China Law Blog

Perspective is good. It's also worth remembering that there was nothing wrong about criticising the poor human rights record in South Korea in the 1980s (or the US in the civil rights era etc). But it's always good to bear in mind that China is NOT the USSR and is not in an ideological confrontation with the West. Its values and aspirations may one day be very close to ours today. Demonisation of the country or its leaders is clearly not a good idea, but nor is rolling over and accepting their efforts to turn the argument into "whataboutism"... With apologies for the long comment this extract from last week's online correspondent's diary for the Economist illustrates the perils of that line:

So an evening debate on the death of Russian press freedom (where your diarist was putting the case for the prosecution) produced a sense of déjà vu. Two Russian journalists, putting the case for the defence, centred their case not on the rights and wrongs of Russia’s laws on extremism, but on the shortcomings of the British media for superficiality, double-standards, and craven obedience to its political and commercial masters. How dare we criticise Russian public broadcasting after the way the BBC had bowed to government pressure on so many occasions? Had not the newspaper coverage of the Litvinenko murder been a farrago of exaggeration, misunderstanding and hypocrisy?

Well perhaps it had. But the debate was about Russia. The shortcomings of the British press are widely discussed, not least by its own journalists; though it gets most things wrong most of the time, the errors are not directed by weekly meetings at Number 10, Downing Street at which a prime ministerial aide lays down the line to take in the comings days.

Soviet propagandists’ overuse of “whataboutism” provided the punchline for subversive jokes. For example: A caller to a phone-in on the (fictitious) Radio Armenia asks, “What is the average wage of an American manual worker?” A long pause ensues. (The answer would have been highly embarassing to the self-proclaimed workers’ paradise, which was proving to be lots of work and no paradise). Then the answer comes: “u nich linchuyut negrov” [over there they lynch Negroes]. By the late 1980s, that had become the derisive catchphrase that summed up the whole bombastic apparatus of the Soviet propaganda machine.

Yet “whataboutism” attracted vocal support from some parts of the audience. A student from Pakistan passionately denounced democracy as a sham. Someone from Malaysia praised the Kremlin for standing up to America. A bearded Brit came up with a predictable, “Who are we to judge?”.

"But it's always good to bear in mind that China is NOT the USSR and is not in an ideological confrontation with the West"

What utter rubbish, various Chinese ministers have been quoted in SCMP calling Japanese, South Koreans, Hong Kongese and Taiwanese "bananas" for accepting "western values" like democracy and fairly open markets. Chinese TV shows like "Little Hero" depict Chinese cartoon characters beating up US based comic book heroes or soap operas where foreigners are always lowering themselves before Chinese.
Beijing constantly utters lines of "non-interference" or supporting "alternative governments" as an excuse to exclusively back totalitarian gov'ts.

Perspective is good and very much needed. However, though I agree that China shouldn't be demonized, I think there might be a real ideological conflict with the West. And as long as we're quoting journals, reading the following interview with the former president of Taiwan Lee Teng-hui at Far Eastern Economic Review seems relevant to that point:

For instance, take Malaysia and Singapore. "They cannot give up Asian values. They vote for a prime minister, but he is thinking, ‘I am an emperor. I can control everything.’ All the national power, money, assets, belong to him." That condemns them to the endless cycle of dynastic politics.

Taiwan seemed to be progressing out of this cycle, but since 2000, it has stopped, and is even regressing. "Now on every matter, the president will express a view. This is not the way of democracy, the president cannot run everything. It is very similar to the Chiang Kai-shek era."

On the topic of the post itself, China always struck me as a 3rd World country with 2nd World cities and 1st World ambition. Whether the ambition can succeed without addressing the country, and how long the cities will tolerate the friction between the two is a question no one can answer. The only close example is the USSR, and China has gotten past that first economic collapse hurdle, so everything from here forward is a new experience. "Fragile Superpower" seems to me an incredibly apt description.

