Chinese leaders can be confident that the plight of dissidents and their blatant human rights abuses and the malevolence of their Tech wars with the West and even the hacking intensity of their secret stealing; will not bother anyone, as long as they can profit from a China business relationship.
Well – am not so sure anymore.
Maybe the hanging of the retarded Britton and the secret hangings of their own citizens and more visibly the ever-louder complaints of foreign businesses over the increasing – day by day – barriers they face in China will not keep the world away – but will certainly make people think twice - before committing resources and outsource their sensitive product lines and even services to the PRC Mainland.
Google is just a high visibility example of an enlightened business becoming a Chinese victim and – economic openness charade - Refusnik. Many others – in a low profile way – have been reteating; the way of the Marko Polo. Going home to avoid the coming socio-politico-economic wars… and upheavals that cyclically rock China to the core like an exaggerated Chinese influenza virus.
After Google got hit hard with the state hackers stealing it’s core secrets – they decided mindful of the coming change of scenery – to sit this round of bloodshed out.
Good Move that will play well in the coming years. But they also know somethings You don’t…
And so it is that somewhere else – like Taiwan is looking so much better right about now with Vietnam and South Korea – acting as the true powerhouses they are. This, makes me also see the Sino-alternatives in a Greener light.
So can the friends who habitually invest there. See the Green light – to leave China – I mean.
The growth curve in China is exhausted after all… Let the late birds take the poo-cake.
But this May - China – will be different. Even if only for a show. Many visitors, led by a series of foreign leaders going to the World Expo in Shanghai will enjoy another spectacle designed to lull the senses.
I plan to be amongst them too. But in respect to reality and truth – here are some thoughts:
And let us play the character game as it is so much more fun than simple Sino-logic and economic double talk…
So it is when announcing that among the first China visitors – come this May and high water, will be France’s president – Nicolas Sarkozy and beautiful Carla Bruni. A Euro power couple to speak about all and CLimate with the geriatric Chin leaders. Han Chinese long have favoured Europeans over Americans as European diplomacy is farmore suave and gentle to the Yankee gunboat variety.
Still the Canton bombardment by the US naval force is remembered in select ruins and even the burned out portion of the Summer palace… sparks a vivid reminder of the flat footed marines – Might over Rights – practices.
Although Sarki is much reviled by Chinese nationalists for his stance on the constantly aggravating Tibet – China debate – they see the Canton Expo - like the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A great chance to flaunt China’s strength.
But, as the power base is leaning on people harder and reducing basic human rights and diminishing freedoms the party gave many years ago – it harkens back to an age old cycle – as Confucius had noted of China a couple of thousand years ago: “A tight grip of the rulers is actually a sign of a weak hand. The smart general will retreat.”
Same as Sun Tzu many years before had also said. The hegemon who rules through flowers lasts longer than the one who deals the blows.
US president Bill Clinton in 1999 said after visiting China: ”The forces pulling China toward integration and openness are more powerful today than ever before.”
Hmmm…
Maybe He called this wrong as the blue dress attests to his otherwise errant judgement…
Bet you a quarter – it was a well designed window dressing and – He fell for it. China then, though battered by the Asian financial crisis, was busy putting an elaboraqte facade and playing charades for the benefit of the Gainzi. Much like Nixon before him – CLinton only saw – what they wanted him to see. China is seriously that way. When they were dismantling state owned enterprises – and lobbying for admission to the World Trade Organisation to access markets – it was not to democratize, but rather to rearrange the bases. Today, the state owned enterprises still constitute the great majority and the vast economic powerhouses the West deals with are all concentrated in indirect government ministries and directorates with token private shareholders. This exposes the markets to catastrophic events as it compresses the ownership basis. When one goes – all goes. Get it?
And event he free market dwellers and their supporters, are much weaker and also are naked from the forced wearable embroidery.
Bunch of recent events, from the heavy jail sentences passed on human-rights activists to an undiplomatic obfuscation at the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen last December – invite questions about the thinking – of China’s leaders. Has their view of the outside world and dissent at home changed so dramatically over the decade and a year ?
