China, in its present state of government will never be the global power that it wants to be. The reign of the ruling Chinese Communist Party will only last so long as they have the energy for the Chinese people.
The unprecedented growth and industrialization of China is, by any measure, remarkable, and fuelling this growth is, well, fuel. Specifically, oil. China has little in the way of its own oil reserves – optimistic estimates say that there’s about 14 years of oil left given the trend of growth and consumption. The government needs to import oil. A lot of it. The problem was that most developed countries that were willing to sell oil to the Chinese would always add the condition that one of the situations, be they the human rights situation, organ harvesting, censorship or any other of the distasteful activities that the CCP indulges in should stop. The rather inventive solution to the problem was to invest in countries that didn’t have the money or the resources to drill for their own oil, and these are usually the countries that don’t have the best human rights situations themselves, so they’re in no place to pile criticism on the Chinese government. The upshot is that the Chinese are ruffling more feathers in the human rights community, signing million dollar deals with countries that White House hawks would consider rogue states.
The big question that is asked by most young Chinese is: “When America and Europe were industrializing, they didn’t have anyone telling them they should use less coal or burn less oil, or pipe less gas. They polluted with wild abandon and everyone in the west is rich and fat because of it. Why can’t we do the same?” The answer is: China can. Not only “China can”, but “China can and I want it to do so”. Why? Because the interest in renewable energy sources is gathering more and more momentum every day. More tax dollars and more private companies are pouring money into solving the world’s energy crisis. They’re not doing this in order to save the world, they’re spending money because they know that renewable energy will become, in the very near future, the next global market. Holland exports its wind turbine technology, and Holland has 2% unemployment. It’s no coincidence that they were one of the first countries to reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil to zero, while also becoming one of the first countries to seriously invest in renewable energy technology. The more time that China wastes arguing with Japan about where it can drill for oil, the more time Europe, America and Japan (Japan, being the most energy efficient developed country, which will be able to exploit a market of 1.6billion people in China) have to be the first to make a product that everyone will be relying on. Of course, I want this product to be designed and patented by a British firm, rather than a Chinese firm.
And if you think that this is all just prevarication, the bad news that this has already happened. Pennsylvania train maker GE Transportation is selling energy efficient, eco-friendly train locomotives to Chinese rail and freight companies. The American trains last longer, don’t use as much fuel (they have 10-cylinder engines instead of the Chinese 12-cylinder) and don’t break down as much as the older, more inefficient engines that China has been using for years. Already an American company has a foothold in the Chinese economy. All of this has been done while the Chinese are partying hard, singing Hu Jintao’s praises and raising a glass to Wen Jiabao. While the officials are taking bribes and looking after their own, the Americans are starting to take over major Chinese industries, thanks to their clear regulation and inventive innovation. Some money is going to the Chinese, it’s true, but the big money is going to the US.
How does innovation follow on from regulation? When the auto industry in American was told that they must install all their cars with catalytic converters, only one company looked at how it could get around these rules that were, on average, adding $1300 to the production cost of every car. The chairman of Honda told its engineers that they must look at how to reduce emissions before they got anywhere near the tailpipe. The result was a new engine with a pre-burn chamber that reduced the toxicity of the gas/air mix before it went into the piston chamber to be ignited. Honda not only created a solution that saved their company millions of dollars and helped to combat climate change, they also started licensing the technology to other automakers.
When the movie Kung-fu Panda was released worldwide, there were two camps in China that were critical. The first crackpot camp claimed that the move exploited the memories of those who had died in the Sichuan earthquake. The second group asked the rather more valid question of why hadn’t the Chinese movie makers themselves been able to produce a smash hit animated comedy set in ancient China? Americans were selling Chinese to the Chinese. With the government still in control of the TV and of movie production, this is the way that it’s always going to be. China will always be the one picking up the crumbs, living off the pale imitations and pirate copies of things that other people produce. Americans make movies that sell, the Chinese have to make movies that conform to a haphazardly enforced political and moral agenda.
There’s regulation in America, but there’s little in the way of censorship. And look what has happened there – there are hundreds of companies now that actually sell people software that will censor the Internet for them. Worried parents don’t want their kids to be able to access redhotanddutch.com, so they pay companies to give them software that will block pornographic websites or websites that can teach teenagers how to make pipebombs. If the Great Firewall was removed, then it would free up a monopoly that Chinese companies would be able to take advantage of. If there was an open list available and updated reguluarly by the government, then companies would be able to take that list and create filtering software around it. Laws could be passed that made sure that whichever institutions the government wanted these filters to be installed at had the software properly set up. It’s still censorship, but it’s honest censorship, the criteria would be in the open, and everyone would know where they stood.
What’s happened is that people are scared to develop and innovate, because there are no clear guidelines telling people what they can and can’t do. Copies of existing works are being made because they’ve been around for a while and haven’t caused trouble in other countries. What the Chinese Internet needs isn’t censorship and prison terms, it’s stable, reliable, open regulation. With the regulation will come innovation, Chinese software engineers will be able to clearly see what they can’t and can do, and soon they’ll start creating rather than copying. Copying is only a short-term stop-gap solution, sooner or later, foreign companies will get tired of having their products pirated, and they’ll start coming down hard on the Chinese manufacturers by imposing hefty taxes on Chinese imports.
So, let’s assume that there’s a rising middle class in China, and that incomes, on average, are going up too. The money that’s generated from taxes collected from the wealthy middle class give the government a huge pool of money with which to effect massive social improvement. There’s more money to get the best doctors in better hospitals which now have the best equipment. The parks are clean, as is the water that’s piped into the apartments. On sunny days, lovers may stroll in the many clean, quiet parks dotted around the city. The public transport system is being overhauled with new subway lines and cleaner buses being introduced. In short, there’s enough money going spare to pour into big, flashy projects that do two important things: they keep people happy, and they keep people from asking questions. If you’re happy and you know it, then you’re less likely to demand accountability and transparency from your government. The CCP is still able to bank on the growing economy to keep people happy because the famines and the hardships that were endured during the Chinese civil war are remembered by people who are still alive, so it’s easy now to sing the praises of the CCP and the apparent economic wonder that they’ve orchestrated. The trick of politics isn’t to make people happy, it’s to keep people happy. In order to keep the Chinese people happy, and to keep the lucrative manufacturing contracts China now finds itself reliant on an unsteady foreign oil supply, and oil is a resource that is definitely close to extinction.
The fact that the CCP can so effectively crush opposition shows that the government has enough money to not only to keep the people happy on a superficial level, but they’re also able to spend large amounts of cash developing sophisticated internal intelligence services, and preventing groups that have an agenda different to that of the ruling political party from forming. The rise of China’s middle class and the migration of ethnically Han Chinese to remote areas of the country has made it easier than ever for people to compare their economic status with that of others. Needless to say, these people at the losing end of the equation are not happy. Thousands found solace in the sword verses of the Koran, not because they found Allah, but because they were sick and tired of being the losers all the time. The Muslim men that were unemployed and destitute in their home countries are the ones that migrated to the terror training camps, and they turned that dissatisfaction into a hatred so directed and so pure that they were willing to commit acts of mass murder. There’s no billionaire oil sheik on the planet who feels he needs to sacrifice his life and kill countless others in order to enter paradise. Wherever there are have and have-nots, there’s always terrorism.
The creation of a Chinese middle class has given the Chinese government access to a money pot deeper than it could possibly fantasize of, and so long as people are getting richer and are paying their bills, the more money the government has to strengthen its grip on dissidents. The problem that comes is when the energy that is needed to finance the business ventures that enables the rich to get richer runs out, there’s going to be a problem. More than likely, the CCP will be forced to do as Bahrain had to do – reform its basic, fundamental ideas of how society is supposed to be run. People are not likely to give it all up and go through another North Korea-style great struggle; they aren’t going to trek for miles on the second Long March and dig for coal with their bare hands. They’re much more likely to riot in the streets, and demand that the government fulfill their half of the bargain.
The balancing act that Beijing is faced with in unenviable. While their yearly 8%/9% growth is spectacular, and the effect that this has on the nation’s millions that live on $1 a day has been a phenomenal achievement for a country that started its days 60 years ago bankrupt with no gold supplies, there is no question that this growth has to be sustained. Or else. What has been created now is a strange economic cycle where the economy grows, and must keep growing to satisfy the general population (and to help secure to continued governance from the CCP), in order to keep the economy growing, the country needs oil. The country doesn’t have oil so it has to import from rogue states and at some point, that’s definitely going to come up at the next WTO meeting. If you think this is a big problem, I haven’t even mentioned that America is going after the same oil supplies in order to sustain its own addiction to the black stuff.
After all the fear-mongering and doomsaying, for the first time in a long time, I have hope for China. To put it more accurately, I have a little more hope than I did. The hope comes in the form of the members of the very same middle class that are, according to one economic theory, helping the CCP stay in power, the ones who own the massive Chinese companies, and the ones who protested so vehemently about the absurd idea to install the Green Dam/Youth Escort software on all the computers that were to be sold in China this year. It’s the biggest victory that the Chinese people have scored over their government in a long time. One thing that is apparent after spending so much time in China is that people are able to tell you how great the country is, but the list of achievements is always in the past tense. China and it’s people must look to the longer term, they’ve got to turn their “did”s into “will”s, and the one thing that they can’t afford to do is to wait till later to clean up the mess, once they’ve become rich; they’ve got to clean up to become rich.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Staring into the 'Jing
To live in an Asian city is to have your perceptions changed of young people. I know that when I lived in the UK, I didn’t see young people anymore. I saw youths – the same way they're described in police reports. Scrawny, underfed spawn that mill about mindlessly who you’d rather stab in the eye with your housekeys than say hello to. Living in Beijing or Osaka, or taking a trip to Kyoto to see people getting together in a park, dancing, drinking, rollerblading, kung-fuing is a refreshing experience.
For a long time I saw China (especially Beijing, the city where I had illogically chosen to make my home for 2 years) as the cowshit-covered, nose-picking, idiot older brother to the Henry Miller reading, Chablis drinking, smoking jacket clad Japan. I ached to get to Japan where things would be more comfortable, cleaner and a whole lot better. The general fact of the matter is that although it isn’t untrue, it’s a lot less true that you’d imagine. China had been like living in a country that was held together with duct tape, and I fantasized that Japan would be like living inside a Rolex.
The fact of the matter is that Japanese people aren’t crazy. The Japanese themselves have pegged themselves as crazy, and they’re not. It’s true; there are a lot of Japanese problems that have been solved by Japanese people for Japanese people that strike outsiders as odd. They may not be the best solutions in the world, but according to the myriad social rules of public conduct in Japan, they make perfect sense. While Chairman Mao was declaring that “women hold up half the sky”, the Japanese were only just getting to grips with the fact that women could and should go to work – the Japanese women have done their best to paint themselves as weak and feeble in the workplace, but it hasn’t washed well with the Japanese government - and fighting their wars with exactly the same death-to-the-enemies-take-no-prisoners attitude that were taught to the samurai on the streets of Kyoto 200 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, they lost to the Americans. Twice.
To say that China has a better, freer, more open society than Japan is to make a bold statement indeed. But having lived in both countries, it’s obvious that the two have more in common with each other than they dare admit. The moment that I found out that one of Japan’s political party had only been defeated twice in the last 60 years of democracy in the archipelago, I decided that I would be better off in China.
When someone pointed out that there are a lot of pointless rules in Japan that no one follows, I made my mind up to leave the country – if things are going to be like this, then I may as well be somewhere where the beer is cheap. Things are just as “crazy” in Beijing. As you walk on through Bei Hai, you might be lucky enough to see a portly gentleman walking on the wrong side of the lake railings, cheerfully taking his dog for a swim. There's not really any 'normal' in Beijing, and the longer I stay here, the more normal that becomes. Seeing sixty people gathered together in a park with a battered stereo, ballroom dancing the night away is something you would never see my local park. The tourists take photos, I just walk past them, and I secretly wishing that I could dance like that.
