Την ίδια ώρα, στην Κίνα...

[Costas]

(Language Log)
Lǎowài 老外 (lit., "old foreign") is a ubiquitous term for a certain type of person from abroad in China, and dictionaries almost invariably gloss it as "foreigner". Yet the subtleties and nuances of the term seem almost endless, and they can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. To try to get a handle on this colloquial expression, I asked a number of laowai who have had long experience in China what they thought of this appellation that they had doubtless been called hundreds of times and some Chinese friends who most likely had had occasion to employ that designation themselves.
(....)

 

[Costas]

Για τους φαν του αμερικάνικου ράγκμπυ

Year of the Pigskin
My hilarious, heartbreaking, triumphant season with the American Football League of China
(The New Republic)

 

[Costas]

In High Seas, China Moves Unilaterally (ΝΥΤ)
By JANE PERLEZ and KEITH BRADSHER
At least twice in recent years, Beijing has sought to explore the South China Sea but backed down after protests by Vietnam. That good will evaporated this week.


Σχετικά, από το China Hand.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Twilight of Soft Power
PRC Moves to Hard Power in South China Sea

It is difficult to be blithe about the dispatch of China’s HYSY981 drilling rig into disputed waters off the Vietnamese coast.

It actually would have been less of a provocation if the PRC had sent the aircraft carrier Liaoning down there instead.

One of the interesting by-products of the US “freedom of navigation” campaign in the South China Sea was the U.S. staking out a position that military operations by foreign vessels inside an Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ were not the kind of economic intrusion that UNCLOS intended to preclude.

In fact, after the harassment of the USNS Impeccable, a US Navy survey vessel that cruises through China’s EEZ towing various gadgets, the US went out of its way to assert that the ship was not doing anything that could be construed as economic or even dual use, such as mapping the ocean floor, and insisted the ship was there to track PLAN submarine movements.

By that logic, the Liaoning chugging through any waters in the South China Sea, in EEZs disputed or not, is something that nobody can complain about. And indeed, that’s what the Liaoning did, on its shakedown cruise in the South China Sea at the end of 2013.

Sending the HYSY981, China’s billion dollar deep water drilling rig--with its Vaderesque Death Star mission to intimidate China’s hydrocarbon adversaries by demonstrating the PRC’s capabilities in unilateral development of contested oil fields--is exactly the kind of destabilizing EEZ gambit that raises tensions and invites a response.

The PRC has left itself some wiggle room by sending the rig to a location close to the Paracel Islands—held by China and deserving some as yet undetermined EEZ of its own—so that the waters are contested rather than unambiguously Vietnamese, but the nature of the incursion implies that the PRC was not expecting Vietnam to suck it up and ignore the PRC challenge.

The HYSY981 is reportedly escorted by a flotilla of dozens of vessels, including the PRC’s ubiquitous maritime patrol vessels and, I would assume, the various support vessels needed to go about its drilling business. I also came across a report, well, actually a statement by an overwrought PRC nationalist blogger, that the rig is also escorted by anti-missile destroyers, which would be a major crossing of the line in bringing overtly military elements into the PRC’s economic contention with its maritime neighbors.

Even if the destroyers aren't on the scene, the PRC is committed to dishing it out.

Vietnam released a video of PRC maritime patrols vessel ramming Vietnamese coast guard cutters trying to approach the rig, a sign that the PRC has no qualms about playing the pugnacious/threatening/aggressive regional power for a world audience.

The big question is Why?

Why, after Vietnam has been reasonably cooperative in its dealings with the PRC, most conspicuously by declining to openly support the Philippines’ arbitration case against the nine-dash-line, is the PRC picking on it in such an ostentatiously crude and overbearing fashion?

On the most immediate level, I think it’s because the PRC wants the practice—practice in engaging in relatively large, cumbersome naval operations in a genuinely hostile environment, but one in which the embarrassment of a catastrophic military encounter is pretty low. Engaging in a major provocation inside Vietnam’s declared EEZ and getting the chance to bully Vietnam, with its underpowered marine forces and lack of a formal defense alliance with a capable regional (Japanese) or world (US) power, fills the bill.

One of the biggest challenges to the PRC’s military capability and credibility is that it hasn’t fought a hot war with anybody in the last 45 years. With a provocation against Vietnam, the military system gets a nice little exercise.

Bearing in mind a comment I read that “the same capital ships that escorted the Liaoning are with the HYSY981", it doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine the Liaoning plunked down inside the same kind of security cordon that now contains the rig.

On the intermediate level, I see the Vietnam gambit as preparation for a confrontation with the country that the PRC really wants to humiliate: the Philippines.

The Philippines is a much riskier nut, since it has 1) a military alliance with the United States and 2) a foreign policy team that has put most of its eggs in the brinksmanship basket, refusing to engage bilaterally with the PRC, relying/hoping that the US will deter PRC aggression and, if some kind of conflict breaks out, intervene in an effective way on the Philippines behalf.

The Philippines apparently sees it the same way, if yesterday’s seizure of a Chinese fishing boat is indeed designed to demonstrate its resolve to succor Vietnam by presenting the PRC with the unwelcome prospect of getting embroiled in two maritime disputes—with the prospect of US involvement—at once.

I don’t think the PRC will take that particular bait today. But I would not be surprised to see the HYSY981 show up in the “West Philippine Sea” in the near future.

On the higher, long-game level, I believe the PRC leadership has decided that the United States can no longer bring anything positive to the table for the PRC as it has completely and symbolically committed to the Asia pivot and its narrative of PRC containment with President Obama’s trip to Asia.

I think it would have been prudent for President Obama to have hedged America’s bets by dropping in on Beijing, but he didn’t, sending Michelle Obama instead. Die is cast, in other words.

The PRC response, I believe, is not to confront the United States; it is to marginalize it, by driving the Asian security narrative into regions that deeply concern its neighbors but only tangentially engage the United States.

In recent weeks, I would contend that the PRC has reversed the wedge against the US-Japan alliance.

Instead of trying to wedge the United States away from Japan and toward some kind of accommodation with PRC interests, the PRC is trying to wedge Japan away from the United States by goading/enticing Japan into an independent role that marginalizes the United States.

So we saw the PRC wait for President Obama to leave Asia, then resume its provocations in the Senkakus, while exchanging peaceable mid-level envoys with Japan…

…and ostentatiously beating up on Vietnam, which Japan has been courting as a member of Prime Minister Abe’s anti-PRC economic and security alliance.

The motive, I would guess, is to compel Japan to abandon its formal lockstep identification with the US pivot leadership in Asia (which, I would posit, Japan has honored in the breach already with its independent-minded footsie with Vietnam, Philippines, & North Korea) and emerge with its own initiative to provide Vietnam with some kind of diplomatic, economic, or military support—or else reveal the hollowness of the assurances it is offering to South East Asian countries to entice them into the Japanese camp.

Once Japan is “off the rez” so to speak, it will be forced to engage in a meaningful way, either through confrontation or negotiation, with the PRC in order to advance its Asia strategy…and the United States will see its clout diminished and have to deal with the PRC as well to get back into the game.

Given the PRC’s traditional focus on avoiding confrontation while it muscles up militarily and diplomatically, this kind of provocation and open escalation would seem to be counter-intuitive.

