By Anna Chen, from Madam Miaow Says

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, when the Walrus and the Carpenter take the little oysters on a long march along the beach, the Walrus weeps over the fate of the poor shellfish while he scoffs as many as he can behind the cover of the handkerchief he’s sobbing into. This image sums up my feelings about the disgraced party secretary of Chonqing, Bo Xilai whose rising star has been super-novaed in spectacular style.

Months after 41-year old British businessman Neil Heywood died in Chongqing last November of a suspected drinks binge and was hurriedly cremated without an autopsy despite telling friends he feared for his life, the news that he was most likely poisoned with cyanide at the behest of Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai after an argument about their business interests, has exploded across the top echelons of the CPP.

Set to become the leader of the top superpower with a seat on the Politburo, Bo will now be lucky if he’s sweeping streets by the end of the murder investigation, and it’ll be astonishing if his wife —rapidly replacing the late Madam Mao Chiang Ching as Lady MacBeth du nos jours — avoids the death penalty.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
 
“To talk of many things:
 
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
 
Of cabbages–and kings–
 
And why the sea is boiling hot–
 
And whether pigs have wings.” 

“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,
 
“Before we have our chat;
 
For some of us are out of breath,
 
And all of us are fat!”
 
“No hurry!” said the Carpenter.
 
They thanked him much for that.

What’s emerging from the suspected “intentional homicide” of Heywood (and who knows what little embellishments and out-and-out inventions are being devised by interested parties) is a text-book case of the sort of leaders who give despotism a bad name. While Bo was the politician showman and leader of a supercity of 28 million, Gu’s law firm specialised in extracting a large slice of China’s wealth and spiriting it abroad, claimed by Wang to be several hundred million dollars. Heywood is thought to have threatened to blow the whistle on her deals.

Smuggling money abroad is a major problem for China. It’s estimated that, in the ten years to 2009, RMB 800 billion ($127bn) was moved overseas illegally. A China Merchants Bank and Bain & Company joint report, published in April 2011, revealed that 27% of those with over RMB 100 million have emigrated, and a further 47% are considering emigration. That’s a whopping 74% of China’s wealthiest wanting to leave with their loot.

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
 
“Is what we chiefly need:
 
Pepper and vinegar besides
 
Are very good indeed–
 
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
 
We can begin to feed.” 

“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,
 
Turning a little blue.
 
“After such kindness, that would be
 
A dismal thing to do!”

“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.
 
“Do you admire the view?

I’d been hoping that China had avoided the fate of the old USSR where, under Yeltsin and then Putin, communist cadre turned cowboys turned oligarchs and carved up Russia’s assets making billionaires out of the former guardians of the socialist state. However, with China’s top 70 politicians in the National People’s Congress worth $89b, ten times the net worth of all of the US Congress, that’s some wishful thinking.

According to Louisa Lim’s interview with Jiang Weiping, a Chinese journalist who did time in prison after investigating Bo and Gu’s corruption in the 1980s:

Bo was running Dalian’s propaganda office, which oversaw cultural affairs. His wife, who is also a lawyer, started the Folk Customs Culture Research Institute. “The heads of the Authors Association and the Artists Association, etc., were chosen by his wife,” Jiang says. “You had to give her gifts before you would be promoted. She got millions from entrepreneurs ‘sponsoring’ her institute. But she was actually just raking in money. She used this to throw parties, give favors and line her own pockets.” As her husband rose through the ranks, Gu set up a legal firm, which Jiang believes fulfilled the same function. Jiang alleges the pair used family members to hide their wealth. Gu’s sisters have companies worth $126 million, according to Bloomberg news agency. And Bo’s brother is reportedly vice chairman of a state-run company, using a pseudonym, with stock options worth $25 million.

It’s little wonder that the children of formerly privileged families such as Ai Wei Wei are seething. It’s one thing losing the family fortune if it all goes back into the pot for the good of society as a whole. It’s quite another to see another ruling elite emerging who are troughing down on your inheritance.

“It was so kind of you to come!
 
And you are very nice!”
 
The Carpenter said nothing but
 
“Cut us another slice:
 
I wish you were not quite so deaf–
 
I’ve had to ask you twice!”