The only real thing that I’m rather biased towards is anything medically traditional in China. I think it comes from the time when I was suffering from diarrhea that could only be described as “epic” after eating chuanr of dubious origin and was subsequently given a mysterious bottle of green lozenges that I was told would take three or four days to take effect (deciding that in three or four days I would be lucky to have any bones left, I went to a better pharmacy and bought some better medicine).
In the long, seemingly endless summer of 2008, some enterprising young men got together and started producing pirate copies of official Chinese Olympic memorabilia. Even last Christmas, a visit to the Olympic Stadium would almost always in end with someone trying to sell you something Olympic related. When the government said that they had enough stockpiles of almost everything to ensure a safe and enjoyable Olympics, they were including in the two Eiger-shaped mountains of Fuwa plushies. Chinese people are able to reel off four thousand years of history, but seem utterly bewildered when you ask them what their plans are for next week. When you do ask someone what’s changed in whichever Chinese city you left, the answer will, more often than not be, “nothing special”.
One thing that even the casual China observer will notice is that the Chinese often fire criticism at what seems to be the wrong target. While their own news services are censored and monitored by the propaganda department, people set up anti-CNN websites. While people still protest the Japanese prime minister visiting a WW2 war memorial, they ignore the memories of the millions of people who died during the Cultural Revolution. The (mis)representation of Chinese and Japanese in movies has been another sore point, and one that often degenerates into the most pointless of misguided arguments. The uproar over Chinese stars taking on Japanese roles in Memoirs of a Geisha should give you some idea of the average IQ of these mindless, Internet-addicted morons, many of who I daresay would benefit enormously from a sound beating at an internet addiction rehab clinic in the countryside.
The huge gulf between the invading foreign devils and the Chinese that were already living there when the British decided to get them all addicted to opium hasn’t gone unnoticed by the powers that be. The Chinese are too proud and the foreigners are too set in their troublesome western ways. It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Chinese themselves. Last week, I went to a public toilet in Sanlitun’s new shopping district, “The Village” and saw a sign in both English and Chinese that people should not stand on (and thus squat Chinese style over the bowl) the lavatory to use it. Staff at a local hotel run by a English friend are astonished by the fact that foreigners prefer cold milk on their corn flakes in the morning.
One of the things that you'll find about Beijing is the wealth of things that you can actually do. It's something that you'd miss if you traveled to Xi'an or Chengdu. Take the food, if you don’t like Chinese food, so you can go to an Italian restaurant, if that’s full, then you can get Japanese. Despite the out and out hatred that Chinese people foster for the Japanese, there's a number of sushi restaurants that have sprung up, Yoshinoya is here, and so is Kyo Nichi. Beijing is a place to get fat in, there's an obsession with food – have you eaten? Will you eat? What did you eat? When did you eat? Where did you eat? If you're not full you should eat more...why aren't you eating? Are you full? Is your food ok? Is the food good? .
I'm still not really sure what to make of the city – even nearly three years on. Walking down the street, as summer draws its final breaths, the government is clamping down on Internet porn sites and the girls are digging out their skimpiest, tiniest, tightest and unusually sexiest clothes to strut around in. Long ago, I arrived at the conclusion that Beijing annoys the living hell out of me. It annoys me like no other place on the planet, but there's no other city I'd like to be annoyed by.
For a long time I saw China (especially Beijing, the city where I had illogically chosen to make my home for 2 years) as the cowshit-covered, nose-picking, idiot older brother to the Henry Miller reading, Chablis drinking, smoking jacket clad Japan. I ached to get to Japan where things would be more comfortable, cleaner and a whole lot better. The general fact of the matter is that although it isn’t untrue, it’s a lot less true that you’d imagine. China had been like living in a country that was held together with duct tape, and I fantasized that Japan would be like living inside a Rolex.
The fact of the matter is that Japanese people aren’t crazy. The Japanese themselves have pegged themselves as crazy, and they’re not. It’s true; there are a lot of Japanese problems that have been solved by Japanese people for Japanese people that strike outsiders as odd. They may not be the best solutions in the world, but according to the myriad social rules of public conduct in Japan, they make perfect sense. While Chairman Mao was declaring that “women hold up half the sky”, the Japanese were only just getting to grips with the fact that women could and should go to work – the Japanese women have done their best to paint themselves as weak and feeble in the workplace, but it hasn’t washed well with the Japanese government - and fighting their wars with exactly the same death-to-the-enemies-take-no-prisoners attitude that were taught to the samurai on the streets of Kyoto 200 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, they lost to the Americans. Twice.
To say that China has a better, freer, more open society than Japan is to make a bold statement indeed. But having lived in both countries, it’s obvious that the two have more in common with each other than they dare admit. The moment that I found out that one of Japan’s political party had only been defeated twice in the last 60 years of democracy in the archipelago, I decided that I would be better off in China.
When someone pointed out that there are a lot of pointless rules in Japan that no one follows, I made my mind up to leave the country – if things are going to be like this, then I may as well be somewhere where the beer is cheap. Things are just as “crazy” in Beijing. As you walk on through Bei Hai, you might be lucky enough to see a portly gentleman walking on the wrong side of the lake railings, cheerfully taking his dog for a swim. There's not really any 'normal' in Beijing, and the longer I stay here, the more normal that becomes. Seeing sixty people gathered together in a park with a battered stereo, ballroom dancing the night away is something you would never see my local park. The tourists take photos, I just walk past them, and I secretly wishing that I could dance like that.
The only real thing that I’m rather biased towards is anything medically traditional in China. I think it comes from the time when I was suffering from diarrhea that could only be described as “epic” after eating chuanr of dubious origin and was subsequently given a mysterious bottle of green lozenges that I was told would take three or four days to take effect (deciding that in three or four days I would be lucky to have any bones left, I went to a better pharmacy and bought some better medicine).
In the long, seemingly endless summer of 2008, some enterprising young men got together and started producing pirate copies of official Chinese Olympic memorabilia. Even last Christmas, a visit to the Olympic Stadium would almost always in end with someone trying to sell you something Olympic related. When the government said that they had enough stockpiles of almost everything to ensure a safe and enjoyable Olympics, they were including in the two Eiger-shaped mountains of Fuwa plushies. Chinese people are able to reel off four thousand years of history, but seem utterly bewildered when you ask them what their plans are for next week. When you do ask someone what’s changed in whichever Chinese city you left, the answer will, more often than not be, “nothing special”.
One thing that even the casual China observer will notice is that the Chinese often fire criticism at what seems to be the wrong target. While their own news services are censored and monitored by the propaganda department, people set up anti-CNN websites. While people still protest the Japanese prime minister visiting a WW2 war memorial, they ignore the memories of the millions of people who died during the Cultural Revolution. The (mis)representation of Chinese and Japanese in movies has been another sore point, and one that often degenerates into the most pointless of misguided arguments. The uproar over Chinese stars taking on Japanese roles in Memoirs of a Geisha should give you some idea of the average IQ of these mindless, Internet-addicted morons, many of who I daresay would benefit enormously from a sound beating at an internet addiction rehab clinic in the countryside.
The huge gulf between the invading foreign devils and the Chinese that were already living there when the British decided to get them all addicted to opium hasn’t gone unnoticed by the powers that be. The Chinese are too proud and the foreigners are too set in their troublesome western ways. It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Chinese themselves. Last week, I went to a public toilet in Sanlitun’s new shopping district, “The Village” and saw a sign in both English and Chinese that people should not stand on (and thus squat Chinese style over the bowl) the lavatory to use it. Staff at a local hotel run by a English friend are astonished by the fact that foreigners prefer cold milk on their corn flakes in the morning.
One of the things that you'll find about Beijing is the wealth of things that you can actually do. It's something that you'd miss if you traveled to Xi'an or Chengdu. Take the food, if you don’t like Chinese food, so you can go to an Italian restaurant, if that’s full, then you can get Japanese. Despite the out and out hatred that Chinese people foster for the Japanese, there's a number of sushi restaurants that have sprung up, Yoshinoya is here, and so is Kyo Nichi. Beijing is a place to get fat in, there's an obsession with food – have you eaten? Will you eat? What did you eat? When did you eat? Where did you eat? If you're not full you should eat more...why aren't you eating? Are you full? Is your food ok? Is the food good? .
I'm still not really sure what to make of the city – even nearly three years on. Walking down the street, as summer draws its final breaths, the government is clamping down on Internet porn sites and the girls are digging out their skimpiest, tiniest, tightest and unusually sexiest clothes to strut around in. Long ago, I arrived at the conclusion that Beijing annoys the living hell out of me. It annoys me like no other place on the planet, but there's no other city I'd like to be annoyed by.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Welcome To Take Beijing Taxi
A little knowledge is very dangerous, and that’s true of the person who knows about as much Mandarin as the average Chinese four year old. People talk to you. In Chinese. Even if you only know how to say the address of your hotel or apartment properly, taxi drivers, like taxi drivers the world over, will talk to you. Some of them talk about the building work in Beijing, others practice their English, but mostly they yammer on to me in Chinese about everything and nothing. All I’m able to do is offer an appreciative “yes” or “ahhhh”, and hope that it looks like I understand and sympathize.
Because of my horrendously low level of Chinese, most interactions with taxi drivers are short and to the point. I know how to direct someone to my apartment (go straight ahead a little...you see the little road on the left? Ok straight ahead, left here and stop), and I’m particularly good at the old mobile-phone-with-handy-Chinese-directions-on-it trick, but that’s about it. I know nothing of their lives, they’re probably largely more interested in my life as most Chinese people are, and I’d like to know about them, but we’re separated by the huge, bulletproof, reinforced concrete barrier of my own ineptitude, my ignorance and disrespect of Chinese culture.
Sometimes I have a great taxi driver, like the guy a few weeks ago. He seemed, as they often do, rather happy to have a foreigner in the back. Once we’d established that my Chinese was pretty much worthless, and that my girlfriend could speak both Mandarin and English, we quickly fell into the routine of my girlfriend explaining something in Chinese, and then the taxi driver checking his pronunciation on me.
According to the Beijing Olympic website, nearly 90,000 drivers are learning English, and will be able to “chat with foreigners about the NBA star Yao Ming, or Beijing snack[s]”. If the drivers struggle, then there’s still no need worry, as taxi companies are installing computerized translators in their cars. The website doesn't elaborate what’s going to happen if you know nothing of the NBA (like your average British person, who, is, admittedly, more likely to shout directions twice at the poor man, before smashing the car up). Xinhua news releases me always make me nervous, for some reason - especially the use if the word “chat” in the sentence above.
There are two things that foreigners talk a lot about in Beijing. The first thing is mostly about public toilets, ex-pats and tourists alike swap stories about them like war veterans. The second is usually the smell inside a Beijing taxi, largely the smell of a mouth that has been washed with green tea for most of the day, lightly peppered with the smell of aged garlic. The smell problem has caught the attention of the Olympic mandarins and they assure me that only the most fragrant taxis will be available for sports fans this summer - they will conduct extensive smell tests to make sure quality is maintained.
Getting into a taxi, and, a few hours later, when you’ve had a couple of stiff drinks and have worked up the courage to actually take a ride in one to your destination is a watershed for both the tourist and foreign worker. As mentioned, even though the taxis are the lifeblood of the city, not many of the drivers can speak English. They're being forced to do it for the Olympics, but given their attitude of picking and choosing who to pick up and where to go, I wouldn't be too optimistic about them all getting their heads down to study after a 12 hour shift ferrying drunken foreigners to and from Sanlitun.
