China – Page 26 – artdiamondblog.com

Henry Paulson Fears Chinese Economy “Will Face a Reckoning”

(p. B1) About 340 pages into Henry M. Paulson’s new book on China, a sentence comes almost out of nowhere that stops readers in their tracks.
“Frankly, it’s not a question of if, but when, China’s financial system,” he writes, “will face a reckoning and have to contend with a wave of credit losses and debt restructurings.”
. . .
(p. B2) Like the United States crisis in 2008, Mr. Paulson worries that in China “the trigger would be a collapse in the real estate market,” and he declared in an interview that China is experiencing a real estate bubble. He noted that debt as a percentage of gross domestic product in China rose to 204 percent in June 2014 from 130 percent in 2008.
“Slowing economic growth and rapidly rising debt levels are rarely a happy combination, and China’s borrowing spree seems certain to lead to trouble,” he wrote.
Mr. Paulson’s analysis in his book, “Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower,” is all the more remarkable because he has long been a bull on China and has deep friendships with its senior leaders, who could frown upon his straightforward comments.

For the full commentary, see:
Andrew Ross Sorkin. “DEALBOOK; A Veteran of the Crisis Tells China to Be Wary.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 21, 2015): B1-B2.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 20, 2015, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Veteran of the Financial Crisis Tells China to Be Wary.”)

The book discussed above is:
Paulson, Henry M. Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower. New York: Twelve, 2015.

“Red Tape Is Good for the Government but Not for Us Chinese People”

(p. A8) China’s seven million public servants have long been a target of scorn by citizens who accuse them of endemic laziness and corruption. Last year, a municipal water official in Hebei Province with a history of turning off the taps of customers who refused to pay kickbacks — including an entire village — was detained after investigators found $20 million hidden in his home.
In the southwestern province of Yunnan, officials at a local land reclamation bureau often leave for lunch around 10:30 a.m., returning after 3 p.m. “It simply gets too hot to do any work,” Pan Yuwen, an agricultural adviser, said one rainy day last month when the temperature was a less-than-sultry 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
But more than lackadaisical bureaucrats, it is the head-spinning tangle of regulations that infuriates many ordinary Chinese. At the heart of their ire is the hukou, or family registration, an onerous system akin to an internal passport that often tethers services like public education, subsidized health care and pensions to a Chinese citizen’s parents’ birthplace — even if he or she never lived there.
. . .
One recent afternoon, Li Ying, 39, sat in a fluorescent-lit Beijing government office, waiting for her number to be called so she could apply for a temporary residence permit that would allow her 6-year-old son to enroll in school.
Although Ms. Li moved to Beijing with her parents as a child in 1981, her hukou is registered in a distant town, meaning her son will be shut out of the city’s public schools without the permit.
Among the 14 required documents, Ms. Li must provide her hukou certificate, proof of residence, a diploma, a job contract, a marriage license, her husband’s identity card, his hukou, a certificate proving that she has only one child and a company document detailing her work performance and tax payments.
“What a headache,” she said, a pile of paperwork balanced on her lap. “Red tape is good for the government but not for us Chinese people.”

For the full story, see:
DAN LEVIN. “China’s Middle Class Chafes Against Maze of Red Tape.” The New York Times (Sat., MARCH 14, 2015): A4 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 13, 2015.)