The peasants and workers aren’t too pleased, either. There’s a nostalgia for Mao Zedong whose helmsmanship saw life expectancy double, lowered the death rate from 38 per thousand in 1949 to 10 per thousand in 1957, and lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty. In Mobo Gao’s fascinating book, The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, he describes the change in lifestyle for ordinary people in his home village. Not only did their quality of life improve with free or cheap healthcare, decent housing and often a job for life, but their cultural life was enriched as well.

Now, under communism with capitalist characteristics, the poor are getting poorer and 95 percent of the national wealth is owned by 5 percent of the population. Revolution? What revolution?

“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
 
“To play them such a trick,
 
After we’ve brought them out so far,
 
And made them trot so quick!”
 
The Carpenter said nothing but
 
“The butter’s spread too thick!”

So when, in classic demagogue style, wideboy Bo saw a gap in the market, he was in there like a rat up a drainpipe. His popularist Mao-inspired campaigns and crackdown on corruption earned him rock-star status that began to worry his CCP rivals. But at the same time as he was sticking it to the mafia and sticking up for the masses, we now know that his lady wife was getting her alleged lover, the very dead Heywood, to take mega-millions out of the country.

There’s been a groundswell of bitterness in evidence ever since 1989. Although the western press like to depict the Tian Anmen protests as a desire by the populace to emulate western democracy, the occupants of the square that June came with a wide range of complaints, a chief one being corruption and a growing divide between the new rich and the poor who’d made such great sacrifices in the effort to create an equitable and democratic society.

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
 
“I deeply sympathize.”
 
With sobs and tears he sorted out
 
Those of the largest size,
 
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
 
Before his streaming eyes.

It may not have taken a genius to see which way the wind was blowing but it took a charismatic talent like Bo — tall, handsome, a ready smile, charm and utter ruthlessness — to marshall those forces into one which would sweep him to power. And, indeed, he was headed for the very top: leader of the geriatric communist party. At 62 Bo was a mere whippersnapper by CCP standards and probably had a couple more decades of careerism in him. It may not have been his own corruption, however, that triggered his demise. It’s depressing to think that if he hadn’t over-reached himself, he may well have risen to the top. Louisa Lim again:

China’s press is emphasizing that his spectacular downfall has not touched off any political turmoil. “It does not indicate a political struggle within the party,” reads an editorial published Wednesday in the China Daily. But few Chinese believe that, especially in light of news reports that party members and the military have had to swear loyalty oaths to China’s current leadership. “There can only be one explanation for the military’s oath of loyalty,” says Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Renmin University of China. “Bo Xilai tried to mobilize the army, something like a rebellion. He went too far.”

I haven’t yet heard who’s idea it was to cremate Heywood so fast or why a British consul official was present at the deed. In this murky tale, the businessman’s was not the only cadaver clogging up the scenery. When Bo’s former henchman, the police chief Wang Lijun, realised he was in too deep and ran to the sanctuary of the American consulate in Chengdu, seven of his associates were said to have been captured by Bo and two of his investigation team tortured to death, probably by his “personal security detail” getting mediaeval on their arse.

On the other hand, inconveniently deprived of a body, we may never know whether Bo and Gu were stitched up by their rivals or if they really are as monstrous as has been claimed. A handful of dust he may be, but in shaking the ruling elite of the next top superpower to the core, Neil Heywood — suspected of being a spook, now in every sense — may have done a better job than NATO.

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
 
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
 
Shall we be trotting home again?’
 
But answer came there none–
 
And this was scarcely odd, because
 
They’d eaten every one.


by Rachel, from Tea Leaf Nation

Public opinion polls about political issues in China are harder to find than wild pandas. To find one in Global Times, a Party-loving tabloid, is kind of like spotting a wild panda on the beach in balmy Hainan.

But there it is. 

The very fact that this opinion poll [Chinese] was published by a conservative Chinese newspaper confused microblog users. Many asked for confirmation from Mr. Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of Global Times. Writing on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, @一人一票民主连线 asks, “Do I dare to believe that the mouthpiece has become Deep Throat?” @欧阳贝丹 tweets, “The word ‘poll’ appears in Chinese media, what does it harbinger?” @做还不乱 wondered, “Did Editor Hu have too much to drink?” 

[NB: Some results do not add up to precisely 100% due to rounding.]

 

According to this poll, on the key question of whether Chinese people believe their country should become a Western-style democracy, almost half surveyed said they are not opposed to the idea but do not believe it is realistic. The vague phrasing of the answer opens it up to different interpretations: Do people believe it’s not realistic because of possible intervention by the current government? Do they fear a high cost of transition? Or do they believe such system cannot be properly implemented in China? 