Under normal circumstances - that is, if I didn’t live in Beijing - I would say that the taxi driver has to put up with a lot of grief. Having been booted out of innumerable taxes simply because the driver doesn't want to go where I want to go - I assume it’s something along the Chinese version of “I’m not going south of the river this time of time of night, you’ll stink up the cab with your kebabs” - I’m going to say that they don’t have that much of a hard life outside of working on national holidays.
Beijing is a crowd surfing city, built on a shifting sand of people. You meet people in Beijing, and then pretty soon, they leave. The Chinese guys usually go back to their families, taking two day train journeys back home. The foreigners soon ache for something different, somewhere where you can breathe air you can't see, a green field, a flower or two that isn't choking on car fumes. Maybe the attraction of English-speaking Hong Kong draws them south, or cooler climes of the north take them to some one-horse village in Gansu. China owes it’s economic success to the migrant worker, and it’s the migrant workers that make up the bulk of Beijing’s taxi driver community.
Weather they liked it or not (and it's more than likely not), Beijing taxi drivers were the front line of the city's personality drive for the Olympics. The hardened, dour-mouthed resident would argue that trying to give a city like Beijing a personality is akin to bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, failed to run, been shot and turned into the contents of a glue pot, but still, you have to give points for effort. Taxi driver might need lessons in hygiene, customer service and basic Beijing geography; they were the first and last people that Olympic visitors were likely to see.
One such driver, a former pig-dung shoveler, laborer and electrician (the connection between the three isn't very clear) isn't optimistic about his prospects, "My monthly income was about 3,000 yuan (£195) two years ago. Now it is 2,000 yuan (£130).” he told a Guardian reporter, “I expect it will go even lower in the future," he says. "I don't get any days off. I want to cry." So says Xia Shishan, Beijing taxi driver of four and a half years. He has to support a daughter at university, and a sick mother.
Compared to his own youth, when he only had flour, sweet potatoes and tea leaves to eat, things are now undoubtedly much better. Shishan and his family eat meat on a regular basis, compared to the times when meat was confined to special events like Spring Festival, but still there is the worry. His worries are not those politics, or social stability, banned movies or songs, or imprisoned journalists. He is more concerned about supporting his family, while surviving on one of the lowest rungs of Beijing society. Already the Olympics have affected him personally - "Developers are going to knock down my mum's home. It's part of the project for South Beijing railway station. They offered compensation, but it is only enough to buy a bathroom. We can appeal for more, but ordinary citizens don't have much power."
The Olympics fired the imagination of everyone in the capital. Xia Shishan reckons that "China is an ancient nation with 5,000 years of history. Thanks to the Olympics, we can show how great our country is. We will finish top of the medal table. There is no doubt about it. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil."
Of course, not all the taxi drivers are this nice. In 2004, Li Pingping was executed for murdering prostitutes in Beijing, he killed three of them from November 2002 to April 2003 - he also managed to stab his ex-employer, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter to death. He killed the hookers because he believed they made money more easily that he did, and his wife was sent to the slammer for fifteen years for helping him.
When you do a little research on the Beijing cabbie, you tend to see why Pingping blew his stack. As well as having to cope with ever-changing rules and traffic regulations, the ever-increasing price of petrol, and the fact that the drivers have to pay their management companies anything from 2000RMB to 6000RMB while they earn a maximum of about 2000RMB - which doesn't leave a whole lot of cash to live on. Add to that a compulsory English test for the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that there are obligatory price hikes, you get a much clearer picture of what's going on. It becomes more and more unfathomable as to why I routinely get told that a destination is too far, or is in the wrong direction, or perhaps the drivers have accepted the inevitable, and have just given up on trying to offer some kind of recognizable customer service. When you consider that the Beijing taxi will be the front line of the welcoming committee for the Games, then everything becomes even more unfathomable - the city authorities should be doing things to keep them happy, rather than poking them with a pointy stick. Repeatedly. For no good reason.
Everything came to a head two years ago, when the driver arranged a mass “go slow day” in Beijing, throwing the city into mild chaos. While it fell short of an out-and-out strike, the message was pretty clear - the drivers were not happy. Foreigners and Chinese alike were forced to stand...waiting (people do not like to wait for much here in Beijing) for a driver to take them somewhere and they did take them. Very, very slowly they took them.
Ok, so no one forces them at gunpoint to become taxi drivers, but when these people have very little else in the way of employment options for them, you can hardly blame them, and they do get a bum deal. Most of them sign on for four or five year contracts, and get paid less that Ghandi’s personal assistant.
What is lacking is a clear, thought-out strategy. The Olympic Games are a great source of national pride, and if there are few smiling faces to ferry around the fresh-faced tourists, then it will largely be the fault of a government that, while it wants to be accepted, is more preoccupied in taxing heavily, and dreaming up kooky new laws that serve only to confuse and bamboozle the average Beijinger. Instead of reveling in their red tape paradise, perhaps the powers that be should focus on giving the workers reasons to be cheerful beyond the pipe dream of a harmonious society.
Because of my horrendously low level of Chinese, most interactions with taxi drivers are short and to the point. I know how to direct someone to my apartment (go straight ahead a little...you see the little road on the left? Ok straight ahead, left here and stop), and I’m particularly good at the old mobile-phone-with-handy-Chinese-directions-on-it trick, but that’s about it. I know nothing of their lives, they’re probably largely more interested in my life as most Chinese people are, and I’d like to know about them, but we’re separated by the huge, bulletproof, reinforced concrete barrier of my own ineptitude, my ignorance and disrespect of Chinese culture.
Sometimes I have a great taxi driver, like the guy a few weeks ago. He seemed, as they often do, rather happy to have a foreigner in the back. Once we’d established that my Chinese was pretty much worthless, and that my girlfriend could speak both Mandarin and English, we quickly fell into the routine of my girlfriend explaining something in Chinese, and then the taxi driver checking his pronunciation on me.
According to the Beijing Olympic website, nearly 90,000 drivers are learning English, and will be able to “chat with foreigners about the NBA star Yao Ming, or Beijing snack[s]”. If the drivers struggle, then there’s still no need worry, as taxi companies are installing computerized translators in their cars. The website doesn't elaborate what’s going to happen if you know nothing of the NBA (like your average British person, who, is, admittedly, more likely to shout directions twice at the poor man, before smashing the car up). Xinhua news releases me always make me nervous, for some reason - especially the use if the word “chat” in the sentence above.
There are two things that foreigners talk a lot about in Beijing. The first thing is mostly about public toilets, ex-pats and tourists alike swap stories about them like war veterans. The second is usually the smell inside a Beijing taxi, largely the smell of a mouth that has been washed with green tea for most of the day, lightly peppered with the smell of aged garlic. The smell problem has caught the attention of the Olympic mandarins and they assure me that only the most fragrant taxis will be available for sports fans this summer - they will conduct extensive smell tests to make sure quality is maintained.
Getting into a taxi, and, a few hours later, when you’ve had a couple of stiff drinks and have worked up the courage to actually take a ride in one to your destination is a watershed for both the tourist and foreign worker. As mentioned, even though the taxis are the lifeblood of the city, not many of the drivers can speak English. They're being forced to do it for the Olympics, but given their attitude of picking and choosing who to pick up and where to go, I wouldn't be too optimistic about them all getting their heads down to study after a 12 hour shift ferrying drunken foreigners to and from Sanlitun.
Under normal circumstances - that is, if I didn’t live in Beijing - I would say that the taxi driver has to put up with a lot of grief. Having been booted out of innumerable taxes simply because the driver doesn't want to go where I want to go - I assume it’s something along the Chinese version of “I’m not going south of the river this time of time of night, you’ll stink up the cab with your kebabs” - I’m going to say that they don’t have that much of a hard life outside of working on national holidays.
Beijing is a crowd surfing city, built on a shifting sand of people. You meet people in Beijing, and then pretty soon, they leave. The Chinese guys usually go back to their families, taking two day train journeys back home. The foreigners soon ache for something different, somewhere where you can breathe air you can't see, a green field, a flower or two that isn't choking on car fumes. Maybe the attraction of English-speaking Hong Kong draws them south, or cooler climes of the north take them to some one-horse village in Gansu. China owes it’s economic success to the migrant worker, and it’s the migrant workers that make up the bulk of Beijing’s taxi driver community.
Weather they liked it or not (and it's more than likely not), Beijing taxi drivers were the front line of the city's personality drive for the Olympics. The hardened, dour-mouthed resident would argue that trying to give a city like Beijing a personality is akin to bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, failed to run, been shot and turned into the contents of a glue pot, but still, you have to give points for effort. Taxi driver might need lessons in hygiene, customer service and basic Beijing geography; they were the first and last people that Olympic visitors were likely to see.
One such driver, a former pig-dung shoveler, laborer and electrician (the connection between the three isn't very clear) isn't optimistic about his prospects, "My monthly income was about 3,000 yuan (£195) two years ago. Now it is 2,000 yuan (£130).” he told a Guardian reporter, “I expect it will go even lower in the future," he says. "I don't get any days off. I want to cry." So says Xia Shishan, Beijing taxi driver of four and a half years. He has to support a daughter at university, and a sick mother.
Compared to his own youth, when he only had flour, sweet potatoes and tea leaves to eat, things are now undoubtedly much better. Shishan and his family eat meat on a regular basis, compared to the times when meat was confined to special events like Spring Festival, but still there is the worry. His worries are not those politics, or social stability, banned movies or songs, or imprisoned journalists. He is more concerned about supporting his family, while surviving on one of the lowest rungs of Beijing society. Already the Olympics have affected him personally - "Developers are going to knock down my mum's home. It's part of the project for South Beijing railway station. They offered compensation, but it is only enough to buy a bathroom. We can appeal for more, but ordinary citizens don't have much power."
The Olympics fired the imagination of everyone in the capital. Xia Shishan reckons that "China is an ancient nation with 5,000 years of history. Thanks to the Olympics, we can show how great our country is. We will finish top of the medal table. There is no doubt about it. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil."
Of course, not all the taxi drivers are this nice. In 2004, Li Pingping was executed for murdering prostitutes in Beijing, he killed three of them from November 2002 to April 2003 - he also managed to stab his ex-employer, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter to death. He killed the hookers because he believed they made money more easily that he did, and his wife was sent to the slammer for fifteen years for helping him.
When you do a little research on the Beijing cabbie, you tend to see why Pingping blew his stack. As well as having to cope with ever-changing rules and traffic regulations, the ever-increasing price of petrol, and the fact that the drivers have to pay their management companies anything from 2000RMB to 6000RMB while they earn a maximum of about 2000RMB - which doesn't leave a whole lot of cash to live on. Add to that a compulsory English test for the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that there are obligatory price hikes, you get a much clearer picture of what's going on. It becomes more and more unfathomable as to why I routinely get told that a destination is too far, or is in the wrong direction, or perhaps the drivers have accepted the inevitable, and have just given up on trying to offer some kind of recognizable customer service. When you consider that the Beijing taxi will be the front line of the welcoming committee for the Games, then everything becomes even more unfathomable - the city authorities should be doing things to keep them happy, rather than poking them with a pointy stick. Repeatedly. For no good reason.
Everything came to a head two years ago, when the driver arranged a mass “go slow day” in Beijing, throwing the city into mild chaos. While it fell short of an out-and-out strike, the message was pretty clear - the drivers were not happy. Foreigners and Chinese alike were forced to stand...waiting (people do not like to wait for much here in Beijing) for a driver to take them somewhere and they did take them. Very, very slowly they took them.
Ok, so no one forces them at gunpoint to become taxi drivers, but when these people have very little else in the way of employment options for them, you can hardly blame them, and they do get a bum deal. Most of them sign on for four or five year contracts, and get paid less that Ghandi’s personal assistant.