Chinese Communists Crush Innovative Entrepreneurs by Banning Open Internet

(p. A1) BEIJING — Jing Yuechen, the founder of an Internet start-up here in the Chinese capital, has no interest in overthrowing the Communist Party. But these days she finds herself cursing the nation’s smothering cyberpolice as she tries — and fails — to browse photo-sharing websites like Flickr and struggles to stay in touch with the Facebook friends she has made during trips to France, India and Singapore.
Gmail has become almost impossible to use here, and in recent weeks the authorities have gummed up Astrill, the software Ms. Jing and countless others depended on to circumvent the Internet restrictions that Western security analysts refer to as the Great Firewall.
By interfering with Astrill and several other popular virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, the government has complicated the lives of Chinese astronomers seeking the latest scientific data from abroad, graphic designers shopping for clip art on Shutterstock and students submitting online applications to American universities.
If it was legal to protest and throw rotten eggs on the street, I’d definitely be up for that,” Ms. Jing, 25, said.
China has long had some of the world’s most onerous Internet restrictions. But until now, the authorities had effectively tolerated the proliferation of V.P.N.s as a lifeline for millions of people, from archaeologists to foreign investors, who rely heavily on less-fettered access to the Internet.
But earlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chi-(p. A6)nese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.
The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors who complain that in its quest for so-called cybersovereignty — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.
“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow American broadcasters. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”
. . .
The vast majority of Chinese Internet users, especially those not fluent in English and other foreign languages, have little interest in vaulting the digital firewall. But those who require access to an unfiltered Internet are the very people Beijing has been counting on to transform the nation’s low-end manufacturing economy into one fueled by entrepreneurial innovation.
. . .
Avery Goldstein, a professor of contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said the growing online constraints would not only dissuade expatriates from relocating here, but could also compel ambitious young Chinese studying abroad to look elsewhere for jobs.
“If they aren’t able to get the information to do their jobs, the best of the best might simply decide not to go home,” he said.
For those who have already returned to China and who crave membership in an increasingly globalized world, the prospect of making do with a circumscribed Internet is dispiriting. Coupled with the unrelenting air pollution and the crackdown on political dissent, a number of Chinese said the blocking of V.P.N.s could push them over the edge.
“It’s as if we’re shutting down half our brains,” said Chin-Chin Wu, an artist who spent almost a decade in Paris and who promotes her work online. “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet.” The New York Times (Fri., JAN. 30, 2015): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 29, 2015.)

Marxist Chinese Education Minister Bans “Western Values” from Textbooks and Lectures

(p. D8) This week [the week starting Sun. January 25, 2015], China’s ideological drive against Western liberal ideas broadened to take in a new target: foreign textbooks.
Meeting in Beijing with the leaders of several prominent universities, Education Minister Yuan Guiren laid out new rules restricting the use of Western textbooks and banning those sowing “Western values.”
“Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials,” Mr. Yuan said at a meeting with university officials, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. “By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”
The strictures on textbooks are the latest of a succession of measures to strengthen the Communist Party’s control of intellectual life and eradicate avenues for spreading ideas about rule of law, liberal democracy and civil society that it regards as dangerous contagions, which could undermine its hold on power.
On Jan. 19, the leadership issued guidelines demanding that universities make a priority of ideological loyalty to the party, Marxism and Mr. Xi’s ideas.
Mr. Yuan’s message this week spelled out how universities should do that.
“Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms,” he said, according to the Xinhua report. “Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students.”

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “China Warns Against ‘Western Values’ in Imported Textbooks.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 31, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed words, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 30, 2015.)

Billionaire Risks All for Hong Kong Freedom

(p. A11) Hong Kong If Chinese soldiers crush Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, there’s little doubt media tycoon Jimmy Lai will be high on their wanted list. His Apple Daily newspaper and Next magazine cheer on the movement for universal suffrage. He bankrolls the city’s pro-democracy political parties, as financial records stolen by hackers show. The government-owned media accuse him of fomenting a “color revolution” at the behest of the American government. . . .
But Mr. Lai’s activities this week are not hard to track. From about 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., he sits in the protesters’ encampment outside the main government offices. Most of the time he can be found at one of the makeshift supply pavilions labeled “materials stand,” chatting with students or listening to speeches.
On Friday morning, I find Mr. Lai at the encampment reading essays by Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, and we walk to a nearby food court to chat. Two photographers from a pro-Beijing newspaper conspicuously record our meeting.

For the full interview, see:
HUGO RESTALL. “Hong Kong’s Billionaire Democrat; Despite threats and smears from Beijing, Jimmy Lai talks about his support for student protesters in Hong Kong and why they might succeed.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 4, 2014): A11.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Oct. 3, 2014.)

