Familiar...

From Egypt, we have this NY Times report on a protest by villagers threatened with eviction that is strikingly similar to stories from China:

"The Gurna standoff... illustrates the challenges facing an authoritarian government that for decades imposed its will on the people, keeping them poor but fed, underemployed but employed, but now seeks to adjust the social contract without sparking widespread unrest...."

"Political analysts say the dynamics here are similar to those all over the country as the government tries to transform a centrally controlled economy. In recent months thousands of workers in bloated state-owned factories have staged wildcat strikes, out of fear that privatization will take their jobs, or demanding pay raises."

While I appreciate that the reporter, Michael Slackman, sees in the old Egyptian system a "social contract", his article still misses something of the deeper sense of fairness that underwrit "bloated state-owned factories" in many systems, the sense of being in something together and of workers having a priviliged position in society.

This feeling will be hard to recapture, whatever efficiency gains privatization may yield.

Wen Jiabao on political reform--important?

I've been off the internet for a while, so I don't know if the foreign media have been making much of Premier Wen Jiabao's recent comments at the NPC / CPPCC meetings. Conversations with friends--who are usually given to cynicism about any and everything related to the CCP--have given me some hope that these comments have at least opened a space to which others can lay claim.

At any rate, at the risk of redundancy, here are some of my translations from the March 19 issue of "21st Century Business Herald" (Ershiyi shiji jingji baodao). The original was a paper copy, so no link I'm afraid. Direct quotations are marked by, naturally, quotation marks. All else is summary.

1. Premier Wen Jiabao, "when replying to a reporter's question, promised that the central government will push forward political reform, reduce the over-centralization of power, increase the people's oversight of government...."

2. According to Premier Wen, "socialist democracy" means "making the people be masters of their house, which requires ensuring that there be rights to democratic elections, democratic decision-making, democratic governance and democratic oversight, that is to say creating the conditions for the people to oversee and criticize their government..."

3. The paper also noted that Wen had said in November that creativity is important to any progress and that "there is a direct link between liberated thinking and creativity / innovation; liberated thinking is the cause, while innovation is the result."

Less impressively, the Premier also indulged in "online democracy" by replying to some of the "more than 100,000" questions put to him by netizens. Of course, this is a) a rather inefficient form of democracy and b) a form with little of the "cause and effect" he mentioned earlier---there is no guaranteed result to putting forward the questions, not even that Wen will read them. He can pick and choose.

These things, again, may or may not matter in and of themselves. Premier Wen Jiabao, like this whole administration, is quite media savvy. His comments on Tibet and Taiwan departed little from formula.

But Wen's words on political reform have the potential to restart a discussion that has been practically frozen in official speeches since Zhao Ziyang.

Uh, I meant intuiting the "will of the people..."

From China Digital Times:

When a reporter asked Minister Li about China's policy on Taiwan, Li answered: “All policies follow the will of the motherland and will of the people."

"Do you mean you want them to vote?" a female Taiwanese reporter asked.

Li Zhaoxing (laughing): "This question is a tricky one. The answer is No. No!"

Mines and authority

A recent piece on Shanxi coal miners in Time by Simon Elegant and Zhang Jiachang hits the nail on the head with this remark on Wen Jiabao's efforts against mine deaths:

"In a country famously assumed to be authoritarian, like China, you might think such repeated investment of personal authority by a top leader would produce rapid results."

Pei Minxin's explanation for this seeming paradox makes the most sense: authority is so dispersed and the central government is so hesitant to grab that authority back (other than in tightly military-guarded places like Tibet and Xinjiang) because there is rent seeking behavior up and down the chain of command that MUST BE SATISFIED.

Without corrupt local officials on its side, the government not only loses any presence at the village and township level, but it is faced with a potential new enemy, as Kevin O'Brien and others have shown. Local officials can bolt and go populist.

The potential for this is shown most strangely and tragically in the cases of mine bosses and small town despots who are able to rally workers to STOP the shutting down of unsafe mines.

PM Abe on Korean comfort women...

Prime Minister Abe is quoted (link) as saying: "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion" (a repudiation of his own government's apology in 1993).

Like President Reagan on the Vietnam War: "Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought for freedom, a truly noble cause" (link).

Tidying up history can deliver political dividends far down the road, clearly. But I wonder if it doesn't end up distancing people from their own countries in the end, all that white paint makes for a history that's rather hard to access. Surely pain is a part of living in a country, feeling a part of something, thinking of responsibilities.

