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Apr 17, 2010

After Quake, Ethnic Tibetans Distrust China’s Help - NYTimes.com

By ANDREW JACOBS

JIEGU, China — The Buddhist monks stood atop the jagged remains of a vocational school, struggling to move concrete slabs with pickax shovels and bare hands. Suddenly a cry went out: An arm, clearly lifeless, was poking through the debris.

But before the monks could finish their task, a group of Chinese soldiers who had been relaxing on the school grounds sprang to action. They put on their army caps, waved the monks away, and with a video camera for their unit rolling, quickly extricated the body of a young girl.

The monks stifled their rage and stood below, mumbling a Tibetan prayer for the dead.

“You won’t see the cameras while we are working,” said one of the monks, Ga Tsai, who with 200 others, had driven from their lamasery in Sichuan Province as soon as they heard about the quake.

“We want to save lives. They see this tragedy as an opportunity to make propaganda.”

Since a deadly earthquake nearly flattened this predominantly Tibetan city early Wednesday, killing at least 1,400 people, China’s leadership has treated the quake as a dual emergency — a humanitarian crisis almost three miles above sea level in remote Qinghai Province, and a fresh test of the Communist Party’s ability to keep a lid on dissent among restive Tibetans.

President Hu Jintao cut short a state visit to Brazil to fly home and supervise relief efforts, while Prime Minister Wen Jiabao postponed his own planned visit to Indonesia and came to the quake site promising that China’s Han majority would do whatever it could to aid the Tibetans.

The official state media prominently featured stories of grateful Tibetans receiving food and tents, and search and rescue specialists toiling to reach survivors even as they cope with altitude sickness.

Image via Wikipedia

The relief effort has indeed been impressive. With thousands of soldiers and truckloads of food clogging Jiegu’s streets on Saturday, earth-moving equipment started clearing away toppled buildings from the downtown. More than 600 of the seriously injured have been taken to hospitals in the provincial capital 500 miles away. In recent days, blue tents bearing the Civil Affairs Ministry logo have popped up across the city.

But despite outward signs of government largess and ethnic unity, the earthquake has exposed stubborn tensions between Beijing and Tibetans, many of whom have long struggled to maintain their autonomy and cultural identity amid a Han-dominated country. Widespread Tibetan rioting against Han rule severely disrupted Beijing’s planning to host the Summer Olympics in 2008, and China has kept Tibet and predominantly ethnically Tibetan regions of China under tight police and military control since then.

The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader who has not set foot in China since 1959, has issued a formal request to visit the disaster zone. It will most surely be denied.

Since the quake hit early Wednesday morning, thousands of monks have come to the city, some making a two-day drive from distant corners of a largely Tibetan region that spreads across three adjoining provinces.

It was the burgundy-robed monks who were among the first to pull people from collapsed buildings. On Saturday at dusk, long after the rescue experts had called it quits, they could be still be seen working the rubble.

“They are everything to us,” said Oh Zhu Tsai Jia, 57, opening the truck of his car so a group of young monks could pray over the body of his wife.

On Saturday morning, the monks ferried 1,400 bodies from the city’s main monastery to a dusty rise overlooking the city.

There, in two long trenches filled with salvaged wood, they dumped the dead and set cremation pyres ablaze.

As the fires burned for much of the day, hundreds of mourners sat mutely on a hillside next to the monks, who chanted aloud or quietly counted prayer beads of red coral and turquoise.

The police and Han officials were conspicuously absent.

The monastery’s leaders said no one from the local government had included their dead in the official tally although they were careful not to voice any criticism. Many of the younger monks, however, were not as reticent.

At the No. 3 Primary School, the monks said they had pulled 50 students from collapsed classrooms but when an official came by to ask how many had died, the police offered half that number. “I think they’re afraid to let the world know how bad this earthquake is,” said Gen Ga Ja Ba, a 23-year-old monk.

One of the most persistent complaints, however, was that many of the official rescue efforts have focused on the city’s larger structures and ignored the mud-brick homes that, with few exceptions, collapsed by the hundreds. Others spoke of skirmishes with the police over bodies, although such accounts could not be verified.

The other more incendiary criticism heard wherever monks gathered was that soldiers had prevented them from helping in rescue efforts during the first few days after the earthquake.

Tsairen, a monk from a monastery in Nangqian County in Sichuan, spoke about how he and scores of other monks tussled with soldiers at a collapsed hotel that first night. “We asked why they wouldn’t let us help, and they just ignored us,” said Tsairen, who like some Tibetans, uses only one name.

Later, he and more than 100 others headed to the vocational school, where the voices of trapped girls could still be heard in the rubble of a collapsed dormitory.

They said the soldiers blocked them from the pile and later, the chief of their monastery, Ga Tsai, scuffled with a man they described as the county chief.

“He grabbed me by my robe and dragged me out to the street,” Ga Tsai said.

In the evening after the soldiers had left the scene, they went to work, eventually pulling out more than a dozen bodies.

Even if exaggerated, such stories can only work against the government’s efforts to win over Tibetans.