Or were the forces detected by Mr Clinton and so many others after all – just smoke and mirrors and a silly Chinese vignette – not even pulling in the direction they were expecting?
The early years of what China calls its “reform and opening” after 1978 were marked by cycles of liberalisation and repression.
But remember: The turning-points were all marked by bloody political crisis: Mass demonstrations, dissent on the streets, shootings of civilians in the same streets and squares they use for celebrations, vehement leadership struggles, and always a return to the right. A return to the Neo-Con variety of Sino-conservative right wing conspirators [the left side of the political spectrum].
Now, however, the only big protest movements are the marginalized as splittist and heavily repressed ones. The conflicts among ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang and Yunnan are only the most important. Yet China’s big cities are hardly bothered nor roiled by political turmoil with the exception of the annual demands for apopular vote in Hong Kong. An easy scuffle for the red army to suppress in their annual head banging exercise against the Pro-Democracy movement….
By the time Liu Xiaobo, an academic and small time blogger, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December, dissident debate surrounding the reform manifesto he had issued a year earlier had subsided. Interest on this was waning – yet it was the heaviest – known penalty imposed on any activist for “inciting subversion” since such a crime was written into law in 1997. A thought crime to be sure. And the thought police here is ever vigilant.
And although China has so far survived the global economic downturn with hardly any of the agitation many once feared it might cause among unemployed workers or jobless university graduates – the underbelly is simmering. The economy grew at a very robust-sounding 8.7% last year and is predicted by many to be on course for similar growth in 2010. Yet the jobs for the well educated ones are scarce… A new Mao might come out of these overeducated ants… and their growing diiscontent. Or better yet a reformer like Deng Xiao-ping, surely is presently unemployed and pondering economic theory – right about now - in the shanty towns ringing Beizing or Shanghai…
Still major and sweeping changes are also naturally due in the senior leadership in 2012 and 2013, including the replacement of President Hu Jintao and of the prime minister, Wen Jiabao. But if a power struggle is brewing, signs of it are hard to spot.
The storm is built in the peaceful lull of the seas. An unusually high-profile campaign against organised crime by the party chief of Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai, has raised eyebrows. Some speculate that it is part of a bid by Mr Bo, who is a Politburo member, to whip up popular support for his promotion to the Politburo’s all-powerful Standing Committee in 2012. An online poll by an official website chose Mr Bo as the “most inspiring voice” of 2009.
But we do not see this as a challenge to the expected shoo-in for Xi Jinping, the vice-president, as China’s next leader, despite Mr Xi’s failure last year to garner the leading military post analysts thought would form part of his grooming. Li Keqiang, a deputy prime minister, still looks set to take over from Mr Wen in 2013.
Against this backdrop of political stability and economic growth, the most credible interpretation of the government’s recent hard line is that the forces pushing its leaders towards greater liberalisation at home and sympathetic engagement with the West are weaker than had been hoped.
Nor is there any sign that the next generation of leaders see their mission differently. The argument in policy-making circles where reform is concerned is: ‘how much more authoritarian should we be?’ not ‘how do we embark on Western-style democracy” - is the casual description of events – by a Politburo member.
And although the recent sentences of activists have been draconian, they are hardly out of keeping with the leadership’s approach to dissent in recent years. The death sentences though are kept secret and unless it involves a foreigner like the mentally retarded Briton last month – they are kept out of the news – even if it’s a political death sentence.
This has involved giving a bit of a jeer to freethinking individuals, and keeping in line the timid masses of progressives, by occasionally punishing harsh – those seen as – straying too far.
Since late last year many serious political activists have been executed in secret; and two high profile - and well known in the West – activists have been jailed.
This, two have been punished for something really minor. They were in an apparent attempt to deter people from organising the parents of children killed in shoddily built schools during an earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008. But another critic of the government’s handling of the parents’ grievances, Ai Weiwei, remains free in Beijing albeit under house observation.