Nh, talk about rubbish, which Chinese ministers referred the Japanese, South Koreans etc. "bananas"? What Chinese TV show "Little Hero"? Sun Wukong beating Spiderman?

Dan, why do we have to compare China to others, whether be the US, Denmark, Japan, Korea or Russia? China is China. Regardless of whether Beijing is right or wrong, no matter what China's future is going to be, it's their country, it is their choice and it is their future. They have to bear the consequences for their actions. I don't think we are in any position to influence them in order to make the outcome better for us. That wouldn't be right.

Kebab homie,

You mean little hero comic from like the 60's???

You serious?

Soap opera? I dunno the few Soap Opera that I've seen the expat in it are always respected, as in, I'm successful, I'm doing international business with the Chinese (or I'm a lawyer and you wife is hooking on with me biatch! e.g Beijinger in New York, I know it's an old show); people that have an interest in Chinese culture etc... So what are you talking about? Do you want the expat to be portrayed as someone who kicks in the door and screams, democracy now! Your government is EVIL! Free Tibet! Globalization suxors! Illumanati! The Billderburg group rules us all!!!

Then proceeds to shake his phatty dread locks while puffing on a spliff?

In my interactions with Chinese culture I have had to coin a phrase that captures the high metabolic rate of the chinese people and its economy in order to have a conversation that allows me from getting run over.

Chimo...

as in ...China Momentum..."She has incredible chimo and nothing can stop her, she talks a mile a minute."

Due to China's amazing metabolic rate, the Chinese entrepreneurs, engineers, architects and lawyers I interact with all display this quality of having "Chimo".

No other nation or its citizens has this Chimo, and is why they are cruising right now in history. (India for all of its success cannot hold a candle to the Chinese)

Yes...China is relatively poor, but they are moving in the right direction with Chimo, unlike the US which is crumbling like Rome did.

Nh...watching cartoons and then referencing them here in your arguments on this blog does not give you much credibility. Propaganda is everywhere m8.

Duncan,

I'm on your same page, as usual.

nh,

Dude, you are speaking nonsense again; one cartoon does not a coherent foreign policy make, and I am the one always screaming from the rooftops about the importance/meaning of cartoons.

skyywise,

I think it unfair to group Asians together on this and then treat them all as though they have the same genetic code and that this code dooms them to tryanny. I don't buy that for a minute and I think you are completely ignoring the tremendous progress that has been made in places like Taiwan (so maybe it isn't a straight line -- I don't know enough to dispute you) and Korea and Japan (I do know it is not a straight line there).

I do not see the problem as Asia, I see the problem as time. Many of the countries you mention are "new" in the same way the United States was new in the 1800s and Russia is today (talk about backsliding!) Again, perspective.

Pffefer,

Comparisions yield knowledge and perspective, that's why. Man, you are idealistic. Of course China belongs to the Chinese and I will be the first to tell you that I am not terribly big on telling other countries how to do things. I have this view not for moral reasons (I have never really thought about it that way), but because I do not think it is terrible effective and because it can so often lead to blowback.

Iran under Mossadegh is a classic example of that. I am convinced that had we not messed with that country, Iran would be an ally of the West today.

Soviet Dude,

You make a good point in your own unique way. Kudos, dude.

Stephen Allard,

Chimo has existed in countless countries. Koreea in the 1990s. Japan in the 1980s. Moscow right now. It also has existed in just about every immigrant population that has come to the US, which is one of our many "secret sauces" that I am convinced will prove you so wrong on your analogizing the US to a crumbling Rome.

Josh,

I'm so with you. I thought about whether that line was accurate for at least a minute (which is a long time for me) and decided it was because any country with 900 million essentially pretty poor people is a "big poor developing nation." These 900 million create issues way different than that faced by countries like Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, etc.

Unfortunately, I fear Edwards is right about America becoming two nations.