In recent days, the government has vowed to rebuild Jiegu, which is also known by its Chinese name Yushu, promising to spare no expense. But while many Tibetans expressed gratitude for the relief efforts and the official outpouring of concern, others were less appreciative.

As an excavator and a bulldozer sifted through the remains of the vocational school dormitory on Saturday, Gong Jin Ba Ji, a 16-year-old student, stood watching.

A day earlier, she said, the machinery inadvertently tore apart the body of a classmate. She was still waiting for them to recover the body of her older sister.

“I wish they would work more carefully,” she said numbly. “Maybe they don’t care so much because we are only Tibetans.”

Ziang Jiang contributed research.

Apr 12, 2010

BAE Systems Tops List of Biggest Arms Companies - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By DAVID JOLLY

PARIS — BAE Systems has topped the list of the world’s biggest armaments companies, as the company, based in London, sharply expanded its sales of armored vehicles for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Swedish research institute said Monday.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said BAE moved up two spots in 2008 to become the largest arms maker, with military sales of $32.4 billion. It was followed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics, all based in the United States, in the top five spots.

Image by Kuba Bożanowski via Flickr

Though BAE is a British company, more than half of its business is with the United States. Sales in its land and armaments business rose to $12 billion from $7 billion, the institute said, largely on the strength of sales to the U.S. military of mine-resistant, ambush-protected, or MRAP, vehicles.

Total arms sales by the world’s 100 largest arms-producing companies rose to $385 billion in 2008, an increase of $39 billion from a year earlier, the institute said. The data are for 2008 because that is the latest period for which the figures can be verified and analyzed, the institute said in its annual ranking.

The institute, partially financed by Sweden, describes itself as “an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.”

Chinese companies were conspicuously absent from the list, even though the institute ranks China’s military spending as second only to that of the United States. “China probably would appear in the top 100 if we had adequate information,” Bates Gill, director of the institute and a longtime student of East Asian military affairs, said by telephone. “The figures are opaque. Still, it’s a big, big industry,” he said.

But even considering China’s huge domestic sales, it does not rank among the top 10 exporters, he said. The United States ranks first, Mr. Gill said, followed by Russia, Britain, Germany and France.

Mr. Gill said that “one or two of the big Chinese producers, those making rockets for their space program, for example, would probably rank in the top 25 if we simply valued Chinese production at the international market rate.”

China’s overseas arms sales have declined in the past two decades, Mr. Gill said. “Partly that’s because of a greater availability of other competitors with more advanced weaponry since the end of the Cold War,” he said, “and partly, quite simply, because China doesn’t compete very well in terms of quality.”

Still, he noted, Pakistan ordered Chinese fighter jets last year in a deal worth more than $1 billion, a sign that Chinese exporters were taking overseas markets seriously.

Also notable, the institute said, was that Navistar, a truck maker based in Illinois, sold military goods worth $3.9 billion to the U.S. government in 2008, an increase of 960 percent from 2007. The Navistar sales were primarily of armored vehicles for use in Afghanistan.

North American companies, of which all but one are based in the United States, dominate the list, accounting for 60 percent of arms sales by the top 100 companies, the institute said.

Apr 6, 2010

Stupid Americans? Send Them to China | china/divide

by C. Custer on April 2, 2010

So says President Obama, who is working with Chinese officials to ensure that the US sends 100,000 students to China over the next four years. The number of Americans studying in China has been rising steadily on its own, but what is the point of this? That’s a vast generalization, of course, but take it from someone who spends all day every day with American kids — they know nothing about the world outside the US.

When I say “nothing” I want you to understand exactly what I mean, so here are some examples. I asked my students what language they speak in Australia. Less than half of them knew for sure, several thought “Australian”, and one of them said French. I asked them what continent China was on, and only around half of them got it right. Several of them wrote “China”. I could go on, but you’ve heard these statistics before. That’s because they are true. American students are woefully, woefully ignorant of the world outside their iPods.

As some of you know, I teach Chinese and History at a boarding school in New England, so my students tend to be privileged. They have grown up with more and better access to education than the average American. Many of them have traveled abroad with their parents before. By all accounts, they ought to be performing better than the average American on simple questions like the ones I asked them, which makes their abject failure even more worrisome. Obviously, my “study” was not at all scientific and my sample size far too small, but this is a blog, so I’m going to make the point anyway: Americans don’t know anything about other countries.

More worrisome than that, though (after all, as a teacher, isn’t that kind of my fault) is that at least among my students, I believe there is a complete lack of empathy for those outside the US’s borders, especially those in faraway places like Asia. Students act as though historical events were plot points in a movie, and their writing further betrays that conceptually speaking, they do not perceive the places we are talking about as real.

I probably don’t have to explain why that’s a problem in the long term. Now, maybe kids are all like this, or have always been like this. I wouldn’t know. But I do think I understand why Obama wants to send 100,000 Americans to China. They aren’t all going to come back speaking Chinese fluently, ready to join the CIA’s China analysts pushing desks in Virginia. But they are all going to come back with a real sense that there is a world outside the US. They’re going to come back with friends, business contacts, and experiences — real life experiences, not classroom knowledge — that turn the Sino-American policy debate into something that seems real and important. Say what you will about Obama, but at least when it comes to China, it seems like he’s not planning to throw the whole “mutual understanding” thing under the bus.

