seemed to outsiders, the official response to the Nobel Prize whipped up some nationalistic points for the government. It’s unlikely any such points can be won here. The US could be criticized for “interfering in China’s internal affairs” by sheltering Chen, but that invites some very risky juxtapositions between the two governments.

That leads to the most important difference with the Liu Xiaobo case: Liu was tried for a law he did actually break – a horribly unjust and poorly-defined law, yes, but still a law that’s on the books. What can the government say in Chen’s case? There’s no legal justification to point to. Chen served his time and is legally a free man.

For the past 18 months the central government has been largely able to keep its hands clean of Chen by leaving local Linyi officials to do the dirty work. But now he’s found his way to the central government’s backyard and has already begun to tell the world his story.

National leaders have some important decisions to make in how they respond to Chen, his rescuers, and his family. So far it seems they’re maintaining the status quo by tacitly approving of local authorities’ suppression. Chen’s family has already been retaliated against and his rescuer has reportedly been detained in Nanjing. The Communist Party can either live up to the rule of law it’s been trumpeting and ensure the  freedom of these people, or it can make a hypocritical spectacle of itself at a time when official credibility is already hanging by a thread.

But did it actually happen?

On April 24^th The Harvard Crimson printed a statement by Bo Guagua addressing many of the rumors floating around about him. One of the points said:

I have never driven a Ferrari. I have also not been to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing since 1998 (when I obtained a previous U.S. Visa), nor have I ever been to the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in China. Even my student Visas were issued by the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, which is closer to my home of five years.

This echoes the denial his father made at a press conference last month shortly before he was sacked.

Yesterday I contacted Jon Huntsman’s press office asking about the Ferrari incident and was simply told, “Unfortunately the Governor is not commenting on this story.”

I next contacted the US Embassy in Beijing. Richard Buangan, the embassy’s press secretary, told me by phone that he couldn’t confirm anything.

It was never previously confirmed which of Huntsman’s three adult daughters Bo Guagua supposedly met, but today New York Times reported that they had contacted one of the girls. The article stated:

[Abby Huntsman Livingston] said her sister Mary Anne did share a ride with the younger Mr. Bo after dinner one night but did not notice the make of the car. Ms. Livingston added that she and a friend of Mr. Bo’s were also at the dinner that evening. “He was a very nice person,” she wrote. “I can’t confirm that a Ferrari was involved because I didn’t see it.” She did back up one thing Mr. Bo said: contrary to published accounts, he did not pick up her sister at the ambassador’s residence. “Not sure where the story originated from to be honest, nor does my family,” she wrote.

I tried contacting all three Huntsman sisters myself via their Facebook and Twitter pages, but there was no reply.

The Ferrari story was first exposed in an article by Jeremy Page in Wall Street Journal last November with no names or titles of sources given, citing only “several people familiar with [the episode].”

Anonymous sources are a fact of life with government/embassy officials who aren’t officially authorized to comment. But I emailed Jeremy Page to see if he could give some clarity about the sources he based his report on. I asked  how many sources there were, who they’re affiliated with and if he approached them independently of one-another. Page sent a reply, not answering my questions but directing me to a Dow Jones (WSJ’s parent company) PR rep in New York. She said, “We don’t publicly discuss sources but we’re confident what we reported is true.”

Jeremy Page is a very reputable reporter (whom I and several other journalists have recently said deserves a Pulitzer for his Bo coverage). There’s little reason to doubt that reliable sources did indeed give him the Ferrari information, but who are they? Why do their accounts conflict so greatly with those of the parties directly involved? The issue has serious implications, not only for the Bo family, but also in how the ruling elite and their offspring are viewed in China.

Unfortunately I have more questions to offer at this point than answers, and until one of Page’s sources decides to speak up, it will probably stay that way.

