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.