But I am extremely tired, and it’s possible this line of reasoning makes no sense, so, what do you think?

Apr 2, 2010

Overtures to China may signal opening of North Korea's economy

Image by IsaacMao via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Friday, April 2, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- Squeezed by food shortages and financial sanctions, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be reaching out to China and Chinese investors in a way that could mark an extraordinary opening in the insular nation's shuttered economy.

Kim might soon travel to China, according to the office of South Korea's president and U.S. officials. They cited preparations that appear to be underway in the Chinese border city of Dandong and in Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday it does not have information on whether Kim will visit China.

Such a trip could help restart six-party talks, hosted by China, aimed at persuading North Korea to denuclearize in return for economic and political benefits.

Kim is also attempting to accelerate Chinese investment and has ordered the creation of a State Development Bank. Officials from the new bank told a South Korean professor last week that they intend to allow the construction of foreign-owned factories in major North Korean cities. This would allow Chinese firms, many of which are running short of low-cost factory workers, access to North Korea's pool of low-wage laborers.

If the investments move forward, they would represent a major policy reversal by the government. For six decades, North Korea has sealed almost all its citizens off from the "poisons" of capitalism.

Outreach to China comes at a time of sharply increased pressure on Kim's leadership.

Image by yeowatzup via Flickr

Inside North Korea, food shortages have worsened because of botched currency reform, which disrupted the private markets that feed most of the country's 22.5 million people. Kim's medical ills also include kidney failure, and he undergoes dialysis every two weeks, according to the head of a state-run think tank in Seoul.

And outside, U.N. sanctions are reportedly limiting the North's ability to profit from weapons sales. State trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes and illicit drugs appears to be dwindling. In addition, large-scale food aid from South Korea has been stopped until Pyongyang agrees to junk its nuclear weapons.

"Through this State Development Bank, North Korea is trying to lure foreign investment in agriculture, ports, railroads and also light industry," said Lim Eul-chul, a research professor at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies. He spent four days in Pyongyang last week, talking to officials from the bank and to Chinese businessmen.

They told Lim that the bank is offering itself to foreign investors as a one-stop investment shop. With its board including senior members of the military and the ruling party, the bank will be able to conduct transactions with foreign commercial banks and invest in major projects, North Korean state-controlled media have said.

"The North is now planning to open foreign-owned factories not just in closed-off special economic zones, but in major cities like Nampo and Wonsan," Lim said. Until now, the government has confined nearly all foreign business operations to sealed-off economic zones, such as Kaesong near the South Korean border. "The military is closely cooperating with the State Development Bank to try to increase foreign investment."

Although the repressive power of the army and security forces remains strong, the North's command-style economy is a ruin. There were unconfirmed reports of starvation deaths in some areas this winter.

Image via Wikipedia

Kim, 68, and showing the effects of a 2008 stroke, is in the early stages of handing power over to his untested 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun. But the legitimacy of the succession -- and of the state itself -- is being weakened by the growth of the markets and increased public access to foreign media.

Refugee surveys show that many North Koreans blame Kim's government for food shortages, corruption and incompetence.

"Kim Jong Il doesn't have many cards to play, so there is more and more pressure on him to return to the six-party talks," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "He is also aiming to get investment from ethnic Korean businesses in China."

In South Korea and China, there is widespread skepticism about North Korea's willingness to create modern banking systems and enforce laws that allow foreign companies to operate under standardized accounting rules.

Companies that have invested in North Korean mineral ventures have complained for years of corruption and outright theft by the government.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Mar 31, 2010

BBC News - Google says Vietnam mine opponents under cyber attack

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BBC News - Google says Vietnam mine opponents under cyber attack

Mar 30, 2010

Google Says Glitch Blocks China Service - NYTimes.com

Mar 8, 2010

Educated and Fearing the Future in China - Room for Debate Blog

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March 7, 2010, 7:00 pm

Educated and Fearing the Future in China

By THE EDITORS

Reuters/China Daily College graduates at a job fair in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in 2009.

As China’s economy recovers, employers are competing to hire low-skilled workers, but many of China’s best and brightest, its college graduates, are facing a long stretch of unemployment.

In 1999, the government began a push to expand college education — once considered a golden ticket — to produce more professionals to meet the demands of globalization. This year, more than 6.3 million graduates will enter the job market, up from one million in 1999. But the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.

What might be done to correct the mismatch between expectations and reality? How is this problem altering Chinese attitudes about upward mobility? If college graduates are not reaping economic rewards, how will the next generation view the value of education?