But I think the PRC has decided that, with the US public commitment to the pivot and encouragement to Japan to implement collective self defense, the US “honest broker” ship has sailed, the real US security role in Asia is backstopping its pivot allies, and the pivot battleline has to be challenged before it became too entrenched.

And it’s doing that by demonstrating, in relatively crude terms, that the deterrent strategy that underpins the pivot will not, well, deter the PRC and the PRC will bear—and extract—the economic costs of defying the will and preferences of the US and its Asian allies (and, in the case of Vietnam, its unlucky Asian associates).

As to why the PRC should decide to excite universal fear and loathing at this particular junction, one could spin it positively by saying that it is simply accelerating the birth of a new Asian order with a new balance of powers and the US stripped of its dominating role.

The negative interpretation is probably more persuasive. The PRC sees a hard and ugly decade ahead, with anti-PRC administrations in power in many of the Asian capitals, keystoned by a Hillary Clinton presidency. Best to lance the pivot boil early, before the pivot military bulk-up has completed , and while the relatively conciliatory President Obama is in power and distracted by the idea that he doesn’t want to pile a confrontation with China on top of his current problems with Russia.

The PRC’s decade of soft power is, prematurely, over, thanks to the success of the pivot in blunting the PRC’s drive to dominate the region by virtue of its economic, demographic, and implied military clout. Its relations with its maritime neighbors will, I expect, be increasingly driven by hard power.

I think the PRC has decided to hunker down, and absorb the diplomatic, economic, and social costs of heightened fear and anger, and gamble that it can outmaneuver and outlast the hostility of the pivot nations.

It’s an ugly and dangerous gamble, especially since the first, second, and third instinct of everyone involved on the anti-PRC side will be to escalate in order to create a greater feeling of security and also bolster the deterrent narrative that the military capabilities of the US and its pivot partners is what is keeping Asia safe.

Dangerous days, indeed.


I originally addressed these themes a couple weeks ago in a piece I’m excerpting below. So far the model is holding up. If trends continue, we're in one of those "hate to be right" scenarios.


From April 23, 2014:

In bad news for the United States and the pivot, it looks like the PRC has decided to call [the pivot] bluff.

When Secretary of Defense Hagel visited the PRC, his counterpart, Chang Wanquan, stated:

"The China-U.S. relationship is neither comparable to U.S.-Russia ties in the Cold War, nor a relationship between container and contained. China's development can't be contained by anyone."

This statement is not just bravado and bullshit, in my opinion. It reflects the PRC’s considered response to the threat of the pivot.

Specifically, the PRC is stating that the containment model doesn’t apply because the PRC is deeply integrated into the global economy and, indeed, into the economies of its putative adversaries. The PRC does not recapitulate the containment of the USSR envisioned by George Kennan; for Kennan, the USSR had intentionally isolated itself and sought to prop up its rule by invocation of the Western threat, so economic isolation automatically underpinned the military element of containment.

Also, I think the PRC position is based upon the perception that there are no existential issues involved in the PRC’s conflicts with its neighbors. Nobody wants to upset the global economic applecart by starting World War III over TWINWTDF [The Worthless Islands Nobody Wants to Die For].

So the PRC is signaling it does not fear the pivot. Or, more accurately, the pivot has produced genuine disadvantages and costs to the PRC, but it has decided it is in its interests to push back, strategically and systematically, instead of trying to modify its behavior to suit the US and its pivoteers. That’s why the PRC excluded Japan from the naval fleet review planned at Qingdao and, when the US pulled out to demonstrate its support for its pivot partner, cancelled the whole exercise instead of pursuing some face-saving compromise.

…
Given the unfavorable west Pacific environment, sitting idly by, or trying to ingratiate itself with the Asian democracies and the United States through soft power gambits do not appear to be high on the PRC's list of options.

With its overtly confrontational moves in Qingdao and Shanghai, it appears the PRC is signaling it is prepared to abandon "soft power", give up on the promise of US forbearance, and manage its business in an increasingly hostile regional environment.

And it doesn't seem likely that the PRC is blustering in order to obtain some face-saving concessions or lip service from the US. It is targeting Japan instead of dealing with the US, and challenging the United States to do something effective in support of its ally.

The PRC has always been alert to the need or opportunity to challenge the credibility of the US deterrent and, with the heightened anxiety fostered by Russia's annexation of Crimea, that day has arrived perhaps sooner than anybody wished.

If the PRC intentionally fomented the Ayungin Shoal resupply crisis with the resolve to let the US-PRC relation go south if needed rather than passively let the pivot dynamic play out to its disadvantage, we are definitely in for some tense and unpleasant times - and the costs of maintaining the credibility of the US deterrent might be considerably higher than we prefer.

The PRC appears to be signaling its determination to hunker down and weather the geopolitical storm - which might include a sooner-rather-than-later Taiwan crisis and the need to blame a handy US scapegoat - for years if need be, and pursue the struggle in domestic venues where it holds an advantage.

Και επίσης, προχτεσινό:
Thursday, May 08, 2014
China Offers Vietnam the Red Pill or the Blue Pill…Now!

 

[Costas]

(China Hand, May 15, 2014)

There has been some bewilderment expressed as to why Vietnamese demonstrating--against the PRC’s provocative positioning of its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone--attacked Taiwanese factories.

The answer is depressingly simple.

Anti-Chinese prejudice—including prejudice against all Chinese, including Taiwanese Chinese, PRC Chinese, and Vietnam’s own ethnic Chinese citizens—is baked into Vietnam’s current political and social narrative.

It is not a matter that Vietnam was colonized by China in the far off imperial era or, for that matter, the fact that Chiang Kaishek’s KMT army behaved extremely poorly when it made a clumsy play to claim northern Vietnam as part of China’s political sphere immediately following World War II.

Anti-Chinese sentiment grew out of the Vietnamese government’s sense of threat in the 1970s, as it pursued its alliance with the Soviet Union while spurning the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Chinese dominated the commercial sector of the economy, especially in recently liberated/conquered Saigon, and were seen as an undesirable social element capable of disloyalty to the Communist government, divided loyalties vis a vis the PRC, and also serving as a key component in the bourgeoise economy that presented obstacles to the socialization.

So the Vietnamese government adopted and implemented various policies hostile to its ethnic Chinese community. Hostile enough, in fact, that over half a million ethnic Chinese fled. Here’s a good, if perhaps dated, discussion of the period.

Remember the “boat people” of the 1970s? Maybe not. But they were predominantly ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.

The Vietnam government also implemented extremely harsh measures against Chinese communities in Cambodia during its invasion to topple the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge.

This combination of toxic elements contributed to the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 which, in a development little recognized in Vietnam today, was executed by the PRC after US president Jimmy Carter gave Deng Xiaoping the green light as part of the whole “contain Soviet influence in Asia” exercise (now, of course, succeeded by the whole “contain PRC influence in Asia” exercise).

Distrust of Chinese—not just China i.e. the PRC—is still an essential social and political element in modern Vietnamese nationalism, as well as the government’s effort to maintain its a central, legitimate position in that nationalistic narrative.

So, it’s not much of a stretch for angry nationalists demonstrating against a (PRC) Chinese oil rig to burn down an (ROC) Chinese plastics factory.

