The protests

For someone who cares an awful lot about China, the country's recent anti-Carrefour, anti-Tibetan-freedom-activists, pro-nationalism, ultimately-pro-government protests have been hard to watch.  But I do think this moment in history will, in the end, have been for the best.

For one thing, the experience will be good for international human rights campaigners.  It will no longer be possible to deal with China in the abstract, as some symbol of Communist authoritarianism or of tradition versus modernity or of capitalism minus democracy.  China will no longer be a stage for noble dissidents and beleaguered masses and heartless authorities, but a more confusing place altogether.

Activists will, I think, come to realize that they have to get into the mess of a complex society if they want to accomplish anything.  They will have to choose fights and make compromises---and prudently refuse to make compromises, too, and know the consequences and take them anyway. It will no longer seem natural to address all petitions to Party Secretaries and heads of foreign corporations.   But it will be tough as hell to find out who to address a petition to at all---like it is in any other country.

This experience will matter the most, probably, for the Chinese people---though it will take a while for it to really matter.   At present--to generalize grossly--young people, particularly those of the middle class, who have largely put aside their politics (or hidden their politics in private conversations) for "concrete" things like jobs and a new-found pride in a rising nation, are feeling hurt.   Fine.  Maybe they've been criticized unfairly too often over the years.  But sometime, when things have settled down, they will have to mull over what exactly it is that the world is so upset over.

Most pressing in the list of things to be mulled: 

I.  While it may be fine to criticize the Western media for its biases,  why are Chinese people still served by a media that took ages to even acknowledge protests abroad, which acted as if the protests / riots of March 14 were the beginning and end of the Tibetan uprising (and that Han and Hui were the only victims), and which has shown about as much reflection---with some important exceptions (such as Chang Ping's and He Yanguang's posts, though neither of these are directly connected to the journalists' respective papers)---as the announcements on the web page of the Chinese Embassy in Washington?

II.  And what does it mean to occupy a people?  Historical arguments and developmentalist rhetoric aside, do Tibetans seem thrilled to be ruled by the People's Armed Police and tour buses and railroads and policies for settling nomads?  And if not, what does that mean for a young person with morals living in Beijing?  

III.  Finally, who really represents China?  For a couple decades, the country's focus has been on its cities, which have rushed ahead at an earth-shaking pace.   But far off, portions of Tibet and Xinjiang are run like military garrisons.  And people there don't want to be a part of China, at least many of them don't.  And closer in, farmers are fighting pitched battles with land grabbing officials, while the prices of feed and oil are undercutting the benefits (for farmers) of rising food prices. Where are these people in the country's national self-image?

Sometimes, China, the massive country, seems a lot like Washington, DC, the powerful mini-city: sharp class divides, a polished exterior, and a defensiveness about taking the "insider" path. But in both places there are unpredictable currents that can change what is "normal" and upset the "status quo" while no one is looking.  For good and for bad.

Right now, China might be most similar to America right after 9/11---proud and hurt and ordering "freedom fries" (the French, interestingly, being the targets in both cases).  But I think---or hope---that things will change.  

And I hope that the world will be engaged with China in a way that will allow it to be a part of those changes, not just cheering or booing from the sidelines.

Zhang Qingli and stupidity and violence

In my last post I mentioned Tibet's Party Secretary, Zhang Qingli.  I quoted his silly talk about Tibetans being children and the Central Party Committee being their Buddha (via Shanghaiist). And I called him essentially a caricature of the colonialists of old--the British, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French and the Americans.

China Vitae shows that Zhang previously held posts in Gansu (where there are large numbers of Tibetans and Hui Muslims) and "is currently a member of the standing committee of the CPC Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Regional Committee, deputy secretary of the CPC Xinjiang Production and Construction Crops Committee and commander of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Crops." Xinjiang? I didn't know you could hold two such scattered posts like that, but is this man supposed to be a sort of go-to person for "national minorities"?

Willy Lam furthermore reports in Asia Sentinel that Mr. Zhang is part of a larger "Tibet Faction" of Hu Jintao cronies from the General Secretary's own days in Lhasa in the 1980s.

Now, it may be that the ongoing Tibetan uprising will push Hu Jintao to fire some members of his "Tibet Faction."  It may even be that the Central Committee will lose its faith in Hu's understanding of areas like Tibet and force a broader change in policy.  But the fact that bone-headed policies like those pursued in Tibet---forced relocations, grossly uneven economic development, interference in religious traditions, violence toward dissenters, hysterical scapegoating of the Dalai Lama---have been allowed to go on for so long speaks to a bigger problem.  

That problem is the belief that stupid decisions are OK because the state can always use violence to deal with any consequences of the decisions.  Building a massive dam and moving people from their homes and then discovering that the dam isn’t as great as it was cracked up to be is a bummer, but ultimately OK—the PAP can deal with any unrest.  Allowing multinational corporations to brutally exploit workers is not the best way of doing things (maybe things should be more "scientific" and "harmonious"), but it is, again, ultimately OK—the police and mafia can deal with any unrest.  And pursuing outdated policies toward “national minorities” may be in need of review, but it’s OK—the PLA can deal with any unrest. 

No End in Sight, a recent documentary on a different occupation, the American occupation of Iraq, shows that the need for violence multiplies with each stupid decision.  Until, in the end, no amount of violence is enough. 

On the uprising

After the uprising in Lhasa, protests have spread to what China calls the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan and Tibetans view as greater Tibet. Horsemen have galloped, waiving the banned Tibetan flag at lines of riot police.  Forty protesting middle-schoolers have been arrested. Students at the National Minorities University in Beijing held a silent vigil with candles.  Tibetan blogger Woeser, under house arrest in Beijing, is posting information on a still-expanding circle of unrest.

And images have surfaced of bodies wrapped in white against a wall in Sichuan Province with a crowd gathered around them dumbfounded.  Eight bodies have been brought to a Sichuan monastery.  A middle-schooler was reported shot dead in Ngaba.  Reports by Tibetan exile groups put the Lhasa death count at 80-100 Tibetans.  The Chinese government has highlighted the deaths of over a dozen Han Chinese at the hands of mobs early in the protests, though it has now also conceded that four people were “wounded” by gunfire from police in Sichuan (after first saying that they were “killed” and then hastily changing the story). Footage by foreign journalists shows endless military convoys climbing mountain roads onto the Tibetan plateau.

What is the best way to understand all this? 

Western political leaders have implied that the Tibetan uprising springs from a lack of respect for the Tibetan religion on the Chinese government’s part and from Beijing’s lack of dialogue with the Tibetan government in exile. Both of these assertions—I wrote they were “implied” because they can only be read backward from leaders’ tepid calls for “respect” and “dialogue”—are, of course true.  But if Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and the Party Secretary of Tibet, Zhang Qingli, just showed more “respect” for Buddhism (by, say, building a slew of temples, like those built recently around China) and continued their on-again off-again talks with Dharamsala… well, we’d be where we are right now.  It doesn’t touch the fundamentals.

