Global Times Promotes "Freedom of Speech"

News comes from Fei Chang Dao that the Global Times is working hard to promote freedom of speech on the Chinese mainland.  Previously, the Chinese government has been relucantant to answer qustions about Internet and civil freedoms in China, but now seems to take a different tack, openly reporting that the Japanese version of the Chinese search engine Baidu  was blocked because of pornographic content.

As Chine wrestles with it's position in the global economy, the whimsical nature of the Chinese censorship system throws up the occasional blip in reality for Chinese consumers.  This month, while  Despicable Me 2 has been receiving coverage in Chinese language entertainment magazines, and has been heavily promoted on the Beijing subway video feeds, the movie itself has been deemed illegal by SARFT and is unlikely to be screened to Chinese audiences.

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Chinese Brain Drain Not Likely to Improve

The Chinese brain drain, according to the China Daily, is one of the worlds worst. It’s not good news for a country that is desperate to establish itself as a world leader in science and technology.

The Chinese love modern drugs. Antibiotics are especially popular, with Chinese patients popping ten times the number of pills that Americans do - nearly 140g a year per capita. GlaxoSmithKline’s bribery scandal shows how much money can be made by pointlessly prescribing useless drugs. Accused of bribing doctors to prescribe more of GSK’s own products, the Chinese entity stands accused of spending nearly £320m to cater to the whims of doctors.

The ease of which doctors can dole out antibiotics also highlights the low penetration of even basic scientific understanding in China. While the cash-strapped doctors who are told to prescribe more expensive drugs for minor ailments certainly bear most of the blame, the patients that demand better care (that is, more drugs with impressively complicated names) aren’t entirely innocent either.

While it’s easy to paint the underpaid doctors as the bad guys and point out that patients are just following the directions of their physician, a study from the Ministry of Health, showed that patients who knew the basic ideas behind what works for a viral infection, or what won’t work for a bacterial infection were less likely to be incorrectly prescribed antibiotics. "A simple intervention in which patient's display of knowledge about appropriate antibiotic use can dramatically reduce the abuse of antibiotics," the report found, also noting that if patients asked if they really needed the medicine they were being prescribed, the relationship they had with their doctor rapidly “deteriorated”.

The Chinese government is desperate to promote scientific theory across the country. It’s no small challenge by any stretch of the imagination, especially considering that during the Cultural Revolution academics - including scientists - were attacked as being bourgeois and were sent to labour camps. For almost a decade, no new scientists were trained and all academic research ground to a halt. It’s this 10 year period that partly explains the desperate measures some Chinese parents go to when the gaokao rolls around every year - it’s the only chance to guarantee an education for the child that their parents never had the chance to get.

Forty years on, China has the money and the equipment, but still lacks when it comes to the actual talent. The outcome-oriented culture has given rise to a situation where highly qualified scientists are reduced to operating equipment making medicines that right now are selling like hotcakes, but, given the alarming rate of the spread of drug-resistant bacterias, might not be so red-hot in the next ten or fifteen years.

At the end of July, the Chinese scientific community could hardly contain itself when news came from Guangzhou that a team of researchers had manage to create teeth from stem cells collected from urine. Buried at the bottom of the press release, the team also pointed out that the teeth were about 1/3 the hardness of real teeth. Professor Chris Mason of University College London was underwhelmed by the development, telling the BBC "It is probably one of the worst sources [of stem cells], there are very few cells in the first place and the efficiency of turning them into stem cells is very low. You just wouldn't do it in this way.” A damning critique that shows Chinese researchers aren’t even doing it wrong.

It’s the closed system, boring work and relentless pursuit of profits that has made many scientists are researchers shy away from professional life in China. When asked, an alarming 87% of Chinese graduates said that they had no plans to return to China in the future.

By contrast, in Denmark, where 1 in 10 scientists at the Technical University of Denmark, the dean, Martin Bendsøe, is under no illusions as to what attracts top flight Chinese talent out of their homeland. Speaking in an interview with ScandAsia, he said ”They come here because we are often cited in international scientific articles. After some time many open their eyes to the advantages of the democratic Danish management structure and the work environment,” said Dean of the Technical University of Denmark, Martin Bendsøe. Chinese scientists make up the third largest demographic after Germans and Americans.

