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.