China's chaos as "Wild West"?

The first time I remember hearing someone compare China to the "Wild West" was when I studied there (in China, not the Wild West) in 2001. An American guy--nice in many ways but with many of the more obnoxious characteristics of expats--declared happily that in the P.R.C. "you can do anything... it's like the Wild West." I was pretty angry with him--what gall, taking one's host country as a playground!

But that motif comes up again and again. And it's not really inaccurate.

Yesterday's New York Times piece on the Shanghai stock market crash began with the words "In China’s wild cowboy stock market...."

As the author, David Barboza, went on to describe how Chinese companies' stocks actually rise when their CEOs are accused of corruption, my first thoughts were that this is mayhem! Name recognition ALONE driving stock prices, even INFAMY is good! Yes, the Wild West! Then, I thought of how corruption might be seen as good by investors, y'know in a Tamany Hall sense... a historical reference again.

Indeed, it is quite easy to view China (or other parts of the developing world, for that matter) as simply being on a continuum of the Western experience. You hear it often from the tough guys who see in the P.R.C.'s labor problems "only what we went through a century ago." You hear it from neo-liberal economists and lefties alike.

But there is a big difference. China's "Wild West" is contained within a government cloak. As evidenced in today's follow-up NY Times piece, "Chinese Investors Shrug, and Shanghai Rallies", small investors in China are going back to the same stock brokers after the crash that they lost money on before. They are doing so in large part because the government "will not let anything terrible happen."

It's like a capitalist Cultural Revolution---mayhem within limits.

New Year's parade

I just attended the big New Year's parade on Mott Street (see photos above). Marching bands and corporate-sponsored floats mixed with older Chinatown mutual aid societies. It's funny how "Chinese New Year" is becoming an American holiday of sorts.

Peaceful rise

I just came across an interesting blog on "China's influence on the developing world." It's called Peaceful Rising and is run by "a historian and a cultural anthropologist."

Obama begins campaign

So, I suppose I'm one of those people who's pretty caught up in the whole Obama excitement, but I've got a good, simple reason: there's excitement.

If Obama doesn't jump through all the liberal/left's hoops and do everything the old way, that's fine. The other politicians have ditched progressives after the primaries, anyway. What he's got is a forward-looking sense of what America is about that is at the heart of what liberalism's about--and no one seems to have captured that like him in years.

(Photo courtesy of NY Times)

More on labor contract law

In These Times has a report on multinationals' opposition to China's new labor contract law. See Fights Over Chinese Labor Reform .

Three Gorges Embezzlement

BBC reports: "More than $30m has been embezzled from funds allocated for residents displaced by China's Three Gorges Dam project, state media has said." What can one possibly do about such plain, everday, devastatingly anti-social behavior?

Lan Chengzhang

I am always hoping for that turning point when Hu and Wen live up to the hopes some of us placed in them right after SARS, for that turning point when they will let us know that they've only been clamping down until the right moment arrived, that they've been waiting for some rivals to fall aside before they make their big political reformist move. That moment probably won't ever come (as just about everyone else but me has admitted).

But at least we can expect a few more moments of change like the aftermath of Sun Zhigang's death, when "detention and repatriation" was abolished. At least we can expect some tweaking of the state's coercive apparatus.

Such a moment may have come again with the journalist (or fake journalist by some accounts) Lan Chengzhang's beating death at the hands mine thugs. Hu has intervened as Wen did for a woman whose husband was owed back wages long, long ago--back when we thought the leaders might be a new wind.

The furor this time is a little too planned. Why allow discussion of the incident for so long? It's more like the death penalty debate a little while ago (which led to a policy of referring all capital cases to the Supreme People's Court) than the out-of-control Sun Zhigang case. Maybe this is being used for a long-planned change.

But what would the change be? Lan Chengzhang's death epitomizes something huge in China's new economy: corporate-official collusion. Changing this would mean actualizing the last NPC meeting's decision to relax pressure on local governments to develop, develop, develop. It would mean an end to giving capitalists a comfy seat at every big meeting, regardless of how they came to their wealth--and risk alienating them as Party supporters. And it would mean really unshackling the press.

For the best summary of coverage on Lan Chengzhang, see, as always EastSouthWestNorth's collection.