Blogger Chunzhu uses Amy Chua’s concept of “market dominant minorities” to explain the anger and violence exhibited by Lhasa protesters toward Han and Hui residents.  “Market dominant minorities,” according to Amy Chua, are groups—she uses Indians in Africa, Jews in Russia and Chinese in Southeast Asia as examples—that enjoy a privileged place in a given society, benefiting from market reforms, receiving political protection, and arousing the anger of the ethnic majority, especially as the majority transitions to democracy.  Minus the democracy part, the analogy works well for the Tibetan situation.  But, as Chunzhu acknowledges, it only really applies to one aspect of the uprising—the violence against Han Chinese, the "market dominant minority" of Tibet.

In an excellent op-ed in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Andrew Fischer gives a more expansive economic explanation. He writes, "Beijing has been trying to convince us that the marginally improved material conditions of the average Tibetan somehow absolve all previous sins.  Yet superficial incantations of statistical indicators tell us little about people's ability to control their lives within the context of the dramatic social and economic changes that lie behind such statistics."  Fischer then lists several mistakes of Beijing’s “western development” strategy. They are worth quoting at length:

The first and most fundamental [mistake] has been Beijing's fast track strategy to "develop" Tibet through the force of massive amounts of subsidies and subsidized investments, the newly constructed railway being one such example. These strategies have resulted in rapidly rising inequalities, to a level much higher than that observed anywhere else in China, where rising inequality is already a source of great concern.

The second oft-noted trend is a corollary of the first; the in-migration of non-Tibetans (most Han Chinese) from elsewhere in China. The railway has increased the number of these migrants, although this is primarily due to subsidies, not the existence of the railway infrastructure itself.

The third trend has been the abandonment of most previously-existing mechanisms to protect local labor in the context of such out-of-province migrant inflows. This trend is particularly important because it affects the upward aspirations of many relatively well educated urban Tibetan youths. For instance, the government recently ended its policy of guaranteeing employment for local high school and university graduates. As elsewhere in China, the old system has been replaced with competitive exams for the coveted posts of state-sector employment, although the exams, as elsewhere in China, are in the Chinese language. As a result, even relatively well educated Tibetans are easily out-competed by Han Chinese migrants, even Han Chinese migrants from Chinese rural area.

The fourth trend has been the tightening of political control by the government in response to rising tensions.

All that Fischer says rings true.  But the deeper, more cutting and---I think---the best explanation of what is happening is a rather old-fashioned explanation: colonialism.  No, not, perhaps, colonialism like that seen in the first wave of imperial expansion, the one led by Britain, France, the Netherlands and the U.S.  But like the second wave, if you want to call it that, the one China shared with Indonesia, India, Pakistan and plenty of others, all post-colonial states themselves.  

These nations came away from humiliation at the hands of Western imperialism (and a particularly brutal Japanese imperialism, too, in China’s case) with a desire to reconstitute their past, to reconstitute not just their culture but the full swath of land that they could conceivably have ever claimed as their own culturally or politically (East Timor and West Papua for Indonesia; Kashmir and the princely states for India; Balochistan and what is now the Northwest Frontier Province for Pakistan; Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet for China)—whether the residents of those lands shared the same dreams or not.

Tibet is ruled by the military, PAP and police.  The central government decides to relocate Tibetan nomads into cement towns and it just does it---with even less openness to dissent or even discussion than in the Han countryside, where violent, forced relocations are also common. It has never had a Tibetan Party Secretary (to my knowledge).   Zhang Qingli, the current Secretary is quoted as saying, "The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need.  The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans."  A British colonialist couldn't have said something nastier.

A violent response by Tibetans---and, to be clear, the response so far has not been as violent as it might have been in just about anywhere else in the world---is natural.

Frantz Fanon, the Algerian freedom fighter and psychiatrist wrote, “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." More specifically, "By its very nature, colonialism is separatist and regionalist.... Violence is in action all-inclusive and rational."  And, "At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force.  It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."

Mahmood Mamdani writes in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:

Fanon has come to be regarded as a prophet of violence.... [but Fanon's writing] was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between settler and the native.  It was a claim that anticolonial violence is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress, that it is indeed the midwife of history.  And last and most important, it was a warning…”

Defending Wright

The spectacle of right wing preachers predicting the destruction of all Jews who don't convert to Christianity (after, of course, Israel is safely secured from the dastardly Palestinians for the end times)... and an epic war to the death with Islam... and rambling on about Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks being the result of homosexuality... and calling the Catholic Church some rather nasty names... and getting just a passing tsk tsk from the media... or, less dramatically, offering themselves as cheerleaders for a war of aggression against the Iraqi people and against international law... or slapping down any of their newer, younger converts who happen to care about frivolous things like climate change or poverty... is pretty lame. 

Still, hey, it's their opinion.  And we've had their opinion explained to us ad nauseum on TV and radio and in paperback books in grocery stores and by a few people we know.  It's an idiotic opinion on the face of it and it's a dangerous one, enabling power and violence on an awesome scale despite--or because of--its patent silliness. Still, fair enough. 

But how is it is beyond the pale to in turn explain to America a Pastor who has been active combating HIV/AIDS, active in the anti-apartheid struggle, active in, yes,  supporting the Palestinian people and active in building a close-knit church?  And who---horrors!---feels some real bitterness toward this country?  

Or, a tad more controversially, why can't we explain someone who was involved in the Weather Underground and doesn't feel like it was a total mistake?  Someone who saw a brutal conflict, the Vietnam War, and racial inequality at home as justifying a militant response?  And who has worked tirelessly in local politics ever since to right the same wrongs he saw then as they recur today?

It may not be the best time now, in the midst of a political campaign, but sometime, when the dust settles, we should speak up clearly for radical veterans of the 1960s, who have become the backbones of communities across this country.  We shouldn't conveniently dismiss them as an equal (and equally regrettable) Left aberration, symmetrical with the fascists of the Far Right. We shouldn't just explain them, as Obama eloquently did in the Huffington Post, as relics of the past.  We should actually defend them.

NPC, CPPCC and the Right

Of the annual "two meetings" held in March, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee (CPPCC) always feels like the neglected younger brother of the National People's Congress (NPC). The CPPCC is described best by China.gov:

It is composed of the CPC, other political parties, mass organizations, different ethnic groups and representative public personages from all walks of life, representatives of compatriots of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao as well as of returned overseas Chinese and other specially invited people.

Ever since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, many major issues concerning economic construction, political life, social life and the united front have gone through consultation in the CPPCC. Such consultation may take the form of full discussion and repeated exchanges of opinions so that the policies, regulations and laws taken by the state are adequate and well-prepared, in conformity with the demands and wishes of the great majority of the people and in due respect to the rational ideas of the minority.