The good news, if there is any, is that this level of anti-Chinese resentment and violence has always been bubbling near the surface in Vietnam. It’s been managed before, and I’m sure the government in Hanoi hopes it will be able to get the lid on again.

 

[Costas]

Άρθρο του συγγραφέα Yu Hua (Γυ [προφ. Γϋ] Χουά) στη ΝΥΤ

Follow the Money, China-Style
The economy's mystery of surplus currency yet low inflation may be a result of the piles of cash hoarded by corrupt officials.

(...)

For example, Xie Mingzhong, a former Communist Party secretary of Wenchang in Hainan Province, was dismissed after he allegedly concealed more than 25 million yuan in safe deposit boxes.

Yan Dabin, the former chief of the state communications bureau in Wushan County, Chongqing, hid cardboard boxes containing 9.39 million yuan in the bathroom of his new apartment, where they were discovered after a water leak.

Xu Qiyao, a former chief of the construction department of Jiangsu Province, accepted some 20 million yuan in bribes. Parts of that sum were wrapped in layers of plastic and hidden in a hollow tree trunk, beneath an ash heap, in a rice field and inside a latrine.

Li Guowei, the former chief of the highway bureau in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, buried a box stuffed with 2.8 million yuan in a garbage heap next to a brother’s house. “I was an unlucky dog when I got picked out,” he said.

Luo Yaoxing, the former chief of the immunization planning office of the disease control center of Guangdong Province, rented a luxury apartment to store his booty. He wrapped the notes tightly inside black plastic bags. Despite protecting his stash with waterproof paper and drying agents, 1.2 million yuan still got moldy.

(...)

Yu Hua is the author of “Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China.”

 

[Costas]

President Xi Jinping
Beijing, China

Mr President

We have learned that our fellow scholars Xu Youyu, Hao Jian, and Hu Shigen, and civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and writer Liu Di, were criminally detained for “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder.” The alleged reason for their detention was that on 3 May they were among the fifteen participants in a “2014 Workshop on Beijing’s June Fourth” that took place in a private apartment in Beijing.

These detentions raise many disturbing questions. For example, how can a private meeting “create disturbance in a public place”? These Citizens were detained because they discussed an event that took place twenty-five years ago and that had a profound impact on the course of Chinese history. How can a discussion among scholars, lawyers and writers at someone’s home be considered a “disturbance”? As you have often reminded your Japanese counterparts, to be strong, a nation must confront its past. As scholars who have devoted our lives to the study of China, we are convinced that this country will only benefit from a free exchange of ideas that helps to establish historical truth.

Three days after these citizens’ detention, we learned that veteran journalist Gao Yu was criminally detained for “leaking State secrets”. She has admitted to having sent a Party document abroad. But, since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the separation of the state and the Party in China has been a fundamental principle. How, then, can A “Party document” be considered a “state” secret?

It is obvious that none of the above-mentioned citizens has committed a criminal offense. Their detention is an injustice to loyal Chinese citizens as well as a harm to the image of China at a time when it is becoming a great power. We therefore ask you respectfully to correct this mistake, and to free unconditionally the citizens who have been wrongfully detained.

Sincerely,

Jean-Philippe Béja
Senior Research Fellow at CNRS Paris, CEFC Hong Kong

Michel Bonnin
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Jean-Pierre Cabestan
Baptist University, Hong Kong

Joseph Cheng
City Unversity of Hong Kong

Steven Levine
University of Montana

Perry Link
University of California, Riverside

Andrew J. Nathan
Columbia University

Xiao Qiang
University of California, Berkeley

-----------------------------------------------------

I, Too, Will Stand Up for Tiananmen
(Murong Xuecun, ΝΥΤ 22/5/14)

(...)

On May 6 three of my friends were arrested in Beijing on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They are Xu Youyu, a scholar and former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Prof. Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy, and Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights attorney.

Three days earlier my three friends and a dozen other people had gathered at Hao Jian’s home to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago, when a huge number of students and other protesters took to the streets calling for democracy and an end to dictatorial rule and official corruption. The peaceful protests lasted nearly two months, but in the end the government sent troops and tanks, killing several hundred — possibly several thousand — unarmed citizens. Hao Jian’s cousin was among the dead.

I wanted to attend the gathering, but I had to travel to Australia, where I am a writer in residence at Sydney University. One of those present read out an essay I wrote about the Tiananmen crackdown. Hard as it may seem to believe — I have a law degree, and I myself can hardly believe it — reciting such an essay at a private gathering can violate China’s laws. By the government’s logic, I too have committed the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

I am going to turn myself in.

For me, the Tiananmen crackdown was the beginning of a gradual awakening. I was only 15 in 1989, a middle school student in a remote mountain hamlet in China’s far northeastern province of Jilin. Everything I knew about the events of that year came entirely from China’s state-run television station, CCTV: The demonstrators were counter-revolutionary rioters. The People’s Liberation Army exercised great restraint and did not open fire, whereas some rioters burned soldiers alive. I believed it all. I was even grateful to the government and the army for rescuing the nation.

Gradually, the events of 1989 receded from center stage. Everyone was busy earning university degrees or getting rich, as if nothing had ever happened. Even today, the Tiananmen crackdown remains one of the biggest taboos in modern China. Beijing has been attempting to expunge our collective memory through the worship of a soaring economy. But this most traumatic of memories has never truly faded. It continues to live among the people, despite Beijing’s determined efforts to suppress its history.

Soon after I entered university in 1992, a senior student came to our dormitory, sat down and demanded a cigarette. He then asked if we knew what had happened at the school in 1989. We said we didn’t know. He took a deep drag, then told us solemnly that during the Tiananmen incident students from our school, the China University of Political Science and Law, were the first to take to the streets. They were, he said, the first to coordinate links with protesters from other universities. The first president of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation was from our school. Our university, he told us, had “19 firsts.”

Since then, I came to understand what really happened in 1989 and its significance to China and the world. The government may have condemned the participants as “criminals,” but we students considered it a glorious moment. We regard it as a great honor to have had even the slightest connection with the democracy movement.

My university’s “19 firsts” may not have been entirely accurate, but they became a legend, passed down from one student body to the next. In 1994, when I was the wise senior who visited the new students’ dormitory, I too drew deeply on my cigarette and solemnly intoned: “During the Tiananmen incident of 1989 this university had 19 firsts ... ”

By then, all traces of blood on Tiananmen Square had been scrubbed clean and the bullet holes cemented over, but in the nooks and crannies of the city the story passed from person to person. Around 2003, a friend bought a documentary about the crackdown in Hong Kong. In no time we all made copies. One day I watched it with some friends in a bar in the southern city of Guangzhou. One scene in particular struck me. A youth lay prone on a broad avenue amid the sound of intermittent gunfire. We thought he was dead, but then he suddenly began crawling in a circle. He did not dare stand up, but he didn’t want to stay where he was, pretending to be dead. Crawling was better than doing nothing. “If I were there,” said a migrant worker from Sichuan Province who was standing behind us, “I’d have carried him to safety.”

Whenever I’m asked about China’s future I recount this anecdote of the migrant worker from Sichuan.

(...)

Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” [ΣΣ: το παρόν νήμα έχει και άλλες εμφανίσεις του]

 

[Costas]

Chinese elite push for release of jailed Nobel laureate
By Benjamin Kang Lim and Michael Martina
BEIJING Sun May 11, 2014 12:25am EDT

(Reuters) - A group of "princelings", children of China's political elite, has quietly urged the Communist Party leadership to release jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo on parole to improve the country's international image, two sources said.

Liu's release is not high on the agenda of the party, which is trying to push through painful economic, judicial and military reforms amid the most extensive crackdown on corruption in over six decades, the sources with ties to the leadership said, requesting anonymity.

But the back channel push for Liu's parole shows that a debate is taking place among leaders about damage to China's reputation caused by his jailing. It also suggests the ruling elite are not monolithic when it comes to views on dissent.

Liu, 58, a veteran dissident involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests crushed by the army, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 on subversion charges for organizing a petition urging an end to one-party rule. He won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

"For many princelings, the pros of freeing Liu Xiaobo outweigh the cons," one of the sources said. "Liu Xiaobo will definitely be freed early. The question is when."

He is eligible for parole after serving half his term.

The sources declined to say how big the group of princelings was, but said most were second- or third-generation born in the 1960s or 1970s and some were close to President Xi Jinping.

"The biggest worry is hostile forces using Liu Xiaobo once he is freed," the second source told Reuters.

Asked how the message was relayed to the leadership, the source said: "We have our channels ... the topic has come up many times during our gatherings."

The sources declined to identify the princelings or say if they had written or spoken to Xi or went through his aides or family members.

The Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Justice and State Council Information Office did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

Liu's wife, Liu Xia, has been put under effective house arrest since shortly after her husband won the Nobel prize, ostensibly to prevent her from talking to the media, and could not be reached.

Liu Xia was admitted to hospital in February after police refused to let her seek medical help abroad.

Liu Xiaobo is considered a moderate dissident, but the Communist Party is obsessed by anyone or anything it perceives as a threat to social stability.

Critics say Chinese leaders are insecure about what they feel are Western efforts to undermine one-party rule by pushing democratization.

President Xi, despite being the son of a reform-minded former vice premier, has shown no sign of wanting to loosen the political system. He said in Belgium last month that China had experimented with multi-party democracy and that it did not work.

China's human rights record has been a thorn in its side since the army crackdown on student-led demonstrations for democracy centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, which attracts endless opprobrium abroad.

SUPPRESSION OF EXPRESSION

The government has stepped up pressure on the rights community ahead of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown, detaining several leading dissidents and activists, including lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and journalist Gao Yu.

Xi's administration has also clamped down on Internet critics and tightened curbs on journalists in what rights groups call the worst suppression of free expression in recent years.

Yet the purge of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang could be conducive to Liu's release, the sources said.

Zhou is under virtual house arrest and under investigation for corruption. He had little sympathy for dissidents and during his five-year watch government spending on domestic security eclipsed the defense budget.

"Zhou Yongkang had recommended imprisoning Liu Xiaobo," the second source said, adding that this could be an opportunity to undo Zhou's deeds.

"But even if Liu Xiaobo is freed, the government will not (politically) rehabilitate June 4 soon," the source said, referring to the Tiananmen crackdown.

Liu's lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said that any decision on releasing Liu would be political, not legal.

Maya Wang, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said there have been sustained efforts from within China to get Liu released, but that she was not optimistic.

"According to Chinese law he would have to admit guilt first. Since he didn't, the likelihood of that happening is rather low," Wang said.

Despite Beijing's crackdown on dissent, there have been nuanced changes to China's policy towards the 1989 protests.

Taiwanese song writer Hou Dejian, who defected to China in 1983 and was deported seven years later for staging a hunger strike with Liu and two others in support of student protesters on the eve of the Tiananmen crackdown, set foot in China in 2006 for the first time in 16 years.

Hou's return and the recent release from detention of two outspoken bloggers - Xue Manzi and Wang Gongquan - have raised hopes the government may show leniency towards Liu.

In another sign of possible tolerance, President Xi approved publication in China last year of the Chinese version of "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" by Harvard academic Erza Vogel, multiple sources said.

The book was the first unofficial account of the crackdown by a foreign academic to be published in China.

In yet another sign, "democracy movement" was dropped last year from a government blacklist of "hostile forces", three independent sources said. But the security apparatus continues to put dissidents and bereaved families of victims under house arrest ahead of politically sensitive dates.

In a rare move, Chen Ziming, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison as one of two "black hands" behind the 1989 protests, was allowed to go to the United States in January for medical treatment and to receive a human rights award.

The 1989 protests had initially been labeled "counter-revolutionary", or subversive, but have since been watered down to a "political disturbance".

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Maxim Duncan and Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Nick Macfie)

 

[Costas]

Μια μικρή συζήτηση για τη μεγάλη απεργία του Απριλίου. (alternet)

 

[Costas]

Monday, May 26, 2014
Cold War Heats Up in Asia (China Matters)
(στην πρωτότυπη σελίδα το κείμενο έχει λίνκια)

The People’s Republic of China decided to defy the “pivot to Asia” by parking its HYSY 981 drilling platform—protected by a flotilla of various vessels perhaps not including PLAN ships-- in waters that Vietnam considers part of its EEZ.

Vietnam has been displeased, to put it mildly. It has reached out to the Philippines, indicating that it may support Manila’s legal challenge to the nine-dash-line or perhaps institute a legal case of its own.

A Vietnamese deputy prime minister is also visiting Washington DC at US Secretary of State John Kerry's invitation, apparently to provide optics for an expected US congressional resolution condemning PRC activities in the South China Sea. The visit also raises the specter (for the PRC) of a US return to Cam Ranh Bay, the massive US-built naval base on the southish Vietnamese coast.

Many Western observers believe that the PRC has blundered into the pivot’s clever trap, and its aggressive moves are simply driving its neighbors into the welcoming arms of the United States, enabling a more forward military presence for the US around China’s borders, and justifying US claims to a central role in the region as security guarantor.

I suspect, however, that the PRC has gamed this out and is willing to roll the dice in the South China Sea.

The long-term view from Beijing, I think, is that China occupies enough islands to move beyond the hard to defend “cow tongue” claim to a more defensible island sovereignty + EEZ formula for pursuing its interests in the SCS; China’s growing economic and military heft, its ability to limit the terms of dispute to economic terms, the unresolved issues of EEZ ambiguity, definition, and enforcement, and the PRC’s unwillingness to budge from its positions will force its neighbors to come to terms, albeit reluctantly and resentfully, over the long haul.

East China Sea is a different matter.

On the issue of the Senkakus, the “possession is 9/10s of the law” shoe is on Japan’s foot. Furthermore, the islands are unambiguously included in the scope of the US-Japan security treaty thanks to President Obama’s statement during his recent pivot tour to Asia (even though the US doesn’t recognize Japanese sovereignty over the islands; that’s another story), and Japan’s military infrastructure and capabilities to defend them are increasing. Assuming that Prime Minister Abe is able to thread the needle through the Japanese constitution and past the suspicious Japanese public and institute “collective self defense”, Japanese military power will be augmented by its ability to engage in “defensive” military activity while conducting joint operations with the US.

