Berlusconi Plans International Ministry of Truth

If the man’s corruption, perjury and possible sexual misconduct are somehow not enough to persuade Italy’s people that getting rid of Silvio Berlusconi is now a necessary step, they may soon have his mental health to worry about. After declaring himself “without doubt the person who's been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man,” Berlusconi is surely only a couple of steps away from placing a teapot on his head and declaring himself the reincarnation of Jesus, or Napoleon, or both.

The Guardian has just run a report on the bleagured leader’s plans to launch a charm offensive under the direction of tourism minister Michela Vittoria Brambilla, aimed at convincing the world that actually, he’s an alright guy.

Reading through Ms. Brambilla’s remarks, I couldn’t help but notice a certain eerie resonance, almost as if I’d heard them somewhere before…

[Their] task will be to "bombard those newsrooms with truthful and positive news", and reveal to the world "a generous, truthful and audacious Italy – the Italy of entrepreneurs, art, cultural events and our products".

All media must follow the principle of positive propaganda as the main content. Strictly control the negative reports. Those reports which might produce negative social impact should all be banned. Strictly implement the system of controlling content from all three editorial levels. Strengthen news discipline. No playing up negative news online. Make sure there is no accident in guiding the public opinion. Strive for excellency in propaganda.

Chinese Ministry of Propaganda, twitter instructions to news editors, September 2009.

“According to Brambilla, Berlsuconi's problems with the law are not in any way blackening Italy's reputation. Instead she blamed "an anti-Italian group working against Italy with the single aim of discrediting and destroying the prime minister”.

“In order to profoundly expose the crime of the Dalai Lama clique and Western anti-China forces of undermining China's national unity and social stability, refute the distorted coverage by Western media, and enable the broad ranks of the masses in the ethnic minority regions to acquire an understanding of the truth of the…incident that took place on 14 March in Lhasa, the publishing house has collected authoritative reports from central media and compiled the Tibetan-Chinese version of the book Stability and Harmony Is Tantamount to Blessing While Separatism and Turmoil Will Bring Calamity - Reality of the 14 March Incident.”

Wire report by China’s Xinhua state news agency, 23 April 2008.

Here be dragons, Silvio. Time to call it a day.

Environmental Migration - A Wolf in Green Robes

Sounding a small but pleasing note amid the broader cacophony of impending environmental cataclysm, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency filed a cautiously optimistic report this week on the success of a project aimed at revitalising the retreating grasslands at the headwaters of the country’s largest rivers.

Satellite surveys apparently show a quicker than expected recovery of the fragile environment of the Sanjiangyuan region, home to the sources of the Langcang (Mekong), Yangtze, and Yellow rivers.

It’s a welcome piece of news at a time when the ecological balance of the Himalayan region as a whole looks to be creaking towards a tipping point, with serious implications for China’s already shaky water security situation. Since its inception in 2005, the Sanjiangyuan project has been a major set-piece in the Chinese government’s attempts to tackle the issue of massive environmental degradation within its own borders.

But beyond its talk of ‘scientific’ methodology, enclosure and re-seeding strategies, it is clear that the main thrust of the government’s approach here has been devastatingly simple: remove people from the equation.

Paying the price of this ‘green’ success story are some 60,000 or more Tibetan herdspeople, who have been arbitrarily plucked from their nomadic surroundings and deposited abruptly in towns and cities outside the area, ostensibly to counteract the effects over-grazing. Shoddily built communities, lack of employment opportunities and a string of broken government commitments have all but snuffed out the optimism felt by many Tibetans at what they saw as a chance for a better life.

From the Siberian wildernesses of the north-east, across the Mongolian steppes, and into the high-altitude plains of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, a similar pattern is repeating itself: China’s minority nomadic communities are being systematically and often forcefully integrated into a fixed mode of urban existence as part of a process known as ‘ecological migration.’

The term itself is deceptive. Internationally, ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ migrants have increasingly become the focus of concern as the effects of climate change threaten to, displace millions if not hundreds of millions of vulnerable people worldwide. But in China, ‘ecological migration’ is not a phenomenon; it is a policy.

Adopted nationwide in 2002, its stated aim is “the re-location of people from ecologically fragile regions or those with an important ecological role to other areas, with the aim of achieving regulated economic and social development of population, resources and the environment.”

Although media accounts of ‘ecological migration’ now tend to view the process through the lens of the state’s more recent rhetorical emphasis on environmental protection and green issues, the original wording highlights the Chinese government’s long-running obsession with ‘improving’ its non-Han minorities, which make up just under 10% of the population

To date, Chinese academic and political appraisals of completed relocation projects have focused less on their ecological impact, and more on the successes of the ‘townification’ (chengzhenhua) of the herdspeople involved. Though they certainly encompass environmental goals, there is little doubt that, at least where minorities are concerned, these are often little more than thinly-disguised attempts at a very old-fashioned kind of civilizing program. In many respects, this fixation on ‘progress’ is inherited directly from the European colonial project that Beijing still occasionally makes time to condemn.

However, not all targets of such programs are ethnic nomads. As a recent scheme to protect the dusty, drought-stricken county of Minqin, in the country’s western Gansu province has shown, thinking on ecological migration diverges sharply when the country’s majority Han population are concerned.

Back in the 50s, thousands of Han migrants flooded into the area as part of Mao’s plan to ‘open up the west.’ Converting thousands of acres of desert into productive farmland, they came to represent a triumph of the peasant revolutionary spirit, and were hailed as national heroes. But the success was fleeting; by the beginning of this century, the dunes were encroaching once more, the water table was falling several metres a year, and the area’s rivers had taken a permanent leave of absence.

In domestic Chinese politics, the efforts to save the Minqin oasis have become one of the more high-profile environmental sagas of recent years. At the personal behest of State Premier Wen Jiabao (a former party secretary of the province), teams of scientists were dispatched to the area to work out a strategy for restoring its environmental balance.