So, basically, the CPPCC doesn't enact legislation (as the NPC does). It just gathers together the legal smaller parties--- The Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomingtang (the wing of the KMT that stayed behind on the mainland), The Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, The China Democratic National Construction Association (the party of businesspeople), etc.---and random others and"consults" with them, provided, of course, that their ideas are "rational."

Recently, the buzz coming out the CPPCC has been one of a rather nasty "rationalism." Pro-business groups have used the forum to push back against tax laws and the Labor Contract Law. As the Telegraph reports:

Miss Zhang [a tycoon and CPPCC delegate], whose paper recycling firm grew from nothing a decade ago to see her valued at £1.7 billion in the latest China rich lists, said those earning more than £84,000 a year - a huge sum in China - should have their top tax rate cut from 45 per cent to 30 per cent.

She also attacked the country's new labour law, which, in theory, provides workers with similar protections - apart from free trade unions - to counterparts in Europe.

She said it should be amended to exempt labour-intensive industries from a clause which provides almost unbreakable contracts to employees with more than 10 years' service.

Xinhua sees this kind of activism as an encouraging development in terms of deepening democracy--and it is. Real debate is always, of course, refreshing. The more the better.

However, there is something of a pattern at work here. We heard similar crowing in regards to the space provided to the public to criticize the Labor Contract Law when it was still a draft, a space that was quickly dominated by Western business groups and Chinese liberal (i.e. pro-market) intellectuals.

While the NPC and CPPCC have often heard complaints about labor rights (and Wen Jiabao highlighted employment standards in his work report to the NPC this year), outbursts like Miss Zhang's have been largely absent from the Left. Where are the farmers and workers? Why don't we hear about them pounding the table and demanding this and that? And wouldn't it, Xinhua, be encouraging if they did?

Looks like the shadow of Jiang Zemin still hangs over these chambers.

Saigon Grill strike continues

I got the following e-mail from Justice Will Be Served, a "campaign that
unites restaurant, hotel, deli, and other service workers in different communities across New York to fight against long hours, second-class wages, stolen tips and other sweatshop conditions."

On February 14, 2008 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a decision ordering Saigon Grill Restaurant to 1) restore its delivery service at its two locations in the UWS and in Union Square, 2) reinstate all 28 delivery workers, and 3) pay workers their lost earnings. The delivery workers were fired in early March 2007, and have been picketing the restaurant every week for the past year to demand reinstatement. In the past year, their example has inspired countless other workers to stand with them on the picket line and organize workers at other restaurants, including Ollies' Noodle Shop and Grille, Republic Restaurant, among others. At Flor de Mayo Restaurant on the UWS, Latino delivery workers are uniting with Chinese delivery workers in this united effort to end sweatshop conditions in NYC restaurants. Workers are now calling for a boycott of Flor de Mayo's two locations. But when workers started to take their fight to the courts, bosses resorted to retaliatory tactics, including firings and blacklisting. This decision is an important step in the restaurant workers' movement, and sends a message to all bosses that we will not allow them to use firing and business closing as tactics to stamp out worker organizing.

However, Saigon Grill owners Simon and Michelle Nget act as if they are above U.S. labor laws and tax laws. They continue to snub the workers, the community, and elected officials who have given many opportunities for the restaurant to resolve this labor dispute. The owners continue to cheat the workers of their wages and their tax withholding. They continue to cheat the workers and the public. Furthermore, they undermine law-abiding businesses.

This is an incredibly inspiring campaign that brings to mind some of the most beautiful moments in labor history: when people of different backgrounds have united for basic fairness---and have grown inside themselves, too, in the process.

Corporate flight--remedies?

According to a study by Booz Allen and the notorious American Chamber of Commerce Shanghai (yes, the AmCham chapter famous for its anti-Labor Contract Law letter with the social Darwinist language):

Nearly one in five companies surveyed (17 percent) say they have concrete plans to relocate at least some of their China-based operations to other countries. Although 88 percent of these corporations say that they originally chose China for its lower labor costs, they are finding that cheaper labor and tax benefits have made alternative locations more attractive. Among these corporations, Vietnam is the top alternative to China, according to 63 percent of this group, while 37 percent say India is their first choice.

Among all respondents, when asked to compare China to alternate countries, they cited lower labor costs in those other countries as the largest differentiator, at 3.7 out of a scale of 5, indicating that China's reputation as a source of cheap manufacturing labor is diminishing.

If the surveyed companies are representative, this gives some startling numbers for the trend described in my earlier post.

The flight of sweatshops, as I and many others have said, may not be a disaster, but simply a part of positive long-term change for China's workers--China is banking on the growth of higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs filling the gap. But in the short-term, it is important to slow this drift or local officials in China may panic and dig in their feet on enforcement of ANY labor laws---not just the Labor Contract Law---and future pro-labor reforms may be delayed, including efforts to beef up the ACFTU.

The Asia Floor Wage Campaign presents one possible method for preventing investment flight (see the Campaign's still-under-construction website). Vietnam may be interested in agreeing to sharing a few basic labor conditions with China, if only in order to cool down Vietnamese workers, who have launched a wave of brave wildcat strikes. But how serious would Vietnam really be? Or Cambodia? Or India?

There may be other avenues. An argument could actually be made for companies staying from a business perspective. Besides higher labor costs, the Booz Allen / AmCham report notes, "staff retention is also a major concern" for firms in China "with 33 percent of respondents citing it as a reason for lost competitiveness."

The Fair Labor Association's Auret van Heerden notes the same problem and makes the obvious conclusion in a Newsweek interview:

Sure, you're going to have to register a lot of workers now, pay the minimum wage, give benefits. But this will lead to a much more stable and productive workplace. Before, in some places we've seen 100 percent labor turnover per year. We've never captured the costs that entails in training. Firms have been bleeding ridiculous amounts of money because they've had such an unstable workforce.

Now, I'm not one for bending over backwards to justify everything through this lens---that's a sure way of painting yourself into a corner. But it seems that companies who aren't too caught up in the whole cowboy-capitalist-in-a-new-lawless-land ethos might be interested.

Labor Contract Law having an effect

Those who dismiss the new Labor Contract Law as window-dressing by the Chinese government have some pretty concrete changes to explain.

Companies are leaving the coast for the inland or other countries. It's a fact. The departure of Korean firms has been especially dramatic. From AP:

In Qingdao alone, about 200 mostly small and medium-sized factories closed down without paying wages and taxes, said Kim Oh-ryong, deputy director of the China division at South Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy.

If you set up a Google news alert for the terms "China" and "labor" you will get a rash of dire pieces from industry publications and bloggers. See, for example, this observation from Seeking Alpha:

Many factories in the Southern part of China will be closing before Chinese New Year and not reopening. The new labor law instituted by the Chinese government is too much for many of the marginal factories to absorb.

