Umbrellas in Tiananmen - June 4, 2009

When I was young, I thought it odd that my mother would put up an umbrella on a sunny day. Well, it appears that Chinese security personnel also think its a good idea. Particularly on June 4, 2009 - the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square incident.

Update: somewhere between 63,000 (police estimate) and 150,000 (organiser estimate) hold a commemorative rally on June 4 at Victoria Park in Hong Kong. Surprisingly little international media coverage of this rally.

Twitter blocked in China before June 4

There are a range of news stories about (here and here and here) about how the Chinese authorities have blocked access to social media sites including Twitter, You Tube, Flickr and MSN Hotmail prior to the 20th anniversary of the Tiannemen Square crackdown on June 4, 2009. This story won't be blocked, as my understanding is that Blogger is always blocked in China.

The Chinese Communist Party: why does its membership keep growing?

The Guardian has a feature on the interesting question of why the membership of the Chinese Communist Party continues to grow. The appeal of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought would not appear obvious in 21st century China, and the party would appear to be a long way from its roots in peasant uprisings and the "Long March". But its continued growth continues to pose a challenge for those assuming that democratisation must at some point follow China's transition to a market economy.

Outwardly, the party remains rigidly ideological; members are drilled in Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents and current president Hu Jintao's Scientific Development Outlook. Hu has, in fact, stepped up political education – perhaps because of an evident disconnect: to many, what the party really stands for is personal advancement, social stability and national unity.

For more read here. Information on the Communist Party of China can be found here.

Smoking for the Economy

In Hubei Province in central China, local government issued a regulation determining quotas of cigarettes to be consumed by all public employees. They must be local brands to stimulate the local economy. It is estimated that quotas requiring consumption of 230,000 additional cigarettes a year will generate 4 million RMB for the local economy.

For more read here.

Photos from the QUT EMBA Internationa Study Tour visit to China - Shanghai, Xi'an and Beijing

Nothing is real? The IP/piracy problem in China

Spending the morning at a "copy" market in Shanghai today illustrated the problem of developing industries in China, which is that copyright infringement is rampant and expected, and no price for any product is given. While this exists because branded products are unreasonably overpriced relative to their production costs (as they are virtually all manufactured in China), it has a consequence for travelers for China, which is that you become reluctant to pay reasonable prices for genuine products, as occurred with me later at Shanghai Museum. I am also not sure that you actually save money by doing this, rather than buying Chinese brands at shops such as the No. 1 Department Store on Nanjing Road.

It was notable at the Huangpu Acrobatic Theatre performance attended that evening that the reason given for prohibiting the taking of pictures during the performance was not that it would affect the performers, but that it would infringe their intellectual property rights (actual words of the announcer). As they sell DVDs for 120RMB after the show, this is reasonable, but the extent of piracy must have been significant for such an announcement to be worth making.

On another matter, note these regulations governing use of the Renmin Park in Shanghai. The requirement not to shit in the park (point 2) is notable, but even more so is point 5's instruction not to engage in "activities of a feudalistic or superstitious nature." Before I read Vanessa Shue's essay on Falun Gong's challenge to the "Mandate of Heaven" for the CCP, I may not have understood this.

Recession hits hard: No food at Chinese Banquets

This from Wednesday 4 March 2009 Courier-Mail online. I suspect the sub-editor meant "No booze, less food at Chinese banquet". Perhaps he/she had just been for a "No food, more booze" dinner.

No food, less booze at China banquets

Article from: Agence France-Presse

From correspondents in Beijing

March 04, 2009 06:25pm

CHINA will no longer wine and dine visiting heads of state at sumptuous banquets, cutting back the fare to just one soup, three dishes and no liquor, a senior official says.

The scaled-down menu comes as China implements government savings and encourages thriftiness in the face of the global financial crisis, said Li Zhaoxing, spokesman for China's
parliament, which convenes this week.

"When our president ... and prime minister invite foreign heads of state, during the state banquet the menu will not exceed one soup and three dishes," Li said.

"No Chinese liquor will be served."

Bad news from China?

If you needed confirmation that China is not 'uncoupled' from the US economy, as it was once optimistically put, and that there will be knock-on effects from the US economy to China's economy to Australia, this piece by Don Lee from the LA Times would be of interest:

Shaoxing, China -- First, Tao Shoulong burned his company's financial books. He then sold his private golf club memberships and disposed of his Mercedes S-600 sedan.

And then he was gone.

And just like that, China's biggest textile dye operation -- with four factories, a campus the size of 31 football fields, 4,000 workers and debts of at least $200 million -- was history.

"We're pretty much dead now," said Mao Youming, one of 300 suppliers stiffed last month by Tao's company, Jianglong Group. Lighting a cigarette in a coffee shop here, the 38-year-old spoke calmly about the bleak future of his industrial gas business. Tao owed him $850,000, Mao said, about 60% of his annual revenue. "We cannot pay our workers' salaries. We are about to be bankrupt too."

Government statistics show that 67,000 factories of various sizes were shuttered in China in the first half of the year, said Cao Jianhai, an industrial economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. By year's end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed.

As more factories in China shut down, stories of bosses running away have become familiar, multiplying the damage of China's worst manufacturing decline in at least a decade.