China May Have Higher Incomes, But India Has Freedom and Hope

(p. A11) The author remains generally optimistic about India’s prospects. Economic reforms that began in 1991 have quickened growth. On average, GDP has grown nearly 7% a year since then. Thanks to a media revolution that began in the 1990s and has exploded over the past decade, a state-owned monopoly over television news has given way to upward of 450 raucous channels that make Fox News look staid by comparison. The author argues that together these two trends have sparked a kind of virtuous cycle: Better-educated and better-fed Indians are demanding more from their politicians. A take-no-prisoners media will keep them on their toes.
. . .
Educated Indians can’t stop complaining about the politicians who lead them. Yet, echoing the historian Ramachandra Guha, Mr. Denyer argues that India’s main success since its independence in 1947 has been political rather than economic. It has strengthened its democratic institutions and nurtured religious and cultural pluralism. Despite the fact that the average Indian earned $1,500 last year, less than a fourth of the average Chinese, it is in New Delhi, not Beijing, that you can afford to call the president (or prime minister) a blithering idiot without worrying about a midnight knock on the door.

For the full review, see:
SADANAND DHUME. “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Rogue Elephant’ by Simon Denyer; The average Indian earns less than the average Chinese. But it’s in New Delhi–not Beijing–where you can call the prime minister an idiot without worrying about a knock on the door.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 28, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 27, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Rogue Elephant’ by Simon Denyer; The average Indian earns less than the average Chinese. But it’s in New Delhi–not Beijing–where you can call the prime minister an idiot without worrying about a knock on the door.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Denyer, Simon. Rogue Elephant: Harnessing the Power of India’s Unruly Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

China as Evil Empire

(p. C1) Mr. Eimer is a British correspondent who sometimes roamed around minority areas using a second passport with (p. C6) a tourist visa to avoid official restrictions that apply to journalists. What he found on his travels was a pattern of misrule and oppression on the part of the Han, as ethnic Chinese call themselves, and a mixture of resentment, despair, resignation and anomie among the subjugated peoples.
. . .
Because Mr. Eimer is not bound by diplomatic or journalistic niceties, he can be blunt in the terminology he uses. To him, China is not so much a state or a nation as a “huge, unwieldy and unstable empire,” with the Han in the dominant position that the Austrians, Turks or English once enjoyed in empires now vanished.
. . .
“We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population,” Mao Zedong said in a 1956 speech buried deep in the fifth volume of his selected works but cited by Mr. Eimer as a likely explanation for Chinese expansionism. “As a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.”
As the Mao speech shows, Mr. Eimer is especially adept at ferreting out obscure historical facts and documents that put the lie to Beijing’s claims that these outlying areas have always been part of China. To deal with neighbors who were then outside its borders, the Qing dynasty, he notes, “established a separate bureaucracy called the Lifan Yuan, or Court of Colonial Affairs,” which “functioned much like the former Colonial Office in the U.K., which administered the British Empire.”
Mr. Eimer’s travels take him to all four quadrants of China’s land border, the longest in the world. His method is to spend time with an ethnic minority living in Chinese territory, then cross over to a neighboring country to see how the same group is faring there — almost always better than in China.

For the full review, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Antidote to Illusion, Examining Restive Borders.” The New York Times (Mon., AUG. 4, 2014): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 3, 2014, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Antidote to Illusion, Examining Restive Borders; ‘The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China,’ by David Eimer.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Eimer, David. The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014.

In China “Overwhelming Evidence of the Leaders’ “Moral Vulnerability””

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-peoples-republic-of-amnesia/9780199347704_custom-d21f4e2d0281b692c74781102e750ff1e27b7cc9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. 21) During the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the Chinese Army was slaughtering demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Wang Nan, a young student, was shot in the head. As he lay dying at the side of the road, soldiers threatened to kill anyone, even some young doctors, who tried to help him. In the morning, finally dead, he was buried in a shallow grave nearby. A few days later, the smell of Wang Nan’s body was so great that it was dug up and moved to a hospital.