The results were stark – the county’s inhabitants were placing substantially more pressure on the land than it could bear. Unless unsustainable rates of water extraction were curbed, the entire oasis would be swallowed by desert in a matter of years. Researchers proposed a direct readjustment of the population to reflect the level of resources available, a process which would involve the resettlement of thousands of households to adjacent counties.

But the authorities have so far decided against resorting to their usual drag-and-drop approach in Minqin. The measures currently in place to bleed the county’s bloated population currently involve a range of incentivised options for voluntary re-location, with mandatory moves here a thusfar unused weapon of last resort. Last year, around 8,000 individuals shipped out on their own initiative, lured by the prospect of 10,000 yuan (£1,100) compensation packages.

From any standpoint, the environmental situation at Minqin is much more desperate than it ever was at Sanjiangyuan. Moreover, the scientific evidence linking its deteriorating environment to overpopulation is much more substantial (questions still hover over how much nomadic farming practices really contribute to grassland retreat, with some scientists suggesting that wetter and warmer temperature trends, and not absent Tibetans, are behind the area’s miraculous recovery). Why, then, have the locals not been given their marching orders on this occasion?

The simple fact is that the government cannot treat ‘townified’ Han citizens like the residents of Minqin as it does its Tibetan herders. If it did so, it would in all likelihood precipitate what is known in current Chinese bureaucratic parlance as a ‘mass incident’ (or as the uninitiated would term it, a riot). With the political legitimacy of high-profile figures attached to the project, this represents too great a risk.

Whether this approach resulted from conscious consideration of the ethnic dimension involved or just a realistic assessment of the situation is irrelevant. The fact remains that so long as it senses it can get away with it, China’s government will continue to treat its ethnic minorities like children.

A journalist in the popular Chinese Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper recently published a passionately-argued piece decrying the country’s ‘blind fixation’ with rapid urbanization. In it, he attacked the dominant political trend of viewing the countryside as no more than a set of problems in need of solutions, seeking instead to validate rural existence as a legitimate alternative to urban life. China’s leaders could do worse than apply this logic towards their ethnic minorities. If engaged on their own times instead of as ‘baby brothers’ to the Han, they might be less inclined to throw the kind of tantrum that left hundreds dead in the ethnic riots on the streets of Urumuqi this summer.

The Washington Note

a bit of shameless self-advertisement: a post by this author on the Hu/Obama speeches in New York yesterday has been published on the Washington Note. Do check it out.

Blasphemy on the eve of National Day

Note: The Guardian has now picked up on this story in a more extensive (but less whimsical) manner.

...And this week's award for most unconsciously ironic proclamation goes to...Cui Lianqing, of the PLA airforce meteorological staff. Cui is one of the gentlemen charged with blasting any offending clouds from the sky as waves of carnival floats and military vehicles file through Tiananmen square on the upcoming 60th aniversary of the People's Republic.

When asked if he could guarantee clear skies for the celebrations, Cui had this to say:

"Sometimes, you just cannot change the way nature governs itself. But we will do our best."

Now just steady on! Can you verify this? Are you sure? This sounds like heresy to me, and from the mouth of an official of state to boot!

In a lot of ways, it seems fitting that man-made control of the natural world should form a part of China's national day festivities. The efforts of successive rulers to restrain and manage the country's waters are an important subnarrative in its history; the mythical sage king Yu was famed for building the nation's first network of canals, halting a decade of floods and winning his crown on the back of it. A millenium and a half later, it was the expansion of that same system that helped China's first emperor Qin Shihuang outmanoeuvre his rivals in his bid for supremacy.

Perhaps it was the weight of such precedents that fuelled the ambition of Mao and his successors. What is certain is that since the founding of the People's Republic, China's leaders have busied themselves with waging a virtual war against nature which has fundamentally altered the landscape of large tracts of the country.

As early as the 1950s, Mao was championing the cultivation of vast tracts of desert and scrubland in the country's western provinces; the image of industrious Chinese peasants coaxing green fields from sand dunes seemed to sum up the recently triumphant revolution in a nutshell. This was followed by the blossoming of a dam-building fetish that has persisted to this day; of Chinas major watercourses, only one (the Brahmaputra or Yarlong Tsangpo) now remains unimpeded by walls of concrete.

Although undoubtedly committed to improving the lot of its population, the administration has also displayed an unhealthy tendency to cast itself in Yu's mould - a miracle worker, above the laws of the natural world, and, most importantly, an unquestioned master of all it surveys. This almost adolescent 'because it's there' attitude has found its fullest embodiment yet in the Three Gorges project, and shows little sign of abating. Plans are currently being floated to use 'peaceful' nuclear weapons to blast a path through the Himalayas as part of a project to transport water from the headwaters of the Yangtze to the drought-stricken north.

The planned festivities for national day are a telling embodiment of Beijing's continued fixation with embodying its legitimacy through displays of total control (think the Olympic opening ceremony bereft of any lightness of touch). It will be interesting to see if the next major anniversary is played out with similar pomp, or whether, like the Han ruler who scaled down his own version of the Terracota army to a collection of soft-faced minature fiugines, the administration will come to realize that scale and spectacle are not the only measures to success.

Death and Glory

"We have moved from a one nation to a no nation party, thanks to Gordon. We are unelectable everywhere, and that is untenable." - Anonymous former Labour minister

"Governments in richer countries use the excuse of democracy to claim it is "politically impossible" to make bigger cuts" - Yang Fuqiang, WWF China

"There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible." - Albert Camus



The time has come, Gordon, to consider your situation. The Bolivian army is at the door, you've only a few rounds left, and Australia is a long, long way away.

The sad truth of it is that the only way for you to avoid a swift and brutal death at the hands of the electorate would be to bring Princess Di herself back from the grave. Not only Mr. Cameron, but a sizable portion of his shadow cabinet as well would need to be exposed as perennial buggerers of marsupials before people would even begin to entertain the idea of voting anything other than Tory.

Don't get me wrong here, Gordon, I've always rather liked you. I'm at a loss to explain how the English fetishism of the underdog seems to have made a special exception in your case. Perhaps a passive-aggressive swipe at your Caledonian roots, perhaps?