One way to read the data is that about 63% of the Chinese people generally approve of Western-style democracy. @抱个老虎当猫养 tweets with sarcasm, ”Only 63%? So only a small minority of Chinese approve of Western democracy. Most people, as high as 37%, are not in favor. Therefore we can say that the Party still represents most Chinese people.”  @初一成了职业宅咯 asks, “Shouldn’t it be more than 63%?” Other comments in microblogs, however, echo the ambivalence about Western democracy shown in the poll. @小熊娃娃_USA, whose location is shown as the U.S., tweets, “So I’m actually the 37%.” 

@虎爸_Michael had a question about the phrasing, “Democracy is democracy, why call it Western democracy?” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FROM KASAMA

This letter of solidarity, signed over by 50 intellectuals and activists in China, was posted to Utopia  on Sunday.  Made available by China Study Group. Thanks to everyone for the translation and editing work!

From the middle of September, a great “Wall Street Revolution” has broken out in the United States. This street revolution, going by the name of “Occupy Wall Street,” has already expanded to over 70 cities and countries in North America, Europe, and other areas. In their statement on “The Wall Street Revolution,” the American people have sworn that this demand for “a democratic country, not a corporate kingdom” mass democratic revolution must spread to every part of the world, and they will not rest until this goal is met. From the anti-capitalist demonstrations that began after the 2008 financial crisis, and which this year have spread across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South America, this magnificent global mass democratic movement has finally spread to the center of capitalism’s financial empire–Wall Street. Click to continue reading →

By Robert Griffiths, from the Morning Star

In one enormous hall in a tower block near Tiananmen Square, Beijing, Communist Party of China central committee member He Yong and other officials were welcoming a deputation of communist parties from western Europe.

In another part of the building, Chinese government and party leaders were meeting US Vice-President Joseph Biden.

The Western communists were expressing varying degrees of admiration, solidarity and concern about economic and political developments in the world’s most populous society.

The imperialist politician from the world’s wealthiest country had come to Beijing to beg for more Chinese investment in US industry.

China’s socialist state is already the biggest owner of US Treasury bonds, helping to fund the biggest national debt in the world.

Now Chinese funds are sought to create jobs in the US’s productive economy.

On his first day in the Chinese capital, Biden had made a detour from his schedule to attend a “friendly” basketball game between a local team and their US visitors.

The match had to be abandoned during an almighty brawl — an example, it might be said, of an antagonistic contradiction.

The public relations fiasco was fully covered in China’s mass media, most of which are in the public sector, just as — contrary to Western media claims — the July 23 Wenzhou bullet train disaster was widely reported, including by the state-owned People’s Daily Railway newspaper.

The scale of economic and social transformation taking place in that country has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

The figures are impressive enough on paper — annual growth rates of 10 to 14 per cent and, between 1981 and 2004, more than 600 million people lifted out of absolute poverty (defined by the World Bank as an income of less than $1.25, or 78 pence, a day).

But to see the forest of cranes in city after city, the new office and residential apartment blocks, shopping centres, civic and business parks, railway stations and airline terminals under construction or newly opened, to travel along the new eight-lane motorways or ride in modern trains with enough leg-room to swing several cats, is something more.

A modern, industrial and predominantly urban society is being built in China without foreign conquest and colonies, without a slave trade, without shoving children up chimneys or down coal mines.

This is happening in a country the size of a continent, with a population of 1,346m bigger than Africa (1,033m), Europe (733m) and north America (352m).

It is being done on the basis of state economic planning, a mixed economy and Communist Party rule.

Private capital from emigre, foreign and now domestic sources has been utilised, under licence by the state, to drive investment, employment and technological advance.

Many such arrangements will be renewed into the middle of the 21st century at least.

Although Chinese communists are not comfortable with the analogy, this strategy is akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, but on a vast scale and over decades rather than years.

A native Chinese capitalist class has been created over the past two decades, although it is small.

As yet it has no political voice outside the Communist Party, although its economic concerns are expressed in sections of the press, by some academics and — within the context of the party’s strategy and policy — by business owners who are now allowed inside the CPC itself.

There are eight other political parties in China, mostly based on intellectual, peasant or emigre circles and founded before the People’s Republic in 1949.

They supported the national-democratic and socialist revolutions and participate in the National People’s Convention and other representative bodies.

Potential threats to the revolution do not come from any existing political forces.