What is lacking is a clear, thought-out strategy. The Olympic Games are a great source of national pride, and if there are few smiling faces to ferry around the fresh-faced tourists, then it will largely be the fault of a government that, while it wants to be accepted, is more preoccupied in taxing heavily, and dreaming up kooky new laws that serve only to confuse and bamboozle the average Beijinger. Instead of reveling in their red tape paradise, perhaps the powers that be should focus on giving the workers reasons to be cheerful beyond the pipe dream of a harmonious society.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Unflat Japan: Living in the Shadow of the Dragon
There are many things that a trip to your old stomping ground can do to you. Some people lose themselves in remiscences, others realize why they left in the first place, and others just give up and acknowledge that nothing is going to change much no matter how much they hope they will. I belong to the latter group, with a little dash of the second. Over the Japanese Obon holiday I got the chance to return to the Beijing after nearly a year hiatus.
With my ex-girlfriend badgering me on MSN to check her university paper, and adverts for the 2008 Olympics playing constantly on the subway lines, I could’ve been forgiven for thinking that the plane had inadvertently shot itself through a worm hole over the South China Sea. Given that the plane appeared to be piloted by a drunken eight-year-old, the worm hole and the ground were probably the only two things that we did manage to avoid on the Air China flight.
Due, in part, to the fact that I’m close to finishing Thomas Freidman’s excellent The World is Flat, and mostly due to the astonishing sense of complacent insulation that a lot of Japanese people seem to be hardwired with, it seems clear that something bad is going to happen to Japan and it’s people sometime soon. The problem is, as Friedman would put it, Japan is not flat.
Flattening of the world, for the uninitiated, comes about when technology enables people to communicate and do business with other people in other countries. When call centre jobs are outsourced to India, there is flatness – cheap fiber optic cabling allows someone to be routed from their home in New York to a call centre halfway across the world in Bangalore. Software engineers in China are writing applications for Dell, IBM and Google – three programmers in China can be paid twice the national average wage and still be three times cheaper than. Flattening, and therefore increased globalization (and thus increased interaction and competition with a global ecosystem) comes about through one thing: cheap tech. In Japan, there’s no such thing as cheap tech.
Yes, Japan has one of the world’s highest penetrations of broadband internet in the world. Yes, Japan’s Internet access is both cheaper and faster than anywhere else in the world, and yes, I know that Japan is one of the first countries to completely move to a 3G mobile phone network. I know these things, but, the problem comes about when you realize that innovation in Japan is not encouraged from the bottom up. In Japan, gadgets, gizmos and toys are doled out by closed companies that only conform to their own, closed, proprietary network or format. A Docomo phone works on the Docomo 3G networks with which you can only access the Docomo website, i-mode. To get onto the Docomo network, you can’t just use your cheap Softbank phone, you have to go out and get a Docomo phone with a new Docomo SIM card. Everything is branded, stamped, sealed and walled up.
You might think that this is all well and good, that this is nothing new, and why should Docomo allow free roaming Internet access on its mobile phones, anyway? No one else does. The problem isn’t the mobile phones or the business model, it’s the Japanese population, which is shrinking, and it’s shrinking fast. The over 65’s now account for nearly 45% of the entire populous, and if there’s one thing that over-65’s do not do, it’s play around on i-mode hoping trying to get a dancing panda dance in time with the music. The people who spend the most money on mobile phones are the teenagers, the ones who desperately need a mobile phone to stay in touch with the people they see every day, and have a large disposable income. This pool of rich kids is rapidly diminishing, and so are the profits of Japanese fun-providers everywhere.
There are two important factors that will contribute to Japan’s economic downfall. The first is that the Confucianist culture that promotes the second: top-down innovation. This essentially means that instead of people going out and grabbing tools – be they lathes, scythes or laptops – the companies and government tell people what they can use and then make available a series of models to choose from. Giving people the widest possible choice of how to do their business – or bottom-up innovation – is what has driven economies since the first industrial revolution. When I went to buy a mobile phone, I was told that there were only 4 models that were available with my pre-pay SIM deal. Two of the models were out of stock and the two remaining choices were a black Samsung and a white Samsung.
Compare this with an American going to Starbucks, where the customer is able to create his or her own coffee, mixing and matching from various items on the menu – regular milk or soy milk, low fat or high fat milk, sugar or sugar free, caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can argue that a mobile phone is not a cup of coffee, but the principle of giving choice to the customers is exactly the same. In China, mobile phones are cups of coffee: you can go to a China Mobile showroom and buy the handset of your choosing, then go to the shop on the corner and buy a SIM card (all Chinese phones are unlocked by default) for the network of your choosing. There’s a wealth of choice and payment plans. In Japan, people tell you “these are what we’ve got” and you have to make do with that.
The best example, however, of a flat world (or an unflat Japan) is the actual booking of the flight (for an expat) in Japan to…well, anywhere else in the world but Japan. A local travel agent, No. 1 Travel, takes out adverts in the local press almost every week (every day in the daily English language newspapers). Obviously, they plaster their lowest theoretical ticket prices all over the adverts, and usually the actual price you pay can be double or triple that. The main problem with this particular travel agent was that they add a 5000 Yen fuel surcharge to all their tickets. Thus, a ticket that costs 74,000 Yen can end up costing nearly 80,000 Yen.
So, over Obon, I wanted to fly out to Beijing on the 9th and return on the 16th of August. I was duly informed that because of the busy holiday period, there were no inbound Japanese flights available on the 16th August, and that a ticket on a two and a half hour flight would cost somewhere in the region of 85,000 Yen. I wasn’t particularly happy with this, and spend about an hour scouring the local expat web forums for any website that might be able to give me a cheaper deal. I came across the ANA website, and found that not only were there flights to and from Beijing on the dates that I wanted; there was also no fuel surcharge. In addition, I was able to pay for the ticket at my local convenience store using the same technology that allows me to top up my pre-pay phone credit.
That’s flatness – someone somewhere was offering a cheaper deal that I had to use my laptop to get. Not only did I give my hard earned to the flatter operating business, I took my hard earned away from another, unflat business. If everyone did what I did, sooner or later, the unflat business will be in trouble. And that’s just what’s happening in Japan everyday – unflat, traditionally run companies are being run out of town by flatter companies that are doing Japanese work, but might not be actually located on Japanese soil. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to Dalian and see how many Japanese businesses are outsourcing to Chinese workers.
All this boils down to one simple point: The Japanese economy is in trouble and is going to continue to be in trouble because the tools that people need to compete in a global economy are held in an iron grip by companies that are failing because they won’t give the people the tools they need to compete in a global economy. There are people hungrier than they are who are studying ten times as hard in an effort to race them to the top. In China, there’s evidence that this is happening already, with Japanese companies outsourcing huge tracts of business to Dalian – so much so that the local universities are offering degree courses in Japanese. Of course, the Chinese people in Dalian are also learning English faster and to a higher degree of competence than their Japanese counterparts, so now there’s a labor pool in Dalian of Chinese skilled workers, who speak Chinese, Japanese and English.
These students came from families who worked on farms 60 years ago, and today, they’re leaving behind their contemporaries in developed countries at light speed.
Like many English teachers who work in Japan, I’ve come to both hate the Japanese school system and pity the student drones that it produces. Typically, the average Japanese child goes through about 10 years of English study. This is half the number of years that I studied Spanish at high school, and I could probably get by in Spain on that, some 15 years later. After ten years of English study, Japanese people still have problems asking the time in English (for the record, I can ask the time in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and English). This lack of decent, effective second langauge education is disempowering every child in every developed country, but not all have a country like China on it's doorstep. The demand for international English speakers wasn't created by native English speakers, it was created by domestic and international economic forces - those who spoke English suddenly found themselves in the international market, able to make pots of money, and others wanted to do the same. For the vast majority of Japanese, they've been tragically let down by the Japanese education system when it comes to learning English. An Asian school and university system that produces adults who have to think about starting to study English when they're 22 years old when their counterparts have been studying since they were 12 years old is a school and university system that is falling way short of what is needed in the 21st century.
As the undisputed leader of the great tigers of the Asian economy, Japan is probably in the most dangerous, not the most comfortable, position because China is starting to catch them up, and they’re three times hungrier and three times more likely to study harder in order to become Japan. Pretty soon, products that have "Made in China" stamped on them will be designed in China too. As Thomas Friedman points out several times in his book, developing countries are not racing developed countries to the bottom, they’re competing on the most level playing field that’s ever been available to race us all to the top. Whether you're untouchable in terms of a skillset when the time comes, is up to you.
With my ex-girlfriend badgering me on MSN to check her university paper, and adverts for the 2008 Olympics playing constantly on the subway lines, I could’ve been forgiven for thinking that the plane had inadvertently shot itself through a worm hole over the South China Sea. Given that the plane appeared to be piloted by a drunken eight-year-old, the worm hole and the ground were probably the only two things that we did manage to avoid on the Air China flight.
Due, in part, to the fact that I’m close to finishing Thomas Freidman’s excellent The World is Flat, and mostly due to the astonishing sense of complacent insulation that a lot of Japanese people seem to be hardwired with, it seems clear that something bad is going to happen to Japan and it’s people sometime soon. The problem is, as Friedman would put it, Japan is not flat.
Flattening of the world, for the uninitiated, comes about when technology enables people to communicate and do business with other people in other countries. When call centre jobs are outsourced to India, there is flatness – cheap fiber optic cabling allows someone to be routed from their home in New York to a call centre halfway across the world in Bangalore. Software engineers in China are writing applications for Dell, IBM and Google – three programmers in China can be paid twice the national average wage and still be three times cheaper than. Flattening, and therefore increased globalization (and thus increased interaction and competition with a global ecosystem) comes about through one thing: cheap tech. In Japan, there’s no such thing as cheap tech.
Yes, Japan has one of the world’s highest penetrations of broadband internet in the world. Yes, Japan’s Internet access is both cheaper and faster than anywhere else in the world, and yes, I know that Japan is one of the first countries to completely move to a 3G mobile phone network. I know these things, but, the problem comes about when you realize that innovation in Japan is not encouraged from the bottom up. In Japan, gadgets, gizmos and toys are doled out by closed companies that only conform to their own, closed, proprietary network or format. A Docomo phone works on the Docomo 3G networks with which you can only access the Docomo website, i-mode. To get onto the Docomo network, you can’t just use your cheap Softbank phone, you have to go out and get a Docomo phone with a new Docomo SIM card. Everything is branded, stamped, sealed and walled up.
You might think that this is all well and good, that this is nothing new, and why should Docomo allow free roaming Internet access on its mobile phones, anyway? No one else does. The problem isn’t the mobile phones or the business model, it’s the Japanese population, which is shrinking, and it’s shrinking fast. The over 65’s now account for nearly 45% of the entire populous, and if there’s one thing that over-65’s do not do, it’s play around on i-mode hoping trying to get a dancing panda dance in time with the music. The people who spend the most money on mobile phones are the teenagers, the ones who desperately need a mobile phone to stay in touch with the people they see every day, and have a large disposable income. This pool of rich kids is rapidly diminishing, and so are the profits of Japanese fun-providers everywhere.
There are two important factors that will contribute to Japan’s economic downfall. The first is that the Confucianist culture that promotes the second: top-down innovation. This essentially means that instead of people going out and grabbing tools – be they lathes, scythes or laptops – the companies and government tell people what they can use and then make available a series of models to choose from. Giving people the widest possible choice of how to do their business – or bottom-up innovation – is what has driven economies since the first industrial revolution. When I went to buy a mobile phone, I was told that there were only 4 models that were available with my pre-pay SIM deal. Two of the models were out of stock and the two remaining choices were a black Samsung and a white Samsung.
Compare this with an American going to Starbucks, where the customer is able to create his or her own coffee, mixing and matching from various items on the menu – regular milk or soy milk, low fat or high fat milk, sugar or sugar free, caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can argue that a mobile phone is not a cup of coffee, but the principle of giving choice to the customers is exactly the same. In China, mobile phones are cups of coffee: you can go to a China Mobile showroom and buy the handset of your choosing, then go to the shop on the corner and buy a SIM card (all Chinese phones are unlocked by default) for the network of your choosing. There’s a wealth of choice and payment plans. In Japan, people tell you “these are what we’ve got” and you have to make do with that.