I think you fail to see that China's poorness is its power. China is essentially the world's largest corporation. With a central command center, it has vast resources as well as 1.3 Billion employees to flood the world with goods.

Don't blame China for its pollution. It is merely a by product of Western consumerism.

Perspective means giving up the ignorant yet emitionally satisfying, static view of "Red China"... sadly too much to ask for some folks.

@Soviet Dude;
Good script ideas, maybe some characters like a John Wayne and a rugged Aussie.

@pfeffer;
"Dan, why do we have to compare China to others"
Because everyone uses a frame of reference to understand the world around them and since we are all human, it is correct and fitting to compare other nations to China and China to other nations. And the "banana" comments popped up about the same time as the anti-domestic security protests and the realization that HK was not going to get universal suffrage anytime soon. Maybe you ought to read more and write less.

@CLB (cc: Steve Allard)
You are more traveled than I am, so haven't you noticed that the media can reflect the context of a society and in certain circumstances the opinions of the gov't?

Ok, here's another Chinese show I remember, a little fat American kid with American mom who married a Chinese guy. No harm there except for the fact that the show constantly made a point of the mom leaving the boy's biological father because the father was an abusive alcoholic (as all American men are) and she chose a good Chinese man (who worked hard but never late and wasn't a KTV addict).

Some more; old Chairman Mao shows in which Mao's chair and desk being a bit higher up than the seat and dispensed personal and political advice starting with "comrade, comrade...". The grateful receiver was always leaning forward with elbows on hands and eagerly nodding their head in agreement.

Now modernize this scene with a Chinese boss and the eager expat gleefully receiving tips and pointers, always leaning forward and/or looking down to lower themselves.

Just like lowering your glass to others to show deference and humility when doing "gan bei".

Did I miss anything?

@CLB;

The US has always been "two nations" for the most part, but it is the freedom of social and economic movement that has set the US apart from other nations in the past and should continue in the future as long as a caste system is not allowed to develop. As long as people can see others in similar circumstances improve their financial and social lots, they have hope as well.

China has recently built the worlds most elevated railway at 5072 meters above sea level at it's highest point.

During construction they had zero fatalities (compare that to the 200 + recorded deaths on the hoover dam. They invented multiple new types of concrete and new deep pile technology to combat pouring into permafrost most of which was poured at anywhere between - 10 to - 50 and melts every year causing the earth to sink by up to 0.5 of a meter. Tanggula station is the worlds highest above sea level at 5068 meters.

It surely is a wonderous feat of engineering. (Yes I have Nat Geo)

Two well known burger and cofffee franchises are currently battling it out for the exclusive F&B rights at Tanggula.

Perspective enough?

@Alex

...and the people 'cross the land, with full bellies, rosy cheeks and bountiful water gave thanks and rejoiced the leadership of the party!

The railway is already beginning to warp, the rate of permafrost melt and subsidence is faster than MinTran predicted.

Invented new concrete? Hardly, the Russians and Scandinavians have been building ultra-low temp railroads for a long time, including the O&M work, weight and speed upgrades the Russians have been doing on the Trans-Siberian railway for 30 years.

I have not read the entire article either, but I want to simply point to an unexamined premise of the article snippet I read, which is that China is either a superpower (US view) or fragile (China view) and not both at the same time.

This binary thinking (superhero or weakling) underlies a lot of thinking (or should I say rhetoric?) about China today and tends to simplify (shall I say distort?) the truth.

Quasi-China-watchers such as myself would point out that arguing relative superiority is missing the point. China is fragile,but also from a geo-political and economic perspective extremely important to the entire world in which we all live (whether that world be Africa, Europe or the US). Whither China, so too does most of us, whether that be in respect to climate change, counterfeiting of IPR,or the next geopolitical flashpoint.

While we may seek comparisons with the past, it is quite hard to find close parallels that best match China's promise and threat. Whether we look at GDP growth, the hunt for natural resources, the population explosion, the one-child policy, China has harnessed the world's largest population, the zeal for entrepreneurialism to create much of the goods people crave. We may reduce our estimates of when and if China will surpass the US, but we may not safely ignore it--smugness is always the enemy of self-knowledge.