C. Cindy Fan, associate dean of social sciences, U.C.L.A.
Yasheng Huang, professor of political economy, M.I.T.
Daniel A. Bell, professor of political philosophy, Tsinghua University
Albert Park, economist, University of Oxford
Loren Brandt, economist, University of Toronto

Materialism and Social Unrest

C. Cindy Fan is associate dean of social sciences and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of “China on the Move” and numerous articles.

Like prostitution, stocks, private cars, beauty pageants, and McDonald’s, “unemployment,” thanks to collectivization, was practically absent from Chinese life for the three decades after 1949.

The Chinese economy, no longer centrally planned, has not put enough people back to work.

Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms paved the way for the collapse of inefficient state-owned enterprises, shattering the “iron rice bowl” of millions of workers and creating the first wave of unemployment in post-Mao China.

Unemployment among college graduates is a hot-button issue in China. A large number of young people have little other than materialism and consumerism to believe in — a general description of Chinese society today since socialist ideology lost its grip. Not having a job is a perfect recipe for social unrest.

Today, China’s official unemployment rate is about 4.3 percent, but it is a gross underestimate because of underemployment among both rural and urban Chinese — they may have a job but their skills are underutilized and they are underpaid.

What explains this situation? No doubt, the global economic crisis has contributed to job loss, but China is considered one of the first economies to recover from the recession.

Another explanation widely cited in the media is the government-directed increase in university enrollment since the late 1990s. But even with that expansion, less than 8 percent of the Chinese population are college-educated compared with more than one in four in the U.S. That suggests there is much room for growth in higher education, especially if the country is to live up to the expectation of “China’s century.”

Instead, three explanations may account for the relatively high unemployment among college graduates. First, geography matters. Young people from smaller places and rural areas, upon obtaining a university degree, are likely eager to go to or stay in big cities. This effect is crowding the labor market in cities like Beijing and Shanghai and hurting the economy of small cities and towns.

Second, globalization matters. By rough estimates, one quarter of the Chinese who have studied overseas have returned. Nicknamed “sea turtles” (haigui), these returnees are highly competitive and can easily push the domestic college graduates down the job hierarchy.

Finally, China’s economy continues to be dominated by the industrial sector, which accounts for about 49 percent of the gross domestic product. While services — the most likely sector for college graduates — account for about 40 percent of the G.D.P., high-skilled, professional jobs are still relatively few compared with low-end service jobs like those in sales.

Creating high-end jobs and increasing the incentives for young people to live in smaller cities are obvious ways to reduce their unemployment. But this is easier said than done. The Chinese economy is no longer centrally planned, and as we have observed on this side of the Pacific, relying on the market alone — even with stimulus packages — has not yet put enough people back to work.

A Terrible Education System

Yasheng Huang is professor of political economy and international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” and will soon begin a large-scale survey of college graduates in China.

In 2007, the job openings for new graduates fell by some 22 percent compared with 2006, according China’s National Development and Reform Commission.

Although Chinese universities have pockets of excellence, they are churning out people with high expectations and low skills.

Some estimate that 30 percent of Chinese engineering students will not find jobs after graduation and that the average pay of the college graduates is now approaching that of rural migrant workers. At the same time, factories in Guangdong province cannot find enough labor. What is going on?

The idea that China is running out of unskilled labor is a myth. The news reports typically concentrate on Guangdong but this does not mean the country as a whole is short of unskilled labor. Development in rural areas in the past six years has meant that rural residents, previously denied economic opportunities close to home, now have a choice between going to Guangdong and staying in their hometowns. Many choose to stay. Any “labor shortage” in Guangdong is mostly evidence that the factories should not be located there in the first place.

But the job market is a problem for college graduates — with the opportunities created in the wrong places. Colleges educate students, but in China they also give a young person a formal right to move to an urban center.

Going Back to Mao?

Daniel A. Bell is professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University and author of “China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.”

“In education, there are no social classes,” Confucius said. The value of equal opportunity for education has deep roots in Chinese culture and may help to explain why most Chinese parents, regardless of social background, put so much pressure on their kids to do well in school.

Even at an elite university, students are lowering their aspirations or settling for government jobs.

It also helps to why explain the university entrance examination system — one of the least corrupt institutions in China — is designed at least partly to provide an equal opportunity for all students. Those who make the cut go on to university, regardless of social connections.

In response to societal demands for more educational opportunities, the government has boosted university enrollment by 30 percent annually over the past decade. Even in the context of a booming economy, the predictable consequence is that there are large numbers of unemployed college students. My own students — graduates of the elite Tsinghua University — are also feeling the pinch, though it usually means lowering their aspirations or changing their plans rather than coping with unemployment.

Waiting It Out

Albert Park is a reader in the economy of China at the University of Oxford. He has co-directed several surveys on China’s urban workers and is currently leading a World Bank-supported project on the impact of the global economic crisis on employment in China.

China has been confronting the challenge of employing college graduates for some years now. The number of graduates from regular institutions of higher education increased dramatically from 9.5 million in 2000 to 37.8 million in 2006.

The broader trends definitely suggest that the economy will be able to absorb more graduates.