I read the red tea leaves and believe that the PRC does not have a realistic expectation of seizing the Senkakus or otherwise changing the status quo vis a vis Japan over the islands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC has few serious intentions of occupying the Senkakus and foments tension simply as a “pricetag” retaliation for Japan’s increasingly overt and aggressive anti-PRC foreign policy.

With the PRC deterred from making a genuine move against the Senkakus, the dominant dynamic in the East China Sea will be of Japan trying to achieve unity of doctrine and response with the United States for a contain-China policy, while the PRC will be trying to wedge US and Japan.

The process plays out with Japan’s invocation of “gray zone crises” i.e. friction with the PRC manifested in non-military ways. Japan is trying to define a definition of gray zone conflicts that permits a military response to a non-military scenario such as the PRC's ceaseless salami-slicing, and thereby gets the United States on the hook to provide backup muscle for the Japanese move. I see this as Japan's desired quid pro quo for signing on to "collective self defense".

One scenario I saw involved “armed Chinese fishermen” i.e. the idea that the PRC might try to seize the Senkakus with some kind of irregular force that the coast guard couldn't handle, and would require an SDF response even though PLA forces nominally weren't involved. As the United States digests the Crimea annexation precedent, expect Japan to invoke this kind of scenario more frequently.

The United States, whose primary interest is to get Japan on the hook for US military adventures, not the other way around, is apparently resistant to nailing down the “gray zone conflict” definition and giving Japan a green light (or at least a blinking yellow) for pushing back on the PRC, especially in murky a.k.a. "gray" clashes between Japanese and PRC vessels on the high seas.

Indeed, the gray zone problem neatly crystallizes the whole problem of the pivot: that it creates a moral hazard (in Western terms) or emboldens US allies (the PRC formulation) to engage in reckless behavior not necessarily advantageous to US interests, specifically the US interest in not engaging in a scorched earth economic conflict with the PRC for the sake of some uninhabited rocks.

Failing a meeting of the minds on “gray zone” conflicts, Japan has to content itself with provocations against the PRC in the hope that a PRC over-reaction will compel the US to expand its de facto security guarantees to Japan.

I place the recent contretemps over the close-quarters flyby conducted by Chinese fighter jets against Japanese military surveillance aircraft in the area of the joint PRC-Russia naval exercise in the category of a provocation, committed with an awareness of growing US disgruntlement with the PRC as well as the Obama administration's need to explicitly stand with allies post-Crimea.

Western media has reliably regurgitated Japanese government spin that the flyby was some recklessly aggressive behavior by the PRC.

However, facts indicate that the Chinese military posted ano-fly/no sail notification concerning the naval exercise and Japan flew over there anyway.

The only justification that Japan can offer is that it refuses to recognize the PRC ADIZ over the East China Sea. In fact, the incident shows why it’s important to respect other countries’ declared ADIZs and in fact the reckless party in this episode was not the PRC, but Japan. In terms of unintended consequences, it may also feed into US concerns about the hazards of letting Japan take the initiative in butting heads with the PRC in the ECS and then demanding US backing.

Interestingly, the official Japanese position now seem to be limited to the “Chinese planes flew too darn close” bleating.

An as yet unnoted element of the ADIZ issue is that the United States is the only power that asserts the right to fly military aircraft through somebody else’s ADIZ without filing a flight plan (to refresh everybody’s memory, US-flagged civilian carriers respect the PRC ADIZ regs. But the US immediately flew two B-52s into the ADIZ unannounced to affirm the US military prerogative).

Now Japan seems to be asserting that same right for its military aircraft, at least within the PRC ADIZ, a “destabilizing” “status quo-changing” state of affairs, one that also places the Japanese military at parity with the United States on this issue. I wonder if the US is terribly happy about this but will have to suck it up since Japan is currently dangling the collective self defense and TPP carrots before it.

It would seem unlikely that the United States would take Japan under its wing, so to speak, and conduct joint military flight patrols within China’s ADIZ as a show of support, but the Obama administration’s red line manhood is being questioned worldwide post-Syria and post-Crimea. So it might happen.

And the PRC might just have to suck it up, consoling itself with the idea that getting its way in the South China Sea is adequate compensation for getting balked in the East China Sea.

At the back of everybody’s mind, I think, is the potential real crisis in East Asia: the possibility that Taiwan will declare de jure independence at some time, and the PRC will be compelled to put up or shut up on the relatively existential issue of losing Taiwan. That’s when military posturing, military threats, and military maneuvers become genuinely pressing issues.

In this context, I consider the most disturbing development in US-PRC relations is not the tussling over rocks in the South China Sea or the East China Sea; it is the decision to twist China’s nuts with the indictment of five PLA officers for hacking. I expect the US national security civilian apparatus considers the indictment one of those clever, legalistic soft power moves that, again traps China in the web of law and international norms.

But the battle lines in Asia have hardened: pivot vs. China. The status quo is becoming confrontation, at least in regional security issues. With the expectation that US and PRC forces will be engaging and confronting each other, it would seem desirable that both sides have a better understanding of their opposite numbers. Indeed, the US Department of Defense has shown little enthusiasm for the White House's anti-hacking jihad which, in addition to clearing out the US government's stock of cyberrighteousness, seriously depreciated by the Snowden revelations, has scotched US-PRC military-to-military exchanges on ground rules for cyberwarfare.

Engagement with the PRC, for better or worse, has become a military matter. And if a clash occurs, it had better be because at least one side really wants it, and not because of the main abettors of military catastrophe: FUD or "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt."

 

[Costas]

Νέα διεμβόλιση ψαράδικου, βιετναμέζικου από κινέζικο αυτή τη φορά, στη Νότια Κινεζική Θάλασσα (βλ. αμέσως προηγούμενη ανάρτηση): Wide Support on Chinese Social Media for Boat Attack (με τη βοήθεια και της λογοκρισίας των αντίθερων φωνών, βεβαίως-βεβαίως) (ΝΥΤ/Sinosphere. Η πρωτότυπη σελίδα έχει λίνκια)

Updated, 3:50 a.m. ET| As news spread in China that a Chinese fishing boat had rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat about 20 miles from a deep sea oil rig that China has placed in waters contested by both countries, the reaction in social media appeared overwhelmingly supportive — even bellicose.

Critical voices appeared to be censored, including one that sharply criticized the Chinese Foreign Ministry, saying a comment it made about Vietnam after the incident calling into question the country’s credibility was “beneath the dignity” of a major power. But most commentators whose opinions were permitted to remain online by China’s tens of thousands of censors in the police and Internet companies, seemed excited by the action.

“Chinese fishermen are mighty! There are still heroes among the people!” wrote a person with the online handle Hou Ning on his Sina Weibo account. According to Vietnamese accounts, the 10 fishermen aboard the boat that sank on Monday were all rescued.

Other social media sites also showed support for the action of the Chinese boat, such as on the popular Phoenix, or ifeng, bulletin board. “This finally shows some backbone,” wrote a commenter in Hubei Province, garnering more than 6,600 thumbs-up signs.

The top-ranking comment on ifeng.com, with nearly 13,000 thumbs-up, from someone in Beijing with the handle Smog in the Imperial Capital, suggested that the Chinese were only doing to the Vietnamese what others have done to the Chinese.