Guo Hui, Haikou engineering maintenance worker

People’s Daily:  [The Bo decision] fully illustrated the Chinese Communist Party, which represents the people’s fundamental interests and shall never allow any “special party member” to be above the discipline of the party or the law of the country. Everybody is equal before the law and there is no privileged citizen or exception in the system. 同时也充分说明，代表人民群众根本利益的中国共产党，决不允许有凌驾于党纪国法之上的“特殊党员”；法律面前人人平等，制度面前没有特权、制度约束没有例外，

Worker: From the decision we can see the clear stand of the Party and government to safeguard party discipline and the laws of the state, that is to say, no matter what their position is in the party, nobody can be above the discipline of the party or law of the country. 从这个决定中我们可以看出，我们党和政府在坚决维护党纪国法面前的一个鲜明态度，就是说，在党内不管职位高低，不管任何人，都不能凌驾于党纪国法之上。

Yu Xingshou, Chongqing citizen

Chongqing citizen: As a party member, no matter how high your position is, whoever violates the law should be severely punished by the law. This treatment reflects equality before the law. 作为一名党员，不管你职位多高，干部多大，谁触犯了法律，都应该受到法律的严惩。这次的处理体现了在法律面前人人平等。

Chen Zhiwei, Changsha farmer

People’s Daily: China is a socialist country under the rule of law. The dignity and authority of the law cannot be trampled on. Whoever is involved, whoever broke the law shall be dealt with according to the law with no mercy. 我国是社会主义法治国家，法律的尊严和权威不容践踏。不论涉及到谁，只要触犯法律，都将依法处理，决不姑息。

Farmer: Our country is a socialist country under the rule of law. No one can be above the law and corruption will surely be punished severely by the law. 我们在法治社会主义国家，任何一个人不能凌驾于法律之上，有腐败行为的一定会得到国家法律的严惩。

Yang Fengcheng, Renmin University professor of party history

People’s Daily: Strict organizational discipline is a distinctive feature of our party. One of the party’s advantages is that organizations and members at all levels strictly obey the party discipline and consciously accept it. 严密的组织纪律性，是我们党的一个鲜明特征；党的各级组织和全体党员严守党的纪律、自觉接受党的纪律约束，是我们党的重要优势，

Renmin Professor: The Chinese Communist Party has a distinctive feature: that is strict discipline.  We say everyone is equal before the law, so to a Communist Party member, every member is equal before the party discipline.  中国共产党它有一个鲜明的特点，就是有着严明的纪律。我们讲在法律面前人人平等，那么在党纪面前，对于党员来讲那就是党纪面前人人平等。

Sun Fei, Deputy director of research at the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection

People’s Daily (from earlier April 10th editorial): [The Bo decision] fully reflects the spirit to stress facts and rule by law. It complies with the party’s concept to discipline itself strictly and rule the country according to law. It demonstrates the party’s firm determination to keep its purity.  这充分体现了重事实、讲法治的精神，完全符合我们党从严治党的根本要求和依法治国的执政理念，表明了我们党保持自身纯洁性的坚定决心，

Discipline inspection researcher: The decision by the CPC Central Committee to initiate an investigation of Comrade Bo Xilai’s serious disciplinary problems fully reflects the party’s determination to discipline itself strictly. It fully reflects that the party will never tolerate any corruption and that its ruling concept is to rule the country according to law. It also demonstrated the party’s firm stand to keep its purity.党中央决定对薄熙来同志严重违纪问题进行立案调查， 充分体现了党要管党，从严治党的决心，充分体现了我们党对腐败现象绝不容忍的政治态度，体现了依法治国的执政理念，表名了党保持自身纯洁的坚定立场。

It seems to me one of three things happened here:

1. CCTV reporters did some serious shoe-leather reporting in several different cities across China in the space of a few hours, managing to find interviewees that happened to have nearly verbatim opinions to the People’s Daily editorials.
2. The whole country truly was engulfed by the heated editorials and their spirited points rolled off the tongues of all those CCTV approached.
3. CCTV told interviewees what to say.

I know I know. Chinese state media lacking journalistic integrity…truly breaking news.  Last year a leaked uncut video showed a farmer being told what to say on camera by a reporter, and CCTV has had plenty of its own fake interviews exposed. But having the audacity to do it with five back-to-back interviewees speaking from a single source openly available to the public is a bit surprising; especially for a network now trying to build credibility for its ambitious overseas expansion plans.

This is the Communist Party’s narrative of history. It’s the message that’s taught in textbooks and reinforced in the media, museums and movies every day throughout China. The elephant in the room that this narrative ignores of course is what happened for the first 30 years of communist China. And it also ignores the damage done by wholly domestic forces during the Century of Humiliation. The below charts show the relative death tolls inflicted on China by domestic and foreign forces over the past two centuries.

The first breaks down the major deadly events.

Getting an accurate count on these events is notoriously difficult*; especially when looking back to the 19th century. But even when we look at the range of estimates the picture is pretty obvious. The next chart shows when we combine these events into a simple Chinese vs. foreign-caused death comparison.