The book that has influenced me the most on US foreign relations is William Appleman Williams', The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Nations like to self determine, and no nation and nobody likes to be forced to do something or be told why they're screwing up. There are two, non-mutually exclusive, ways to go about getting nations to do what you want: 1) constructive criticism; 2) leading by example. Just because the US is the biggest baddest kid on the block, does not give it the right to tell other countries how to behave. But if the US acts as a constructive role model "with confidence, good humor, and thick-skinnedness befitting a country of our stature," then other nations are more likely to treat us as a role model than as the opposition. The key is not to criticize the nation itself, but to constructively criticize the ways in which another nation conducts business by hinting at what it can do better. China does do a lot of things wrong, but it also does a lot of things right, from my standpoint at least. If the US can convince China that they can improve their institutions by demonstrating how our perspective of 'rightness' can improve their quality of life, or whatever barometer of achievement you wish to use, then we will see greater success in making China less dangerous to and more compatible with the US world view, which in the abstract is a good and healthy world view.

What I find dangerous is the willingness to impose sanctions and vilify nations that we don't agree with. These don't work because they serve to piss these nations off. Aid has a greater role in this modern age than harm in getting nations to change. The last time harm inflicted by the US succeeded in getting a nation to change was WWII. But only total war and total devastation, both unacceptable today, has succeeded.

From a lot of the comments, I gathered that perspective is important, and perspective does not forgive or exonerate bad behavior. I couldn't agree more.

NH, is that a glimmer of hope for the Chinese people in your 11/05 10:17pm post? I dig it!

I appreciate Stephen Allard's comment, although I think it's an over-statement to say that America is crumbling. I can relate to his concept of "chimo" though, which I myself witnessed on a daily basis throughout the entire five years that I lived in China. This can-do attitude, with its idea that nothing is impossible, seems to be a fashionable trait among the Chinese, for almost anything seems doable. China is where development is racing ahead the fastest, and where the biggest risks are often taken – projects like the construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam for example, the world’s largest hydroelectric river dam and power station, which required not only the taking of huge environmental risks, but also the relocation of a staggering 1.13 million people.

The completion in 2006 of the Beijing to Lhasa railway line, the world’s highest, also demonstrates clearly the power of this can-do spirit, with Chinese engineers able to defy many of the world’s leading experts who said that it couldn’t be done, for much of the line had to be built on permafrost, and in the Kunlun Mountains, tunnels had to be bored through long stretches of hard rock and ice, and at altitudes dangerously thin in oxygen.

China can not only boast to having the world’s longest wall, the world’s tallest Buddha, the world’s largest dam, and the highest railway – taking passengers to the roof of the world – but also it has succeeded in launching a man into space, operates the world’s fastest train (the Shanghai Maglev), the world’s largest Ferris wheel (the Nanchang Star), the world’s largest public bathhouse (in Chongqing), and three of the world’s ten highest skyscrapers are in China, five if we include Hong Kong. At the Snoopy Fun-Fun Garden in Shunde, one can marvel at the world’s largest Snoopy doll, fifteen metres in height, and in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, one can walk along the world’s longest dragon, a good twenty-one kilometres in length. The Middle Kingdom, not surprisingly, now has the world’s largest penis too, with its nine metre high erection rising up from the grounds of the Longwan Shaman Amusement Park in Changchun city, Jilin Province.

Given the obvious phallic symbolism of rockets and skyscrapers, the desire to build the world’s biggest and best of everything reveals much about the country’s growing self-confidence, prepared as it is to act ever more assertively when negotiating its interests on the international stage. Over the past twenty years, life for most in China has been steadily improving, as the United Nations Human Development reports clearly indicate, and as China continues to rise, so too will its monuments to success.