Underneath the forced smiles and the stapler-hurling, there has been that shimmering vestige of a deeply serious, moral human being in there, looking for a vent. Where Tony was quite comfortable warping his ideals to his ambitions, the internal conflict between what you know you should do, and what you feel you ought to be seen to be doing.

Now, you could prolong the agony, sweating through interviews and shredding your fingernails ever closer to the bone until we boot you out. Or you could dispense with this fantasy now, and accept that far too much blood has now passed under the bridge for you - or your party - to remain in parliament for very much longer.

Just think of the release this could bring - no more listening to focus groups or advisers, no more desperate horse-trading to hold your cabinet together, no more desperate attempts to play the great man. Scowl away. Pepper prime-minister's question time with long and incomprehensible economic formulae. Tell David Cameron exactly what you think of him.

And floating free from your political chains, you could do worse than take a lesson or two from Dubya, of all people. Concerned that his successor might actually start listening to all this flim-flam on global warming and the environment, Bush's people passed a raft of so-called "Midnight Regulations" which the current regime are still in the process of trying to unravel.

Now, there's no point in trying to scupper the Tories' plans because, let's face it, they don't have any. No, you need to aim your sights much higher. Let's take climate change as an example. You've always wanted to make a difference, but you're worried that anything too radical might come back to bite you in the arse at the polls. Not anymore! Impose punitive emissions taxes, cover East Anglia in solar panels, force us all to start driving golf buggies, anything you want!

The only people you really need to convince are your own party. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of disgruntled, desperate backbenchers would be more than happy to pin their colours to a madcap, attention-grabbing enterprise like this. It'd certainly be a more interesting diversion for them than sniping away at every half-baked cabinet attempt to keep voters happy that they can get their fangs into.

So hang the party, hang the opposition, and hang the voters. Turn Britain into the world's leading light on climate change (or anything else, for that matter). Shame the Americans, hush the Chinese, even trigger a wave of copycat responses across the globe. As you hand in the keys to Downing St., you can retire into well-earned obscurity satisfied in the knowledge that you've just saved the planet. Hurrah!

Easy.

Carbon tariffs? Not if we get there first!

At least on the international stage, the proposed imposition of a ‘carbon tariff’ on imported goods has risen to prominence as perhaps the most contentious component of the Waxman-Markey bill climate change bill. Set to hit the Senate next month, the Obama administration’s efforts to show some kind of progress on climate change have come under heavy fire abroad.

The tax in question would levy a fee on imported goods proportional to the levels of CO2 involved in their production.

Given that a substantial portion of its economy is given over to producing vast quantities of goods destined for US consumers, China in particular has, after a fashion, been importing a share of America’s carbon emissions for quite some time. The idea that should now be punished for so doing has put more than a few noses out of joint. “Since we’re producing about a fifth of our emissions on their behalf, we ought to be treated properly. This is only fair,” argues Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of China’s economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission.

Frustratingly hard to contend with, this issue of ‘fairness’ has become the standard go-to for developing countries seeking to avoid commitments on emissions reduction: don’t put this on us. You broke the climate, you fix it. But as the next round of climate talks at Copenhagen looms, this closing of ranks along post-colonial lines is increasingly threatening to strangle genuine innovation on the issue of how to actually fix things.

More praise then, to Fan Gang, head of the Chinese think-tank the National Economic Research Institute, who outlined his proposals on how to respond to Waxman-Markey to the Chinese Guangzhou Daily newspaper last week:

“Fan’s suggestion runs as follows: at our current development stage, we can’t accept the imposition of specific emissions quotas, and we mustn’t have our hand forced on entering into any international agreements to that end. But if we announce our own domestically imposed carbon tariff, it could neutralize America’s plans entirely. What’s more, if we impose ours first, any American attempt to do likewise would effectively amount to double-taxation, which contravenes the principles of the WTO.

Yes, imposing something of this nature will inevitably harm competitiveness and ramp up costs for our own companies. But if we don’t and someone else does, an increase in costs will be unavoidable anyway. Getting in first means that we’ll be able to deploy the money raised in helping our own companies reduce their emissions. If developed countries then end up landed with self-imposed emissions quotas, their costs will increase as well, so in the long term the relative cost for China should be virtually nil.”

Fan’s proposals are unusual in a number of ways: firstly, they cut across the usual east-west tug of war in an unusually long-sighted manner, offering a way in which China could profit by acting first, rather than digging its heels in. Second, they turn the post-colonial victim complex (a feature in politics across much of the developing world and a centerpiece of China’s international persona in particular) on its head. Instead of bawling out America for threatening to throw sand in its face, Fan suggests China is suggesting that China delivers a pre-emptive kick in the balls of its own, “turning passive to active.”

Although the chance of Fan’s views becoming policy anytime soon are pretty slim, it’s heartening to see a mainstream member of China’s body politic thinking well beyond the traditional frame of the climate-change debate. If politicians and thinkers on both sides can start seeing climate change as more than a zero-sum game between first and third world, then maybe – just maybe – the environment might end up as the winner here.

Mandy's Ethical Foreign Policy

I'm not quite sure what to make of Lord Mandleson's performance before the white-shirted cadres at Beijing's high-powered Party School this morning. It's hard not to speculate on whether the UK business secretary's stumbling series of mixed messages perhaps tells us more about his fraught experiences on the dating circuit than it does about Britain's China policy.

The click of chips was almost audible as Mr. Mandleson raised the possibility of Europe lifting its embargo on China, in force since the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre (or incident, depending on who you ask). "There are some things we in Europe would like China to accept or sign up to just as there are things you would like us to repeal or adjust. Perhaps there are the makings of good bargaining there."

Afraid that such remarks might be read the wrong way, he was then helpful enough to clarify, "I don't want to pitch a deal to the Chinese on the arms embargo."

Yes, rather.