It is important to note that many of these factory owners, while bemoaning the new Labor Contract Law, are not really reacting to provisions in the law itself, but are focusing on social security payments, wages, hours, emergency exits----stuff they were ALWAYS required to pay! In other words, the new legislation is being read not so much as legislation at all but as an omen of greater government scrutiny.

It may be that companies will calm down. But if they don't, it seems that the Chinese government is not panicking. Beijing knows it has to begin to move beyond its reliance on sweatshops into more high-tech industries---it is simply impossible to compete forever with Southeast Asia on being cheap and it makes no sense to endlessly depress domestic consumption.

China has actually raised minimum wages in many places since the law's passage ( in response to inflation first and foremost, of course). China Labour Bulletin acknowledges that the ACFTU may be starting to take its roles seriously---in Shenzhen at least. CLB has further noted recent prosecutions of company bosses. In an interview with The New Republic's website, Han Dongfang even says (not in quotes):

... the government is starting to sanction NGOs that assist workers, so long as they don't challenge the ruling party.

Doubt about implementation of the Labor Contract Law is understandable. Criticisms of the government for not doing enough are always in order. But dismissing the law as completely useless, as some have done, just doesn't match with the reality on the ground.

And it is a disservice to the many activists in China working hard to build on these new opportunities.

America now and then

I just read some essays from a collection ("Styles of Radical Will") that Susan Sontag published in 1966.  Throughout, I was struck by the difference that forty years have made.

Sontag's chronicle of a solidarity mission to North Vietnam during the war ("Trip to Hanoi") is as honest an attempt to sort out cross-cultural interactions as I've ever read, avoiding both the temptations of a know-it-all travelogue on the one hand and extreme self-consciousness and self-criticism on the other. But her musings about different modes of thinking, East vs. West, revolutionary societies vs. the United States, comes across as quaint today. 

It is incredible how much more familiar Asia now feels to Americans than when she wrote the essay and how concrete and mundane conflicts in different lands now appear---even if, unusually, those conflicts are in fact rooted in deep political convictions as, I believe, the Vietnam War was. Social science, with its numbers and comparisons, its economics and its models and "failed states", has won out, for now, over the epic, the ideologue.  

Her response to a series of questions from Partisan Review ("What's Happening in America") feels even more revealing period-wise.  Sontag blasts all of us for "the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture" and concludes that "today's America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing." Addressing the Vietnam War, Sontag implies that violence and tackiness extend from our culture to our foreign policy.

She defends the counter-culture.  But she does so as essentially a reaction to the hopelessly corrupt mainstream---mainstream America AND the mainstream of the Old Left ("no need for dismay if the kids don't continue to pay the old dissenter-gods [Freud and Marx] obeisance").

What we want now, in 2008, is, basically, the opposite.

People long for a tradition to be a part of.  I think the popularity of the Obama celebrity music video lies in part in how it ties today's young people to "union organizers" and "abolitionists" and, of course, through its monumental feel, to Dr. King---mighty traditions, mightier than anything people can think of today.  

The same, to a lesser degree, goes for the old-fashioned silkscreen Obama posters you see sometimes, the return of Johnny Cash to center stage near his death, the craze for revolutionary green caps, boot jeans and singers channeling the IWW or Pete Seeger (the Springsteen album before last, for example). Or Wild West TV shows ("Deadwood") and movies ("3:10 to Yuma," "There Will Be Blood," "The Assassination of Jesse James," "No Country for Old Men," etc., etc.")---wild west stuff having long been a playground for progressive narratives.  

Not real populist stuff, most of this---not any more than the folksy symbols in a Ben Harper album's artwork.  

But what people want now is not to trash unthinking squares and jingoists---the targets of Sontag's ire---but to have some sort of affirmation that the Left and progress are rooted in squares, too.

Spielberg's resignation

Steven Spielberg's resignation from his role as artistic director for the 2008 Olympics is starting to make an impact on the Chinese net. Danwei and Global Voices Online have a number of translations from the brewing debate.

Predictably, nationalists have jumped on the news with acid scorn for the director. More disappointing, the cynical real politik you sometimes hear from Chinese university students has reared its head--"the West is just trying to edge China out of Sudanese oil for its own interests," "this is how big powers behave and now we are a big power," etc. Sure, the U.S. has its own record in regards to fossil fuels and violence, but for young people in other countries to be pumping that as a role model for their own leaders really drains the air out of the room. It is like the formation of an international wing of the Young Republicans.

And outright baffling--as much as one should be prepared for it--is how little sense there seems to be on the Chinese net of how NORMAL it is for activist groups to campaign on an issue, that not every organization is the mouthpiece for some foreign government (though some, of course, are part-time) and that, yes, plenty of citizens in plenty of countries demand a say in their countries' foreign policies.

But other voices have joined in, too. Danwei translates a post by Wang Xiaoyu that sarcastically praises Spielberg's collaborator, Zhang Yimou, who has not quit his position in the Games, as "China's Riefenstahl" and ends with this:

A PhD student at Renmin University who is relatively familiar with international affairs told Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao that he has frequently heard the name Darfur in the news, but he is not at all clear what the situation there has to do with China, or why people want to boycott the Beijing Olympics over this: "It's truly mystifying." This PhD student is full proof that our higher education system is completely successful. Congratulations.

Other Chinese bloggers have laid out short chronologies of the Darfur conflict for readers (see John Kennedy's translation here).

The point is that this thing is spreading. Will it change Chinese policy overnight? No. But if you really want to influence Zhongnanhai by putting pressure on it where it really feels pressure, you go to the one relationship that keeps Chinese leaders up at night: not their relationship with Sudan or even the United States, but their relationship with their own people.

When the government has to respond to the growing online discussion--and it will respond, even if the discussion ends up lopsided toward the nationalist, anti-Spielberg faction--then another entry point has been created.

An entry point for foreign interference? No, people in China will make up their own minds. But an entry point for an issue, for making it REAL to the P.R.C.

Australia returning to Asia?

New Australian PM Kevin Rudd is a welcome change. From BBC:

The last asylum seekers have left Australia's detention camp on Nauru, putting an end to the controversial "Pacific Solution" immigration policy.

Maybe Australia will now really begin to think again about what it means to be part of Asia---not in terms of meetings with the leaders of different countries and fanciful talk of some sort of grand democracy alliance (with India and Japan), but as just another country in the region.

Australia is a white settler country, like the U.S. or Canada (though arguably with a stronger indigenous movement), and it is a continent in its own right. But it is also an increasingly diverse society and is tied to the same issues affecting Indonesia, Vietnam, China...

The snow

The media routinely says a whole host of things threaten the power of China's ruling Party--the internet, religion, protesting farmers, rock and roll, the middle class (?) and the market.