Here’s what it looks like when you just compare deaths caused by the Communist Party’s policies to the events of the Century of Humiliation (This graph doesn’t include the Communist Revolution).

In just 27 years the Communist Party managed to kill significantly more Chinese than all the foreign aggressors did in the previous 106 years combined.

Now in many ways these graphs miss the point. Killings were only one of the grievances over the Century of Humiliation. The damage done to the Chinese psyche was caused more by foreigners stealing territory, imposing unequal treaties, looting cultural relics, exploiting Chinese people, and of course, the heinousness of Japan’s war crimes. But making other considerations goes both ways. During the party’s first 30 years it took the personal property and land of millions, destroyed countless historical relics, denounced and humiliated people for the crime of being intellectual, and enabled violence often every bit as vile as what the Japanese committed. But these death tolls simply provide one objective measurement of the damage caused to China, and they have some important implications.

The nationalism derived from the Century of Humiliation legitimizes the party’s rule and unites the people against a common enemy. China’s education system emphasizes the greatness of China’s 5,000 year civilization and in many ways promotes the idea that Chinese are exceptional people by nature. Take this question from a college entrance exam:

25) Since reform and opening up, China has successfully embarked on improving national conditions and adapted to the road of peaceful development. Adhering to the path of peaceful development is in line with China’s historical and cultural traditions. This is because______

• A. The Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation
• B. Peace and development is the trend of the times
• C. In foreign exchange the Chinese people have always stressed “loving neighbors” and “finding common interests among diversity “
• D. Chinese culture is a culture of peace. Longing for peace has always been a spiritual characteristic of the Chinese people [A,C, & D are "correct"]

China was the greatest nation in the world and only lost its footing because of incompetent leadership and war-warmongering foreigners who don’t share China’s peaceful values. The party kicked out the imperialists for good (according to its version of history) and still takes an aggressive stance on any whiff of foreign insult or interference with China. Therefore, the Communist Party is “The inevitable choice in China’s social development.“

However, to acknowledge that much of what derailed the country in the first place was home-grown violence would take a lot of wind from that idea’s sails. So would the implication that the rescuer (the CCP) did far greater damage to the country than those it needed rescuing from.

These numbers also matter for low-level foreign relations. Chinese businessmen have been known to invoke the Century of Humiliation as leverage with Western counterparts in getting a better deal. You’ll sometimes even hear common street vendors use historical grievances to justify overcharging foreigners. There remains a strong sense that China is still poor because foreigners set China’s progress back a century. So when there’s a chance to balance the scales a little bit, some try to seize their due compensation.

In the coming months as the party begins its difficult power transition (which just became even more complicated) and tries to grab whatever legitimacy it can, we can probably expect to see even more international events covered in China from an angle that harkens back to the humiliating century. And we might even see an uptick in coverage of scarcely-newsworthy events that portray foreigners in China as exploiters or aggressors. It would be a travesty to deny the damage that foreign powers did to China in the past two centuries, but when talking about setting back China’s development, these numbers suggest that foreigners’ role was slim next to certain other “parties.”

*The main sources for these charts are listed on necrometetrics.com here and here and were compared to a few other independent estimates to get a reasonable range. Some of the “various internal uprisings” have very scant data with only a single (likely unreliable) number though and should be taken accordingly. 
 

But wait. This isn’t 2012 and we’re not talking about Bo Xilai. It’s 2006 and I’m describing former Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, Jiang Zemin’s old “Shanghai Clique” brethren. He found himself on the wrong side of a politically-motivated corruption investigation launched by Hu Jintao’s Beijing clan while posturing for the following year’s 17^th National Congress (China’s mid-term leadership shuffle). At the time, foreign media sank their teeth into the sensational political drama.

But wait. If we rewind further to 1995 we find that Beijing mayor and Politburo member Chen Xitong was taken down for corruption and embezzlement. He was in the Beijing faction and a rival of then paramount leader Jiang Zemin. Oh, and the scandal unraveled following the mysterious death of one of Chen’s close associates.

Are we noticing a pattern here?

Bo Xilai’s unfolding scandal is very similar to these past instances, but of course it’s different in one critical way: A lot of Chinese people know about it.

Yesterday morning it was the talk of the Beijing subway and a Chinese friend told me politics has replaced celebrity gossip around her office water cooler. This has forced the government to face the public with the scandal to a degree never before seen.