In some ways, it's rather refreshing to see a Western politician (sort of) stripping the human rights issue down to a straightforward political gambit. The generally held view among Chinese academic and policy circles is that the developed world's hang-ups over the country's human rights record are simply part of a strategy of using ideology to 'control' China's rise. While this particular brand of realism-with-Chinese-characteristics fails to appreciate the genuinely important role that moral sentiment plays in democratic politics, it is, in many ways, not that far wide of the mark.

As the much-missed foreign secretary Robin Cook came to realize as he was politically disembowelled in its service, a purist 'ethical foreign policy' is difficult to enforce much further than one's doorstep. While China hacks may look forward to the much-needed dose of February cheer that the side-splittingly disingenuous annual US-China 'human rights record' exchange brings, there are, perhaps, more dignified ways to conduct our business (this year's match ended in an agonizing 1-1 draw, with America's seemingly-secure 38,000 word lead all but overhauled by China's more concise I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I comeback).

Perhaps Mandleson's wavering displays at its core an understanding, however murky, of the dual persona that ethical issues are forced to adopt when international politics are concerned. As countries where the intertwined worlds of politics and public life are constructed around a complex and unendingly contested set of moral codes and consensuses, it would be wrong of us not to make ethics our business. But at an international level, we must accept that, like agricultural subsidies and WTO memberships, ethical demands are, and cannot help but be, tools; unless we sideline them entirely, we will inevitably find ourselves deploying them as means of negotiation or coercion. While this raises a difficult set of choices in its own right, the reality alone does not sully the purity of our ideals, such as they are.

Chinese rhetorical hypocrisy is annoying. No, more than that, it's infuriating, a kind of toe-curling, fist-clenching smugness. But underlying that, perhaps worse, is the fact that at some level, it will always remind us of our own.

Rumormongers’ Paradise

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the poor folks at the China Daily now and again. In the face of yesterday’s resumption of hostilities in Urumqi, their task of putting a positive spin on each and every news item must surely be about as much fun as grafting a brave face onto a frightened rodent. A conversation with a recent intern at the state news agency Xinhua revealed the remarkable levels of conviction involved in this process. Far from the simple burying or manipulation of facts, she saw the tendency among the Chinese press to focus on the positives as a vital public service, a reasonable defense against explosions of irrational, ill-informed public sentiment. Still, one can’t help but wonder what was going through the mind of the editor responsible for surrounding a brief news item on Xinjiang’s latest woes with ‘related links’ on the vigor of the region’s economy and tourism, without even a passing mention of the riots in July that left almost 200 dead.

While the flashpoints for earlier bouts of violence were fairly tangible events (at least at first), the trigger for yesterday’s resumption of hostilities is that most perennial of Chinese favorites, the capricious specter of rumor. Han mobs are reportedly up in arms over tales of syringe-wielding Uygurs prowling the streets in search of women and children to infect with HIV. Such imagery forms a curious blend of urban legend and racial stereotyping. While many newspapers point out the link with a similar needle-induced hysteria occurred in Tianjin back in 2002 (when fears over HIV-tainted blood donations were at their peak), the image of the sinister ‘other’ bent on sapping the life-force of ordinary citizens is a deeply persistent one in Chinese history.

In the run-up to the Boxer rebellion, Christian missionaries were widely believed to be kidnapping villagers in order to harvest their organs, while at the end of the 18^th century, fear of pigtail-clipping ‘soulstealers’ caused a full-scale national panic, a case which drove the Qianlong emperor to mount an obsessive search for culprits that simply did not exist. Coupled with this, the near-universal objectification of Uygurs by Han Chinese into a race of shifty, ungrateful thieves with a penchant for plunging a knife into everything they see seems to have spawned a genuinely terrifying bogeyman.

The new disturbances in Xinjiang are not the first time that rumor panic has flared in China this summer. In late July, local officials in the central city of Kaifeng were faced with the unusual task of coaxing thousands of local residents back to their homes, having watched them flee in terror, possessions in wheelbarrows, spurred on by rumors of an impending nuclear explosion at a nearby factory. Then, as now, a fundamental lack of trust in the abilities of the state-media complex to provide adequate information led people to concoct their own news. Such is the psychology of rumor that people are far more willing to cling to shreds of doom-laden mistruth than they are to face up to the terrifying uncertainties of an information vacuum.

But while extracting villagers from makeshift blast shelters may seem almost charmingly ridiculous, the twin failure of China’s ethnic and information policies sets up a dangerous playground for worried fantasists on the streets of Urumqi. A Chinese journalist recently noted that the Han and Uyghur communities are now so thoroughly alienated from each other that each suspects the other of being capable of literally anything. When newspaper and government reports of ethnic harmony restored and ‘isolated troublemakers’ brought to book jar so fundamentally with the situation on the ground, it’s no wonder that people are turning to Chinese whispers for their news.

Two types of lawyer

The news last week that China has strongarmed yet another batch of its lawyers into submission has been the cause of much hand-wringing both abroad and within sections of the Chinese law community. The closure of the Beijing-based Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng) is the latest step of an energetic, jack-booted dance over the shoots of China's civil society (such as it is) seemingly choreographed by the country's ruling elite to commemorate the 60th anniversary of their country's founding.

Gongmeng's founders have been rightly lauded for going head-to-head with the authorities on high-profile 'sensitive' cases involving Tibetan dissidents and earthquake victims. However, waving the law like a flaming sword in the face of one’s opponents is not necessarily an approach universally favored by those seeking to use it as a tool for real, long-term change.

Lingering antipathy and mistrust on the part of the government means that founding an NGO in China is a bit like thinking up a creative variety of alternative descriptions for a spade. One way is to dress it up as something else, registering it as a private company. This was the approach adopted by Gongmen,g which was eventually scuppered last week by the imposition of an impossibly large fine for the late payment of taxes.

Another way of camouflaging one’s NGO is to hide it under the wing of an academic institution, and it is here, concealed in the legal departments of dozens of universities across the country, that a different brand of legal activist continues to flourish. Often guided with the tacit help of foreign NGOs, such institutions run low-profile grassroots initiatives such as legal aid programmes for peasants, or labour law education courses for factory workers. In doing so, they encourage people to resist bullying from above and exploit the system as it stands to maximum possible advantage.