But when we really, truly see the CCP shaking, it is because of failures to fulfill the routine tasks required of any state. This week's snowstorm and the government's clumsy response, which resulted in Wen Jiabao apologizing to tens of thousands of huddled workers waiting for delayed trains home, was such an instance. The failures of authorities were understandable in a way (snow like that doesn't usually fall in the southeast of China) but the country's overweighted power lines (spaced too far apart to save money) and inability to provide adequate emergency housing were serious mistakes---and were compounded by galling calls for workers to celebrate Spring Festival, the biggest holiday of the year, inside their factories. Which had closed.

The SARS epidemic and its coverup in 2003-2004 was another such instance. The recent protests against the Xiamen PX chemical plant and the Shanghai mag-lev train extension also fall in this category: the government failed in both instances to properly inform the public about its (poorly conceived) development plans. So too, in a way, do the environmental disasters that have sent people into the streets.

Does this mean that people in China are fine with authoritarianism just so long as, in a phrase borrowed from Mussolini's time but appropriate today, "it can make the trains run on time"?

I don't think this is the case, at least not any more the case for the Chinese than for any other people.

A comparison with President Bush's failure to provide timely relief to the residents of New Orleans is instructive: this failure was seen, quite rightly, as symptomatic of residents' everyday experience of racism and disregard for the poor.

Government and market incompetence on a grand scale remind people of the small indignities they have suffered at the hands of the government and market. The middle class is reminded of the red tape and paperwork and corruption and insensitive government projects that stifle their small businesses and disrupt their housing developments. Working people think of the general callousness of employers and cops.

Another argument for Obama

The Clintons are good at both gaining and maintaining power. There are other things to like about the couple (Bill’s brave refusal to trim away affirmative action comes to mind, as does, of course, Hillary’s failed attempt at national health care reform). But it is the Clintons’ power that Democrats miss most.

Hillary Clinton could probably win the general election this fall. And then after four or eight years we’d have another grand Republican resurgence. Then some mediocre Bush Sr.-style Republican. Then a centrist Democrat. And around and around.

Obama wouldn’t change everything. But I do think he has the best chance of resetting the default temperature of American politics, of keeping the left-right-left-right pendulum from not swinging back quite as hard to the right in the future, of making liberalism (yes, just liberalism, sigh, not leftism) “American” again.

I must confess to a less straightforward reason for supporting Obama, too, though. Please bear with me, as I might not explain this as exactly as I would like.

For China, America’s racism has always been a reason to discount its democracy and, as the U.S. is seen by many there as the archetypal democracy—rightly or wrongly—America’s problems are taken as an excuse for writing off the concept of democracy as a whole. An America that can move beyond its racism, not totally, clearly, but at least in a very symbolic way by electing a black president, can present a real challenge to authoritarianism.

An America that elects Obama and not Clinton II, says, moreover, that mistakes count against a politician, that the people can keep score. The Clintons’ support for the Iraq War was a major mistake, a mistake not diminished by the fact that the couple shared it with much of the U.S. political elite. China is something of a meritocracy still—bad marks on an official’s record hold him back, good marks mean a promotion—but imagine if a mistake, an unnecessary dam, say, or mine deaths that ran to the thousands in a year, or just rampant inflation really put a question mark on someone at Zhongnanhai?

Or think if being a community organizer and state senator who introduced taped police interrogations meant more to the U.S. electorate in terms of “experience” than an extra, wasted Senate term and a half?

This is silly, of course. Only a very conceited nation would think of its election in terms of the example it sets for the world. But still…

Bandung and Bali

Over half a century ago, in April 1955, Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference or the “Asian-African Conference” (or “African-Asian Conference”). In a statement implicitly critical of both the United States and the Soviet Union, the attendees—who represented twenty-nine countries and more than half the world’s population—condemned “colonialism in all of its manifestations.”

Beyond its lofty principles, the conference is remembered for the friendship on display between two attendees in particular, China’s Zhou Enlai and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders that would be divided by deepening suspicion and a border war in the years ahead.

Reports from the recently concluded Bali conference on global warming had echoes of Bandung, as when Kevin Conrad, the delegate from Papua New Guinea spoke:

“We seek your leadership,” he said referring to the United States. “But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.”

Or comments by Kapil Sibal the Indian Minister of Science and Technology:

"Those who want to remain on the periphery of the protocol but want to ask developing countries to bear the burden. That is against the spirit of the multilateral agreement and not acceptable.''

Or, finally, at the end of the conference:

Xie Zhenhua, China’s lead delegate at the conference, took the floor and welcomed on the United States “onto this bus.” But he quickly added: “The United States is not in the driver’s seat.”

The presence of wealthy European and North American states alongside developing world countries (“Third World” having disappeared as a potent political term and even become somewhat un-pc since Zhou and Nehru’s generation) made Bali different. The old dividing lines have clearly blurred—for better or worse.

But that sense from the old Bandung conference that something big is at stake (global warming being undeniably "big") and that differences of rich and poor matter, that we're not all in the same boat, not yet... that was there again.

[Photos courtesy of NY Times and Memo]

More on class struggle in airline seating

The New York Times agrees with me about the brutal class system aboard airplanes:

It’s that insubstantial curtain that is drawn after we reach altitude, the one that pretends to protect decadent first-class activities — it cannot be lap-dancing, orgies or the tango — from the purportedly covetous eyes of the rest of us. What that curtain really does, its sole purpose, believe me, is to keep us from using the toilet up there.

...and...

To be blunt, I now hate those people in first class and whatever system deposits them there. Hi, Karl Marx, did you say class system? Sometimes, I imagine myself as Pirate Jenny in “The Threepenny Opera”: kill them now, or later?

In truth, when the revolution comes in an airline cabin, it will be a petit bourgeois revolution. The organization World Development Movement, in making an argument for a tax on aviation to pay for poverty relief, notes:

Flying is an activity dominated primarily by the rich. The richest 18 per cent of the UK population are responsible for 54 per cent of flights, whilst the poorest 18 per cent are responsible for just 5 per cent. The average salary of passengers at UK airports is £48,000.

So, when the first class sections are dismantled and distributed evenly, cushion by cushion, martini by martini, personal DVD player by personal DVD player, it will only be one step on the way. It will be the Sun Yatsen to the Mao Zedong!

Collective bargaining under new law

One little wrinkle in China’s new Labor Contract Law:

Whereas in the past workers could engage in collective bargaining through their own chosen representatives if there was no ACFTU branch in their workplace (according to the Labor Law and Regulations on Collective Contracts), they may now (only?) do so “under the guidance of the next-higher level union.” China Labour Bulletin has more details in its new report available here.

Of course, in practice the ACFTU has always tended to intervene anyway. So, is this really a step backward? Or something positive that will push the ACFTU to engage in more collective bargaining? We’ll have to see how it’s implemented…

Also, there's more great coverage from Global Labor Strategies and Beijing Newspeak on the law.