On April 10^th, China’s official Xinhua news agency released a short, but explosive statement announcing that Bo had been officially stripped of his titles and his wife was suspected in the British businessman’s murder.

The embarrassing thing for Xinhua (and ergo the government) was that Reuters had broken this news hours earlier. And microbloggers on Weibo reported it (in one form or another) hours before that. In fact, the whole Bo saga unfolded on Weibo as the state media released only occasional terse statements.

When the Chen Liangyu scandal hit the light of day in 2006, there were about 130 million Chinese internet users and precisely zero of them were microbloggers. Today, over 500 million Chinese are online and half of them microblog. Imagine what those numbers will look like at the next leadership shuffle in 2017.

One can’t deny the sensational theatrics of late night foreign embassy runs, a dead (possibly ex-spy) foreigner, and a flamboyant neo-socialist. At its core though, Bo’s case is hardly unprecedented. But if we look back at the cases of Chen Xitong, Chen Liangyu and now Bo Xilai, we see that each incident has shaken the central party apparatus successively harder.

The party has been thrown off balance, but at the end of the year it will in all likelihood still be standing with its new leadership. But when China’s shadowy power politics inevitably spill out again into the increasingly connected and decreasingly trusting public, can things possibly remain as stable?

The unremarkable case of Bo Xilai: Part I

Step back for a moment and consider some of the events that led to where Bo is today:

• In February suspicions were raised over a death which had occurred three months earlier. This dead person happened to be a foreigner, ensuring that people outside the controllable domestic media and police would take an unyielding interest.
• Wang Lijun, Bo’s Chongqing police chief, apparently ran into trouble while investigating Neil Heywood’s death and/or activities by Bo’s wife, yet he persisted.
• Wang Lijun was fired by Bo and fled to the American consulate in Chengdu drawing international attention to the affair.
• Uncensored information was allowed to run wild on microblogs, making much of China aware of the Bo saga.
• Bo fell on the opposite side of the political spectrum from some of the top leaders in the Communist Party (ie. Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao).

The Titanic didn’t sink simply because it swiped an iceberg. Any colossal disaster is the result of multiple, mutually-aggravating factors that come together in a perfect storm. Subtract any one of these factors and it’s highly possible Bo would be sitting in one of the most powerful positions in the world one year from now. He was very unlucky.

It would be very naive though to think that Bo’s crimes are anything extraordinary in a system where the same people who wield complete political control also control the police, courts and media theoretically responsible for indicting them. Consider that Bo’s replacement as Chongqing party secretary, Zhang Dejiang, almost certainly had a hand in concealing from the world the breakout of a dangerous, highly-infectious disease, which caused incalculable deaths and illnesses. Several other high-level leaders were sacked. Zhang wasn’t.

Jia Qinglin presided over Fujian Province during the Yuanhua case – one of the biggest corruption scandals in China’s history. He was widely expected to be taken down with several other high officials who were jailed or executed. Instead, he became the 4^th most powerful man in China. Then there’s Jiang Zemin, who’s had several close ties convicted in major corruption scandals – including the mastermind of the Yuanhua case. And these are all just the most powerful and publicly visible leaders. Imagine how easy it would be for lower leaders to imprison (ergo discredit) or kill off potential aggravators.

The Chinese media is already hailing the Bo case as evidence China is under the rule of law. The Xinhua piece that broke the latest news was titled “Police reinvestigate death of Neil Heywood according to law” It and the Global Times piece contained phrases like, “Police authorities paid high attention to the case, and are reinvestigating the case according to law with an attitude to seek truth from facts” and “[A senior official said] the incident would neither disrupt the Party’s 18th National Congress in fall nor the country’s long-term political and social development.”

When the state media uses statements like these so gratuitously, it’s a flimsy way of compensating for the fact that the opposite is probably true. You can be sure that at every turn in the Bo case, legal considerations were made only in the context of their political implications.

We don’t know how guilty any of the other leaders mentioned above are, and we may never know. The media and individuals aren’t allowed to touch them with a ten foot pole, despite the fact that the law clearly says they are.

In China, political winners and losers are decided by unpredictable backroom tactical cunning rather than the ballot box. In the internet age though, anyone with a bone to pick or rival to eliminate can leak damning information easily and anonymously. Cases like Bo’s will inevitably become more common and destabilizing in the future without political reform.