What I will remember most about China though, is not the grandness of any of its architectural feats, be they ancient or modern, but rather the thrilling irrepressibility and optimism of its people. It seemed as though just about every person I met had made some kind of personal investment in their own future, either through further education, or by setting up a business or securing a job, and for some, through the buying of their own home. ‘The Chinese people today,’ as the British journalist Kevin Sinclair has observed, ‘are healthier, wealthier and more free than at any time in their long history,’ and for this reason, the nation is full of confidence. ‘China will continue to prosper and living standards improve,’ a student of mine in Huai’an once said to me. ‘That is our common expectation.’

Nothing reflects this brimming confidence more so than China’s soaring college enrolments, as increasing numbers of families join the rush to invest in their children’s higher education. In 1990 there were only two million college students in China. By 2007, this figure had jumped tenfold, to just over twenty million – and that’s despite the fact that rises in the average cost of college tuition over this period greatly outpaced the growth in personal income: in 2007 the average college tuition fee in China was twenty-five times higher than it was in 1989, though the annual income of urban residents had grown only fourfold throughout this same period.

But development, wherever it occurs, is always going to be an uneven process, and economic growth rarely, if ever, benefits everybody equally. China is no exception: in 2005, the wealthiest ten percent of the population consumed forty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, while the poorest ten percent consumed slightly less than one and a half percent. Around 300 million people in China lack sustained access to adequate supplies of fresh drinking water, and nine percent of the population continue to live undernourished.

Yet even those I encountered at the lowest rungs of the social ladder struck me as being determined in their struggles to create for themselves a better life – people like young Tang Ming, who Gao Ying and I met in the small village of Nangang, or like Lujie and her husband, who we met by the river bank in Fuli, whose son they were optimistic would one day grow up to be another Lu Shen – a god of wealth. Yuan Haijiao, a student of mine in Shunde, also had a flame burning bright within her, a fiery ambition to provide for herself and for her impoverished family all the comforts of a modern life. Nor can I forget the migrant workers I saw each day on the streets of Shenzhen, motivated as they were by the need to support their far away families – forever on the lookout for new opportunities, though often very unfairly exploited, their journeys no doubt never stale.

Dan, I know what China is and what it is not. China is both rich and poor, both good and bad, just like everyone else is. It is not what many of us think it is. China is not a homogenous entity, it is so complex and full of contradictions. It is certainly no Japan.

Of course we can all comment on how we feel about China, but I deeply resent the notion often implied by the west, especially the US that we must have a say in China's future and that we need to make sure it will turn out positively for us. I mean the Chinese or the Russians etc. don't demand a say in America's future, who are we to tell them what they should become?

I should just like to clarify something about my last comment above. I agree with Dan, that what Stephen has creatively termed "Chimo" exists, or has existed, in "countless countries". I was by no means trying to suggest that "Chimo" is somehow unique to the Chinese (I'm not sure Stephen was suggesting this either). I was merely pointing out that, according to my observations, China is right now experiencing a "Chimo" phase - one that I think will last for quite some time yet.

Dan wrote: "...it is not fair to expect [China] to be the United States or Denmark or Japan, or even Korea. It does not say China should be free of all criticism, but it does counsel us to be cognizant of its past, which shapes its present and gives it a wariness for rapid political change. Judged against Denmark, China loses, but judged against where it was twenty years ago, China wins. Judged against countries like Russia, China does just fine."

I agree entirely. Randall Peerenboom, incidently, in his new book, China Modernizes, stresses this very argument throughout the entire length of his book, supporting the view with overwhelming amounts of empirically-verifiable evidence. He shows China as being on course - that it is experiencing the exact same developmental path as Singapore, South Korea, Japan, etc. - and that it is actually performing better on certain measurements than the way that most of these countries had when they were at similar levels of economic development.