Huang He* is the assistant-director of just such an institution, based in central Hubei province. It would be hard to unearth a man with a more unshakeable, almost religious conviction in the law as a sacred panacea for almost any problem, anywhere. In his delivery, the word always emerges somehow dressed in the pomp and magnificence of a proper noun in some 18th century difcourfe.

But his convictions are matched by a subtle and realistic assessment of the hopeless muddle competing political interests and incoherent or unclear statutes that makes up the bulk of the present legal system (as a basic example, China currently has no presumption of innocence or guilt built into its legal framework at any level).

Counter-intuitive as it might seem, the key to the success of his institution and others like it lies in ‘communication and co-operation’ with the government. By highlighting the role that strong legal institutions can play in reducing the risk of social instability, they have skillfully co-opted local government officials as advocates, rather than opponents. In doing so, they have so far navigated themselves around the dubious honor of officialy imposed martyrdom.

Even so, convincing officials that they pose no threat to the sovereignty of the independent kingdoms they have carved for themselves often involves resorting to creative diplomatic measures. “At the beginning of our project, we did have a crisis of trust with the Justice Department of Hubei Province, and they want to retreat from the project, fearing the risk of rural movements. So, we invited the leaders of the department to a feast, and had a very significant communication with them with the help of wine. After that, the project was revived.”

These two contrasting approaches represent different attitudes to working within the system. Institutions like Gongmeng work hard to make sure the constitutional rights theoretically extended by the People’s Republic to its citizens are upheld. Without their work, acts of criminal injustice meted out to some of the most vulnerable members of Chinese society would go unnoticed and unchallenged. However, the confrontational nature of their work means that as instruments of change, they are fighting a battle against impossible odds.

Huang He is confident that his work represents a much more sustainable approach, a driving force just behind the leading edge of change that preserves itself by avoiding exposure to the unpredictable realms that lie beyond. “The inevitable trend is that the political climate will be more and more opening and tolerant… We just follow the mainstreaming of human rights.” Although they would like nothing better than to keep themselves out of the press, and the Western press in particuler, the continued presence of these hidden cultivators of grassroots change in China must not be overlooked, even as sexier, more dynamic warriors for reform are suppressed with the customary unpleasantness.

*name changed for obvious reasons

Halls of Memory

Lying just beneath the skin of the terse explanations, the exhibits of battle armour, shrunken heads and ploughing implements of every museum the world over, a narrative crackles. Museums collect, gather, encapsulate, centralize; they are neat little boxes of story, plucking chaotic elements from a moving world and fixing them in a new, artificial framework. Virtually nothing, despite common wisdom, belongs in one.

More often than not, a museum’s story is told through its exhibits, allowing for a certain level of give and take between visitors and curators. While the grouping of items, their explanations and other such manipulations will hold a certain sway over our perceptions, we remain free as creatures of the imagination to conjure up our own images, fill in our own blanks (and ignore those damned boxes of dry, insistent text).

In places where the story is threatened, contested or remains fluid, museums are often co-opted into becoming focal points that pin down the meaning of key points or events, lest they pull a protean escape act and leave the threads of the stories to which they attach flapping untied, dangerous. In such places, the emphasis shifts from showing to telling, and exhibits become no more than props. Subsumed in importance by the story they are supposedly telling, they often revert awkwardly to their original form; artefacts redundant, out of place.

Just occasionally, however, the exhibits themselves fight back, undermining the stories with their own truths.

Lodged in the damp, spring flatlands of Anhui, the entire village of Xiaogangcun has been turned into this latter type of ‘history’ museum. Once a desperately poor farming community at the centre of a storm of controversy surrounding China’s first nudges in the direction of market reform, the entire place has been transformed into a model village in both senses of the word.

Replacing the wattle and straw shacks of previous years, lines of identical blue-roofed concrete houses are linked by immaculately metalled roads. Bar the presence of a few soggy black dogs, the place is completely deserted. Along a lane from the marble wasteland of the coach park (built, we are informed, to coincide with a visit by state leaders last year) stands an exhibition hall commemorating the events that sparked the restoration of land ownership to individual households in the late 70s, a process over which controversy continues to rumble.

Here, exhibits are not so much presented as created in situ. To the left of the door sprawls an enormous tableau depicting that fateful night when the farmers of Xiaogangcun got together and decided, in spite of the huge risks it would involve, that they wanted their land back. The mural is a bizarre combination of styles – the composition and poses of the subjects is lifted straight out of Victorian melodrama (think Martin or Alma-Tadema), but the cartoonish grotesques that stare out from between piles of straw or gaggles of chickens lend the whole thing an air of bizarre, deflated camp.

At the end of a long gallery, this sense of bathos is revisited in a parody of victory memorials the world over; impossibly muscular figures swarm across a bronze bas-relief in a display of brash, brazen socialist realism (the exhibition hall was completed in 2008). Flanking them on either side, a crude half-verse repeats itself: “Contract system! Contract system! Forging on, no turning back! Pay the state its due, make sure the collective has enough, and the rest you keep!” (altogether now: “aaaand it’s no, nay, never…”).

But despite its symbolic position at the heart of the gallery, the glorified image it presents is punctured by the rows of photographs that unfurl next to it. Dressed in t-shirts or polo tops, caught at home or out in the street, posed, but not elaborately, stand the life-sized contemporary images of Xiaogangcun’s surviving reformers. A run of identical family names belies the continued thriving of the old lineage structures (if Mao had really wanted to nail shut the coffin of traditional China, he would have done well to consider getting rid of surnames). In the midst of a sea of carefully orchestrated political narrative, they are captivating in their ordinariness.

It is tempting to romanticise; the two rows of open-seeming smiles and thick, greying eyebrows conjure a sense of a hard life, well-lived. The museum, the model village, the historical ‘event,’ all recede into the background. What remains is the reality of a group of people with goals far more modest than setting their nation on the shining path of development. Thirty years ago, they did a very brave thing. Then, they got on with their lives.