“South Korea detains Chinese fishermen. Japan detains Chinese fishermen,” the person wrote. “Russia attacks them with cannons. A Chinese fishing boat rams and sinks a Vietnamese fishing boat, hahahahahahaha.”

China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody war in 1979 that Vietnam won. But many Chinese regard Vietnam as a minor southern nation that, they say, was once a Chinese province.

Many commentators approvingly forwarded a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that Vietnam’s credibility in the international community was “very low.”

But one comment posted on Sina Weibo was sharply critical of the Foreign Ministry statement, saying relations between states should be conducted with greater courtesy. That comment was censored, according to Freeweibo, an overseas-hosted website that gathers such censored comments.

Speaking of the statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Monday, a person named Duan Wanjin, who said he was a lawyer and whose account had a “V” for verified, indicating he had been approved by Sina Weibo, said the Chinese government was behaving in a way unbecoming of a great power.

“Territorial disputes are something that should be talked about, and one shouldn’t humiliate another country,” he wrote in the censored comment. “A country’s whose pattern” of foreign relations “is too small will find it hard to rise, unless China has decided it wants to make its relations with Vietnam like those between the United States and North Korea.”

“Today the Foreign Ministry is flooded with clowns who only want to ingratiate themselves with the leaders. There isn’t the slightest bit of Confucian culture exerting any uplifting influence of refinement. It’s just all ruffians. The gateway to the country is in a sad state.”

But many other commentators approved of scorning Vietnam: “I think the best way to frighten Vietnam is to attack Japan. Kill the monkey to scare the chicken,” wrote a person with the online handle The Ninth Number on My Identity Card Is Eight.

The phrase neatly turns around a Chinese saying that one should “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” — that is, frighten one’s real enemy by attacking a lesser one. The reversal both threatens and humiliates Vietnam, by suggesting it is a lesser nation.

The central notion of a master-servant relationship between China and Vietnam also featured elsewhere: “Originally Vietnam was a prefecture of China, today you are independent. Take good care of yourself and that’s enough, how dare you act rashly!”

Also on Tuesday, the state news agency Xinhua reported that direct flights that had begun on May 18 from Tianjin, a major city near Beijing, to Danang, a coastal destination in Vietnam, had been indefinitely suspended “because of the influence of the situation on the ground.”

The Vietnamese authorities had offered Chinese citizens a visa on landing in Danang to facilitate tourism, said the report, which described Danang as “not inferior to the Maldives,” a major Chinese holiday destination.

Referring to the boat incident, the latest development in a growing territorial conflict over the South China Sea, Haoshuai De Ba from Sichuan Province wrote on ifeng.com’s bulletin board: “A new phase is beginning… get ready for it….”

More than a thousand people gave that the thumbs-up.

 

[Costas]

Ανακοίνωση της Διεθνούς Αμνηστίας για τη δίκη των 55 Ουιγούρων σε στάδιο.

China: Shameful stadium ‘show trial’ is not justice

The deplorable mass sentencing of 55 people at a stadium in China’s north-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region [XUAR] is no solution to addressing public security fears, said Amnesty International.

Fifty five people, believed to be mostly Muslim Uighurs, were sentenced for terrorism, separatism and murder. Three were sentenced to death.

“Those responsible for the recent violent attacks have shown a callous disregard for human life and must be held to account. But speedy show trials will not deliver justice for the victims. Hastily sentencing people after unfair trials will only exacerbate tensions in the region,” said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International.

The sentencing took place in front of more than 7,000 people state media reported on Wednesday.

All of those sentenced are believed to be at risk of torture in detention. The local Communist Party leader, Zhang Chunxian said recently that suspected criminals should be “severely punished” before trial.

“With such charades, the Chinese authorities appear more concerned with courting public opinion than justice. It is highly doubtful the accused received fair trials,” said William Nee.

The sentence parade followed a wave of attacks as ethnic tensions rise within the XUAR. Thirty-one people died and over 90 were injured on 22 May, when bombs were thrown from two cars driving along a busy street in the region’s capital Urumqi.

The Chinese authorities have declared a “strike hard” campaign in response to recent attacks. Last week saw the launch of an anti-terrorism campaign, with convoys of anti-terrorist forces and military equipment paraded through Urumqi.

“The Chinese authorities have a duty to ensure public security but the response so far seems only likely to inflame tensions,” said William Nee.

Ethnic Uighurs face widespread discrimination including in employment, education, and housing, and curtailed religious freedom and political marginalization.

 

[Costas]

Αφιέρωμα της South China Morning Post στα 25χρονα της καταστολής της 4ης Ιουνίου 1989 στο Πεκίνο.

Επίσης:
Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary: the last prisoner of the protests
Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen protests, one man is still paying for the stand he took on the streets of Beijing
By Malcolm Moore, Beijing
3:23PM BST 26 May 2014

A tall, introverted 50-year-old man from Beijing is the only known person still serving time in prison of the roughly 15,000 who were arrested after the Tiananmen protests.

Miao Deshun was a factory worker who became wrapped up in the chaos of the Tiananmen protests. Together with four friends, he was arrested for arson as he battled the army on the streets of Beijing.

"According to our records, at present he is the one prisoner still in prison," said John Kamm, the director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has successfully lobbied for the release of several prisoners from the Tiananmen protests.

Workers like Mr Miao, who took to the streets to fight, were hit with far harsher sentences than the students peacefully occupying Tiananmen Square, Mr Kamm said. Dui Hua estimates that "fewer than 100 people" were even executed.

"There's a big difference between violent and non-violent counter revolution," he said.

"The higher educated, university graduates did not, for the most part, get as heavy sentences as the workers and the peasants. Those guys were all in the front line throwing molotov cocktails and the intellectuals did not do that," he said. "If you look at all the recent releases that we have reported, they have all been workers".

He added that Dui Hua had a list of a handful of other prisoners who were unaccounted for. "Based on what happened to many others, dozens who were given life in prison or a suspended death sentence, they would be out. But we do not know," he said.

A cellmate who spent time with Mr Miao in Beijing's No.1 prison, where he was initially confined, said that his sentence had been extended because he refused to cooperate with the prison authorities. The man asked not to be named in fear that he might be targeted for speaking out.

"Miao was very opinionated about the Communist party and he refused to do the work we were set in prison," he said. At the time the prisoners manned a badminton racquet production line inside the block.

Each day, the prisoners would rise at 6am and work until 10pm, breaking to eat watery cabbage soup that was ladled from an old oil barrel that had its top sliced off.

"Everyone had their sentence cut for good behaviour, one way or another, but Miao never got anything. Actually his sentence was extended not long after he was thrown in because he refused to do the labour."

"It got him beaten up over and over. He was always thrown into solitary confinement, once for two months, because he had rebelled against the guards," he added.

Almost 6ft-tall and rake-thin, Mr Miao seldom spoke, but stood out among the prisoners. "He was so skinny and he developed hepatitis and often went to the clinic," he said. "He never slept at night and sat on his bed all day while everyone else worked. He refused to consider himself a prisoner and he would spend days reading the newspapers, analysing every article."

He added that five years after his imprisonment, his family had stopped visiting. "His father used to come frequently, always crying, and he would buy things for him," he said.