The story is the same the US. Speaking to the China Daily, Joseph Jen, former undersecretary for research, education and economics for the US Department of Agriculture, said “Chinese institutions have new research equipment, much of it better than at places in the US” but that many Chinese “choose to stay in the US is because of the scientific culture ... (in which) scientists have bigger freedoms to pursue research of their choice.”

When it first started allowing students to travel abroad to study, many high-ups in the Chinese government were afraid that the end result would be that once exposed to the high life in the US and other western countries, they would never want to come back home again. For once, their foresight is pretty much bang on the money - not many want to leave the dynamic world of American research. Showing their trademark two dimensional thinking, a plan to lure back scientists was unveiled in the 1994 that promised tax breaks for returning academics. In the 20 years since, a mere 1568 have taken advantage of that particular carrot, this project being only one of seven misfires that have woefully missed their targets.

Once back in China, Chinese scientists face major roadblocks to developing their research into functioning businesses. An underdeveloped credit system and reliance on the “it’s not what you know, but who you know” guanxi system as well as hobbled and patchy small business framework simply doesn't give anyone the confidence to innovate or invest in Chinese startups that focus on risky new ideas rather than copying the ones that are already successful - exactly what the Chinese government wanted to avoid by sending students abroad in the first place. As Nixon’s War on Cancer showed, nothing much comes of top-down directed research, but since the Chinese government is averse to anything resembling real market competition, it will be a long time before we see anything of great interest emerge from Chinese research labs.

The Good Samaritan: Legislating Civility

When video footage came to light last year of 2 year old Yue Yue, who lay dying the street after being run over twice, Chinese netizen erupted in outrage over the moral vacancy in modern Chinese society. When the two different vehicles struck her, neither stopped, and CCTV cameras caught 18 people walking past her, apparently unconcerned about what had befallen the toddler. Eventually a scrap metal collector picked her up and took her to hospital, where she later died.

Stories concerning the apparent lack of any moral fibre among the Chinese have become increasingly common in the last few years, not least because they spread like wildlife on the country’s microblogging platforms, where they garner endless comments and retweets. Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian about a number of tragic cases of child abuse, and, most recently, ex-pat sex offenders have be caught in foreign-run schools and English training centers who administrators obviously are more focused on the profits they turn than the characters of the people they employ.

As has been remarked before, it’s not so much the frequency of these kinds of stories of abuse and mistreatment, but the amplitude. To foreign observers, it seems incredulous that a child sex offender on the run from Scotland Yard could ever be employed in a French school, and the idea of a father so tired of his daughter’s voice could sew up the child’s mouth sounds like something cut out of a low budget schlock horror.

The fear of litigation forms the basis of the logic behind the reluctance of members of the public to help others in need. People who have helped, or in the recent case of a couple of boys who failed to act to save two girls from drowning and were fined 50,000rmb each, people who don’t help get sued equally. The lack of moral decency extends to those who help themselves, especially if it involves an easy way of making a lot of money.

While true that people’s distrust of others and institutions was eroded during the harshest years of Mao’s rule, scandals involving charitable organizations have done little to bolster confidence that money donated in good faith will actually end up with the people who need it, creating a downward spiral of mocking cynicism. The last sixty-odd years may have created unprecedented wealth for people in China, but it hasn’t done anything to inspire it’s citizens to stick their necks out.

Nearly a year on after Yue Yue’s death, and China’s first Good Samaritan law, snappily entitled the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Good Samaritans' Right Protection Regulation, comes into effect in the south of China. Initially effective only in the south of China, there are plans to roll the law out across the country in a desperate bid to make people that little bit more civilized. Only in China, do good manners have to be legislated. Typical of these new breed of laws aimed at leveling the playing field for the rich and poor alike, the law makes a big thing about compensation. In order to encourage people to help strangers, the law explicitly says that there will be no repercussions if the efforts to help are unsuccessful, and if someone is accused of causing the accident, there’s the opportunity to sue and claim compensation.

The good news is that, especially among the richer, younger classes, philanthropy and charitable works are actually on the increase. It’s not so much following in the footsteps of Lei Fang, but it does represent the level of financial comfort that the younger generation now find themselves. It’s the very gap between the rich and the poor that has created an “us and them” situation, the anonymous migrant workers don’t rub shoulders in Starbucks with the recent Harvard graduates returning to the Motherland. The graduates are a sign of a changing attitude towards money - as the pursuit of economic growth becomes a secondary concern, so might the reluctance of Chinese to offer a helping hand - especially when there’s no security cameras watching them.