The best example, however, of a flat world (or an unflat Japan) is the actual booking of the flight (for an expat) in Japan to…well, anywhere else in the world but Japan. A local travel agent, No. 1 Travel, takes out adverts in the local press almost every week (every day in the daily English language newspapers). Obviously, they plaster their lowest theoretical ticket prices all over the adverts, and usually the actual price you pay can be double or triple that. The main problem with this particular travel agent was that they add a 5000 Yen fuel surcharge to all their tickets. Thus, a ticket that costs 74,000 Yen can end up costing nearly 80,000 Yen.
So, over Obon, I wanted to fly out to Beijing on the 9th and return on the 16th of August. I was duly informed that because of the busy holiday period, there were no inbound Japanese flights available on the 16th August, and that a ticket on a two and a half hour flight would cost somewhere in the region of 85,000 Yen. I wasn’t particularly happy with this, and spend about an hour scouring the local expat web forums for any website that might be able to give me a cheaper deal. I came across the ANA website, and found that not only were there flights to and from Beijing on the dates that I wanted; there was also no fuel surcharge. In addition, I was able to pay for the ticket at my local convenience store using the same technology that allows me to top up my pre-pay phone credit.
That’s flatness – someone somewhere was offering a cheaper deal that I had to use my laptop to get. Not only did I give my hard earned to the flatter operating business, I took my hard earned away from another, unflat business. If everyone did what I did, sooner or later, the unflat business will be in trouble. And that’s just what’s happening in Japan everyday – unflat, traditionally run companies are being run out of town by flatter companies that are doing Japanese work, but might not be actually located on Japanese soil. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to Dalian and see how many Japanese businesses are outsourcing to Chinese workers.
All this boils down to one simple point: The Japanese economy is in trouble and is going to continue to be in trouble because the tools that people need to compete in a global economy are held in an iron grip by companies that are failing because they won’t give the people the tools they need to compete in a global economy. There are people hungrier than they are who are studying ten times as hard in an effort to race them to the top. In China, there’s evidence that this is happening already, with Japanese companies outsourcing huge tracts of business to Dalian – so much so that the local universities are offering degree courses in Japanese. Of course, the Chinese people in Dalian are also learning English faster and to a higher degree of competence than their Japanese counterparts, so now there’s a labor pool in Dalian of Chinese skilled workers, who speak Chinese, Japanese and English.
These students came from families who worked on farms 60 years ago, and today, they’re leaving behind their contemporaries in developed countries at light speed.
Like many English teachers who work in Japan, I’ve come to both hate the Japanese school system and pity the student drones that it produces. Typically, the average Japanese child goes through about 10 years of English study. This is half the number of years that I studied Spanish at high school, and I could probably get by in Spain on that, some 15 years later. After ten years of English study, Japanese people still have problems asking the time in English (for the record, I can ask the time in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and English). This lack of decent, effective second langauge education is disempowering every child in every developed country, but not all have a country like China on it's doorstep. The demand for international English speakers wasn't created by native English speakers, it was created by domestic and international economic forces - those who spoke English suddenly found themselves in the international market, able to make pots of money, and others wanted to do the same. For the vast majority of Japanese, they've been tragically let down by the Japanese education system when it comes to learning English. An Asian school and university system that produces adults who have to think about starting to study English when they're 22 years old when their counterparts have been studying since they were 12 years old is a school and university system that is falling way short of what is needed in the 21st century.
As the undisputed leader of the great tigers of the Asian economy, Japan is probably in the most dangerous, not the most comfortable, position because China is starting to catch them up, and they’re three times hungrier and three times more likely to study harder in order to become Japan. Pretty soon, products that have "Made in China" stamped on them will be designed in China too. As Thomas Friedman points out several times in his book, developing countries are not racing developed countries to the bottom, they’re competing on the most level playing field that’s ever been available to race us all to the top. Whether you're untouchable in terms of a skillset when the time comes, is up to you.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Cyber Spies and Heinous Lies
"I could hardly stop It was so exciting," the boy mumbled. "I went to the Internet cafe almost every day, and was dreaming of making girlfriends." Half drunk one night, Xiao Yi sneaked into the student dormitory and raped a 15-year-old girl. "If I had not seen the porn websites, I would not have done such a thing," the teenager says wistfully. Sadly, Xiao Yi is not an exception. Jin Hua, deputy director of the Beijing juvenile facility, said about 20 percent of the offenders last year committed rape, and almost all of them said porn websites were to blame.
In 2006, an article appeared in the China Daily (and subsequently on the China Daily website) that told the story of Xiao Yi, a seventeen year old who had been jailed for 10 years for raping a fifteen year old girl. “If I had not seen the porn websites, I would not have done such a thing,” he told a reporter.
The CCP began its campaign to “purify the internet environment” with a crackdown on porn sites in April 2007. As AP reported, Zhang Xinfeng, deputy public security minister, was under no allusions as to where the roots of the darker side of the Internet reside. "The boom of pornographic content on the internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds. The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace." What followed were a few arrests for hosting “cyber strip shows” and a major clampdown on the myriad blogs and search engines hosting in China. Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China's Cabinet, told Xinhua that as more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control.”
Throughout the year, the government produces a list of guidelines for ISPs and Internet companies to follow. China Digital Times publishes translations of the latest set of rules, which says that posts the criticize the Chinese political system should be “absolutely blocked or deleted” - information about the tiger being skinned and beheaded should be deleted, and all sorts of other rather distasteful stuff, including the rather chilling “Strengthen positive guidance. Web sites should proactively guide public opinion in a positive way, highlight positive voices and create a pro-NPC online environment.”
The technological savvy of the CCP is its strength. While the Soviet Politburo aged into a distant and disconnected leadership, the CCP has not only seen how technology can be of benefit to the country's economy, but they are also very aware of how a technology could be subverted into a tool that, in a worst case scenario, could lead to them losing power. The Party has long since acknowledged that controlling the Internet is crucial to maintaining their political supremacy. Western investments and web companies therefore face something of a dilemma – they must fall in line with the draconian censorship laws that exist in mainland China in order to capitalize on the largest market in the world. Fortunately, the American companies that supply hardware to the Chinese government to facilitate censoring have already made their decision, as well as Yahoo, and now, Google - the company that once prided itself on not being evil - is now under the thumb of a totalitarian dictatorship.
The initial motivations of preventing the perversion of political ideals have been the basis of the argument in favor of policing and restricting activities on the Internet. That's what some people would argue. Other people make a slightly more convincing argument, and it has nothing to do with keeping the people pure of thought. The pervasive theory is that while media websites such as Youtube and Flickr have captured a large portion of worldwide users, Chinese copycat start ups have been having a hard time establishing a user base. The answer was fairly obvious – block access to the foreign sites which would force users to use the Chinese sites, and essentially poach business from existing companies.
The motivation for blocking access are therefore little to do with politics and more to do with commercial concerns, after all, Yahoo has helped to track down and jail online dissidents by handing over emails that were held on their servers in mainland China. Since Flickr is owned by Yahoo, it seems unlikely that the Chinese authorities would block a site that is owned by a long time collaborator of the Chinese regime. Flickr had plans to establish version of it's photo hosting site specifically for Chinese users, but this would be based in Taipei, something of a smart move to evade the CCP's demands for Internet censorship in the mainland. In the case of Victor Koo's Youku service, a copy of Youtube's video hosting site with the added advantage that due to China's lax enforcement of copyright laws it hosts full length movies and TV shows.
Far from being terrified into not using the Internet, Chinese internet users have taken over the medium. Today, there are more Internet users in China than in any other country. How Chinese people use the Internet is much different from the way that westerners use the Internet. Instant messaging and streaming online music and video are the most popular pastimes for Chinese netizens.
Cyberspace is also where you can find the worst side of Chinese mob mentality. Incensed by the poor design of the Chinese Olympic Team's official uniform, Internet users swore to hunt down the designer and ruin his career, and the online reports of Chinabounder, who wrote about his casual sexual encounters with Chinese girls, most of whom where his students, caused a national outrage – the protest was led through an article posted on a weblog. The online voices are the most extreme, and sadly, the ones that always seem to make the headlines, it appears that while no one seems to put much stock in the online opinions of Americans or British 'net users, people are quite ready to accept the online comments of Chinese people to be something of a barometer of public feeling in China. The Chinese press has certainly leapt on the helpfully nationalistic outrage that seems to stream constantly from Chinese netizens.
Stories of Chinese hackers breaking into US computer systems are nothing new. The Chinese have taken the blame for everything from stealing World of Warcraft passwords to the numerous zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows Vista and Office 2007. A recent CNN story detailed one particular hacker team that claimed to have gained access to the Pentagon’s internal networks, more tellingly, they said that they were hired by the Chinese government to penetrate secure networks in America. Rather than being hired electronic terrorists, the Chinese government might just be protected its own networks – if the security at the Pentagon can be breached, then surely the software that runs the Great Firewall of China wouldn’t present much of a challenge - by giving encouraging overseas targets, attention is deflected from Chinese Internet infrastructure.
So what of the discovery of Ghost Net? The covert network was discovered by a Canadian research team called InfoWar that was asked to investigate suspected breaches in the security of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Over a period of 10 months, InfoWar uncovered a large-scale cyber-spying organization based on the worm Gh0st Rat. The Gh0st Rat Trojan enables, amongst other things, a hacker to control the sound and webcams of a remote computer. Although the network was mostly based in Hainan, China, there was no conclusive proof that the Chinese government was directly involved, independent research has shown that the Chinese government made decisions that could only have been influenced by information gathered by the network.
Using unique IP addresses, information was traced back to government servers that were owned and operated by the People’s Liberation Army intelligence arm. The Chinese embassy in London countered the cyber-spying allegations, saying that "China is opposed to and would seriously deter hacking activities, and had enacted clear laws against hacking. Rumors about Chinese cyber-espionage are completely unfounded, and those attempting to smear China in this way would not succeed." This comment was made despite 300 businesses being alerted to Chinese infiltration by the Director-General of MI5, Jonathon Evans.
According to the results of the investigation, published in the InfoWar Monitor, embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan and the office of the Prime Minister of Laos had been penetrated and the foreign ministries of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan were also targeted.
While the vehement denials of any involvement with any kind of cyber-espionage have poured forth from both Beijing and Chinese embassies, the truth is that the Chinese government is probably as involved with country-to-country hacking as any other government is. The report from the investigative team itself says "Attributing all Chinese malware to deliberate or targeted intelligence gathering operations by the Chinese state is wrong and misleading... The most significant actors in cyberspace are not states.... In China, the authorities most likely perceive individual attackers [ie, teenagers in internet cafes] as convenient instruments of national power." It’s just fashionable to accuse the Chinese of secretly and stealthily taking over the world one computer at a time, and the delicious irony that a country synonymous with Internet censorship should be famous for using it as a tool for world domination is just too hard for western hacks to ignore.
In 2006, an article appeared in the China Daily (and subsequently on the China Daily website) that told the story of Xiao Yi, a seventeen year old who had been jailed for 10 years for raping a fifteen year old girl. “If I had not seen the porn websites, I would not have done such a thing,” he told a reporter.
The CCP began its campaign to “purify the internet environment” with a crackdown on porn sites in April 2007. As AP reported, Zhang Xinfeng, deputy public security minister, was under no allusions as to where the roots of the darker side of the Internet reside. "The boom of pornographic content on the internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds. The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace." What followed were a few arrests for hosting “cyber strip shows” and a major clampdown on the myriad blogs and search engines hosting in China. Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China's Cabinet, told Xinhua that as more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control.”