Strangers in the City - pt. 2

As promised, part 2:

Shen, 35, Construction Worker

“I don’t really have much contact with the people around here. I’m here for the work.” Having worked in the construction industry for seven years and in six different cities, Shen’s relationship with the city he now happens to inhabit is definitely a marriage of convenience. That being said, there’s not much love lost regarding his home village, either. “Work’s work. It isn’t really on to be asking for holidays all the time. If there’s a spare weekend here and there, I might go home, since the transport’s so easy from here.” As a family man and roving beneficiary of China’s booming construction industry, his main concern is working his way up the ladder to the coveted rank of foreman. Moving with the work, Shen is a fully paid-up member of China’s substantial “floating” population.

He also has an unswerving faith in the power of China’s continued development to keep workers like him insulated and afloat in the wake of the current global economic turmoil. “I’m not worried about my job. Ever since this country was founded it’s needed new buildings. There’s no way that’s going to just tail off.” As far as he’s concerned, his industry’s ability to weather any storm is assured. “I don’t know what I’d do if things did take a turn for the worse. It’s just not something I’ve devoted any thought to.”

A pragmatist he may be, but perhaps unlike many others Shen also derives a strong sense of satisfaction from his work. “It’s a great feeling to complete a project. Everyone from the boss down to the laborers get’s pretty worked up about it. Still, it’s a shame we don’t get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.”

Cao Junqiao, 20, Waitress

“I never thought I’d miss my family this much.” As she speaks fondly of her parents back in Anhui, or protectively of her younger brother (like her, a recent migrant), it becomes apparent that after the initial excitement of arriving the big city, the reality of living a life uprooted from family and friends is starting to hit home for Cao. “My mum called over autumn festival; she was all worked up, worrying that I wasn’t going to get my moon-cakes this year.”

Cao is still relatively new in town. After graduating from high school in June, she decided to head for Nanjing with a group of her classmates. Arriving with no jobs awaiting them, no knowledge of the city, and no money, the first few days were tough going. “When we first got here, we had nowhere booked to stay, so we dumped our bags at the Nanjing Library. We had scarcely any money on us, so pretty much every hotel was outside our price range. We ended up spending the night in an internet café! When the next morning came around, we had no idea what time the library opened. It was some way away, but we’d spent all our money so we just had to make do with walking. We got there at 5.30 and hung around for four hours until the place opened. While we were waiting, we bumped into an old guy playing erhu and doing his morning stretches in the park next door. Turned out he was a university professor, over 80 years old, spoke great English. He asked us where we were from. We told him we were from Anhui, and that our parents were peasants. He said “ah! Peasants are the kind of people I admire most!’ Can you imagine?”

Now established as a waitress in a Hunanese restaurant, Cao is slowly starting to settle into her new surroundings. “At first, I didn’t have a clue, but the others helped me out, and I got the hang of it after a few shifts. Now it’s great – I’m good at what I do, and I love working with all the girls here.” However, though she remains sanguine about the challenges that face her, the current job is definitely no more than a means to an end. “I need to get together a bit more money first, but I’m hoping to start night school next year. I really like the idea of studying to become a tour guide, but you’ve got to learn so much, even reading classical Chinese. It’s tough. Whatever, though, I’m not going to be a waitress all my life!”

Strangers in the City - pt. 1

Apologies for recycling material - I'm snowed under and abroad for the next ten days, so in the interests of continuity, here is the first of two parts of an interview piece on migrant workers produced for a local magazine last November. The introduction, on re-reading, is over-wrought and over-written. Far better to let the interviewees speak for themselves:

Li Chao, 40, Street-Sweeper

Despite the sickly bittersweet smell of generic fermentation that suffuses the place, the waste-processing post near the intersection of Danfeng Jie and Zhujiang Lu is unexpectedly spotless, its white-tiled surfaces gleaming in the early morning sunlight. Inside, we meet Li, an unassuming yet affable man sitting resplendent in his brand new glowing orange safety jacket. It’s the job of Li and his team to make sure that their designated section of road is kept spotless throughout the day. The hours are long: “Normally I’m up and working by four in the morning,” Li says. “We work through until a bit before seven, then set down to breakfast. We don’t clock off until ten at night, so I only get about four hours’ sleep a night.” It’s not always enough. “If there’s a break in the work, I might catch forty winks now and then, though strictly speaking it’s against the rules,” he says with a smile.

Li first moved to Nanjing eight years ago. Like so many new arrivals, he found his job through personal connections: “My aunt was in Nanjing. She helped sort me out. It’s hard to just roll in and find a job.” As street sweepers, he and his wife are able to earn enough to put their two children through university, so long as they all live frugally. “Things are alright here, it’s a pretty cheap place to live, we can get by on about five hundred yuan a month. That leaves us a thousand or so to put the kids through school. That said, they’re on a tight budget, even the school canteen’s expensive, so it’s no gourmet dinners for them!”

With his old village some two hundred and fifty kilometres away, Nanjing is beginning to feel more and more like home for Li. “If someone were to tell me I had to up sticks and work elsewhere, I think I’d find it pretty hard to leave,” he says. “You could say Nanjing is my second home town now.” Yet so long as he is unable to register as an urban resident, the future remains uncertain. “We’ve got no pensions. I certainly hope our kids will end up taking care of us, but that’s just a hope. Whether they choose to or not is up to them, really.” And if the worst comes to the worst? “Well, I’ll just have to move back to my first home town and grow old, won’t I?”

Chen Changyou, 47, Taxi Driver

Originally from a peasant household, Chen was awarded the much-sought after status of full urban resident after a stint in the army. With access to healthcare, a pension, and the right to own property, he has been blessed with the opportunity to integrate into his adopted city in a fashion most migrants can only dream of. As he puts it, “Nanjing’s my mother-in-law.” Working in the relatively lucrative taxi business (on average, he can expect to take home 4,000 yuan a month), he has been better placed than most to view the city’s evolution in the 28 years since he first arrived. For people in his line of work, development’ translates directly: a new road to be traveled, an new landmark to be committed to memory. “When I first arrived in town, the tallest building around was six floors,” Chen says. “And that was a hotel. Back then, the roads were narrow, torturous. There were still plots of cultivated land strewn about the place. There were no expressways, airports or anything like that. The reality of life today goes way beyond what I could ever imagine as a child. Back then, even driving cars was the preserve of party secretaries and cadres. Now, I’ve got two homes, and I can buy my own car if I want to. Life’s better everywhere, sure, but it’s 28 years of hard graft that got me where I am today.”