"But I think he did not want his family to have to look after him, he wanted to be responsible for himself. But after his father stopped visiting, he had no money. He only had six yuan (60p) per month and would spend two yuan on soap, two yuan on toilet paper and two yuan on washing powder. The others gave him food sometimes."

Another prisoner, who also developed hepatitis at the same time, said the authorities had stopped Mr Miao's family from visiting him because Mr Miao would not confess to his crimes.

A third prisoner, who also knew Mr Miao, described how the authorities had rounded up workers after the protests. "I was a worker in a printing factory," he said.

"I went on the streets and I set fire to an oily rag and put it on the wheel of a truck. Someone must have reported me. On June 10, there were two plainclothes at the office. They put me in a jeep and lifted my t-shirt over my head and forced me to kneel on the floor of the jeep, with one person stepping on my face and another sitting on my back. When we got to the police station, they started beating me hard, and then slamming my head into the door over and over," he said.

"They told me they would send me to Tiantan park where the martial law forces were camped and they would dig a hole and bury me there."

After his trial, he spent 17 years in prison, being released in September 2006. "What we did was just to show our anger and dissatisfaction with the government and we were not some mob.

"Some people once asked me whether I regretted what I did. I said I don't regret it and will not regret it, even though it has cost me a lot. My father died in 2003 and after I was put in prison my wife and my three year old son left me.

"I see him sometimes during the Chinese New Year holiday. Once when he was in school, the teacher threatened that if he was naughty he would be put in prison like me. He is quite introverted, and I think what happened to me had an influence on him."

Mr Miao is now in Yanqing prison, a special facility for prisoners with medical conditions. He is scheduled for release in 2018, but may have nowhere to go. It was not possible to contact his family. "He suffers from severe mental illness," said Mr Kamm.

"If we look at the guy who was released at the end of 2012 in a very similar situation, essentially he had nowhere to go. The family was indigent, the sister couldn't take him in, she had to sell her home and a neighbourhood committee stepped in and made arrangements for him. That is a possibility. It may be he has no one to go to and he is ill," he said.

Additional reporting by Adam Wu

 

[Costas]

Το τανκς τού έλιωσε τα πόδια, κι έτσι έγινε καλός για τους παραολυμπιακούς. Αλλά υπό όρους... (China Change)

The Morning of June 4th and Its Long and Insidious Shadow (1) (2) (3)
By Fang Zheng

I was a student communist party member at the time. “As a party member,” the party official said to me, “you should keep the party’s interest in mind and yield to it. June 4th crackdown is in line with the party’s interest, and you have to make demand of yourself according to the standards of a party member.”

The party official claimed that “the interest of the party is the interest of the people.” I disagreed. “June 4th crackdown may be in line with the party’s interest, but it is not in the interest of the people. On this, the party does not represent the people.”

After the unsuccessful visits by school officials, many teachers whom I was familiar with came to give me advice one after another. “Give up,” they said. “For the sake of getting your diploma and for the sake of getting a job to survive, don’t say you were run over by a tank. You can say you were run over by a military truck, or even by an armed vehicle. As long as you don’t say tank, they will let you pass.”
(...)
Lots of people were standing around, and I saw a few people lifting and moving the Chairman of the CDPF into the hall. He was Deng Pufang (邓朴方), Deng Xiaoping’s wheelchair-bound son who was paralyzed when he had jumped out of a window in Peking University during the Cultural Revolution to escape “rebels” pursuing him for being the son of one of the biggest capitalist roaders.

Liu Xiaocheng (刘小成), the chairman of the CDPF and a few other officials came over to me. “I talk to you today on behalf of the CDPF,” Mr Liu began. “We know how you became disabled and we discussed whether we should let you participate. Despite differences among ourselves, the CDPF still hopes to keep you if you can make three promises. If you do, you can continue to train and attend the games.”

1) Do not talk about June 4th and your injury with other athletes at the training camp;

2) Do not contact anyone connected to June 4th during the training or the games;

3) If you win medals you will be requested for interview by the media. We hope you avoid media; if it really cannot be avoided, do not talk about the circumstances in which you were injured. Make up something else, like a car accident. Anything.

“If you can promise these three things,” Liu Xiaocheng concluded, “we will let you compete.”

 

[Costas]

Online censorship reaches unprecedented scale on June Fourth anniversary
British Broadcasting Corporation, June 4, 2014

One legacy of Tiananmen: China’s 100 million surveillance cameras
The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2014

LinkedIn is censoring posts about Tiananmen Square
Quartz, June 4, 2014

Vietnamese state media publish articles on June Fourth anniversary, soon deleted
British Broadcasting Corporation, June 4, 2014

 

[Costas]

Voices from Tian'anmen (South China Morning Post)
Σύμφωνα με τον Bill Bishop του Sinocism το καλύτερο αφιέρωμα στο τότε κίνημα, αλλά σέρνεται απελπιστικά. Προκαλεί μάλιστα σούρσιμο σε όλο μου το σύστημα.

Και μια και τον ανέφερα, νά και η γνώμη του:

I first came to China 25 years ago, to spend the second semester of my junior year at Peking University. We arrived in late January and I stayed until the third week of June. No one who was in Beijing then will ever forget the Beijing Spring and subsequent crackdown.

The one lesson I took away from those first few months in China is that it is always a mistake to underestimate what the Party will do to stay in power.

That lesson, which has held up very well over the last quarter century, is why I continue to believe that Xi Jinping is very serious about both economic reforms and reining in corruption. There is no shortage of people, inside and outside China, who believe Xi’s efforts will fail without said political reform, but Xi and his colleagues appear to disagree. Political reforms in any Western or liberal sense seem even less likely now than they have in decades.

 

[Costas]

(The New Statesman)

At the peak of its popularity, Mao's bible was the most printed book in the world. It attained the status of a sacred, holy text during the Cultural Revolution, and retains its place among western devotees.

In 1968 a Red Guard publication instructed that scientists must follow Mao Zedong’s injunction: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.” Expert knowledge was not valid, and might be dangerously misleading, without the great leader’s guidance. Examples of revolutionary science abounded at the time. In one account, a soldier training to be a veterinarian found it difficult to castrate pigs. Studying Mao’s words enabled him to overcome this selfish reaction and gave him courage to perform the task. In another inspirational tale, Mao’s thoughts inspired a new method of protecting their crops from bad weather: making rockets and shooting them into the sky, peasants were able to disperse the clouds and prevent hailstorms.

By the time the Red Guard publication appeared, Mao’s Little Red Book had been published in numbers sufficient to supply a copy to every Chinese citizen in a population of more than 740 million. At the peak of its popularity from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, it was the most printed book in the world. In the years between 1966 and 1971, well over a billion copies of the official version were published and translations were issued in three dozen languages. There were many local reprints, illicit editions and unauthorised translations. Though exact figures are not possible, the text must count among the most widely distributed in all history. In the view of Daniel Leese, one of the contributors to Mao’s Little Red Book, the volume “ranks second only to the Bible” in terms of print circulation.

Originally the book was conceived for internal use by the army. In 1961, the minister of defence Lin Biao – appointed by Mao after the previous holder of the post had been sacked for voicing criticism of the disastrous Great Leap Forward – instructed the army journal the PLA Daily to publish a daily quotation from Mao. Bringing together hundreds of excerpts from his published writings and speeches and presenting them under thematic rubrics, the first official edition was printed in 1964 by the general political department of the People’s Liberation Army in the water-resistant red vinyl design that would become iconic.