The U.S. on Pakistan = India and China on Burma

General Musharraf has tear-gassed, beaten and arrested his country's ordinary citizens and civil society. The Supreme Court has been replaced. Opposition party leaders have been silenced (though Bhutto has been left alone and may, finally--just maybe--taking a real stand that puts her outside her carefully managed strategies within strategies). Needless to say, labor activists have not been spared.

Khalid Mahmood of the Labour Education Foundation was arrested (and later released), as was Nisar Shah of the Labour Party. Other arrests included the convener of the Pearl Continental Hotel Workers Solidarity Committee, Liaqat Ali Sahi, and two members of the Solidarity Committee, G. Fareed Awan, Assistant General Secretary of the All-Pakistan Trade Unions Federation (APTUF) and Ayub Qureshi, Information Secretary of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation (PTUF) (see the IUF report). Activists belonging to the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum narrowly escaped arrest in Karachi; workers helped them evade police. Mohammad Ashiq Bhutta, Information Secretary of the National Federation of Food, Beverages and Tobacco Workers, was arrested and later released.

And this is for the war on terror? As Asma Jangahir of the Pakistan Commission for Human Rights stated: "Those he has arrested are progressive, secular minded people while the terrorists are offered negotiations and ceasefires."

More specifically, if Musharraf returns with a coalition of religious parties to hold him in power after all this, it will certainly seem like a cruel joke.

Pakistanis have struggled for decades for real democracy and social justice, through divisions and dictators. And they have voted for religious extremists in lower percentages than Americans have.

Now, an incredible consensus seems to be forming between workers and landless farmers and their advocates, liberals in the form of lawyers and human rights organizations, stodgy party activists, and thousands of citizens who don't fit any specific category. The idea of a Pakistan that trusts itself, that will make its courts matter, that wants to begin again without the military, or without such a domineering military, is taking hold.

Or it is trying to take hold, amid all the confusion and bitterness of what is essentially martial law.

And yet, the U.S. is worried--not so much about the broken skulls and packed prisons, but about that very energy I just described. From The New York Times:

Among Western diplomats, there is rising concern that General Musharraf’s declaration is also damaging the standing of the Pakistani Army as an institution, which has long been seen as the force holding the country together.

“It’s the concern about how the military retains its position as an institution of national respect,” said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “These kinds of things can be damaging to the institution, the respect for the institution and also the morale.”

The "standing of the Pakistani Army"... we're crying for THEM at a time like this?

This is not because American politicians (or "Western diplomats" generally) are so reactionary that the idea of people power makes them scurry into dark places and plot to stab the masses in the back. It's just that they have no sense of how to even talk to the Pakistan people if they had to. Sure, everyone wants democracy, but the military is an old buddy and we just, y'know, feel comfortable around it.

It's a little like the good ol' boy diplomacy of the U.S. in Central America during the Cold War. I'm sure some in the State Department or CIA genuinely wanted fair elections in El Salvador. But if the elections had to be held amid massacres and intimidation, well, at least we could keep our dinners with the elite down there.

And, when things settled down, bones of El Mozote and those murdered nuns largely forgotten, and the rebels too worn out to keep up their dreams, we could teach the "Salvador Option" to young commanders in Iraq.

I'm not saying dash it all to hell. Sure, keep your ties with generals if need be. But for heaven's sakes don't make it be about them. Make it be about the country.

Right now, U.S. rhetoric is sounding a lot closer to China and India's statements on Burma than anything else.

Chinese diaspora photographers at Q Art Space

For those in New York City, there's a great photography show going on at Q Art Space entitled "Intimate Distance." From the its press release:

...a photography exhibition featuring nearly fifty photographs by nine photographers of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. Young, well-traveled, globally-minded, confident and eloquent… these photographers are distinct from artists of the Social Realism, Kitsch and Pop generations.

The exhibit is up from November 8-17. For more information, visit the site: Q Art Space.

Coal deaths down by 50 percent? No.

From China's State Administration of Work and Safety:

Deaths in China's coal mines, the scene of some of the worst industrial carnage, fell from 4.94 per million tons of coal mined in 2002, before the safety law was adopted, to 2.04 last year.

...which begs the question: how much did the production of coal go up between 2002 and last year? The number of deaths in total has not fallen a whole lot.

Hong Kong gangsters and doing what's right

What is so attractive about Hong Kong gangster movies? Obviously, the tough guy stuff has its attractions--and the ballet-like battles in John Woo and Johnny To movies are incredible. But what sets these stories apart from action flicks is the acknowledgment of choices.

Having a criminal at the center of a film forces a certain degree of reflection. If he is to seem at all accessible to viewers, he (and the character is almost always a he) has to acknowledge the pain he causes others by his actions. And if we are to go a step further and actually admire him, the criminal must call on a host of rather old values, values familiar to us from fairy tales, old books with brutal, awkward senses of morality, and our own lives--loyalty, family, honor, redemption.

In crime stories generally, but Hong Kong ones in particular, death takes on a gravity that is almost altogether absent from your typical Hollywood blockbuster.

I've sometimes come out of summer shoot-em-ups--even the ironic stuff of Tarantino and Rodriguez--with a nagging sickness in my stomache. I don't mean to seem holier-than-thou, but I've often felt guilty watching "bad guys" shot down by the dozens without a moment to think about the violence that has just occured. Was that evil henchman really evil?

Chow Yun Fat's characters aren't so certain they are right. In fact, they usually know they are wrong and are searching for some decency to pull them out of the rut they're in--a woman to save, an estranged brother who's a cop, a friend trying to go clean, etc. They play songs on the saxaphone for each of their victims ("The Killer") or make paper cranes for the dead ("Hard Boiled"). And they have hang-dog, worn looks on their faces.

Sometimes, I think American politics could do with a touch of the tragic, a touch of Chow Yun Fat.

A history professor when I was an undergraduate mused that Europeans approach rulers with a history of hundreds of years of lousy kings in mind and therefore have less of a need to airbrush history. The same might be said for China.

America's idealism and simple storylines have sometimes been just what the world is craving. But not now. What is needed is an America that can feel the weight of an awful mistake, of the need to atone, that will not just write off every horror as a "learning experience." It needs to see itself more as a sinner trying to make things right.

Such an America wouldn't allow its president to blanket waterboarding with the lie "America doesn't torture." And such an America would understand the world a bit better.

Reform on the front page

One of China’s most daring papers and the country’s boring, English-language propaganda sheet agree: the People’s Republic will finally begin to open its government.

Or, as Nanfang Dushi Bao (Southern Metropolis Daily) says in its headline, “Expand People’s Democracy, Build Ecological Civilization.” Or as China Daily meanwhile reports, “Political reform ‘will be pursued.’”

Neither explains what any of this means, which is understandable, as we don’t have much to go on but Hu Jintao’s report at the opening of the 17th Party Congress, which was heavy on carefully chosen phrases and a bit sparse on details.

And both papers could have different reasons for the same conclusion.