Meanwhile, the urban unemployment rate for college graduates increased from 6.3 percent in 2000 to 11.9 percent in 2005, while declining for those with less education, according to calculations based on census data. It would be surprising if the expectations of college graduates have not begun to adjust to the new reality.

In recent years, many college graduates have been disappointed by the salaries for starting positions. Some may feel they would rather wait for a better first job, since first jobs can strongly influence future career paths. Of course, wages of college graduates tend to rise with experience once employed. Eventually, the costs of waiting will force graduates to accept available job offers.

College Educations, Needed and Desired

Loren Brandt is a professor of economics at the University of Toronto. He is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on the Chinese economy and has been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in China. He is the co-editor of China’s Great Economic Transformation.

China’s urban labor market is fairly sharply divided between workers with urban residency permits (hukou) and migrants from rural areas. In general, the overlap in the job market for these two populations is relatively modest, but it has been increasing over time.

China’s emerging middle class will continue to demand expanded educational opportunities for their children.

Of the total urban workforce of 475-500 million, 60 to 65 percent have urban residency permits (hukou) with the remaining being migrants. A majority of those with residency permits (upwards of three-quarters) work in the “formal” sector in jobs that offer more security, higher wages, as well as the benefits of China’s social safety net. The migrants are more likely to be found in the “informal” urban sector, including manufacturing, construction and services.

For migrants, one huge barrier to jobs in the formal urban sector is their significantly lower levels of education. The most recent arrivals from the countryside have an average educational attainment of middle school (9 years in total), or five years less than their urban counterparts. Migrants are also willing to take the less desirable jobs that urban residents usually avoid.

Associated Press Graduates from Jinan University at a job fair in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, 2009.

Bo Xilai's charm offensive is paying off politically in China

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 8, 2010; A07

BEIJING -- Of the nearly 3,000 members of China's ruling elite in the country's capital this weekend to kick off the biggest political gathering of the year, only one has the state media and online commentators abuzz: Bo Xilai.

Named "Man of the Year" by a People's Daily online poll, the subject of an adoring home video being circulated on the Internet and revered in countless blogs, Bo is in contention to be named to one of the top jobs in China in 2012, when many of the country's current leaders are expected to retire.

In the three years he has served as the top Communist Party official in Chongqing, the country's largest municipality, Bo has shaken up Chinese politics by becoming a wildly popular politician in a country where politicians in the Western sense are frowned upon.

"Bo Xilai is a selfless person and a fearless one. In these times, we need government officials like Bo . . . He chases justice for ordinary people," said Li Lei, a 48-year-old entrepreneur. Li created the video tribute after reading about Bo's crackdown on Chongqing's mafia, a crusade that not only targeted corrupt businessmen but -- in a departure from previous efforts -- the senior-level government officials who colluded with them.

The official purpose of the meeting of the National People's Congress from March 5 to 14 in Beijing is to review and pass new legislation. But given that there's no separation of powers in China and that some of those who will vote on the laws were also involved in drafting them, the gathering is largely symbolic.

The more interesting discussions are happening behind the scenes, because this year's people's congress is the unofficial start of mid-term jockeying for the 2012 Communist Party Congress where the next generation of leaders will take the reins from Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.

All eyes are focused on which of the "fifth generation leaders" like Bo are up and which are down -- what that says about the direction of the country.

In two years, more than half the members of the ruling Politburo are expected to retire or step aside because of age. This would set the stage for newcomers to emerge as the principal figures responsible for the country's political and ideological affairs, economic and financial administration, foreign policy and military operations, according to Cheng Li, a China researcher at the Brookings Institution.

Among them, Li Keqiang, 55, a former farmer who got his doctorate in economics at one of China's top universities and is now vice premier, is widely seen as being groomed to be the next premier. Xi Jinping, 57, the son of a powerful Communist Party elder and who currently serves as the vice president, is considered to be the most likely heir to the position of president.

However, Li, the China researcher, wrote in a recent policy paper that "a dark horse can emerge in Chinese politics, just as in American politics." He wrote it would be wise to "pay greater attention to a broader group of potential contenders for power, especially the rising stars in provincial leadership." Of those regional leaders, Bo -- a former minister of commerce, provincial governor and mayor -- is the standout.

While other senior-level officials tend to be shy and awkward in dealing with the public and the media, Bo has managed to charm nearly everyone. He has led crowds of thousands in singalongs of "red culture" songs, sat down for TV chats with protesting workers and communicated with students via mass text messages.

At 60, Bo is too old and controversial to be regarded as a candidate to become premier. But Chinese scholars say he's likely to be named to the Communist Party's nine-member standing committee -- China's most powerful decision-making group.

Charismatic, handsome and majestically tall by Chinese standards at 6-foot-1, Bo has become the poster child for a group of emerging Chinese leaders known as the "princelings."

His candidacy reflects how far China's Communist Party has evolved from its origins. Today the party's constituency is increasingly middle class and more concerned with things like business and finance than Marxist ideology.

Like other "princelings" -- descendants of high-ranking party officials -- Bo grew up mostly in China's wealthier coastal regions, came of age during the Cultural Revolution, is fluent in English, has a graduate degree, and began his career in the government after it began market-based economic reforms in the late 1970s.

