Chinese General news resource thread

[Blitzo]

I also laugh at the 1984 reference, given big brother in that book controlled what people could be allowed to think, while the article basically says china doesn't care what people think so long as they don't act on it.

 

[PanAsian]

Catching up a bit on all the talk about the OC movement in HK. The reasons for lack of support for the OC movement in HK are actually the same as those for lack of support for the Occupy Wall St movement in the US. That is both these movements are focused on being antagonistic to the powers that be and the status quo without being able to come up with alternative visions that are clearly better for the average person, nor with realistic methods to achieve them.

 

[xiabonan]

I have not conducted the kind of studies the article did, but based on personal experience and observations, I would like to add to his comments.

It is not true that protests are not allowed. In fact I would say majority of the protests are allowed.

However, the key here is, what's the intention and possible impacts of the protest?

If the protest is related to politics or advocating a change of power, it is likely to be prohibited. If the protest is going to be violent in nature, and cause damage to others and properties, it too is likely to be prohibited.

But people go for protests for all kinds of reasons. Majority of the protests related to environmental issues, labour rights, anti-corruption, are most likely allowed.

In fact, these protests often help the central government to add pressure to the local governments and keep them in check. There's no better reason and evidence to punish officials than "I'm responding to the will of the people".

This has contributed to the interesting phenomena of Chinese citizens mostly hate or detest local governments, but hold a much stronger faith in the central government.

 

[Blitzo]

To be fair the article does basically say protests and anti government posts are allowed, so long as they're not linked to the topics that were listed.

 

[xiabonan]

Edited

 

[xiabonan]

The one world government argument is a red herring. A democracy does not require a single central government responsible for all policies everywhere. It is good and normal for democracies to have federalism--multiple levels of government with different responsibilities. The U.S. has hundreds of thousands of elected entities. Everyone knows the federal, state, and city governments. Did you also know there are thousands of countries, school districts, hospital districts, and water districts, each their own taxing authority? Each one must have an elected committee in charge. In Texas local judges are even elected. Federalism and devolved powers is a democratic idea. One all-powerful central government is an authoritarian idea.

The Ease of Doing Business report is relevant to our discussion of infrastructure because private companies build a lot of infrastructure. Nearly all homes, apartment buildings, office towers, and hotels in the U.S. are constructed entirely through private developers. Local governments may throw them some tax incentives if it's a big project but mostly developers are left to fend for themselves. How easy or difficult it is to do business affects developers' willingness to invest. Moreover, all government infrastructure projects have private contractors who have to do business. Again, the ease of doing business affects prices and willingness to undertake big projects.

It's true that high-speed rail and metro projects have been very slow-going, if they go at all. There's no doubt China and Europe are way ahead of the U.S. in this regard. But that has more to do with the widespread lack of faith in HSR and public transit in American culture more than NIMBYism or a general lack of enthusiasm for infrastructure. In the 1990s Texas went on a prison-building spree to accommodate victims of the War on Drugs. I can't say that was a good investment but it shows that a state government can build a lot of infrastructure fast when it wants to.

Another survey is the World Economic Forum's

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ranking in which the United States is third and China is a respectable 28th.


This is actually one of the biggest weaknesses of an autocracy. How do autocrats lose power? Through military coup d'tats, revolutions, assassinations, or invasions. Those methods are violent and cause great instability. Democracies provide a regular, peaceful way to remove unpopular leaders. If an autocrat knows he/she will be in big trouble (as in they could be killed) should they lose power, then they will do anything to hold power. It's an unhappy spiral: the autocrat creates enemies by their exercise of total power, this makes the autocrat feel threatened and want to stay in office longer, which creates more enemies, making the autocrat more afraid of losing power, etc.

Providing a peaceful, regular way to change leaders encourages would-be rebels to participate in the democratic process and encourages would-be dictators or coup leaders to stand down in the knowledge that they will have another chance in the future. The all-or-nothing mindset of an authoritarian government leads people to use extreme measures.

This sounds good but in reality it is often not the case.