Throughout the year, the government produces a list of guidelines for ISPs and Internet companies to follow. China Digital Times publishes translations of the latest set of rules, which says that posts the criticize the Chinese political system should be “absolutely blocked or deleted” - information about the tiger being skinned and beheaded should be deleted, and all sorts of other rather distasteful stuff, including the rather chilling “Strengthen positive guidance. Web sites should proactively guide public opinion in a positive way, highlight positive voices and create a pro-NPC online environment.”
The technological savvy of the CCP is its strength. While the Soviet Politburo aged into a distant and disconnected leadership, the CCP has not only seen how technology can be of benefit to the country's economy, but they are also very aware of how a technology could be subverted into a tool that, in a worst case scenario, could lead to them losing power. The Party has long since acknowledged that controlling the Internet is crucial to maintaining their political supremacy. Western investments and web companies therefore face something of a dilemma – they must fall in line with the draconian censorship laws that exist in mainland China in order to capitalize on the largest market in the world. Fortunately, the American companies that supply hardware to the Chinese government to facilitate censoring have already made their decision, as well as Yahoo, and now, Google - the company that once prided itself on not being evil - is now under the thumb of a totalitarian dictatorship.
The initial motivations of preventing the perversion of political ideals have been the basis of the argument in favor of policing and restricting activities on the Internet. That's what some people would argue. Other people make a slightly more convincing argument, and it has nothing to do with keeping the people pure of thought. The pervasive theory is that while media websites such as Youtube and Flickr have captured a large portion of worldwide users, Chinese copycat start ups have been having a hard time establishing a user base. The answer was fairly obvious – block access to the foreign sites which would force users to use the Chinese sites, and essentially poach business from existing companies.
The motivation for blocking access are therefore little to do with politics and more to do with commercial concerns, after all, Yahoo has helped to track down and jail online dissidents by handing over emails that were held on their servers in mainland China. Since Flickr is owned by Yahoo, it seems unlikely that the Chinese authorities would block a site that is owned by a long time collaborator of the Chinese regime. Flickr had plans to establish version of it's photo hosting site specifically for Chinese users, but this would be based in Taipei, something of a smart move to evade the CCP's demands for Internet censorship in the mainland. In the case of Victor Koo's Youku service, a copy of Youtube's video hosting site with the added advantage that due to China's lax enforcement of copyright laws it hosts full length movies and TV shows.
Far from being terrified into not using the Internet, Chinese internet users have taken over the medium. Today, there are more Internet users in China than in any other country. How Chinese people use the Internet is much different from the way that westerners use the Internet. Instant messaging and streaming online music and video are the most popular pastimes for Chinese netizens.
Cyberspace is also where you can find the worst side of Chinese mob mentality. Incensed by the poor design of the Chinese Olympic Team's official uniform, Internet users swore to hunt down the designer and ruin his career, and the online reports of Chinabounder, who wrote about his casual sexual encounters with Chinese girls, most of whom where his students, caused a national outrage – the protest was led through an article posted on a weblog. The online voices are the most extreme, and sadly, the ones that always seem to make the headlines, it appears that while no one seems to put much stock in the online opinions of Americans or British 'net users, people are quite ready to accept the online comments of Chinese people to be something of a barometer of public feeling in China. The Chinese press has certainly leapt on the helpfully nationalistic outrage that seems to stream constantly from Chinese netizens.
Stories of Chinese hackers breaking into US computer systems are nothing new. The Chinese have taken the blame for everything from stealing World of Warcraft passwords to the numerous zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows Vista and Office 2007. A recent CNN story detailed one particular hacker team that claimed to have gained access to the Pentagon’s internal networks, more tellingly, they said that they were hired by the Chinese government to penetrate secure networks in America. Rather than being hired electronic terrorists, the Chinese government might just be protected its own networks – if the security at the Pentagon can be breached, then surely the software that runs the Great Firewall of China wouldn’t present much of a challenge - by giving encouraging overseas targets, attention is deflected from Chinese Internet infrastructure.
So what of the discovery of Ghost Net? The covert network was discovered by a Canadian research team called InfoWar that was asked to investigate suspected breaches in the security of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Over a period of 10 months, InfoWar uncovered a large-scale cyber-spying organization based on the worm Gh0st Rat. The Gh0st Rat Trojan enables, amongst other things, a hacker to control the sound and webcams of a remote computer. Although the network was mostly based in Hainan, China, there was no conclusive proof that the Chinese government was directly involved, independent research has shown that the Chinese government made decisions that could only have been influenced by information gathered by the network.
Using unique IP addresses, information was traced back to government servers that were owned and operated by the People’s Liberation Army intelligence arm. The Chinese embassy in London countered the cyber-spying allegations, saying that "China is opposed to and would seriously deter hacking activities, and had enacted clear laws against hacking. Rumors about Chinese cyber-espionage are completely unfounded, and those attempting to smear China in this way would not succeed." This comment was made despite 300 businesses being alerted to Chinese infiltration by the Director-General of MI5, Jonathon Evans.
According to the results of the investigation, published in the InfoWar Monitor, embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan and the office of the Prime Minister of Laos had been penetrated and the foreign ministries of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan were also targeted.
While the vehement denials of any involvement with any kind of cyber-espionage have poured forth from both Beijing and Chinese embassies, the truth is that the Chinese government is probably as involved with country-to-country hacking as any other government is. The report from the investigative team itself says "Attributing all Chinese malware to deliberate or targeted intelligence gathering operations by the Chinese state is wrong and misleading... The most significant actors in cyberspace are not states.... In China, the authorities most likely perceive individual attackers [ie, teenagers in internet cafes] as convenient instruments of national power." It’s just fashionable to accuse the Chinese of secretly and stealthily taking over the world one computer at a time, and the delicious irony that a country synonymous with Internet censorship should be famous for using it as a tool for world domination is just too hard for western hacks to ignore.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
See No Evil, Hear No Evil...?
China doesn’t like non-Chinese poking their noses into Chinese business. To their credit, they don’t poke their noses into other people’s business, either. Andreas Ni calls it “see no evil” diplomacy, and as China expands its international presence, coupled with support for oppressive regimes likes Burma, Sudan and North Korea, it might an policy that is ripe for an overhaul.
The problem is that by supporting these dictatorships, China sends the message to the international community that it’s not serious about being a world power to be reckoned with. The idea of non interference is commendable, but when innocents are being slaughtered by the own governments, most leaders would actually think that doing something to encourage freedom growth would be a good thing. Perhaps Beijing is all too aware of how the international community sees it - with the ghost of Tiananmen still haunting the movers and shakers in the Great Hall of the People, would it really be a good idea to criticize other countries that are doing the same? Is it really because of one embarrassing incident handled badly that Beijing throws a deaf ear and turns a blind eye to similar atrocities in other countries?
China’s rocky relationship with African nations is a curious one. The Chinese themselves haven’t made a secret of the apparent dislike of black people, and it has less to do with the violent images of blacks that have been imported from the US than you might think. During the height of the Cold War, Mao linked the idea of class struggle with the struggle against western imperialists. Third World countries were obvious victims of the imperialists, despite the best efforts of Bob Geldof, and China cemented the brotherly relationship with stipends and special dispensation for African students who wanted to study in the People’s Republic.
The idea didn’t turn out to be as good as expected. In 1979, a fight broke out between African students and Chinese locals in Shanghai, things had come to a head as the central government donated ever increasing amounts to African countries. The situation didn’t improve – differences in attitudes towards dating and the realization by the Chinese locals that the African guests had more rights that they did escalated tensions. More and more African students found themselves being arrested and deported from whence they came.
The Nanjing riots broke out in December 1988. A brawl that broke out on the campus of Hehai University during a Christmas Eve party eventually led to some 300 students chanting “kill the black devils”. Fearing for their lives, anyone who wasn’t Chinese ended up knocking on the doors of their respective embassies begging for protection. The numbers of Chinese protestors swelled to 3000 as they converged on the local rail station demanding more rights for Chinese, and that the African students be booted out of the country.
The attitude of the Chinese towards blacks hasn’t improved, and a wave of anti-Chinese protests broke out across Africa in 2007. Zambians have been especially unimpressed by the treatment of workers and their families when several miners died in yet another accident at a Chinese owned mine. In order to maintain access to the mine, China threatened to pull out of the country, taking its money with it, abandoning the sacred idea of non-interference for its own economic gain. It seems that in the pursuit of control over natural resources, China might have more in common with America that it’s cares to admit to.
Much spin can be put on the specific reasons as to why the Chinese administration continues to support one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. In their defense, they can claim that they are helping a starving nation where no one else lifted a finger, a cynic might suggest that they are simply eyeing up the mineral wealth that lies above the DMZ, while others might point out that having a buffer between the world’s largest army and the 29,000 troops stationed in South Korea.
As North Korea headed towards the launch of its Taepodong-2 missile, it seemed that the international community was turning to China in an effort to convince the DPRK’s administration that a launch would be a Very Bad Idea. When communism first swept through China and Korea, it did so with the backing of the USSR. As the launch date approached, the US and UN asked Russia and China to try to convince North Korea to step down from the launchpad. I guess the reasoning behind the request was that China is communist (and so is North Korea) and that Russia was communist, so a somewhat friendlier face was presented to try to dissuade the North from launching its rocket/missile.
Which goes to show how far the US and the rest of the international community has come in the years since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Korean War.
When communism swept through Asia, it did so on the back of military and financial help from the USSR, they gave both the Chinese and the Koreans weapons, tanks, farming equipment, machines for their factories, essentially everything that an up and coming communist state should have. Unfortunately, since most of communist leaders since and including Stalin have been megalomaniacal dictators, the political capital that the USSR invested in states like the PRC and the DPRK quickly withered. Mao turned on the Soviets by encouraging skirmishes along the China/Russia border and developing his Mao Zedong Thought, while later, Kim Jong-il locked almost everyone out of the picture completely with the consolidation of his juche ideology.
There are only two connections between the PRC and the DPRK. One is the historical fact that Chinese soldiers were sent to fight alongside the North Koreans during the (as yet unfinished) Korean War and the other one is that China is probably the only country that hasn’t established any kind of trade sanctions on the hermit kingdom. They’re not only refusing not to trade with them, they’re actually increasing their trade – goods to the the tune of $1billion crossed the Yalu River in the first half of 2008. The figures don’t include the illegal drug trade that border guards on both sides take part in, or the odd homeless North Korean child that manages to slip across to sell puppies and sing songs for spare change.
The successive Chinese governments have lambasted the two Kims since the Korean peninsula was bisected across the 38th Parallel. First, the elder Kim was criticized for looking too fat, less like a proletarian leader, and more like a czar. Then there was the matter of Kim il-Sung’s massive statue in Kim il-Sung Square that the whole thing had been clad in gold didn’t sit well with the Chinese Politburo. When Kim il-Sung died in 1994, the Chinese media didn’t even mention Kim Jong-il in the official news reports.
So the question is, why is everyone asking China to tell Kim Jong-il what to do? The man clearly doesn’t listen to any of his own advisors, and they’re not shy about not paying back any debts they might owe (a grand total of $10-12billion, Japan has declared the entire country in default on what it owes to the Japanese), and the whole idea of juche means that the North Koreans should rebuild Korea by themselves. True enough that the major player in the continents 6-party talks was China – they’ve managed to repeatedly bring the North Koreans to the discussions - but after Korea’s nuclear test, and Beijing’s approval of the UN resolution 1718, the relationship has become more and more strained, and the government eyes China’s apparent closeness with the US with increasing distrust.
While diplomatic decisions are fairly easy to influence, military decisions are much more difficult. China does has the proper expertise in this area, understanding that public humiliation of North Korea won’t work, and has openly commented that this kind of pressuring diplomacy is counterproductive. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans massively overestimate China’s influence on North Korea.