They arise from the very forces of economic development unleashed by the CPC itself.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.  You can donate to the Morning Star’s fighting fund here.

Photo shows some of the 500000 new public sector owned appartments being built this year in Chongqing, southwest China, for rent to low and middle income families. Source www.gov.cn

by Anna Chen

I’ve just read this in Stalin’s British Victims (pub: Sutton) by Francis Beckett: “In theory, communism is a generous and fair-minded creed, which rejects, for good reason, the poverty amid plenty which is the hallmark of capitalism.”

That just about sums up my sympathy for a system which was supposed to have eradicated poverty and a class system that privileges a tiny bloated section of humanity at the expense of everyone else. This is an ideal worth fighting for but I’ll get onto the provisos later on.

An article by Heiko Khoo has just been published marking the Chinese Communist Party at 90, in which the author goes back to basics and attempts to provide an accessible overview of the present economic crisis in the West.

Forged in the fire of the early 20th century when China was a third world nation on its knees having suffered numerous invasions by imperialist powers — and with the fledgling Soviet Union appearing to be a progressive force in the world that would liberate the international proletariat from capitalism — the Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. Like so many communist parties around the world, it took its confidence from the Soviet model. However, it eventually split from the Soviet template and avoided disintegrating as the USSR did after its fall in 1989. China’s subsequent embrace of a hybrid communism with a capitalist engine, something George Orwell might have dubbed one of his “Barnum & Bailey monstrosities”, was a deft turn that allowed China to powerhouse its economy but at great immediate cost to the workers and peasants it was supposed to represent.

The current onslaught on Western working and middle-classes to pay for the crisis of the banks is persuading many of us through hard experience that a planned economy such as China employs is preferable to the chaos of the free market. Our pensionable age is rising, rail commuters are having to pay a third of their salary just for the privilege of getting to work despite a worsening service, public housing stocks have shrunk or stagnated while lowered welfare payments means an expected exodus of the poor from our cities as they are priced out of the housing market. And as one radio interviewee put it, Nye Bevan got the doctors on board for the creation of the NHS by stuffing gold into their mouths — the ConDem coalition is prising the gold from their teeth and stuffing it into the pockets of NHS privateers.

As Khoo writes:

Capitalist states, no matter how democratic, systematically favor the private sector out of ideological choice, which corresponds to the material interests of the ruling class. Thus widespread fraud and recklessness by private banks before 2008 was rewarded by transferring their debts onto the shoulders of the working classes of Europe and the United States.

It’s not as if the money isn’t there. At the same time as we are daily assailed by the “Big Society” lie that it we are all in together, and that our rights and share of national wealth have to be carved up, we see reports of a Bernie Ecclestone daughter buying a £56 million house, Hyde Park flats going for tens of millions, the Sunday Times rich list revealing the accelerating wealth of the super-rich, supermarkets posting record profits, and so on. Britain is a haven for low or non-tax payers while the tax burden grows for the rest of us.

Without a successful communist model to tempt western workers, the gloves are off and the capitalist elite is clawing back everything we gained after World War II. Yet China’s example seems to reinforce the capitalist argument. A bloated Chinese ruling class may be emerging from the work done by their communist predecessors, but the proletariat is also gaining, albeit at a slower rate than the yuan billionaires now hoovering up the national wealth.

Khoo goes on to write, and this is one area where I take issue :

What the CPC has shown since Deng Xiaoping initiated reform and opening of the economy is that capitalist forces can be kept in check by the increasing strength of the working class. For every capitalist born there are tens and hundreds of workers. A key question confronting modern Chinese communism is how can workers exercise democratic control over productive forces and realize their constitutional rights as masters of the state?

The CCP, whatever its origins and noble intentions, is not synonymous with the Chinese working class. Many would argue it never was. There seems to be a major contradiction in the first sentence of the paragraph: capitalist forces can be kept in check by effectively strengthening it? Where is the “checking” coming from? Although China attempted to relax its trade union rights in 2006, lobbying by the American Chamber of Commerce, supported by the EU, and I’m sure to the satisfaction of swathes of the Chinese leadership, terminated the reforms. It is only recently that strike action outside the official trade unions have exerted enough pressure to gain concessions.