In many democratic developing countries, politics are deeply controlled by a few powerful and wealthy families--not even parties. And these families are all equally corrupt, equally inefficient, equally bad. There are too many such examples that I would not even bother to list them down. No matter which leader the people choose, they are all bad.

 

[xiabonan]

Recently I've been watching a Chinese TV series dedicated to Deng, and the process by which he started the reforms.

I'm not sure if you guys know this, but at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when people are still deeply restricted by Communist ideologies and refused changes and reforms, Deng supported the idea that realities are the only way to test whether theories are truths.

If they work, if they make people's lives better, they are good and should be adopted. If they don't, if people suffer under it, then no matter how good it sounds, it is bad.

It is this logic that eventually led him to make the decision that Cultural Revolution was a great mistake and a great tragedy, simply because people suffered.

The reason why I brought this up here, now, is because I think this logic applies to democracy, too.

If you look at all the countries after World War 2, almost all the countries that prospered and developed are those with a somewhat open-minded and progress-focused autocractic/authoritarian/dictatorial rule.

Japan was under the same party for more than 50 years.

S.Korea prospered and developed the fastest under Park Chung-Hee's 18 year dictatorship.

Taiwan, similarly, developed the fastest during Chiang Ching-kuo's dictatorship, in fact Taiwan's economy has been experiencing sluggish growth or even negative growth ever since the democratic reforms.

Hong Kong, never had any democracy under British rule, her governor was always appointed by Britain.

Singapore, developed the fastest under Lee Kwan Yew, who ruled the island for almost half a century. Next year is Singapore's 50th anniversary of independence, and her current Prime Minister is the son of LKY, and it's still the same ruling party. Never changed once.

China, I think we're all very familiar with.

Although vastly different, all countries/regions/economies mentioned above had similarities. Although there's no real democracy during the period when they picked up speed and developed fast, these leaders and political parties focused on growth and making the lives of the people better, instead of tyrannically suppressing the people (there are such incidents in almost all examples mentioned above but these are not mainstream). They developed good development strategies that suit the circumstances of their countries, supported foreign investors and industrial spirit, built networks of much needed infrastructure to further support growth, valued meritocracy and hard work, adopted measures to curb corruption, trimmed down government bodies and made them more efficient, etc.

I think these qualities are what truly help a backward and poor country to develop. These countries already have scarce resources and time, why do you want to waste any more in democratic processes?

Looking back at those democratic developing countries, very few have succeeded. In fact I can say that among the new democracies after WW2 and after the Cold War, many are failed states and trapped in the poverty cycle. They are nowhere close the kind of spectacular achievements accomplished by previously mentioned countries.

Why did democracy fail to deliver for those countries?

I think the reason why is that the governments of those countries lack the important traits mentioned above.

 

[Equation]

In the end it's about the quality leadership and effective leaders that matters most, regardless of what political system is implemented. Good leaders serve the needs of the people by understanding and knowing the situation and circumstances at hand by listening to them and providing services and protection to meet that demand. That means even sometimes making tough choices in order to serve the majority. Of course it's easier said than done.

 

[Blackstone]

I'm wrapping up another visit to Shanghai for work (by the way, weather in Shanghai has been absolutely gorgeous for my entire visit. Lots of blue skys, with a small amount of rain that freshened the air even more. Octoberfest right in front of the hotel was interesting), and I clicked on a

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article, only to discover it's blocked by the Communist Overlord's Great Firewall of China. Curious as to what was so dangerous to regime survival that it had to be blocked, I logged on my VPN and read the article. Disappointingly, it turned out to be nothing I've not seen and heard from local Chinese media like CCTV and China Daily. So, the logical question is why the heck would Communist minions block a foreign article on topics routinely covered by their own state-controlled media? Is it simply because the censors didn't like the title of the article?

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The clue is in the name. The Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) groups six countries--China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan--and aims to be the dominant security institution in its region; but its origin and purposes are largely Chinese.

So it looks rather worrying from a Western point of view that the group has agreed to expand and that India, Pakistan and Iran are all keen to join: the rise of a kind of China-led NATO to which even America's friends, such as India and Pakistan, seem drawn. Yet that is to misunderstand the sort of organisation the SCO aspires to be. It does indeed pose a challenge to the American-led world order, but a much more subtle one.