With its words intended to be recited in groups, the correct interpretation of Mao’s thoughts being determined by political commissars, the book became what Leese describes as “the only criterion of truth” during the Cultural Revolution. After a period of “anarchic quotation wars”, when it was deployed as a weapon in a variety of political conflicts, Mao put the lid on the book’s uncontrolled use. Beginning in late 1967, military rule was imposed and the PLA was designated “the great school” for Chinese society. Ritual citation from the book became common as a way of displaying ideological conformity; customers in shops interspersed their orders with citations as they made their purchases. Long terms of imprisonment were handed out to anyone convicted of damaging or destroying a copy of what had become a sacred text.

 

[Costas]

Xinjiang moving towards Talibanization: Duowei (Want China Times)

Northwest China's restive Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region is drifting towards "Talibanization," says Duowei News, an outlet run by overseas Chinese.

Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority, who have been blamed for a slate of terror attacks on the mainland in recent years, including the bombing of an open market in the regional capital of Urumqi last week that killed 39 people and injured another 94. Activists point the finger back at Beijing for exaggerating security threats to justify hardline measures that perpetuate an ongoing economic, cultural and religious suppression of Uyghurs.

Citing an article by Beijing-based scholar Deng Yuwen, the controversial former deputy editor of the Central Party School journal Study Times, Duowei says there are three distinct signs that indicate life in Xinjiang is starting to imitate the practices of the Taliban, including the strict regulation of women, discriminatory attitudes towards non-Muslims, the banning of "Western" activities, radical religious views and the aggressive enforcement of regulations.

The first sign, according to Deng, is that terrorist activities have branched out from specific locations like Xinjiang to occur across the entire country. Last October, for example, a jeep carrying people identified as Uyghurs plowed into crowds in Beijing's Tiananmen Square before the vehicle burst into flames, killing a total of five people. Then in March, a knife-wielding gang went on a rampage at Kunming railway station in southwest China's Yunnan province, killing 29 civilians and injuring more than 140.

The second sign, Deng writes, is that more and more of these terror attacks are being carried out against the general population. In the past, the majority of the attacks have been targeted at the authorities and in particular police stations in Xinjiang, though recent high-profile attacks have been launched at innocent and random people.

The third sign of Xinjiang's Talibanization, Deng says, is that government efforts to crack down on terrorism feel lacking or even helpless. Beijing's Xinjiang policy has completely failed, as both the "hardline" and "flexible" approaches have done little to put a halt to terror attacks, Deng said, adding that the Chinese government needs to be extremely careful in implementing its Xinjiang strategies and must also adjust its ethnic, religious and social policies.

Duowei points to the July 2009 riots in Urumqi which killed 197 people and injured thousands as the turning point for when Uyghur society started its descent into extremism. Increasing numbers of Uyghur women have exchanged their colorful traditional silk dresses for veiled black gowns, niqabs and burqas, while many men have quit smoking and drinking. Failure to conform has led to strong criticism and even risk of being ostracized from the community.

In recent years, pictures of girls showing skin on social media have received insulting comments, while women wearing T-shirts in public have reportedly been abused for their lack of modesty. Village officials say many local Uyghurs have stopped dancing their traditional dances as music is prohibited, and family members of the deceased no longer offer guests the traditional Nazer meal at funerals.

Hong Kong's Phoenix Weekly also reported that many teenagers in southern Xinjiang look up to Taliban soldiers as heroes and hang pictures of them on their walls.

What is clear despite this alarming movement, however, is that Beijing is putting up a fight in Xinjiang, Duowei says, pointing to numerous reports of authorities cracking down hard on terrorist organizations, hideouts and training facilities.

Recent reports state that public securities have also targeted the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and materials online, and that police have busted as many as 23 suspected terror groups, arrested more than 200 people and seized over 200 explosive devices this month.

During a meeting of China's decision-making Politburo on May 26, Communist Party leaders discussed further measures to ensure stability in Xinjiang, including improving economic development, ethnic unity, bilingual education, promoting societal values and observance of the law, as well as putting an end to religious extremism.

The Global Times, a tabloid under the auspices of the party mouthpiece People's Daily, also reported that a recent survey of nine Chinese cities revealed that 90% of citizens supported tougher anti-terror legislation.

 

[Costas]

Michael Rank, "Orwell in China: Big Brother in every bookshop"
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 23, No. 2, June 9, 2014.

(...)
The first, and probably the best known, of the many Chinese translations of Nineteen Eighty-four published on the Mainland is by Dong Leshan 董乐山 (1924-99), who, like Orwell, was an independent-minded socialist and who like almost all Chinese intellectuals suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution. Dong, who translated the first PRC edition of the novel that was published in 1979, wrote a remarkably frank introduction which is downloadable here in an edition published by the Liaoning Educational Publishing House in 1998. “Orwell is not a so-called anti-communist writer in the general meaning of the phrase, and Nineteen Eighty-four is not simply a so-called anti-Soviet work….Orwell was first and foremost a socialist, and next he was anti-totalitarian and his struggle against totalitarianism is the inevitable result of his belief in socialism,” Dong declared. “He believed that only if totalitarianism is defeated can socialism be victorious.” Dong’s condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality and authoritarianism is clear enough, and becomes even more direct when he praises Orwell for not being like those Western intellectuals in the 1930s who “paid homage to the ‘new Mecca’ [Stalin's Soviet Union] and were led by the nose through ‘Potemkin villages’ and when they returned raved how they had seen the bright sunshine of a new world.” (Dong was too astute to mention the Western leftists who praised Mao’s China in the 1960s and 70s in similar awestruck terms). But Dong saved his most daring critique for last, concluding with the words: “The twentieth century will soon be over, but political terror still survives and this is why Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid today. In any case so far as we are concerned, only if we thoroughly negate the terror of totalitarianism associated with the ‘Cultural Revolution’ can those people who fought for socialism for so many years bring about true socialism which is worth aspiring to.”
(...)
Αναφέρεται και το ζήτημα της μετάφρασης ή μη του Τελευταίου Πειρασμού του Καζαντζάκη ως highly controversial, χωρίς όμως εξηγήσεις.

 

[Costas]

Έβλεπα BBC προ ημερών και ο ανταποκριτής ήταν στο Πεκίνο και μ' ένα τηλεφώνημα κι ένα ραντεβού στο δρόμο λίγο αργότερα αγόρασε για 60 δολάρια μια άδεια εργασίας λόγω ασθενείας με σφραγίδα κανονικού γιατρού και κανονικού νοσοκομείου (είπε), ώστε να μπορέσει να δει το Μουντιάλ σε εργάσιμη ώρα. Του την έφεραν με ντελίβερυ, δηλ. με παπί...

 

[AoratiMelani]

Φανταστικό...
Εγώ παρακολούθησα τις τρεις τελευταίες μέρες στο κανάλι της Βουλής ένα ντοκιμαντέρ του BBC για την σύγχρονη Κίνα, πολύ ενδιαφέρον. Κάποια πράγματα τα ήξερα, αλλά βολεύει για μας τους αδιάβαστους να μας τα σερβίρουν απλά και συμπυκνωμένα.