Chinese workers and peasants have lost many rights under the auspices of the CCP. Job security, housing and health have all suffered, as well as the all-round emotional, intellectual development that socialism was supposed to bring, although the new sweatshop factories are slowly raising wages and leading to a burst in consumerism. The straight-jacketing of thinking through the imprisonment of dissident intellectuals, the abandonment of political ideals and an adherence to feudal Confucian attitudes have hamstrung Chinese society. The mega-blogger Han Han is held up as an example of freethinking in China, but how much of what this racing-driver playboy has to say is an expression of an old dispossessed elite flexing its muscle and getting ready to displace what little vestigial socialism there is left?

If we are to build a society that is fairer to all, crucial problems need addressing. The Chinese communists were right to combat imperialist aggression as well as aiming for the construction of a classless society. They have succeeded in raising an estimated 600 million people out of absolute poverty and doubled life expectations. Khoo’s document is a sharp reminder that there is a better way to be, but it remains a Platonic ideal while there is such a disjuncture between stated aim and actuality.

The CCP represents the new ruling class. I do not agree that “some have to get rich so everyone can get rich”, as espoused by the Deng Xiaoping group who welcomed Milton Friedman into their midst in 1989, shortly before cracking down on the protests in Tiananmen Square. Neither am I impressed with the vast accumulation of wealth by the children of the former apparatchiks who ran state assets and who are now billionaires. China was one of the most hopeful social experiments ever conducted in the crucible of war, famine and a host of calamities and yet its leadership now presides over an increase in inequality. How to get it back to its ideals so that it is serving all its people and not just the few is the big challenge. A redistributive tax to make the new wealth work for the whole population, welfare protection for the poorest, and a curb on obscene syphoning off of wealth made from what were once state assets and labour exploitation would be a good start. Let’s hope the working class, all 450 million of them, starts to flex its muscles.

Right now, China does not fire the imagination of international movements looking to build a better world. It does not represent a model for workers across the globe, only for the capitalist class who are looking on the new superpower with envy and resentment.

Professor Gregor Benton adds:

A report released by China’s central bank said corrupt Chinese officials smuggled an estimated $123.6 billion out of the country over a 15-year period. Apparently 17,000 Communist party cadres, police, judicial officers and state-owned enterprise executives fled the country between the mid-1990s and 2008. Higher-ranking officials who absconded with money had the ÛS as their favourite destination, followed by Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Those who couldn’t get visas went to eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, to await a chance to remigate to a ‘better’ destination. Lower-ranking officials went to countries bordering China, or to Hong Kong. For those who read Chinese, the report is abridged here.

by Anna Chen

Amitai Etzioni asks in the Chatham House-run International Affairs website, if China can be trusted as a “responsible stakeholder” in world politics.

You may remember that “stakeholder” was a term much used by Tony Blair and New Labour after economic guru Will Hutton began popularising the business term and applying it to their aspirations for a section of the population. Not all of them, mind. Just enough harbouring the delusion that they’d be granted an interest in society (rather than posessing an inbuilt interest on account of their being a member of society already) to ensure they’d vote for their benefactors.

Who can forget how responsible New Labour were in power: a veritable model of democracy, altruism and benevolence.

This was the same New Labour, not old Labour in opposition to Capital, that took Britain to war against the wishes of its people including many of those would-be stakeholders. The government under whom the poverty gap grew for the first time under Labour helmsmanship, a landslide victory notwithstanding.

Etzioni quotes American commentators:

China ‘is refusing to be a responsible stakeholder in the international political system, cultivating, as it has been, good relations with some of the world’s most odious regimes’, according to Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic.

Which is rich considering America’s interests in Saudi Arabia and almost the entire Middle East, along with every other commie-killing despot that ever took a Yankee dollar. In 2005, the Bush Jr administration echoed the fear that China would not be a responsible stakeholder, even as they bombed Iraq. And Condoleeza Rice had America on paranoia standby when she declared China to be “not a status quo power”, meaning the US could not be certain that its own interests would remain untouched by the new kid on the block.

Whether that kid would turn out to be an even bigger bully or a cohort prepared to carve up the world along new lines suitable to the old masters remains to be seen. But some have argued that China is indeed a “status quo power” and plead for its induction into the international community (of business).

China itself has been eager to demonstrate that it is not a “revisionist” power seeking to upset the current geopolitical balance too much:

President Jiang Zemin stated that ‘China needs a long-lasting peaceful international environment for its development’, and in 1997 he initiated China’s ‘New Security Concept’, which stresses ‘mutual respect’ and ‘peaceful coexistence’. Since then, Chinese leaders such as Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have declared that they are seeking a ‘peaceful rise’ and that they seek to focus on domestic development, not international expansion.