In contrast, many of China's current leaders were raised mostly in the inland by ordinary working-class families and they worked their way up the ranks of the government bureaucracy through postings in far-flung provinces. Known as "tuanpai" -- a reference to the China Communist Youth League that they were members of and that was once considered the place to groom future leaders -- these men are considered technocrats who have helped China carry out the goals set forth by previous generations but stopped short of reinventing them.

In policy decisions, the princelings tend to believe the future lies with advancing the interests of the middle class; the tuanpai tend to pay more attention than the princelings to vulnerable groups such as farmers, migrant workers and the urban poor.

Bo "is perceived by the public as a modern, honest and upright official," said Zhang Hongliang, an economics professor at the Minzu University in Beijing. On the other hand, Zhang said, "The high praise of Bo equals criticism of other officials," which has created enemies.

The second eldest son of the seven children of Bo Yibo, one of a group of Communist Party officials known as the "Eight Immortals" who were purged during the Cultural Revolution for supporting open trade with the West and other capitalist-style reforms, Bo and the rest of his family were jailed and his mother was beaten to death in custody. But when Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978, he returned Bo Yibo to his position of vice premier. Bo Xilai thrived during his father's tenure in Beijing, graduating from Peking University with a degree in history and then working at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a prestigious government-affiliated think tank, for his master's degree.

Today Bo is in charge of running Chongqing, a region of more than more than 31,000 square miles and 32 million people along the Yangtze River that is the largest of China's four provincial-level municipalities. In the fall of 2008, Bo gained national praise for the way he managed strikes by teachers, police and taxi drivers in the city as China's economy began to contract. While other regional leaders around the country faced with similar problems treated striking workers as criminals, arresting leaders and sending in police, Bo made what was considered a radical move in China: He invited taxi driver representatives to meet with him in a forum broadcast on state television and negotiated terms for ending the strike.

And in 2009, Bo took another political gamble. He launched what he called a "Red Culture Campaign" to get people to get together and read, study and even sing about Mao Zedong's work again. While a few scholars ridiculed the efforts, it was a hit with the masses, with hundreds of thousands showing up at the events.

Researcher Wang Juan contributed to this report.

Mar 1, 2010

China Names Its Own Lama To Top Body Of Advisers

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China’s handpicked Panchen Lama, the teenage religious figure whose legitimacy is a matter of dispute among many Tibetan Buddhists, has been appointed to the country’s top advisory body, the state media have announced.

Although membership in the advisory group, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is of nominal interest to Chinese, the appointment of the Panchen Lama, 19, on Sunday ratchets up the government’s efforts to elevate his stature among Tibetans. Because he was appointed by Communist Party authorities rather than by Buddhist leaders, many Tibetans reject his religious authority as the ranking leader after the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

Born as Gyaltsen Norbu, he was anointed the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, after the Dalai Lama identified a different child as the latest incarnation of the Panchen Lama. A few weeks later, that boy and his family vanished. The government has said that they are in “protective custody,” but their whereabouts have been a mystery for 15 years.

According to Xinhua, the official news agency, the official Panchen Lama, just shy of his 20th birthday, is the youngest person ever appointed to the conference, which convenes this week as part of the annual pageant that includes meetings of the National People’s Congress, the country’s main legislative forum.

The advising conference is made up of wealthy businessmen, sports celebrities and prominent members of China’s ethnic minorities. It is also cynically viewed as a reward for retired officials. Among the 13 new members appointed Sunday was Li Changjiang, the former head of China’s food safety administration, who was forced to resign over the scandal involving melamine-contaminated milk.

Bkra-lo, a Tibetan scholar at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said there was nothing surprising about Gyaltsen Norbu’s appointment to the advisory conference.

“He has a lot of influence and popularity among the Tibetan people, so it makes sense,” he said. “Although he is very young, he is also very learned.”

Last month, the state media liberally featured his elevation as vice president of the government-run Buddhist Association of China. In an address, he swore to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party and promised to “adhere to socialism, safeguard national unification and strengthen ethnic unity.”

Despite its stated devotion to atheism, the Communist Party has struggled to offer a counterweight to the immense stature of the Dalai Lama, whom it views as a separatist eager to sunder Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama says his only interest is greater religious and cultural autonomy for Tibetans.

Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group in India, said no amount of grooming would burnish Gyaltsen Norbu’s reputation among Tibetans.

“If you look at the Tibetan struggle for the last 60 years, neither torture nor financial incentives by the Chinese have been able to win the hearts of the people,” he said. “Tibetans will never accept him as the Panchen Lama.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Feb 26, 2010

Ethnic Minority Theme Parks Draw Crowds in China

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By EDWARD WONG

MANZHA, China — Tucked away in China’s steamy tropical southwest are the villages of the Dai people, famous throughout the country for a raucous annual tradition: a water-splashing festival where the Dai douse one another for three days in the streets using any container they can get their hands on — buckets, wash basins, teacups, balloons, water guns.