The problem is that by supporting these dictatorships, China sends the message to the international community that it’s not serious about being a world power to be reckoned with. The idea of non interference is commendable, but when innocents are being slaughtered by the own governments, most leaders would actually think that doing something to encourage freedom growth would be a good thing. Perhaps Beijing is all too aware of how the international community sees it - with the ghost of Tiananmen still haunting the movers and shakers in the Great Hall of the People, would it really be a good idea to criticize other countries that are doing the same? Is it really because of one embarrassing incident handled badly that Beijing throws a deaf ear and turns a blind eye to similar atrocities in other countries?
China’s rocky relationship with African nations is a curious one. The Chinese themselves haven’t made a secret of the apparent dislike of black people, and it has less to do with the violent images of blacks that have been imported from the US than you might think. During the height of the Cold War, Mao linked the idea of class struggle with the struggle against western imperialists. Third World countries were obvious victims of the imperialists, despite the best efforts of Bob Geldof, and China cemented the brotherly relationship with stipends and special dispensation for African students who wanted to study in the People’s Republic.
The idea didn’t turn out to be as good as expected. In 1979, a fight broke out between African students and Chinese locals in Shanghai, things had come to a head as the central government donated ever increasing amounts to African countries. The situation didn’t improve – differences in attitudes towards dating and the realization by the Chinese locals that the African guests had more rights that they did escalated tensions. More and more African students found themselves being arrested and deported from whence they came.
The Nanjing riots broke out in December 1988. A brawl that broke out on the campus of Hehai University during a Christmas Eve party eventually led to some 300 students chanting “kill the black devils”. Fearing for their lives, anyone who wasn’t Chinese ended up knocking on the doors of their respective embassies begging for protection. The numbers of Chinese protestors swelled to 3000 as they converged on the local rail station demanding more rights for Chinese, and that the African students be booted out of the country.
The attitude of the Chinese towards blacks hasn’t improved, and a wave of anti-Chinese protests broke out across Africa in 2007. Zambians have been especially unimpressed by the treatment of workers and their families when several miners died in yet another accident at a Chinese owned mine. In order to maintain access to the mine, China threatened to pull out of the country, taking its money with it, abandoning the sacred idea of non-interference for its own economic gain. It seems that in the pursuit of control over natural resources, China might have more in common with America that it’s cares to admit to.
Much spin can be put on the specific reasons as to why the Chinese administration continues to support one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. In their defense, they can claim that they are helping a starving nation where no one else lifted a finger, a cynic might suggest that they are simply eyeing up the mineral wealth that lies above the DMZ, while others might point out that having a buffer between the world’s largest army and the 29,000 troops stationed in South Korea.
As North Korea headed towards the launch of its Taepodong-2 missile, it seemed that the international community was turning to China in an effort to convince the DPRK’s administration that a launch would be a Very Bad Idea. When communism first swept through China and Korea, it did so with the backing of the USSR. As the launch date approached, the US and UN asked Russia and China to try to convince North Korea to step down from the launchpad. I guess the reasoning behind the request was that China is communist (and so is North Korea) and that Russia was communist, so a somewhat friendlier face was presented to try to dissuade the North from launching its rocket/missile.
Which goes to show how far the US and the rest of the international community has come in the years since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Korean War.
When communism swept through Asia, it did so on the back of military and financial help from the USSR, they gave both the Chinese and the Koreans weapons, tanks, farming equipment, machines for their factories, essentially everything that an up and coming communist state should have. Unfortunately, since most of communist leaders since and including Stalin have been megalomaniacal dictators, the political capital that the USSR invested in states like the PRC and the DPRK quickly withered. Mao turned on the Soviets by encouraging skirmishes along the China/Russia border and developing his Mao Zedong Thought, while later, Kim Jong-il locked almost everyone out of the picture completely with the consolidation of his juche ideology.
There are only two connections between the PRC and the DPRK. One is the historical fact that Chinese soldiers were sent to fight alongside the North Koreans during the (as yet unfinished) Korean War and the other one is that China is probably the only country that hasn’t established any kind of trade sanctions on the hermit kingdom. They’re not only refusing not to trade with them, they’re actually increasing their trade – goods to the the tune of $1billion crossed the Yalu River in the first half of 2008. The figures don’t include the illegal drug trade that border guards on both sides take part in, or the odd homeless North Korean child that manages to slip across to sell puppies and sing songs for spare change.
The successive Chinese governments have lambasted the two Kims since the Korean peninsula was bisected across the 38th Parallel. First, the elder Kim was criticized for looking too fat, less like a proletarian leader, and more like a czar. Then there was the matter of Kim il-Sung’s massive statue in Kim il-Sung Square that the whole thing had been clad in gold didn’t sit well with the Chinese Politburo. When Kim il-Sung died in 1994, the Chinese media didn’t even mention Kim Jong-il in the official news reports.
So the question is, why is everyone asking China to tell Kim Jong-il what to do? The man clearly doesn’t listen to any of his own advisors, and they’re not shy about not paying back any debts they might owe (a grand total of $10-12billion, Japan has declared the entire country in default on what it owes to the Japanese), and the whole idea of juche means that the North Koreans should rebuild Korea by themselves. True enough that the major player in the continents 6-party talks was China – they’ve managed to repeatedly bring the North Koreans to the discussions - but after Korea’s nuclear test, and Beijing’s approval of the UN resolution 1718, the relationship has become more and more strained, and the government eyes China’s apparent closeness with the US with increasing distrust.
While diplomatic decisions are fairly easy to influence, military decisions are much more difficult. China does has the proper expertise in this area, understanding that public humiliation of North Korea won’t work, and has openly commented that this kind of pressuring diplomacy is counterproductive. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans massively overestimate China’s influence on North Korea.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Money for Old Hope
February 14, 2003 - A small notice in the Weekly Epidemiological Record reports 305 cases and 5 deaths from an unknown acute respiratory syndrome which occurred between 16 November and 9 February 2003 in the Guangdong Province, China. (WHO WER 7/2003) The illness is spread to household members and healthcare workers. The Chinese Ministry of Health informs the WHO that the outbreak in Guangdong is clinically consistent with atypical pneumonia. Further investigations rule out anthrax, pulmonary plague, leptospirosis, and hemorrhagic fever.
Two weeks later, at the end of February, the Chinese Ministry of Health reports that the infective agent causing the outbreak of the atypical pneumonia was probably Chlamydia pneumoniae. (WHO WER 9/2003)
March 12 - The WHO issues a global alert about cases of severe atypical pneumonia following mounting reports of cases among staff in the Hanoi and Hong Kong hospitals.
March 24 - Scientists at the CDC and in Hong Kong announce that a new coronavirus has been isolated from patients with SARS.
March 30 - In Hong Kong, a steep rise in the number of SARS cases is detected in Amoy Garden, a large housing estate consisting of ten 35-storey blocks, which are home to around 15,000 persons. The Hong Kong Department of Health issues an isolation order to prevent the further spread of SARS.
April 2 - The WHO recommends that persons traveling to Hong Kong and the Guangdong Province of China consider postponing all but essential travel
April 16 - The WHO announces that a new pathogen, a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of SARS.
April 20 - The Chinese government discloses that the number of SARS cases is many times higher than previously reported. Beijing now has 339 confirmed cases of SARS and an additional 402 suspected cases. Ten days earlier, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang had admitted to only 22 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing.
The city closes down schools and imposes strict quarantine measures. Most worrying is the evidence that the virus is spreading in the Chinese interior, where medical resources might be inadequate.
- Sarsresource.com SARS Timeline
Hu Jintao officially assumed power as the President of the People's Republic of China on 1st November, 2002. At around the same same time, a farmer in Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong was being treated for a mystery illness in the First People's Hospital of Foshan. He was never conclusively diagnosed, and soon died as a result of the severity of his symptoms.
The disease quickly spread, and quickly claimed more lives, although the Chinese government was aware of what was happening, and knew that because of the flu-like symptoms, they should report the cases the World Health Organization. Through it's Global Public Health Intelligence Network, WHO had picked up reports of several cases involving "flu-like symptoms" on the 27th November, but it wasn't until February 2003 that the Chinese central government officially reported the outbreaks, after they had realised that a national health crisis was brewing in the south of China.
China apologized for delay in reporting the SARS outbreaks two months later, claiming that Chinese citizens had been fully informed about what was happening. "China has given public notices of this epidemic to Chinese people and to the world at appropriate times, in light of our national conditions and our law," so said China's health minister, Zeng Wen Kang. What had in fact happened was that Beijing media had been ordered not to mention the SARS outbreak, or to downplay it as much as possible. Two months later, in April, the very same health minister had said that it was completely safe for people to travel around China, contradicting the WHO, who had said that some parts of China still weren't safe enough for foreigners. Or for Chinese people.
On April 4th, the lid on the whole thing was blown off by one of the most senior doctors and party members in the country, Jiang Yanyong, who risked both his career and life by writing an 800 word letter to two local TV stations – Pheonix TV and China Central Television (CCTV) 4. The letter was never reproduced in it's entirely in China, but it was leaked to foreign journalists, and ended up being printed in Time magazine. Unbeknownst to the central government of China, the World Health Organization had known that there was a burgeoning healthy crisis in the country because the WHO routinely monitored radio and television broadcasts in China.
The Mayor of Beijing resigned, Wen Kang was fired, and, five months later, the Chinese government began to fully co-operate with the efforts to bring SARS under control. No one admitted, or has ever admitted, to distorting or covering up the full extent of the damage that SARS had caused.
Jiang Yanyong was a hero, when he bravely decided to go against the party line and email local TV stations, he saved the lives of thousands, if not millions of people. In 2003, he would write another letter to China's newly elected leaders, asking the CCP to re-evaluate the Tienanmen Square crackdown:
“I was chief of the department of general surgery on June 4, 1989. On the night of June 3, I heard repeated broadcasts urging people to stay off the streets. At about 10 p.m., I was in my apartment when I heard the sound of continuous gunfire from the north. Several minutes later, my pager beeped. It was the emergency room calling me, and I rushed over. What I found was unimaginable--on the floor and the tables of the emergency room were seven young people, their faces and bodies covered with blood. Two of them were later confirmed dead by EKG. My head buzzed and I nearly passed out. I had been a surgeon for more than 30 years. I had treated wounded soldiers before, while on the medical team of the PLA railway corps that built the Chengdu-Kunming Railway. But their injuries resulted from unavoidable accidents during the construction process, while before my eyes, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China, lying in front of me, were our own people, killed by our people's army, with weapons supplied by the people.”
Although awarded a Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, which recognised "his brave stand for truth in China, spurring life-saving measures to confront and contain the deadly threat of SARS," after sending these letters, Jiang was arrested in June and spent seven weeks under arrest. The Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Jiang Zemin, ordered the arrest of Jiang Yanyong on the grounds of violating military discipline. In a public statement to the Washington Post, the government said, rather ominously, that "the military has been helping and educating him."
The scab of inner secrecy was lifted off the event again by the good doctor, when he posted an open letter to Hu Jintao demanding an apology for the way that he and his wife had been treated by CCP henchmen. He quoted the PLA General Logistics Department's CCP Commission press release that supposedly explained why he’d be arrested:
“According to the CCP disciplinary rules, article 58: “For creating rumors that demonize the Party and the State, for mild offenses, a warning or a serious warning shall be issued; for serious offenses, probation or a change of position within the Party organization shall be issued; for extremely serious offenses, expulsion from the Party shall be issued.” The case of Jiang Yanyong should be considered an extremely serious offense. However, because Jiang has admitted to his mistakes and provided a written letter of repentance and a wish for redemption, we hereby issue, with the approval of the Central Military Commission, a two year internal Party probation for Jiang Yanyong.”