Chen’s work ethic is simple. “You’ve got to get your hands dirty. If you want to get rich, you’ve got to be prepared sweat blood, just like a peasant.” Every inch the self-made man, he is nonetheless fiercely proud of his adopted home and the opportunities it has afforded him. “Ever since I retired from the army, I’ve been doing everything I can to make a contribution to this city, my new hometown. Whenever I pick up foreigners in my cab, I feel like I’m acting as a representative for Nanjing itself.” But despite being able to consider himself a proper Nanjingren now, he remains aware of the gulf he has traversed to make it this far, one that so many others still face. “Every month I put a bit of money aside to give to the migrant school here. Happily, I’m lucky enough to be in a position to do this.”

The Pleasure of Plenums

a handy guide to that thing you probably haven't heard about.

Somewhere on the distant edge of your current-affairs radar, the faint notion that events of a vaguely political nature are currently underway in China may have begun to emerge as a fuzzy, indistinct blip.

Perhaps you’ve been dimly aware of state premier ‘grandpa’ Wen Jiabao’s delivery of the State Council’s annual report (in a speech lasting well over two hours, Papa Wen spent a good deal of time hurling about the word faith as if he’d just invented it, as he has already done at Davos and elsewhere this year. If this behaviour persists much longer, he’s liable to end up sounding like either Gordon Brown or George Michael, neither of which is particularly seemly for a man with this much social capital).

More likely, you might have picked up on People’s Congress chairman Wu Bangguo’s assertion that China has no plans to adopt western-style parliamentary democracy in the near future (Absolutely No Democracy for China Ever Ever Ever! – BBC; more on this later).

Either way, the news that China’s NPC and NPPCC are busy holding their annual double-plenum is unlikely to inspire much excitement. The bodies occupy a confusing position within China’s dizzyingly complicated government structure (which, in many respects, still serves as little more than a front for a highly centralised authoritarian core). According to the epithet-flinging sages at the Guardian, all this amounts to is yet another meeting of the country’s ‘rubber-stamp parliament’, not worthy of the attention of us parliamentary democratic types.

Though there is an element of truth in this, the horse-trading, jockeying for position, political haggling, and genuine all-out policy debate taking place in the corridors and meeting-rooms of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People is becoming more significant with each passing year, and forms a rare and fascinating window onto the realm of modern Chinese politics in motion.

Here, then, is a pocked guide to the Third Plenum of the 10^th National People’s congress. Let’s start with the warm-up act.

The what? The NPPCC, or National People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Who’s involved? Bizarrely for a one-party state, NPPCC delegates are drawn mainly from the eight parties that make up the body of its ‘united front.’ Though they all toe the party line pretty closely today, the names of one or two belie the ossified remnants of a desperate and often tragic struggle for political compromise that took place in certain quarters following the end of World War II, as the nation slid back towards bloody civil war (the ‘China Democratic League’ spent its early days trying to drum up support for a ‘third way’ between the communists and the nationalists before being hijacked from the left, leaving many of its founding members to bear the full brunt of the political upheavals of the 50s and 60s).

The 2,000 odd delegates are chosen through a non-representative system of proposal and nomination, and include leading academics, professionals, intellectuals, and the occasional popular figure like Olympic hurdling champion Liu Xiang (who managed to stumble off the plane from the states just in time to attend the plenum’s closing ceremony). Broadly speaking, delegates are roughly analogous to the kind of people one might find stocking the majority of the shelves over at the House of Lords.

What is it meant to do? “Political consultation, democratic supervision, and political participation.” Essentially, a mechanism for ordinary citizens to play a direct role in overseeing the legislative activities of their government.

What does it actually do? Not much. NPPCC ‘proposals’ have no way of becoming legislation. Next to the NPC’s sleek ship of state, the NPPCC is a bit like a crazed gondolier, sputtering a host of largely unworkable, often ridiculous, yet occasionally intriguing proposals as he punts alongside. Many of the hundreds of proposals put forward are genuine reflections on current political talking points, allowing delegates to serve as a kind of foil for their colleagues next door at the NPC itself. Some, however, remain wonderfully ludicrous (the pick of this year’s crop include suggestions for everyone to start buying a kind of national costume in a bid to boost ‘patriotic’ consumerism, and a proposal to allow 17-year-olds to take their university entrance exams in classical Chinese).

All of which brings us to the main act…

The what? National People’s Congress.

Who’s involved? Technically speaking, this is the elected representative body of the people of China. NPC delegates are elected by and from a pool of local-level NPC’s, which in turn are elected directly by ordinary citizens. However, this is all slightly academic at the moment since most candidates are party-vetted, the number of competing candidates per seat is tightly controlled (usually about 120 candidates for every 100 seats), and electioneering is illegal.

What is it meant to do? Technically speaking, the NPC is the nation’s highest legislative body, representing the apex of the Chinese ‘state’ power structure (as opposed to the ‘party’ structure, with which it is intertwined). At its annual meetings, it discusses major policy initiatives and ratifies them into law, while its smaller, year-round Standing Committee is responsible for more day-to-day legislation.

What does it actually do? Though there still remains a certain whiff of the ‘rubber-stamp’ about it (China’s 4bn yuan stimulus package flitted by this year with barely a mention), the NPC has become an increasingly politicised body in recent years.

The fact that bills forged by the State Council (headed by Papa Wen, China’s equivalent of a cabinet) usually breeze through the NPC with little opposition at the voting stage often masks the torturous business of hammering out the details that can now take place over the course of events like the annual plenums, (a re-emergent by-product of a deep cultural tendency to try and reach consensus wherever possible).