But in Manzha and four surrounding villages, the springtime festival has taken on added significance — or insignificance, depending on how you look at it. Imagine a nonstop Mardi Gras with fire hoses: at a site called the Dai Minority Park, water-splashing extravaganzas take place every day.

Yuppies from China’s boom cities arrive by the busload to take part in a wild frenzy of dousing and dunking and drenching with 100 Dai women dressed in bright pink, yellow and blue traditional dresses — “our warmest and sweetest Dai princesses,” as an announcer calls them.

“A lot of tourists want to come see this, but it’s only a few days a year,” said Zhao Li, one of the management office employees, who are virtually all Han, the dominant ethnic group in China. “So we decided to make it every day, so everyone can experience water splashing.”

The Dai park, with its wooden stilt homes, groomed palm trees and elephant statues, is part of an increasingly popular form of entertainment in China — the ethnic theme playground, where middle-class Han come to experience what they consider the most exotic elements of their vast nation. There is no comprehensive count of these Disneyland-like parks, but people in the industry say the number is growing, as are visitors. The Dai park, whose grounds encompass 333 actual Dai households, attracts a half-million tourists a year paying $15 each.

The parks are money-making ventures. But scholars say they also serve a political purpose — to reinforce the idea that the Chinese nation encompasses 55 fixed ethnic minorities and their territories, all ruled by the Han.

“They’re one piece in the puzzle of the larger project of how China wants to represent itself as a multiethnic state,” said Thomas S. Mullaney, a historian at Stanford University who studies China’s ethnic taxonomy. “The end goal is political, which is territorial unity. Parks like that, even if they’re kitschy, kind of like Legoland, they still play and occupy a political position.”

China’s 1.3 billion people are officially 96 percent Han; the rest range from Tibetans to Naxi to Manchus, categories fixed after the 1949 Communist revolution. The companies running the parks are generally Han-owned, say industry workers. The Dai park was started by a Han businessman from Guangdong Province in the late 1990s and sold to a state-run rubber company in 1999.

The most famous park, the Nationalities Park in Beijing, is a combination of museum and fairground. Ethnic workers from across China dress up in their native costumes for mostly Han tourists. (For a while, English signs there read “Racist Park,” an unfortunate translation of the Chinese name.) In some parks, Han workers dress up as natives — a practice given legitimacy by the government when Han children marched out in the costumes of the 55 minorities during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Yunnan, in the southwest, is one of China’s most diverse provinces, with 25 official ethnic groups. The Dai, one of the largest, are related to the Thai. Many live near Laos and Myanmar in the region called Xishuangbanna.

Dai farmers grow rice and have rubber plantations in the hills. Even in the Dai park, most villagers still farm rubber for their primary income. The villagers also make some money from leasing the land on which they live to Ganlanba Farm, the state-owned rubber company that operates the park.

In exchange, they have to follow rules laid down by the rubber company managers — no significant changes to their stilt homes, for example. By contrast, some villagers outside the park use brick and concrete to build homes now.

About 500 residents work here and put on the daily show, including water-splashing festivals and dragon boat races, held on a nearby stretch of the Mekong River.

Some tourists pay to sleep in family homes that stay true to Dai tradition.

“If you know how to run a business, you can benefit from the park,” said Ai Yo, a father of two who runs one of 27 official homestays. “But if you don’t do business, there’s no real benefit.”

Residents had become dissatisfied with the annual lease price for their land, he said. The rubber company was paying the villagers $73 a year per one-sixth of an acre. Only in recent months has the company agreed to pay about 20 percent more in rent.

Homestay owners have tossed out some traditions to meet the needs of Han tourists. The first tourists slept with their hosts on the floor of a large room, according to Dai custom, but visitors soon complained, Mr. Ai Yo said. So homeowners built separate bedrooms. Traditionally, too, the Dai were skittish about allowing strangers to look inside their bedrooms, because of a belief that the gaze of strangers would frighten away ancestral spirits.

Over all, though, he says tourism has bettered his life. “I had rice paddies, and I worked morning to night and didn’t seen any money,” he said while sitting outside his home one warm morning.

At another table outside were two Han tourists from the city of Chongqing. Zheng Jing, a big-bellied man wielding a Canon camera, was a repeat visitor. He said this park was the only place in the Dai region where he would ever consider staying.

“There are many villages around, and they’re all primitive,” he said as a Han motorcycle club pulled up to Mr. Ai Yo’s house for lunch. “It’s not suitable for us to go there. They don’t speak the Han language. You can’t have exchanges with them.”

That kind of attitude puzzles Dai residents living right outside the park.

“The culture here is the same as inside the park,” said Ai Yong, 32, a rubber farmer in Mannao village. “You’re getting cheated inside. You come out here, you can see everything for free.”

Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.

Feb 23, 2010

China tightens internet controls

A Beijing office worker surfs the internet

China has the world's biggest online population: more than 380m users

China has tightened controls on internet use, requiring anyone who wants to set up a website to meet regulators and produce ID documents.