Even before the global financial crisis, factory owners in China were straining under soaring labor and raw-material costs, an appreciating Chinese currency and tougher legal, tax and environmental requirements. When the credit crunch took hold -- prompting Western businesses to slash orders for Chinese goods and bankers to curtail loans to factories -- many operations were pushed over the edge.

China's engine slows

China's industrial decline is a main factor in the sharp economic slowdown of late. The nation's gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 9% in the third quarter, the lowest in five years and worse than what analysts had forecast. China's GDP expanded 11.9% last year. Now, economists worry that the one big remaining engine of global growth is rapidly losing steam.

For more read here.

After the Olympics: Evaluating the Global Media Coverage

I woke up this morning to Radio National, and heard the BBC report on the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. In commenting on it being a spectacle of noise, fireworks and lot of dancers, the BBC reporter commented:

China can do what democracies can't, because its government is not accountable to the voters.

Um, hello? Government in democracies do not spend lots of money on public spectacles? Taxpayers will not accept this, and want the money to be spent on roads, hospitals, schools etc.

Next Saturday, in the city of Brisbane, the democratically elected government will conduct Riverfire, a public spectacle on the Brisbane River involving, yes, noise, fireworks and dancers.

The transparently bogus claim made by the BBC reporter - that only undemocratic governments can put lots of resources into public spectacles - has typified a lot of coverage of the Beijing Olympics, particularly from Britain.

The hold of the concept of totalitarianism on the Western journalistic imaginary has been quit striking. In a way of thinking that was presented by the 'Four Theories of the Press' model back in the Cold War era of the 1960s, the line has been run that in countries with state-run media and one-party governments, all activities are an extension of the monolithic one-party state. This in turn is contrasted to an entirely normative account of how the media actually function in liberal democracies, making everything appear to be a construct of state ideology.

To take another example, Marina Hyde in The Guardian could attribute the large number of volunteers on hand in Beijing to, wait for it, the authoritarian one-party state that China has. The fact that Sydney 2000 could get 50,000 volunteer without resorting to a suspenion fo democratic rule seems to have missed this columnist.

China does need good independent journalism, and does need good independent research on its journalism. The closeness of the government, the CCP and the media is a major issue that needs to be addressed to develop a civil society that can accompany its impressive economic performanc and growing world power status.

But as long as Western media coverage of China remains freeze-locked in the model of totalitarianism that was an artefact of Cold War politics, and as long as it pursues criticism of China that completely ignores its own culture and context, we will have an awkward intellectual stand-off.

Quality work on how the world's media covered Beijing 2008 remains to be done.

Intellectual Property: Where is China going?

China and copyright have been something of an odd couple for some time. Since the 'reform and opening up' (gaige kaifeng) of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has definitely been the place to pick up a cheap copy of designer label clothing, bags, DVDs etc etc.

But since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, this reputation has sat uncomfortably with both international (especially US) opinion and the nation's own aspirations to become a global leader in brands and IP and not just cheap manufactured goods.

The Wall Street Journal features a piece today by Wang Qishan, Vice Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, pointing to new IPR reforms in China that further harmonisation with international standards and promise greater enforcement of illegal copying.

The Beijing Silk Markets may be no more - or, as stated in the article, have undertaken "rectification" - and the Yashow Market may be too full of bus loads of Germans, but I'll bet 10 pairs of black Hugo Boss socks (cost $US10) that there is still much more to be uncovered about this question.

Is America going backwards economically?

Aside from the Democrat primaries, the major talking point in the U.S. this week is whether the United States is losing ground in the global economy. This is different to the question of whether or not the U.S. economy is in recession (or 'slowdown' as GWB prefers to put it), but is rather about whether the U.S. is losing the competitive race against the emergent economies of East Asia and the Middle East, and indeed to Europe.

Two triggers to this have been Thomas Friedman's 'Who will tell the people' article in the New York Times, and the launch of Zareed Fakaria's book, The Post-American World and the various articles and TV appearances he has made around that. Both are arguing that as much of the world has adopted a free trade, pro-globalization agenda - as the U.S. campaigned for them to do throughout the 1980s and 1990s - the ability to compete successfully in the global market is understood mostly in terms of its threat to the U.S. economy.

Fakaria likes to use examples of 'big things' to make his point (Where's the world's biggest mall? - Beijing). Friedman compares the slow death experience of time spent at a major U.S. airport to the resort/business club experience of spending time at Hong Kong International Airport or Changi airport in Singapore. But both are saying that, having mostly won the arguments about globalization and freeing up international trade, the U.S. polity has largely failed to consider the implications for the U.S. itself of a more competitive global trading regime.

I am struck by how this debate differs in the U.S. to how it plays out in Australia. The Democratic Party in the U.S. is far more protectionist than the Australian Labor Party. This particularly cam through in Hillary Clinton's campaign, where her two biggest rallying points - opposing NAFTA and getting tough on China - struck an odd tone, given that the signing of NAFTA and opening up the space for China to join the WTO were probably the two major trade policy achievement of Bill Clinton's administration.

There is also no equivalent to, say, Paul Keating in the U.S. context, who would say that protectionism s a short-term measure that costs consumers and ultimately won't save jobs, and that more trade with countries such as China not only means the relocation of steel and textile jobs, but cheaper consumer goods and the scope to develop new jobs further up the industry value chain. This is despite the fact that parts of the country that aren't obvious beneficiaries, such as North Carolina and Virginia, are becoming more prosperous and middle-class as they develop more knowledge-based industries.