After 10 days, his mother, Zhang Xianling, was called to the hospital to identify her son’s body. It took eight months, in the face of official obstruction, for Zhang to uncover what had happened to her son. In 1998 she held a modest remembrance service on the spot where he had died. The next year, on that day, she was barred from leaving her apartment. When she met Louisa Lim, Zhang said she longed to go to the fatal place again to pour a libation on the ground and sprinkle flower petals. “However,” Lim observes, ”someone will always be watching her. A closed-circuit camera has been installed” and “trained on the exact spot where her son’s body was exhumed. . . . It is a camera dedicated to her alone, waiting for her in case she should ever try again to mourn her dead son.”
Until I read about that camera in “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” I imagined, after decades of reporting from and about China, that nothing there could still shock me. As Lim contends, Zhang’s “simple act of memory is deemed a threat to stability.” Lim’s overwhelming evidence of the leaders’ “moral vulnerability,” together with her accounts of the amnesia of many Chinese, make hers one of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN MIRSKY. “An Inconvenient Past.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 25, 2014): 21.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 23, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Tanks at the ready in Beijing on June 6, 1989, two days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.

Russia and China Redistributed Wealth “to Disastrous Effect”

Shane Smith, entrepreneur behind VICE media company. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 10) You believe that young people worldwide are disenfranchised. Do you think popular uprisings will fix things? No. I’m actually worried, because I believe that it’s going to get worse. Look, economic disparity is bad. But we’ve already tried having governments redistribute wealth. We tried it in Russia and China to disastrous effect.

News Corp. bought a 5 percent stake in Vice, and now James Murdoch is on the board. Why did you sell to them? I’ve said that I want to be the next MTV, the next CNN, the next ESPN. Cue everyone rolling their eyes. MTV went to Viacom, ESPN went to Disney and Hearst, CNN went to Time Warner. Why? Because to build a global media brand, it’s almost impossible to do it alone. James has been involved in one of the largest media companies in the world since he was in short pants.
Do you ever fear that Vice will become legacy media itself? It’s our time now. Then, I don’t know, it’ll be holograms next, and some kid will come up and eat our lunch.

For the full interview, see:
Staley, Willy, interviewer. ” ‘Have We Unleashed a Monster?’: The Vice C.E.O. Shane Smith on His New Kind of News.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date MARCH 21, 2014, and has the title “Vice’s Shane Smith: ‘Have We Unleashed a Monster?’.”)

Angus Maddison Saw that Life Improved During the “Capitalist Epoch”

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Angus Maddison, the late and eminent economist for the OECD, produced a famous chart in 1995, depicted nearby. For the longest time–basically from after the Garden of Eden until the 19th century–economic benefit for the average person in the West or Japan was flat as toast. The Mona Lisa aside, there was a reason someone back then said life was nasty, brutish and short. Then suddenly, new wealth spread broadly.

Maddison describes 1820 till 1950 as the “capitalist epoch.” He means that admiringly. The tools of capitalism unlocked the knowledge created until then. What came to be called “economic growth” gave more people jobs that lifted them and their families from the muck of joblessness and poverty. Maddison also noted that much of the world did not participate in the capitalist epoch. No wonder they revolt now.
This history is worth restating because the importance of strong economic growth, and the unavoidable necessity of a U.S. that leads that growth, may be disappearing down the memory hole of public policy, on the left and even among some on the right. Both share the grim view that the U.S. economy is flatlining, and the grim fight is over how to divide what’s left.

For the full commentary, see:
Henninger, DANIEL. “WONDER LAND; The Growth Revolutions Erupt; Ukrainians want what we’ve got: The benefits of real economic growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Feb. 27, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 26, 2014.)

One of Maddison’s last important books was:
Maddison, Angus. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Fired Dissident Xia Yeliang Warns that Chinese Universities Do Not Value Academic Freedom

“Xia Yeliang in New Jersey. Professor Xia, whose firing by Peking University provoked an outcry, is joining the Cato Institute.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) A Chinese dissident, dismissed from his job as an economics professor at Peking University after clashes with his government over liberalization, will become a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute on Monday, he said.

In an interview on Friday, the dissident, Xia Yeliang, warned that American universities should be careful about partnerships with Chinese universities. “They use the reputations of Western universities to cover their own scandals,” he said.
“Perhaps Western universities do not realize that Chinese universities do not have the basic value of academic freedom, and try to use Western universities to cover their bad side,” Professor Xia added.

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Chinese Dissident Lands at Institute With a Caution to Colleges.” The New York Times (Mon., FEB. 10, 2014): A10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 9, 2014, and has the title “Chinese Dissident Lands at Cato Institute With a Caution to Colleges.”)