The coming months are unlikely to see much change. Despite boasting of their country’s resilience in the face of the global economic crisis, China’s leaders appear jittery. Mr Wen has forecast that 2010 will see “even greater complexity in the domestic and international situation”. China’s security chief, Zhou Yongkang, in a speech published this week said the task of maintaining social stability “was still extremely onerous”.
Some Chinese economists worry out loud that China’s massive stimulus-spending might have bought the country only a temporary reprieve.
Bubbles, they fret, are forming in property markets, inflationary pressure is building up and reforms needed to promote sustained growth (including measures to promote urbanisation) are not being carried out fast enough.
Occasionally, even the government’s worst nightmare is mooted as a possibility: stagflation and a swift bubble pop in either the housing or the equities market… Both events highly likely in the third quarter of this year. Maybe they can push them off for another quarter or two but not much more than late ’10 or early 2011.
The Gong has sounded the retreat. It’s visible on all the informed high standing Politburo members who are the only ones to have access to the most secret of data streams. A combination of fast-rising prices and low growth might indeed be enough to send protesters on to the streets and a double whammy of bubbles popping might erudite a change in Leadership. A drastic change at that… Not to our liking as it will surely go the other way towards a fear based bamboo garden. The Chinese homeland – builds now a bamboo curtain variety of a dictatorial priority amid a fearful clamp down à la book burnings all over again.
The management and free market book burning – I mean – Milton Friedman and the whole Chicago school cannon will be burned and their ashes will be scattered to the four winds…
Something I might be inclined to agree with. A momentous thought, though. How can that happen to me? The Chinese make truly strange bedfellows. Especially when they are freaked out in plum wine and sweet dumplings as they will surely be – come May.
Enjoy… the party.
Still, when abroad, the Chinese leaders are struggling to manage their image. They make a nasty job of it, as evidenced in Copenhagen last December, in the most important global negotiations they ever partook…
Trying to cope with what they feel to be an accelerated shift in the global balance of power, in China’s favour – they are scared of the limelight – and the effects at home and abroad from fearless decision making and true leadership. This has resulted in what is described as behaviour ranging from “strutting to outright stumbling” and global embarrassment as in COP15 negotiations and the BASIC coalition travesty they designed and perpetuated even in the face of it’s exposed policy stupidity.
Then they jumped on the poor monk the Dalai Lama. They refused to negotiate with his representatives like their ruthless uneducated generals visiting Lhasa back in 1950′s before taking it over and destroying the monasteries in the spirit of the cultural revolution that saw extensive book and artefact burning and people’s lives squandered in the red blood lust…
Do they feel sorry for that?
Don’t think so.
They even reacted with oratorical fury in January, when America announced a $6.4 billion arms deal with Taiwan. But while pandering to popular nationalism at home, they remain aware of China’s limitations.
This week China allowed an American aircraft-carrier to pay a port call to Hong Kong, just a day before President Obama was due to defy grim warnings and meet the Dalai Lama in Washington. The Dalai Lama and Obama met and discussed the tightening grip of the fear led party seniors in China’s standing committee of the Politburo - choking the reforms and – causing pain and anguish to all.
But most of all to the Old Chairman – whose blind allegiance by the people – is all that’s holding this lot together.
Their economic might is in shambles [bet on it] as the popping of the bubble is fast approaching and the Chinese leadership is aching for a conflict – home or abroad – to ease their anxieties.
Seems they borrow again a page from the Monkey bush-chenie administration of half wits and they are going to lead their great country astray…
They did this with great success in Copenhagen – and here is where it got them.
Full speed ahead to an imminent crash and burn.
Cover your face – please – this one is gonna blow…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
Where is the Great Pilot now when we need him most?
He should rise out of his Mausoleum and spank the monkeys to a well deserved livid red butt.
Then they may see the light.
Somehow that way they connect to their inner brain.
A smarter open China is what people need. Yet the leadership want a tighter fear monger a la bush.
Play with these constipated over indulgent conservative Politburo elders at your peril. Do business here and be ready to lose everything. Rules of the game. Conduct inclusive…
Because when they explode as they will surely do – no amount of antacid Maalox will save You – and you’ll have no cover.
Poo all over your face.
Sweet and Sour…