Why bother with armed conflict, a Western enthusiasm, when you can buy what you want?

Since then, Chinese leaders such as Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have declared that they are seeking a ‘peaceful rise’ and that they seek to focus on domestic development, not international expansion. The concept was developed by Chinese scholar Zheng Bijian, who wrote in a Foreign Affairs article entitled ‘China’s “peaceful rise” to great power status’, ‘for the next few decades the Chinese nation will be preoccupied with securing a more decent life for its people … China’s emergence thus far has been driven by capital, technology, and resources acquired through peaceful means … China’s peaceful rise will further open its economy so that its population can serve as a growing market for the rest of the world … China’s development depends on world peace — a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.’

So far, so “responsible”.

However, the John Milius school of Red Dawn politics rages that China is only pretending to be peaceful and that she’ll reveal herself in full gory glory in true Fu Manchu fashion once all her plans and capabilities are in place. I saw Team America, I know how this one plays out.

Although Etzioni piece is published on the (British) Chatham House website, it overlooks a vital state of affairs when it asks if China is a “good citizen of the international community”. Hey, we Brits aren’t citizens of anything, being subjects of the Royal Parasites. In seeking to distinguish between the behaviour expected from communitarian “stakeholders” and upstanding “citizens”, it seems we are the Disappeared.

According to Etzioni, a stakeholding community member does everything a citizen does — paying taxes (unless you can afford the accountants), serving on juries (and paying for superinjunctions if you can afford it), submitting to the laws (unless you can afford not to).

A good community member—aside from being an upstanding citizen—also contributes to the common good by volunteering, making donations, heeding the informal norms of the community and helping to enforce them by exerting informal social controls over those who do not.

Hmm, did I see some sort of power wielded there?

In place of a global state, Etzioni sees, “a non-trivial and growing body of established international laws and institutions which nations are expected to heed”. He examines whether China is a good citizen or stakeholder.

Chiming with a tidal wave of claims that China is not pulling its weight, Etzioni cites a parsimonious foreign aid policy. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I remember foreign media reporting the rapid arrival of fully tooled-up Chinese rescue teams complete with dog-handlers on the stricken island before many Western nations, including Britain, could muster their forces. However, China was criticised for being stingy with their relief aid, donating only a miserly US$1.5 million, against US$350 million from America, but rising to US$60 million for the 2004 tsunami fund. He doesn’t mention the pledges made by the G8/20 rich nations in a drunken bout of “my wallet’s bigger than yours … isn’t is Angela?” and then forgotten as the hangover wore off. What Etzioni doesn’t clarify is the state of the African debt, once thought to be a never-ending problem, which China has alleviated through various deals (open to a slew of criticism), thereby mercifully saving us from Bono’s never-ending career as messiah and right royal pain

Of the list of examples of Chinese aggression throughout the past decades, I’d ask: where’s the cut-off point? At what time can’t you phone someone? Nine o’clock? Ten o’clock? Ten-fifteen if they don’t have kids? Likewise, when’s the cut off point for bad behaviour? How come deliberate acts of aggression such as the opium wars and sending gunboats up the Yangtze don’t count but accidents such as the 2001 collision of a Chinese and an American plane do? Are we mentioning the deliberate downing of an Iranian airliner by the US in 1989?

It’s hardly surprising that the Chinese get arsey about Japan when the Rising Sun invaders held beheading contests of its citizens in the streets of Nanking and experimented on people, all within living memory. How should they respond to a nation that has now rewritten the history books to forgive itself. Comfort women? Shrines to fascist murderers?

How do the Western powers fare when comparing environmental destruction and global deaths resulting from climate change?

At least Etzioni throws a sop to fairness when he writes:

… China is properly criticized for doing little to stop genocides. However, while the US and its allies are credited for stopping the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, they failed to do so in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan.

And he quotes Bill Gates as saying, ” … the trend is clear that China is becoming a more responsible stakeholder.”

Who can blame China for maintaining a discreet distance from America’s conflicts?

From China’s perspective, for example, it is in China’s interests for the US military to be mired in a war in Afghanistan (and before that in Iraq) and to be further occupied with a proliferating Iran, especially given statements by American military officials that define China’s military as a major threat to the US, implying that China is an adversary.

Would you rush to the aid of superpower generals eager to make you a target?