On September 11th and 12th the SCO held its 14th annual summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital. It agreed to adopt procedures for expansion, first for those countries that are already observers. India and Pakistan are likely to join in the next year. Iran is at present disqualified because it is under UN sanctions. Another observer, Mongolia, is a democracy and has long had qualms about joining what looks like a club for authoritarians. Afghanistan, the final observer, has other priorities.

The SCO summit came hot on the heels of one held by NATO, in Wales. This gave columnists in China and Russia the chance to tut-tut about the "20th-century" or "cold war" or "confrontational" mentality that animates NATO, and to boast about what makes the SCO different from what Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has called such "relics of a past era", with the rigid discipline imposed by particular blocs of countries.

In August the SCO held its largest joint military exercises yet, an anti-terrorist drill in Inner Mongolia in China involving more than 7,000 personnel. The SCO's boosters, however, insist it is not an alliance, like NATO, but a "partnership", with no adversary in mind. That is not entirely true. It has always been explicitly directed against three enemies, even if they are only abstract nouns: the "three evil forces" of terrorism, separatism and extremism. China, in Xinjiang; Russia, in Chechnya; the Central Asian members, in the Ferghana Valley and on their borders with Afghanistan. All SCO members face a threat from Islamist extremism.

Hence the plea in Dushanbe from Xi Jinping, China's president, that the SCO should "focus on combating religion-involved extremism and internet terrorism".

China's problems with violent extremism from ethnic-Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang have worsened recently.

Uighur militants have committed terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and other parts of China. They have also been fighting for jihadist groups elsewhere--in the tribal areas of Pakistan, for example. And reports suggest some have joined Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. This month four Uighurs with alleged IS links were detained on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

These men had left China by way of South-East Asia. One of China's successes in Central Asia in recent years has been to secure the co-operation of local authorities in deporting illegal migrants--meaning mainly Uighurs with a grudge--so more are finding their way out through Laos and Thailand.

That success, however, is probably more the result of China's growing presence and commercial clout in the region, and the rendition agreements they have bought, rather than a tribute to the influence of the SCO itself. The same goes for the economic goals China has set the SCO. The countries it covers are on the "New Silk Road" Mr Xi advertises. But it is bilateral deals that will build the dream, not communiqués from an SCO summit.

Viewed like this, not as a regional security bloc but as a rather ineffectual effort at combating cross-border terrorism and boosting other links, the SCO seem less threatening. Its appeal to India and Pakistan also seems more obvious, especially as NATO's withdrawal from Afghanistan opens up new uncertainties in the region. Membership incurs few costs and may have some benefits. India, for instance, is courted both by China--Mr Xi paid a much-trumpeted visit this week--and America. SCO membership would be a useful way for India to flaunt its independent foreign policy and its refusal to be drawn into an anti-China bloc.

For China, however, and even more so Russia, the accession of India and Pakistan would be a mixed blessing. The SCO would look less like a self-absorbed club focused on Central Asia, and it would gain real global heft. However, as other regional groupings have found, expansion would inevitably be at the expense of the SCO's cohesion. India, even under the leadership of a strongman like Narendra Modi, would not sit comfortably in an authoritarian club. The SCO would be able to do even less than it has so far.
Building Brics

In fact, even Russia and China seem unsure about how important they want the SCO to be. Four SCO members also belong to the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation. Russia is also hoping its Eurasian Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan can expand. And China has started lavishing attention on another organisation, the leadenly named Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, or CICA.

But to note the potential conflicts among the different multilateral organisations China is promoting may be to miss the point. America's leading role in Asia is based on a number of bilateral security treaties and a plethora of inclusive multilateral institutions, all open to Chinese membership. China itself is building all sorts of institutions: the SCO, CICA, the "BRICS" (grouping China with Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa), a Trilateral Commission (at present languishing) with South Korea and Japan and a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Their shared characteristics are that China has a big and sometimes dominant role and that the United States is not a member--and indeed was rebuffed when it sought to join the SCO as an observer. China is not just challenging the existing world order. Slowly, messily and, apparently with no clear end in view, it is building a new one.