Nanfang Dushi Bao may be continuing a proud tradition of taking leaders at their words when those words are welcome and then trumpeting those words as loudly as possible in the hope that maybe, just maybe those words—and not other official pronouncements—will come true (O'Brien and Li have called this "rightful resistance" in other contexts). China Daily might just be trying to make foreigners like me happy.

Two, Three, Many Burmas

With the protests in Burma slowed--perhaps only temporarily--I thought I'd post a few updates on the situation:

I wrote earlier wondering what the protests would mean for China. A visit to Boxun's international news page shows Burma, Burma and Burma (and yes, people in China do read Boxun). John Kennedy has a nice translation in Global Voices of Chinese blog posts in support of the protesters. There are plenty of Chinese e-mail calls to action floating around, some of which I've received.

H.H. the Dalai Lama came out in support of the monks early on in clear terms. Archbishop Desmond Tutu just spoke out forcefully, too, linking the repression to the Beijing Games. There were big protests in Japan (who lost a reporter to the repression) and, of course, the Southeast Asian nations neighboring Burma.

The Burmese protests are casting an even wider net, though. Pakistan's civil society was dealt another beating--and tear gassing--the other day when lawyers, political activists (such as Fariq Tarooq, head of the Labor Party of Pakistan) and journalists were brutally attacked by riot police right outside the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Writing in The News, Ayesha Tammy Haq has the following to say:

There are two countries in this world ruled by military dictators, Pakistan and Myanmar, formerly Burma. Both have seen peaceful protests turn violent and currently both are in the news with a new series of protests and resultant police brutality. In Myanmar the monks are out in their orange and rust robes while Pakistan is a sea of black coats. Fortunately for Myanmar, it has in Aung San Suu Kyi a political leader in residence with commitment and vision. We in Pakistan are not as fortunate. Our political leaders, tainted by scandals involving financial malfeasance and stories of power-sharing deals with the very people who carry out these and other excesses, lack moral authority.

Sadly, Haq adds:

While the western powers are willing to condemn the brutality in Myanmar they are not so quick to do so in Pakistan. Burma's military junta is not a part in the so-called war against terror and Al Qaeda is not growing like a fungus in the Shan Mountains.

We can and should demand that Bush act in a more even-handed manner. Certainly, when Israeli troops recently opened fire at a crowd of Palestinians waiting at the Erez crossing in Gaza, wounding a fourteen year old, Bush could have said something. He might also have spoken out about Egypt's recent roundups of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Or come out strongly about the Philippines' grisly record of 33 murdered trade unionists last year.

But the obvious hollowness of the Burmese leaders' recent claim--that criticism of them amounts to neo-colonialism--only serves to emphasize that events in Burma have moved beyond Bush and the support-counter-reaction-support that he inspires. The situation is bigger than him. And it may even be the case in Rangoon, in this one instance, that he can't mess things up.

There might be a wonderful solidarity in the works.

Benedict Anderson describes how novels gave eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century people a sense of nation, the idea of several characters, several lives being lived across a "single" culture in any given instant.

Reading about the beginning of the twentieth century I've often been struck by how people then seem to have felt that they were living something else, even bigger than the nations written of by Anderson, how they identified with struggles in Italy, Russia, Spain, China, etc. The enduring image in my mind (from, admittedly, the novel "Ragtime") is of U.S. workers packing a union hall to raise money for Mexican revolutionaries.

That's all nostalgia on my part--and nostalgia for something before my time, to boot!--but the sympathy that these Burmese protests have ignited abroad is real. I hope it shows the way to a truer movement for democracy--and social justice, too--than has been possible these past nigh-on-eight years.

China and Burma and change

The protests in Burma have reached a critical phase in which the brittle hope of marching monks and ordinary citizens is meeting the Burmese military regime’s first acts of violence. With the United Nations holding its annual summit in New York, attention has naturally focused on the country’s closest friends: India, Russia and China. Sadly, India and Russia have so far been spared the brunt of the world’s indignation, but the pressure that China has received is nonetheless deserved.

The PRC’s ties with Burma go back long before “reform and opening,” despite Burma’s dogged anti-communism (although ties between the countries were strained during the Cultural Revolution, when ethnic Chinese radicals spooked Burmese authorities). As is often noted, China has extensive energy interests in the country (as have Western companies like Unocal). A need to stem the flow of drugs from south of its borders has also drawn Beijing into Burmese politics. So too has the occasional need to burnish China's credentials as a neutral power, saintly uninterested in others' internal affairs.

Editorials, political speeches and protests have demanded a Chinese response to repression of the protests. Only China has any sway in Rangoon! C'mon China, say something!

And China is responding, in its own meandering way. There was China’s rejection of sanctions against Burma today, of course, but also words by Chinese officials regarding “stability” and “reconciliation” and Burma’s need to find its own path to democracy—frustratingly vague words, but hardly supportive of the junta. Why?

There seems to be an impression among some journalists that Beijing is a member of some great, criminal brotherhood of authoritarian states, something like the “Sinister Six” of Spiderman lore or the cackling band of villains in the 1960s Batman TV series. Any threat to any authoritarian state anywhere is viewed as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of the context. The story goes something like this: “China, facing human rights issues at home, would surely not want this or that to happen to such and such awful government…”

In truth, China seems as fine with authoritarian North Korea as it is with liberal South Korea, with a clamped-down, nationalistic Russia as it is with a sleepily generous EU, and, increasingly at least, as comfortable with a Pakistan under occasional military rule as a steadfastly, if unevenly, democratic India. And it goes without saying that ideology in its "left" and "right" sense plays little role in Beijing's calculations.

Reasons for China's support for Burma and for any pressure it has put on the junta--or will put on it--must be found elsewhere.

Isabel Hinton has a great piece in The Guardian entitled “China Does Not Want Another Tiananmen By Proxy” whose title makes a pretty forceful argument by itself.

David Lague writes in the International Herald Tribune about how Beijing has quietly made ties with the Burmese opposition:

…there is evidence that China has been hedging its bets on political developments in Myanmar for some years.
Lintner, the Thailand-based analyst, said Beijing maintained unofficial contacts with exiled Myanmar opposition groups in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries in a bid to minimize their antagonism and to improve its understanding of political developments.

He said Beijing also tolerated the presence of these groups in Ruili, on the border with Myanmar in Yunnan Province, where some maintain unofficial offices.

Naturally, there is also the question of whether China can do anything at all, whether anyone--China, India, Russia, the UN, ASEAN, anyone--has any real influence in Rangoon (see, for example, the rather dry, know-it-all, “let’s hear from a seasoned expat” argument in Foreign Policy).

Another question, though, not touched on much (other than in the caricatured, Sinister Six form) is what exactly the fall of the Burmese junta would mean for China or for other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in the region, such as Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand. What would it mean for Tibet?