Alex:

Zero fatalities is questionable: A foreigner who has lived in Qinghai for several years and speaks good Tibetan and Mandarin, whom I met last year, told me he had heard credible reports of hundreds of fatalities. I wonder where your information comes from?

The best student in my college class is from a farmer family. Actually, a lot of my college friends are from poor rural background. There are two China, at this moment. But the social mobility in China is pretty good and given time, China will be there.

One more point, China is no longer communist, but the leaders still have their socialist ideologies, equality among the population is definitely one of them. And I can guarantee you that the Chinese urban youth are not as cynical as you might think. We do want to lift the mass population out of poverty. Actually, the government is just doing that through taxation and economical policies. Those farmers might have to migrant into the coastal cities for poor paid jobs, but their children and their children's children will assimilate into the urban society without any problem. There are no caste or racial problems thanks to the revolution.

-- a Tsinghua elite

@MAJ;

Your list of "greatest", "biggest" and "longest" is right out of Xinhua's top ten list of China.

For the record;
The Great Wall cost untold lives and was uneffective, the invaders simply went around it. And it doesn't take an engineering miracle to build a wall that isn't very tall, just alot of bodies. I would give the Grand Canal system a thumbs up though.

The manned space program is built totally on top of the Russian and US programs. The Russian still make all of China's capsules and space suits.

The Tibet railway is fulfilling its western prophecy of failure as the gov't must continuously reinforce the sagging elevated tracks. The cooling system can't keep up with the rate of permafrost melt and the rate of subsidence at each pillar is very uneven.

By Beijing's own admission in Xinhua, CCTV and http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/summary/1417-The-Three-Gorges-a-wiser-approach
the Three Gorges project is an environmental disaster in slow motion. It is also unstoppable unless the dam is taken down, which removes flood protection and will leave behind an alluvial fan of super toxic silt.

And for all of those newly enrolled college students, most can't find employment in their area of study. Even city newspapers in Beijing and Shanghai lament the numbers of PhDs sweeping streets and driving subways.

Actually, the Chinese are now building an even BIGGER ferris wheel than the Nanchang one. Work has already begun on the world\'s biggest ferris wheel, in Beijing. When complete, scheduled in 2009, the Great Wheel of China will be 208 metres high!

Alex,

Sorry but anyone that compares the dead toll of China's recently completed elevated railway with that of the Hoover Dam built during the depression is in need of a new prospective.

In general,

I believe in China. But no one knows for sure what will happen in China once the system is tested with a strong and prolonged economic downturn (which will happen sooner or later)or a real push for social freedoms. The current situation has never existed before in China. An environment where so many citizens have real economic power and (most importantly) have extensive knowlegde of and ties to the western world. Any comparsion to China past, in my mind, would be without merit. The past only shows that force can, at least for a while, control ignorance. While much ignorance remains, the question is when and where is the tipping point? It will be interesting to see what happens in the future but no matter what China is likley to continue to grow in importance to the world as a whole.

JL,

And your source is reliable?

I speak English, I heard my friend saying that 9/11 is a inside job.

PWNED!

Nanheyangrouchuan - your observations about the technical problems currently being experienced with SOME of the more ambitious projects that I listed in my comment above, do make for a valid criticism, I admit. It remains to be seen whether or not these problems can be overcome - so the jury is still out. I think too, that you have perhaps overstated your case in regards to the Beijing-Lhasa railway - it's not the disaster that you have painted it out to be. It's still running relatively smoothly, is it not? Many of China's engineers are world class, and they were always expecting technical problems to arise, and to be ongoing. Track maintenance was always going to be an ongoing headache and expense.

The space program may very well be a waste of money in many ways, but it's the symbolism of the project that matters to many Chinese.

The Three Gorges Dam project presents a more potentially serious problem, as does the problem of providing college graduates with meaningful employment.

The existence of these problems, however, in no way invalidates the observation that the Chinese (in general) are at present experiencing a "chimo" phase - and not without good reason. The nation's successes ovger the last 20 years outweigh its failures, and although most Chinese are well aware of the seriousness and scope of the challenges that lie ahead, they nevertheless have good cause to remain cautiously optimistic.