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China Owes Hollywood Millions

This site reported last month of the concerns that many have with Hollywood kow-towing to Chinese censors. In order to get the world’s largest cinema ticket buying audience in front of their latest efforts, movie makers were adding scenes, removing scenes with “director’s approval” and generally ingratiating themselves as much as possible with the Chinese government. It’s probably safe to say that they hadn’t reckoned with the latest wheeze that Beijing’s bean counters have come up with - not paying Hollywood it’ dues once it’s got it’s hands on the cash.

Under the WTO deal that was brokered, studios were expecting a 25% cut of all the profits, but the sate-run company that distributes the films in China has said that it intends to pay 2% VAT on the receipts. The upshot is that Hollywood studios are owed a lot of money - in fact they say they haven’t been paid since late 2012 because of the dispute. The Hollywood Reporter says that Warner Bros is owed $31million for Man of Steel, the first installment of The Hobbit, and Jack the Giant Slayer. For Iron Man 3 alone, the film that had specifically had extra scenes filmed to appease the censors and increase it’s audience friendly quotient, Disney is owed nearly $30million. Fox and Universal are owed for Oblivion and Life of Pi, and Paramount is owed another $30million for three of it’s releases.

Fearful of making too much of a scene that would upset the already highly strung mandarins at SARFT (the Chinese TV, radio and film administration), they won’t be anxious to take the case as far as the office of the US trade representative to the World Trade Organisation, but negotiations are in progress with Chris Dodd, chairman of the US film group the Motion Picture Association of America. Speaking to Variety, former U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk said “Unfortunately it does not surprise me that China has come up with another creative way to cut into that revenue payment,It fits the pattern of their creative accounting at times…there are a number of ways that China has frustrated American interests.”

Delayed payment strains the already difficult relationship between American movie makers and Chinese censors. Frustrated with an organization not used to giving reasons as to why a film makes the blacklist, as happened with Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, there’s no real way of making sure that a release is guaranteed, no matter how much soft power ass-kissing is involved. Adding to that are the problems of rampant and unregulated piracy in China, where pirate copies of the latest releases are available to buy for as little as a dollar a disc - often the illicit sellers set up shop outside the very cinema that the US battled so hard to get the film released into in the first place.

While the dispute doesn’t affect movie goers in any real sense, it does highlight the problems of the west trying it’s damnedest to get around a government that simply isn’t used to playing by the rules. Censorship laws and blacklists are more often used as an excuse to give inferior Chinese productions, unless there’s going to be a sequel to Crouching Tiger any time soon, Robert Downey, Jnr may want to to improve on his Tropic Thunder level of Mandarin just in case.

Exporting Censorship

It seems sometimes like the Internet can do no good. If you believe the writers of the Daily Mail, a popular British conservative daily, it’s responsible for almost all the ills that are inflicted on the struggling middle classes of the UK - immigrants stealing the jobs of Oxbridge graduates, immigrants moving in next door and lowering house prices. The latest wheeze is the tale of the immigrant who moved in next door after stealing the job of an Oxbridge graduate and then set about sexually abusing and murdering young innocent children. And it’s all the Internet’s fault.

Last week David Cameron announced plans to police the Internet, after meeting with the mother of a child who was murdered by pedophile. Accordingly, there are now two types of porn on the Internet: the legal type, where the risk is that children will accidentally type in “Britney Spears donkey act” into a search engine and come up with all kinds of nastiness, and the illegal kind that involves the abuse of children. Google, which hasn’t made many friends since it provided details of how it “maximizes it’s profits”, is to blame, and Cameron has threatened legal action if it doesn't comply with the new laws, which involve Google returning no search results for pornographic material that is illegal in the UK. He stopped short of using the actual words “according to relevant laws and regulations”, but you get the general idea.

Like most politicians, Cameron appears to have selective amnesia when it comes to what laws were passed during the tenure of the opposition Labour government when toothless extreme porn laws were passed, and a number of suspect arrested under the laws were promptly acquitted when the case came to trial. It’s the The Leveson Effect, whereby laws are proposed to make things that were previously illegal even more illegal in response to something that everyone has seen on new reports.