Beyond wild hopes of revolution in these places--which it will sadly probably take more than a Burmese uprising to stir--what will it really mean for the spirit of people? The images we see of monks walking through the rain, having their feet bandaged by supportive city residents, and being beaten by soldiers strike a chord of pure sympathy that seems to have been buried, quite wrongly, with the perceived mush of the post-Cold War era (as if the Cold War wasn't a mush, too, a more horrible one).

No doubt there are complexities to Burma's own politics that someone like me, who doesn't really know more than what the papers have reported, could benefit from understanding. But as a symbol for the rest of the world, what is happening there now is powerful. We'll see what it means for China to engage with another country at a moment like this---for whatever reason China engages and with whatever effect it ends up having.

But in the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to hope.

Mines

The outrage that has been directed at Chinese mine bosses and authorities in Shandong is incredible to watch (see the BBC video on Youtube). But it is even more incredible when contrasted with the bewilderment of people in Huntington, Utah, who seem unsure whether to buy the words of Crandall Canyon mine co-owner Bob Murray or the United Mine Workers---and seem, understandably, just weary above all else.

Time and again, there seems to be LESS tolerance for elites misbehaving in China than there is in the U.S. This is, of course, not what one would expect of an authoritarian country where, it is assumed by outsiders, the government exists only because people never do anything about it and are scared as lambs.

Maybe it's the incredible power of American spin to place seeds of doubt in even the most commonsense reaction to events that makes us tired and confused. The U.S. media is cowed by press secretaries and dithers over torture or wire taps or unsafe mines--"Was something wrong REALLY done? Or do we just not understand the complexity of the issue?"

Or perhaps the boldness with which China's revolutionaries once pledged themselves to "serve the people" still resonates back over the ages, casting into sharp relief today's dull, selfish bureaucrats and spurring Chinese to rally against polluting factories, refuse to leave condemned homes to make way for shopping centers, fight with thugs for fields, and smash every piece of glass in the mine company's office.

Or maybe there is simply a stronger tradition of challenging authority---really spitting on it and dragging it through the streets--- in China than in the States, absurd as this may sound to some. And the Chinese government is lucky to have stayed on top of the wave as long as it has.

At any rate, the facts are there, brutal in both countries, in both mines.

No word yet on 181 miners in China who were trapped in a flooded mine several days ago; the government's most recent statement suggests they were victims of a "natural distaster." Meanwhile, Boss Murray is about to give up on recovering the miners in Utah or even their bodies. Documents obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune show the risks that his mine took before the tragedy:

Records of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) show that, after Murray acquired a 50 percent ownership in the mine on Aug. 9, 2006, his company repeatedly petitioned the agency to allow coal to be extracted from the north and south barriers - thick walls of coal that run on both sides of the main tunnels and help hold up the mine.

That stands in stark contrast to statements Murray made Monday asserting that his company's mine plan, and that of the previous owner, were one and the same.

So, what should we do?

[The above photos are from China Digital Times and Fox News].

Toys

New York-based China Labor Watch (CLW) has hit toy companies hard with a new report on factories in the Pearl River Delta. With attention on Chinese product safety, the report landed on CNN, Reuters, The New York Times, and Bloomberg.

Reforms---market and otherwise

Like my mixed feelings about the Clinton wing of the Democrats at home (Mr. or Mrs. Clinton), I never know quite what to make of the market reformists in China, a country where the distinction between "liberal" and "left" is as clear as day and night.

Hu Shuli has a piece in Caijing magazine, in which he complains, in typical market reformist fashion, that people who think China has become too imbalanced or worry about further marketization leading to social instability are missing the forest for the trees.

He dismisses those who "suggest solving all our social problems once and for all, simply by expanding China’s social welfare system," but then hedges by saying that "current projects that should continue include efforts to establish a strong social-security system."

Then he slips in a little gamble:

Current efforts to deepen reforms of the economic system face many challenges. Therefore, it is high time that we continued on political system reform actively and safely. The core goal for political-system reform is to accelerate democratic change and establish a modern, socialist country with democracy and a full-fledged legal system.

Efforts to reform the political system and other arenas should proceed shoulder-to-shoulder.

A friend of mine said that China will definitely begin democratic reforms before too long; the only question is who will come out on top: liberals or the left. His words had an ominous ring to it, a little like Sunni insurgents and Shiite death squads in Iraq gearing up for the show-down that will come when America leaves.

But, really, where should workers and farmers stand? How much should they cooperate with market reformers who, like Hu Shuli, also advocate a common goal, political reform?

There isn't a ton of history to rely on here. The United Front---during the revolution and immediate post-revolution years---managed to draw on a range of energies for reconstruction, but didn't give liberals much of a real voice. The liberal Tiananmen students, on the other hand, didn't give farmers and workers an equal stage.

And Clinton II isn't likely to give labor any important seat at the table.

The Labor Contract Law and lay-offs

As the implementation of the recently-passed Labor Contract Law nears, companies are firing older workers before management is forced to take on workers who have worked for at least 10 years continuously (or have signed fixed-term contracts twice) as permanent employees.

A July 15 issue of the Guangdong paper "Yangcheng Evening News" has a report by Wang Xiaoyun entitled "'The Labor Contract Law' Made Me Lose My Bowl of Food." It tells the story of 50 year old worker Hua Yi, who was employed at a plant since 1996---until recently, when she was told there wasn't enough work for her. New workers, though, were hired in Hua's place.

Another worker, A Yu, put in 21 years at a factory only to be informed that her work was unsatisfactory and fired. She was left to rely on her husband's 600 RMB per month salary to take care of aging parents and a daughter not yet four years old.

If enterprises' worries are a sign that the law may be better enforced than previous regulations, then these firings, while painful, should give some bitter hope to the Pearl River Delta's proletariat.

But managers and workers both know that much depends on how the national law is translated into local law, that things are still in flux. We can only wait until the beginning of 2008. But the wait will be rough.

Airlines and class struggle

After a spell of travel, I have come to believe that the division of airplane seating into (at least) two classes, "economy" and "business", may be the best possible illustration of the inefficiency of inequality.

A few giant seats---roughly 20+ per plane---take up so much space that the remaining 100+ passengers are forced into conditions best compared to a drawing of medieval prisons that I had in a picture book about knights as a child. While two people serve an intermittent, sputtering stream of "business" travelers at the check-in counter, only three people serve an "economy" line stretching back 100-200-300-more frustrated customers.

"Business" is the reserve of "captains of industry" (a phrase borrowed from a European friend of mine). The rest of us, factors of production, belong to the "economy" as a whole.

No doubt, the choice of luxury seating---and thereby a binary airplane, a world of middle class-less travel---makes sense profit-wise, just like sky boxes at sports stadiums.

But what of the rising hopelessness of the ordinary passengers, the angry "ghost" passing through airports like the spirit of Communism described by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto? Shouldn't the companies placate us with some concessions, try to buy us off like Henry Ford did?