This blogpost is not a plea for ignoring China’s faults. I’m angry at the way the wealth gap is soaring in China; the number of executions; the corruption; the clampdown on free expression and imprisonment of dissidents. But instead of raising issues of international concern in a way that leads to change and understanding, much of the report seems to present yet another skewed “look over there” job while allowing the West to get away with much the same. After all, how much of the Haiti tragedy, in America’s back yard, was due purely to natural forces, and how much — with continuing poverty, disease and corruption, before and since — was set in motion years ago. Presumably prior to the cut-off point, whose location only Amitai Etzioni and his friends know.

The latter part of the report does note areas where China is improving: slow but steady recognition of human rights even if Ai Weiwei is still in prison, and despite double standards being applied to US allies such as Saudi Arabia.

I see Western capitalists on the wane looking enviously at the new Eastern capitalists and studying how to do the same. By all means criticise China’s policies but all too often this looks like the skunk damning the pig for smelling bad.

UPDATE 22 May 2011: Henry Kissinger’s book, On China, is out.

… my first question, which concerns the treatment of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who, like Mr. Kissinger, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. “I have not read his writings,” he answers. … I press on. Does he denounce Mr. Liu’s treatment? “My policy on this,” he replies, “is to talk to them [Chinese leaders], but my personal view is not to denounce it publicly.”

Ye-e-es. Just as well so few Westerners have read them. Lui Xiaobo’s award of the Nobel

Who said, yesterday?

“We must respect the historical institutions and religious rituals of Tibetan Buddhism. I am afraid it is not up to anyone to abolish the reincarnation institution or not,”

Did you guess right? That was Padma Choling, chairman of the Tibet autonomous regional government in the Peoples’ Republic of China.

 The instititution of Tibetan Buddhism has a history of more than 1,000 years, and the specific reincarnation institutions of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama have been carried on for several hundred years. They are an integral part of the religious life of Tibet. Tibetan national and religious traditions are protected in China, where Tibet is an autonomous region, the picture above shows the traditional celebration of the Tibetan new year which happened yesterday. Indeed, earlier this week, Gyaincain Norbu, the Panchen Lama – the second highest Tibetan Buddhist leader – expressed the view that

“The Tibetan people now enjoy religious freedom and are much better off, People can freely choose to start a business, study or become a Buddhist monk. They are free to do whatever they aspire to, which was impossible in old Tibet. The peaceful liberation of Tibet has made people the real master of Tibet”

So who wants to abolish the reincarnation ritual.? You guessed it, Tenzin Gyatso himself, the 14th Dalai Lama, who has declared that once he dies, there should be no reincarnation. Is it not odd that a political leader who claims to want to preserve Tibetan cultural heritage now wants to overturn traditions for short term factional advantage? He wants there to be an “elected” leader for the self-styled “government in exile”; an “election” that would by-pass the Tibetan population, and only include exiles.

We should remember that when the Dalai lama ruled Tibet, serfs, who accounted for more than 90 percent of the population of old Tibet, were treated as private property by their owners, including the family of the Dalai Lama. The feudal class owned some 80 percent of Tibet’s wealth. Serfs were classified into three categories in accordance with their possessions — Tralpa, Duchung and Nangsan, with the third one being the most miserable who could be sold by his owner as cattle.

The family of the current Dalai Lama were slave owners.

On March 10, 1959, the Dalai Lama and some of the feudal owners instigated an armed rebellion to postpone abolition of the thousand-year-old serfdom system in Tibet. He then fled the country to India, taking with him most of the desperately poor nation’s gold reserves, which he expropriated as his personal property.

When the Dalai lama ruled Tibet, average life expectancy was just 35.5 years, it has risen over the five decades of being part of the peoples’ republic to 67 years, mainly due to rising health care standards and an improving social security system

Today Tibet is prospering, its economy grew 12.3 percent in 2010 to 50.7 billion yuan (7.7 billion U.S. dollars), and has expanded 79.5 percent over the past five years. The per capita net income of farmers and herdsmen increased to 4,139 yuan in 2010 from 2,078 yuan in 2005. The per capita disposable income of urban residents in the region jumped to 14,980 yuan in 2010 from 6,569 yuan in 2005, statistics show.

“In Lhasa, the economy is growing rapidly, the society is harmonious and stable, and the people are living and working happily,” says Dorje Tsedrup, mayor of Lhasa.