Regardless of whether new laws are really going to help curb child murders by sex fiends remains to be seen, what has made fewer headlines is that Chinese technology firm Huawei is building the censoring engine that will protect the masses from nasty blue movies. The problem is that no-one really knows what Huawei is up to, and since they’re a state owned company, there are some suspicions that not all of it’s intentions are honorable. Indeed, they’ve already been banned from providing Internet tech in Australia, and they’ve not gone unnoticed in the UK either. An independent security review of Huawei’s activities criticized the “lack of ministerial oversight” of the company’s rapid expansion in the UK.

This has led to an odd situation whereby the UK is actively investigating a company that already has won a contract with the UK government. The good news is that while many might be bemoaning the lack of innovation and the reliance on manufacturing to bolster the economy, censorship and Internet control might be the one service industry that China can successfully export.

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Soft Power and Chinese Cinema

Someone, somewhere in the Beijing higher ups has decided that The Thing that’ll get China onto the world map is making a load of really, really cool movies that show the country in the best possible light.  In the same way that (I’m told) Hollywood and it’s related nonsensical chic is lusted after in the west.  To really complete the PR package, China needs to be seen on the big screen.

While speeches that go on for hours and endless meetings are winners if you want to get ahead in Chinese society, the movers and shakers in China’s recent soft-power drive have realized that promoting China just by putting a few very old things in a museum doesn’t actually resonate with your average foreigner.  To really win the foreign hearts and minds, you need to find something that’s the equivalent of Bruce Willis running around in a dirty vest.

Chinese movies don’t do well overseas - at least when they don’t follow the Zhang Yimou schtick of brightly coloured action sequences filmed at varying speeds.  Recent exports from China have produced nothing more than a whimper at the US box office.  When the low-budget sleeper hit Lost in Thailand debuted in America, it didn’t even come close replicating it’s runaway success that it had in China.  The film, a feel-good comedy about an ambitious executive trying to negotiate and important deal with his boss in Thailand, proved that dealing with contemporary issues in Chinese cinema can be both censor and box-office friendly - the film managed to beat out James Cameron’s Avatar in ticket sales, taking $200 million on it’s $2.2 million budget.  Conversely, proving the adage that comedy never travels well, the film bombed in the US, managing a paltry $88000 upon it’s release.

So alienated are audiences from the Chinese propaganda machine that a recent biopic of idolized revolutionary soldier Lei Feng failed to sell one single ticket in it’s opening weekend.  When a film celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic was released, mandarins put all other releases on hold, and even resorted to faking ticket returns in order to generate buzz.  Needless to say that with all the Iron Mans and Kung Fu Pandas, both of these expensive failures by the Chinese government have sunk without a trace to the bargain DVD bin.

Which is the reason, you may have noticed, that you’ve been finding bits of China in your blockbuster.  Hollywood pap is the quite possibly the best vehicle for promoting Chinese pap, mostly because they don’t do things like contemplate human rights, or civil liberties, and they focus on pleasing as many people as possible in order to extract as much money as possible from people who enjoy watching famous people walking away from big explosions.

The big draw for American movie producers is that while Chinese people have a lot of money, or, at the very least, there’s a lot of Chinese people will little bits of money that add up to one big bit of money.  The problem is that the movie industry is pretty much monopolized by the government, so it’s prudent business sense that no one tries to market a movie that will hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.  Of course, you could argue that Chinese people complaining about how Chinese people always seem to be the bad guys in movies is kind of like Auschwitz prisoners complaining about pickpockets in the shower room, this is soft power we’re talking about here.

Sucking up the Chinese government so that your movie gets approved for distribution is one way of trying to get your hands on the slice of entertainment pie - only 34 foreign movies are approved every year and your movie has to be the suckiest in order to get a screen at the local multiplex.  Another way of getting seen in the mainland would be to do the co-investment thing, whereupon a state-run Chinese film production company gives you money in exchange for positive exposure on the big screen.  This second option has the added benefit of side-stepping the quota, since it’s a co-production, it’s no longer seen as being a foreign import.

Selling out artistic credibility in order to please shareholders is never going to go down well with the libertarian lefties, even when you pull out a Powerpoint presentation and try to explain in simple language that Iron Man 3 isn’t really about artistic credibility, it’s about getting Robert Downey, Jr’s kids through college.  The movie industry has been called out for pandering to the whims of the Chinese government, without grasping the idea that American movies are doing pretty badly in the Chinese marketplace.  On it’s release in China, Mission Impossible 3 held the number one spot for a mighty 23 weeks, yet in the past year, the market share for American movies has dropped 65%, with domestically produced romantic comedies and feel-good buddy flicks trouncing Hollywood efforts at the box office.