There are some things for which tabloid papers are perfect. One is populism (though under the watchful eye of Mr. Murdoch tabloid populism in New York City has tended toward the right-wing, anti-union variety). Another is tales of everyday heroism.

The story of Wesley Autrey combines both qualities perfectly. On January 3rd, Mr. Autrey, described by the NY Times as "a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran" taking his two daughters home after work, saved the life of a 20-year-old student, Cameron Hollowpeter, who had fallen onto the subway tracks on the 1 line. He did this by jumping down and pushing the young man into a narrow space between the tracks and lying there with him as the train passed inches over both their heads.

This is obviously first and foremost a tale of basic, startling decency. Of a solidarity that is human and--with its split moment decision-making--far above politics, race and culture.

But it is also the kind of story that pops up now and then, most notably on 9/11, wherein working people are held up as the heart and soul of America. Firefighters, cops and construction workers. Or, less glamorously, the farmers courted in Iowa every four years. People who we say show us what it's all about.

For too much of the media, this is where it stops. Good people. Then forgotten.

The TV stations will go back to a steady stream of sitcoms about ridiculously upper-middle class citizens, facing--we are told--problems common to us all. In cars and homes beyond most of our reach. And spaced between ads for investments and technologies most of us won't ever handle.

Taking up working people's specific needs--in wages, time with family, healthcare, housing, workplace democracy--is either only a vague slogan (a la the Democrats routine half-baked plans for almost-"universal" healthcare) or, when broached by the wrong people (like the immigrant MTA employees during last year's subway strike), portrayed as downright "disruptive."

Working people aren't any more virtuous than the bourgeoisie. People are people, filled with the same faults and same valor. And, again, an act like Mr. Autrey's is a human act above all else.

But stories like his (and the response they receive) reveal a need to connect, to give thanks that goes beyond a specific moment of heroism. There is a sense of debt bigger than that of one student nearly hit by a train. And, in the sense of the community such moments offer, the possibility of a real community somewhere off in the future.

[Photo courtesy of NY Times]

No new labor contract law for now

The English-language China Daily reports that the National People's Congress has put off a vote on the second draft of the country's new Labor Contract Law (see Vote on labour contract law put off). According to the article, the postponement came--in part--as a result of strong opposition from employers' groups.

In fact, if China Youth Daily Online is to be believed, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai is not the only of these groups (see 劳动合同法该如何偏向劳动者). 190,000 comments have been made on the law to date.

Like China's Marriage Law or oft-postponed Property Law, this might shape up to be a landmark piece of legislation in terms of public debate.

It is only natural that employers will want more flexibility on hiring and firing, unions, etc. That's their role. And, for those of us with the workers who are not entirely enthralled with warm, fuzzy, delicious CSR, it should be only natural to take the employers to the mat.

Debate is good. Labor should keep its voice loud.

[Photo courtesy of Business in Asia]

Pinochet is dead--I hope

Pinochet is dead. It's a pity he wasn't behind bars when he gave up the ghost.

There's still a core of people ready to revive him as the classic developmental-state autocrat. Columnists for the Washington Post, LA Times and others are--with the necessary caveats--praising Pinochet's tough choices to save his country from "communism," his championing of the middle class--that pure, blameless, hopeful, apolitical creature beloved by liberals on sight (but especially when far off and out of sight)--and his alleged success at "restarting" the economy.

Never mind that Allende's government was the victim of a concerted campaign of economic sabotage before Pinochet took over (the Nixon administation spoke of making Chile's economy "scream"), that the first years of Pinochet's rule were marked by utter economic ruin, or that Chile's fortunes eventually turned around as much because of state re-intervention in the economy as the cleverness of "the Chicago boys."

If he wasn't an economic savior (other than in terms of his own ill-gotten gains), what did Pinochet accomplish? He left thousands dead or tortured. He divided his nation, as last week's protests and counter-protests show. And, equally importantly, I am told Pinochet created a deadened political culture in Chile and a disengaged and wary youth.

This comes as the Economist reports that confidence in democratic institutions in Latin America is higher now than it has been for years. Corruption may be down. Businesses in the region are reviving.

And the Left on the continent has arguably never been stronger.

So, of course the old coup plotters are back. They nearly knocked off Chavez (with kudos from the NY Times). They were underhanded to say the least in Mexico's last election. And they have plans for Bolivia's Santa Cruz (see today's NY Times article).

Bush tells us that democracy is rough. But south of the border, he seems eager to smooth things out. Give things back to the good old boys who shook their heads at Pinochet's excesses but still did business.