The disciplinary rules, or Guiding Principles for Inner-Party Political Life, were adopted in February 1980 during the Fifth Plenary Session of 11th CPC Central Committee. A paragraph later, Yanyoung lambasted the Communist Party leadership:
“I believe the “administrative detention” issued by the former Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Jiang Zemin, against me starting on June 1, 2004 was in violation of the Constitution, the Party Charter and army disciplinary rules. The “administrative investigation” starting June 16, 2004 was also without grounds and a complete mistake. Furthermore, it is really outrageous that I have continued to be restricted from visiting family members overseas. I believe all restrictions on me should be removed and the relevant departments should correct their mistakes and issue an apology. Only then will they be in compliance with the ideals of the Party's fourth generation leadership: “rule by law,” “the people first” and “harmonious society.””
On May 19th, 2008, a three day period of mourning was officially announced for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake that had hit the province a week earlier. During these three days, China saw it’s biggest out pouring of grief in China since the death of Chairman Mao in 1979. In Tiananmen Square, after the moments silence, crowds erupted into cheers of "long live China", casinos in Macau were closed, as were servers for online games. Jackie Chan told reporters "I want to make a movie about the earthquake because there were so many touching stories; through this movie, we will be able to show the whole world what happened
The speed at which the Chinese moved to get the army and rescue workers into Weichan impressed many, and it did much to silence those who had be bold enough to ask the question that mattered – why exactly had so many schools collapsed so easily when the earthquake hit?
Seven thousand schoolrooms folded under the stress of the shaking ground, and, thanks to the one child policy, many families lost an only child. The response was that the law was to accommodate those who had lost a child in the disaster, which wasn't really much use since many parents had themselves sterilized or were too old to conceive another child. The local government had promised to investigate why the buildings collapsed as they did, but as of July 2008, no official report has been published, and no investigations have been knowingly carried out by either local or the central government. Stories about the investigation that had been demanded were swept under the carpet, and parents were at first discouraged from protesting, and later, when they did protest, they were dispersed by police.
As usually happens in these kinds of situations, the parents were offered cash payments, offered on the provisio that they never complain or protest about the alleged building faults. Undeterred by the pressure from both the government and local Sichuan officials, a Sichuanese schoolteacher, Liu Shaokun traveled to Shifang to take photos of the destroyed buildings. In one interview he expressed his outrage at the poor quality construction quality of the schools (calling them "tofu buildings”), and was arrested in June 2008 for disseminating rumors and destroying social order". He was sentenced to one year of severe Re-Education through Hard Labor, although, thanks to the media attention focused on him, he served this sentence outside of a labor camp.
While self criticism, is a cornerstone of the Maoism, the only problem is that when the CCP is criticized, or even worse, thinks it's being criticized, they don't take too kindly to it. What the CCP is most worried about, and most anxious to remove is not just direct criticism, but the implication that there is a problem that isn't being addressed. Sweeping the issues into prison is not going to make the issues vanish, and it’s clear from the protests that something isn’t being done through the “proper channels”. Chinese people are no strangers to protest and getting their voices heard. The CCP must learn that protest and dissent are not signs of a weak leadership or symbolic of the decline of society, but they are part and parcel of a modern, prosperous country in the 21st Century.
Two weeks later, at the end of February, the Chinese Ministry of Health reports that the infective agent causing the outbreak of the atypical pneumonia was probably Chlamydia pneumoniae. (WHO WER 9/2003)
March 12 - The WHO issues a global alert about cases of severe atypical pneumonia following mounting reports of cases among staff in the Hanoi and Hong Kong hospitals.
March 24 - Scientists at the CDC and in Hong Kong announce that a new coronavirus has been isolated from patients with SARS.
March 30 - In Hong Kong, a steep rise in the number of SARS cases is detected in Amoy Garden, a large housing estate consisting of ten 35-storey blocks, which are home to around 15,000 persons. The Hong Kong Department of Health issues an isolation order to prevent the further spread of SARS.
April 2 - The WHO recommends that persons traveling to Hong Kong and the Guangdong Province of China consider postponing all but essential travel
April 16 - The WHO announces that a new pathogen, a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of SARS.
April 20 - The Chinese government discloses that the number of SARS cases is many times higher than previously reported. Beijing now has 339 confirmed cases of SARS and an additional 402 suspected cases. Ten days earlier, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang had admitted to only 22 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing.
The city closes down schools and imposes strict quarantine measures. Most worrying is the evidence that the virus is spreading in the Chinese interior, where medical resources might be inadequate.
- Sarsresource.com SARS Timeline
Hu Jintao officially assumed power as the President of the People's Republic of China on 1st November, 2002. At around the same same time, a farmer in Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong was being treated for a mystery illness in the First People's Hospital of Foshan. He was never conclusively diagnosed, and soon died as a result of the severity of his symptoms.
The disease quickly spread, and quickly claimed more lives, although the Chinese government was aware of what was happening, and knew that because of the flu-like symptoms, they should report the cases the World Health Organization. Through it's Global Public Health Intelligence Network, WHO had picked up reports of several cases involving "flu-like symptoms" on the 27th November, but it wasn't until February 2003 that the Chinese central government officially reported the outbreaks, after they had realised that a national health crisis was brewing in the south of China.
China apologized for delay in reporting the SARS outbreaks two months later, claiming that Chinese citizens had been fully informed about what was happening. "China has given public notices of this epidemic to Chinese people and to the world at appropriate times, in light of our national conditions and our law," so said China's health minister, Zeng Wen Kang. What had in fact happened was that Beijing media had been ordered not to mention the SARS outbreak, or to downplay it as much as possible. Two months later, in April, the very same health minister had said that it was completely safe for people to travel around China, contradicting the WHO, who had said that some parts of China still weren't safe enough for foreigners. Or for Chinese people.
On April 4th, the lid on the whole thing was blown off by one of the most senior doctors and party members in the country, Jiang Yanyong, who risked both his career and life by writing an 800 word letter to two local TV stations – Pheonix TV and China Central Television (CCTV) 4. The letter was never reproduced in it's entirely in China, but it was leaked to foreign journalists, and ended up being printed in Time magazine. Unbeknownst to the central government of China, the World Health Organization had known that there was a burgeoning healthy crisis in the country because the WHO routinely monitored radio and television broadcasts in China.
The Mayor of Beijing resigned, Wen Kang was fired, and, five months later, the Chinese government began to fully co-operate with the efforts to bring SARS under control. No one admitted, or has ever admitted, to distorting or covering up the full extent of the damage that SARS had caused.
Jiang Yanyong was a hero, when he bravely decided to go against the party line and email local TV stations, he saved the lives of thousands, if not millions of people. In 2003, he would write another letter to China's newly elected leaders, asking the CCP to re-evaluate the Tienanmen Square crackdown:
“I was chief of the department of general surgery on June 4, 1989. On the night of June 3, I heard repeated broadcasts urging people to stay off the streets. At about 10 p.m., I was in my apartment when I heard the sound of continuous gunfire from the north. Several minutes later, my pager beeped. It was the emergency room calling me, and I rushed over. What I found was unimaginable--on the floor and the tables of the emergency room were seven young people, their faces and bodies covered with blood. Two of them were later confirmed dead by EKG. My head buzzed and I nearly passed out. I had been a surgeon for more than 30 years. I had treated wounded soldiers before, while on the medical team of the PLA railway corps that built the Chengdu-Kunming Railway. But their injuries resulted from unavoidable accidents during the construction process, while before my eyes, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China, lying in front of me, were our own people, killed by our people's army, with weapons supplied by the people.”
Although awarded a Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, which recognised "his brave stand for truth in China, spurring life-saving measures to confront and contain the deadly threat of SARS," after sending these letters, Jiang was arrested in June and spent seven weeks under arrest. The Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Jiang Zemin, ordered the arrest of Jiang Yanyong on the grounds of violating military discipline. In a public statement to the Washington Post, the government said, rather ominously, that "the military has been helping and educating him."
The scab of inner secrecy was lifted off the event again by the good doctor, when he posted an open letter to Hu Jintao demanding an apology for the way that he and his wife had been treated by CCP henchmen. He quoted the PLA General Logistics Department's CCP Commission press release that supposedly explained why he’d be arrested:
“According to the CCP disciplinary rules, article 58: “For creating rumors that demonize the Party and the State, for mild offenses, a warning or a serious warning shall be issued; for serious offenses, probation or a change of position within the Party organization shall be issued; for extremely serious offenses, expulsion from the Party shall be issued.” The case of Jiang Yanyong should be considered an extremely serious offense. However, because Jiang has admitted to his mistakes and provided a written letter of repentance and a wish for redemption, we hereby issue, with the approval of the Central Military Commission, a two year internal Party probation for Jiang Yanyong.”
The disciplinary rules, or Guiding Principles for Inner-Party Political Life, were adopted in February 1980 during the Fifth Plenary Session of 11th CPC Central Committee. A paragraph later, Yanyoung lambasted the Communist Party leadership:
“I believe the “administrative detention” issued by the former Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Jiang Zemin, against me starting on June 1, 2004 was in violation of the Constitution, the Party Charter and army disciplinary rules. The “administrative investigation” starting June 16, 2004 was also without grounds and a complete mistake. Furthermore, it is really outrageous that I have continued to be restricted from visiting family members overseas. I believe all restrictions on me should be removed and the relevant departments should correct their mistakes and issue an apology. Only then will they be in compliance with the ideals of the Party's fourth generation leadership: “rule by law,” “the people first” and “harmonious society.””
On May 19th, 2008, a three day period of mourning was officially announced for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake that had hit the province a week earlier. During these three days, China saw it’s biggest out pouring of grief in China since the death of Chairman Mao in 1979. In Tiananmen Square, after the moments silence, crowds erupted into cheers of "long live China", casinos in Macau were closed, as were servers for online games. Jackie Chan told reporters "I want to make a movie about the earthquake because there were so many touching stories; through this movie, we will be able to show the whole world what happened
The speed at which the Chinese moved to get the army and rescue workers into Weichan impressed many, and it did much to silence those who had be bold enough to ask the question that mattered – why exactly had so many schools collapsed so easily when the earthquake hit?
Seven thousand schoolrooms folded under the stress of the shaking ground, and, thanks to the one child policy, many families lost an only child. The response was that the law was to accommodate those who had lost a child in the disaster, which wasn't really much use since many parents had themselves sterilized or were too old to conceive another child. The local government had promised to investigate why the buildings collapsed as they did, but as of July 2008, no official report has been published, and no investigations have been knowingly carried out by either local or the central government. Stories about the investigation that had been demanded were swept under the carpet, and parents were at first discouraged from protesting, and later, when they did protest, they were dispersed by police.
As usually happens in these kinds of situations, the parents were offered cash payments, offered on the provisio that they never complain or protest about the alleged building faults. Undeterred by the pressure from both the government and local Sichuan officials, a Sichuanese schoolteacher, Liu Shaokun traveled to Shifang to take photos of the destroyed buildings. In one interview he expressed his outrage at the poor quality construction quality of the schools (calling them "tofu buildings”), and was arrested in June 2008 for disseminating rumors and destroying social order". He was sentenced to one year of severe Re-Education through Hard Labor, although, thanks to the media attention focused on him, he served this sentence outside of a labor camp.
While self criticism, is a cornerstone of the Maoism, the only problem is that when the CCP is criticized, or even worse, thinks it's being criticized, they don't take too kindly to it. What the CCP is most worried about, and most anxious to remove is not just direct criticism, but the implication that there is a problem that isn't being addressed. Sweeping the issues into prison is not going to make the issues vanish, and it’s clear from the protests that something isn’t being done through the “proper channels”. Chinese people are no strangers to protest and getting their voices heard. The CCP must learn that protest and dissent are not signs of a weak leadership or symbolic of the decline of society, but they are part and parcel of a modern, prosperous country in the 21st Century.
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