The technology ministry said the measures were designed to tackle online pornography, but internet activists see it as increased government censorship.

A number of websites are now being registered overseas in an attempt to avoid controls.

China has the world's biggest online population: more than 380m users.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Tuesday lifted a freeze introduced in December on registration for new individual websites.

Extensive censorship

But the technology ministry said would-be website operators would now have to submit identity cards and photos of themselves, as well as meeting regulators before their sites could be registered.

The freeze had been imposed by the state-sanctioned group which registers domain names, after complaints by state media that not enough was being done to screen websites for pornography.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Beijing says that despite extensive censorship, the internet remains a surprisingly vibrant and critical environment in China.

Internet users have used it to highlight cases of injustice or to embarrass corrupt officials.

China's web users often manage to stay one step ahead of government controls, says our correspondent.

The Chinese authorities have launched a number of campaigns against online pornography, with the government saying thousands of people were detained last year alone.

Feb 12, 2010

As Obama bets on Asia, regional players hedge

Image via Wikipedia

By Jim Hoagland

Friday, February 12, 2010;

NEW DELHI

Asia forms the crossroads of success or failure for Barack Obama's grandest foreign policy designs. This impression has crystallized over a year in which the president has shown himself indifferent to Europe, sentimental and somewhat conflicted about Africa, perplexed by the Middle East and largely oblivious to Latin America.

Obama's choices about China, India, Japan and Pakistan loom at least as large as the urgent challenges of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president has outlined the need for the United States to shed burdens abroad to help repair the badly damaged American economy. That means that Obama must settle discarded U.S. burdens -- and power -- across a range of international organizations in which Asian nations are becoming increasingly influential.

The president consigned the Group of Eight industrial countries to leadership oblivion in his recent State of the Union message, omitting any mention of it while singling out the G-20 forum of developed and developed nations. This was no oversight: His administration hopes to shift climate change negotiations out of the unmanageable U.N. format that doomed the Copenhagen summit in December and place these talks in the G-20 process, according to U.S. officials.

Asia's giants, India and China, present differing and opposed models of international cooperation. A G-20 world needs at its center a dynamic U.S.-Indian relationship to help bridge that organization's divides between haves and have-nots and their different political systems. But here in New Delhi, Indian officials increasingly fear that the Obama team does not see it that way.

Indians are flattered that the only state dinner Obama hosted last year was given for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose remarkable intelligence and gracious manner would make him a welcome guest anywhere. But they also detect an air of ambivalence blowing their way from Washington -- and are reacting by hedging against a quick U.S. pullout from Afghanistan that would bring greater U.S. reliance on China and Pakistan, at India's expense.

Romanced by the Bush administration to balance China's inexorable rise in military and economic power, India finds itself out of sync with the Obama administration on some key issues. There is no open conflict. But neither is there the air of excitement and innovation about the U.S. relationship that I found on my last trip here 18 months ago.

Since then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has explicitly rejected balance-of-power politics as a relic of the past. Yet India, Japan and other Asian states fear that without a supportive U.S. hand on the scales, they will be swamped by China's growing military capabilities and its increasingly aggressive, and effective, diplomacy.

The somewhat fanciful notion of a G-2 directorate in which the United States and China collude to determine global economic and political direction is increasingly colliding with reality. Tensions over Taiwan, trade and Tibet make the G-2 unworkable, as recent events have again shown. But the specter lingers for Asians as well as Europeans that Obama will be tempted to try -- even though a failed G-2 would be the worst possible outcome for everyone.

"The G-2 carries the implication that the United States would leave Asia to China to run," says B.J. Panda, a rising young political star here. Adds another Indian strategist: "We have to balance the Chinese, irrespective of what the U.S. and others do."

Obama's emphasis on setting an initial date for withdrawal from Afghanistan in his Dec. 1 policy speech, even as he sent additional U.S. troops, stirred doubt here about U.S. strategic patience. So have the frequent U.S. military visits to and overblown praise for Pakistan's army leadership, despite credible evidence of high-level Pakistani involvement in cross-border terrorism directed at India.

The dominant impression from three days of informal conversations organized here by the Aspen Strategy Group with Indian officials and analysts is that Pakistan has become a second-tier problem for India, even as it increasingly preoccupies Washington. What one Indian analyst described as "Obama's nuclear alarmism" also gives Pakistan increased leverage over Washington.

India has recently moved troops away from the Pakistan frontier while increasing deployments into border areas that China is claiming in pugnacious and offensive rhetoric. In a break with its past opposition to foreign bases in the region, India has secured military transit and stationing rights at an airbase in Tajikistan. And Singh's government lavishly welcomed Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, on a recent three-day visit that included publicity about plans for joint military maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.

These are clear signs of Indian hedging: seeking allies for worst-case scenarios while accommodating China on economic matters. The Obama administration's failure to reaffirm clearly that India's rise is in U.S. strategic interests has contributed to this hedging. That is a mistake the president should quickly correct, in the interests of his own vision of a new world order centered on the Pacific and Indian oceans.

The writer is a contributing editor to The Post.