Pinochet remains a model--in the minds of some--for every state facing a little too much democracy, a "transition" figure to, uh, democracy again. But without all that messy "participation."

The Right and Labor

In regards to labor solidarity courtesy of conservatives, see Alec Dubro's The Right Stands Up For Labor on TomPaine.com.

Funny how the Republicans want the workers of the world to unite--as long as the workers are in Caracas or Tehran or Havana....

Good, new stuff on Chinese labor

Another good series seems to be on the way from Global Labor Strategies: "Fair Globalization", which sets out to move beyond "protectionism" and "free trade", with a focus on China-America trade. Also, see Andrew Leonard's excellent "The Chinese Sweatshop Paradox", which came to my attention courtesy, as always, of JKD.

Questions about FOCA

What are we to think of the recent Forum on China-Africa Cooperation? Or, rather, about China's involvement in Africa generally?

The international financial institutions are, of course, worried by the lack of conditions on China's deals with the Africa. They say this may undo efforts aimed at promoting "discipline" and "good governance" on the continent--patronizing words, but with some merit. Others, like economist Jeffrey Sachs, see China's investment in Africa as a development tidal wave, which will do more for the continent's poor than decades of Western aid--even if a bit of the money is siphoned off by corruption.

I'm most concerned with solidarity.

Under Mao Zedong, China, with its advocacy at the Bandung Conference and later its "Three Worlds Theory", proposed a special role for de-colonizing nations, beyond superpower rivalry.

In Africa, Beijing gave rhetorical backing to South Africans, Algerians and others shaking off Western rule. It also supported wars of "national liberation" against both colonial regimes and post-colonial governments--with guns, training, and money.

Unfortunately, despite Mao's grand rhetoric, this support was often as much about wearing down and distracting the Soviet Union as it was about the substance of the African insurgencies. In Angola, for example, China (and the United States, South Africa and Zaire!) sided with UNITA and the FNLA--not the more progressive but Moscow-backed MPLA.

More unambiguously positive were the scholarships China gave to thousands of African students to attend its universities. These students sometimes encountered racism from their Chinese peers (there were riots over African men dating Chinese girls in the 1980s). But bonds were established such that young people in China viewed their lives and those of Africans as part of one historical movement.

What will China's new engagement with the continent mean for CHINESE people? How will this help them situate their country?

Will the ordinary exchanges between African workers and Chinese migrant workers toiling thousands of miles from Hunan or Sichuan matter the most? Or will the neo-colonial actions of companies, like the Chinese mining firm in Zambia that shot its strikerst? Will China eventually distance itself from governments like Sudan's? Or will it use Sudan as a rallying point for "non-interference" and "sovereignty"?

And what will this mean for democracy back home?

[The above video may or may not be viewable from China]

Roughly a year after America's Sago Mine distaster, here's a powerful video on mine deaths from China. With first the Chinese national anthem and then the Internationale playing in the background and numbing images upon images of grieving miners' families it's hard not to feel simple, raw anger.

But a solution to these tragedies must come along a number of tracks--improved rural economies that will leave people more choices (at present, mines pay much more than other jobs in the countryside), effective supervision of local governments, strong penalties for bosses and politicians who turn a blind eye to safety concerns, an independent voice for workers and a willingness to push ahead on these issues, to publicize them even when they become "sensitive."

Note: I am not sure where the makers of the video got their statistics at its end.

Back to China...

What should the newly triumphant Democrats do about China?

It may be tempting for them to bash China, as opposition parties always do and presidents usually do during their first two years in office, before they find out they need the P.R.C. more than they thought--in Korea, in the U.N., on counter-terrorism and arms control, etc. It may be tempting to zig and zag as Clinton did, tying trade to rights one day and pushing PNTR the next.

But if the Democrats can hold themselves together, they could make real progress.

They could push real labor protections in China if they avoided the temptation to wrap the subject up in the futile attempt to protect every textile mill at home. They could raise human rights issues generally by approaching issues through a humble, real dialogue with the Chinese leadership (after Guantanamo and American torture planes from Europe, humility is definitely in order). They could coordinate better with the European Union's China policy.

Most importantly, they can find a balance between championing the world's hopes for Chinese democracy and maintaining the stability of China--internal and in its international relations--that is the prerequisite for a healthy democratic transition.

Here's hoping the party is up to the task!