In a final testament to the place that cinema holds in the push for soft-power, the Chinese government recently spend $13 million turning swampland outside Tianjin into a square kilometer of housing, office space, state-of-the-art computer facilities for CG animation and special effects and a cavernous complex of film studios.  The rebound in Chinese cinema removes a multitude of headaches for the government.  The stars are less likely to go on human rights crusades, like our dear friend Christian Bale did, fighting his way to see dissident lawyer Chen Guang Chen in his village, and the films are more likely to promote the China and the values that the Chinese government desperately wants promoted.

 

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The Plight of North Korean Women in China

70% of the North Korean refugees that make the perilous journey across the Tumen River to China are women. Once in China refugees are targeted by pimps and brokers specializing in human trafficking. The trade in human trafficking of North Korean sex workers starts with brokers who patrol the Tumen River - and the North Koreans who end up living sham marriages with Chinese-Koreans are well aware of the fate that awaits them    When interviewed for a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, many women did not only confirm that they knew of what would probably happen to them once they reached China, but were able to quote current prices that marriage and labor brokers were going to sell them for.

In this series of remarkable interviews with North Korean women, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has gathered together first hand accounts of the rampant human trafficking network that is operating along the Chinese border. Ms Lee tells of her not untypical story of how she ended up in China: “One day in August 2003, I was deceived by a North Korean woman who later turned out to be a trafficker. She told me she would find a decent job in China for me. We crossed the border together and she took me to a house near the Tumen River. After staying in the city of Tumen in Yanbian for one week, I was sold to a Han Chinese man in Qitaihe for the price of 1,000 yuan”

The demand for North Korean brides is fueled by the growing gender gap in China. In rural China, the male-female ration can be as high as 14-1, China’s one child policy and the traditional preference for a male heir creating intense competition and a gap in the market for those seeking a better life across the border. Those who do make the journey, however, rarely find safety in China - thanks to legal twilight that the refugees find themselves trapped in.

Under two secret agreements brokered between China and North Korea, any North Korean refugees are sent back to their home country. Normally, under international law, such refugees would be considered refugee sur place, but the Chinese government has refused the UN to officially designate them as such - openly defying the treaties that it signed up to when China joined the UN. In North Korea, the “reformed” penal code means that forced abortions are often performed on women pregnant with the children of Chinese fathers - why should precious resources should be wasted on the children of fathers who aren’t even Korean?

The Chinese government treats the North Koreans and economic refugees, but once they have been sent back home to face trial, the refugees are treated as political prisoners, and are tried as such. Because of their lack of legal protection in China, the North Korean women are often physically and sexually abused with absolutely no legal protection - except what can be bought with bribes to the local authorities. Chinese law says that to even provide food and shelter to a North Korean is punishable by heavy fines, so even those sympathetic to their plight cannot provide protection for long.

“After I lived with the Chinese man for about one month, I realized that he was trying to re-sell me to someone else,” a refugee only identified as “Ms. Lee” told Human Rights Watch North Korea, “He complained that I couldn’t speak any Chinese. I ran away from the house, not knowing where to go. Within a few hours, I was caught and brought back by the Chinese man. He took out his leather belt and whipped me on my back for about an hour. I got bruises and blood on my back and had severe pain. Later I cried in front of this man’s mother and opened a drawing book, pointing to an image of a bus. I tried to ask her to give me some money so that I could take a bus to leave the place”

Lack of any kind of sex education means that STDs and unwanted pregnancies are rife, due to their economic situations in the rural areas of Jilin, little can be done to treat infections, and back-alley abortions are common. “After moving in with the second man, I realized that I was pregnant from the previous one,” Ms Seok told an interviewer for the CHRNK report, “When my current husband and his family members found it out, they asked me to get an abortion. Even though I was already eight months pregnant, I was made to go through an operation at the hospital. I even saw the dead face of my baby when it was taken out of my womb”

The personal accounts that have been compiled show significant failings of two countries that conspire the diminish the basic human rights of North Korean women, and their families. It is telling indication of how far into nightmarish free-fall that North Korea as a country is. That working as a prostitute in the poorest areas of China, often suffering in a sham marriage, the North Koreans would consider this an improvement in their quality of life - prostitution and abuse being a necessary evil, preferable to their future in the hermit kingdom.