While everyone involved still professes a fundamental loyalty to the party line, different delegates may hold wildly different opinions about the direction in which the country is headed and how best to get it there. Increasingly, NPC legislation represents not just the original intentions of the country’s leadership clique, but the compromise reached after these differing voices have had their say.

This brings us back to the issue of democratisation (yes, that old chesnut). While Wu Bangguo may have dismissed multi-party democracy out of hand, an increasingly vocal NPC presents intriguing possibilities. There is little doubt on this last point – this morning’s papers contain stories of one NPC delegate suggesting acidly that the body would be more effective if less time were spent on collective self-congratulation and more on discussing legislation, while others have called for greater and earlier transparency of central government proceedings, or full immunity of speech [should appear here later today] to allow for wider-ranging debate – comments that would have been unthinkable a few years back.

The question is where next? An empowered NPC and an overhauled, more competitive electoral system could, if properly handled, end up being every bit as ‘representative’ as many of the world’s supposed democracies. Is a one-party democratic model possible, or will the steering hand of the CCP only become more subtle in its stifling of genuine debate? Check back here in 20 years or so to find out!

在这，读不懂中国, or He Who Shouts Loudest....

Events in the row over the return (or not) of artefacts looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace took a farcical turn this week as winning bidder Cai Mingzhong proclaimed that, Chinese patriot that he was, he had no intention of actually shelling out the absurd €31m needed to seal the deal, thus promising to drag out this ill-tempered affair for a good few weeks yet. Dealing as it does with Chinese humiliation at the hands of foreign foes, this is a story that plucks on the raw nerves of popular sentiment like strumming away at a very loud, very angry harp.

While China undeniably has the moral high ground on the issue, it is worth remembering that, in terms of time elapsed, kicking up this much fuss about something that happened in 1860 would be equivalent to the city of Naples demanding the return of its sovereign (nay, inalienable) territory stolen by that upstart Garibaldi.

However, this is by the by. Decades of official narratives about “a century of national humiliation” (1850-1950) coupled with China’s uncertain position in the international pantheon mean that this kind of thing still has a potent resonance.

There are, however, various ways in which to approach an issue. Here is how the story was treated in an editorial from The China Daily, the state run English-language paper:

A French judge's refusal to halt the sale of bronze heads of a rabbit and rat at an auction today does not mean an end to the Chinese people's efforts to retrieve such relics (…).

What is even more ridiculous is the connection Pierre Berge, the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and now owner of the art collection to be auctioned, has tried to make between the return of the animal heads and human rights (…).

That only means he follows what we Chinese call gangster logic - to blackmail someone with something robbed from that person (…).

Those who took part in the plundering and the very act of setting fire to the "garden of all gardens" owe Chinese people a heavy debt not only in the real value of properties they destroyed or plundered but also in terms of morality and justice.

A word about how this particular institution is run. English-language stories are almost always written by Chinese authors and then made serviceable by foreign sub-editors (serviceable being, in many cases, a relative term. Please remember, while you read this link, that this is a story run by the state news agency. Even the BBC, that doyenne of embarrassing cock-ups, manages to run a reasonably professional Chinese language section without making a complete tit out of itself).

The paper’s editorial line, needless to say is handed down straight from the propaganda department, and thus corresponds fairly closely to the impression of itself the Chinese government wishes to broadcast to the outside world.

By contrast, here is a translated extract of an article entitled The Moral History of the Old Summer Palace carried last Thursday by a privately-owned Chinese-language newspaper, the Southern Weekly:

…as pointed out recently by an eminent historian, the reason why contemporary Chinese remain obsessed with the fate of this former imperial retreat is that they are bewildered as to “how Westerners could break the international laws which they themselves had established, laws which expressly prohibited looting of private property in times of war, regardless of whether it belonged to the common people, or the head of state…” However, the story of the Summer Palace has a wider significance. We ourselves must accept at least some of the responsibility for the palace’s current decrepit state. Hot on the heels of the Anglo-French forces came local residents, who stripped the place bare for timber. During the chaos following the fall of the Qing, everyone from high officials to common thieves had a hand in sequestering away what little remained its former glory. Even under the current administration, this process of destruction and neglect continued unabated; the artificial hills and lakes were filled in, and what had once been a garden became a patch of farmland, crisscrossed with roads. Then came the Cultural Revolution…

The story is thus a complicated one, but the main point is simple enough; history deserves respect, and we should cherish all of the material treasures we are fortunate to have in our position.

Don't expect the Chinese domestic press to come out in support the West over such issues. Don't expect it to be particularly moderate, or particularly outspoken. Do, however, expect to find, here and there, a well-constructed argument, a reasoned opinion, or the sound of an individual voice.

This is already a point that has been made much more artfully and at greater length by James Fallows in the Atlantic last year. Though the kind of swill served up by the China Daily on a daily basis may suggest otherwise, there is, in fact, much to be found in China's domestic media that is worthy of admiration and respect. While severe restrictions on press freedom still exist, the dance-like negotiation between censors keen to keep everyone on-message, and editors doing their best to sell papers is slowly pushing the boundary forward. Restricted, alas, to speakers of Chinese, there is a wealth of considered, well-argued and occasionally beautifully written journalism to be found beyond the realms of the state media engine.

In this context, the adolescent tantrums of China’s various state-monopolized English-language outlets are thus made to seem particularly offensive. Not only are they offensive to the intelligence of pretty much everyone on the planet, but worse, their shrill and persistent screams are a misleading and perverse mockery of the actual state of the contemporary Chinese media.

(Note: should you be interested, the following sources offer at least a glimpse of the kind of stuff emerging from non-state media sources. Tim Hathaway, an American journalist associated with the Southern Weekly translates the paper’s weekly editorial on his blog; Danwei.org is a site devoted to following stories in, and about, the Chinese media, and while not strictly media-related, ChinaSmack is an English-language round up of hot topics on China’s BBS discussion forums)