 

[Equation]

I'm wrapping up another visit to Shanghai for work (by the way, weather in Shanghai has been absolutely gorgeous for my entire visit. Lots of blue skys, with a small amount of rain that freshened the air even more. Octoberfest right in front of the hotel was interesting), and I clicked on a

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article, only to discover it's blocked by the Communist Overlord's Great Firewall of China. Curious as to what was so dangerous to regime survival that it had to be blocked, I logged on my VPN and read the article. Disappointingly, it turned out to be nothing I've not seen and heard from local Chinese media like CCTV and China Daily. So, the logical question is why the heck would Communist minions block a foreign article on topics routinely covered by their own state-controlled media? Is it simply because the censors didn't like the title of the article?

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Perhaps you should be thankful for your business contacts and transactions in China that provided your next pay check.


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Had anyone else have any more news about this?

BEIJING (AP) — Multiple explosions in a county in China's western region of Xinjiang have killed at least two people and injured many others, regional authorities said Monday.

The explosions happened at about 5 p.m. Sunday in at least three places of Luntai county, according to a report on the Tianshan news portal, which is run by the regional branch of the Communist Party. Luntai county is in central Xinjiang, 360 kilometers (220 miles) southwest of the capital, Urumqi.

"Public security officers quickly handled the situation," it said, without giving details.

The brief statement said the unspecified number of injured had been taken to hospital and an investigation was under way.

Xinjiang has experienced rising unrest in recent months blamed on militants from the region's native Muslim Turkic Uighur ethnic group seeking to overthrow Chinese rule.

Authorities said that on July 28 a terrorist gang attacked a police station and government buildings in Shache county near Kashgar, killing 37 people before police shot dead 59 of the attackers.

Two days later, a leading pro-government Muslim cleric was murdered in a Kashgar mosque.

State media reported Sunday that Communist Party officials in Xinjiang had punished 17 officials and police officers for their failures relating to the two July incidents. He Limin, the party chief of Shache county, was stripped of his party position and demoted, and the deputy party chief and county police chief were both fired.

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- Chinese militants from the western region of Xinjiang have fled from the country to get "terrorist training" from Islamic State fighters for attacks at home, state media reported on Monday.

The report was the first time state-run media had linked militants from Xinjiang, home to ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, to militants of the Islamic State (IS), a radical Sunni Muslim group which has seized large parts of Syria and Iraq.

China's government has blamed a surge of violence over the past year on Islamist militants from Xinjiang who China says are fighting for an independent state called East Turkestan.

"They not only want to get training in terrorist techniques, but also to expand their connections in international terrorist organizations through actual combat to gain support for escalation of terrorist activities in China," the Global Times cited an unidentified Chinese "anti-terrorism worker" as saying.

In the latest violence in Xinjiang, state media said two people were killed and several injured in at least three explosions on Sunday.

The Global Times, which is run by the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily, said militants from Xinjiang had recently been involved in IS activities in Syria and Iraq as well as with IS "branches" in Southeast Asia.

The newspaper said in the report on its website that four suspected militants from Xinjiang were arrested in Indonesia this month. Indonesian police said last week four foreigners were being questioned but did not identify them.

The four fled to Cambodia from China, and then went to Thailand where they obtained fake Turkish passports, before flying to Indonesia through Malaysia, the newspaper said.

Indonesia has raised concern about a possible spillover of IS support after revelations that Indonesian citizens had traveled to Syria and Iraq to join fighters there.

"Terrorists, separatists and extremists" from Xinjiang have often slipped abroad through mountainous provinces in southern China with porous border areas, because border control in Xinjiang was strict, the newspaper said.

"Their ultimate goal is still to fight back into China," Pan Zhiping, a former head of Central Asia studies at Xinjiang's Academy of Social Science, told the Global Times.

The report is likely to lend urgency to a nationwide "anti-terrorism" operation that President Xi Jinping's administration has launched following attacks that Beijing has blamed on Islamists and separatists from Xinjiang.

Many Uighurs in Xinjiang resent what they call Chinese government restrictions on their culture, language and religion.

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