FCWL: JL,

And your source is reliable?

I speak English, I heard my friend saying that 9/11 is a inside job.

PWNED!

Tibet is a restricted zone for foreigners. On top of that, the terrain is rugged, so few witnesses would exist to contradict government accounts. Besides, the average Chinese doesn't even believe that thousands of students were killed during Tiananmen Square, let alone tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward. I personally know Chinese who don't believe the word of their parents that large numbers died of starvation. I can understand why FCWL would believe the word of the Party over man's historical experience of construction over rugged terrain. The Party can leap over physical barriers just as it overcame the laws of economics during the Great Leap Forward.

MAJ:

"China as being on course - that it is experiencing the exact same developmental path as Singapore, South Korea, Japan, etc. - and that it is actually performing better on certain measurements than the way that most of these countries had when they were at similar levels of economic development."

Would you elaborate on what you mean when you say that China is experiencing the "exact same developmental path" as the above mentioned countries, and "is actually performing better on certain measurements"?

Is do see some similarities, but there are very important differences, especially in the case of Japan. I mean, to begin with, are we talking about pre- or post-war Japan?

@MAJ:

"I think too, that you have perhaps overstated your case in regards to the Beijing-Lhasa railway"

The railway has only been open for a year. No one could have foreseen the rate of permafrost and polar ice melt, but the fact is that it's happening and Beijing will either have to dump more money into it or rely on airlines.

China with love,

No my source is not definitely reliable.
I only asked to know what the source of Alex's info was, because I do consider that information to be questionable.
If you base your opinions on info that people will question (and fatalities on the Tibet railway comes under this category given the politics involved), then it's essential to give the source of your info if you want people to take you seriously.

And China with love,

"Those farmers might have to migrant into the coastal cities for poor paid jobs, but their children and their children's children will assimilate into the urban society without any problem"

This is not true. Farmers children cannot 'assimilate into urban society' because of hukou restrictions that prevent them from going to urban schools and getting the same education as "Tsinghua elites" like you.

Perspective is an interesting thing.

For example, from my perspective, if current Russia can rise out of the mess that was Soviet Union in 20 years time, I am sure something will rise out of the mess that is the USA today in 20 years time.

Good luck.

Dear Amban - Thanks for your question. I am busy at work at present, but I will type up a detailed response to your question later this evening.

JL

I never claimed that those migrant worker's children get the same education as city kids. All I said was that they will not be discriminated against like what their parents have to go through. I used the word "assimilate". Those kids have to go to the schools for immigrant workers' children. I am aware of that and I know it's very unfair.

But since we are at it, what about the public school system for the inner city kids in the US? Do they get the same education as the suburban kids? Is there a color line? And how many generations have passed since black people can vote? Why are they still under represented in every prestigious university in the country?

I am not saying China has a perfect education system for under privileged kids. Read my post. I was only expressing my optimism about the further urbanization of China. Brought up in a major city, I hate the fact that there is a clear urban-rural line in China, it's unfair and immoral. But the government is working towards eliminating the gap between rural and urban population.

The fact is that most of the urban population in China have their roots in the countryside, my grand parents on both sides were farmers. So what? I am as urban as the next guy hanging out in Sanlitun bar street. I know a lot "first generation urban dwellers" who are well accepted in the city.

We are one people in China, deal with it. There might be a gap, but given one generation, it's gone. It's actually a great incentive for a lot of rural kids to work hard to top the class.

And to be honest, the hope of China lies on the huge hardworking rural population, I have great respect for them.

A Tsinghua elite

JL

"No my source is not definitely reliable. "

"A foreigner who has lived in Qinghai for several years and speaks good Tibetan and Mandarin, whom I met last year, told me he had heard credible reports of hundreds of fatalities."

If you cannot provide a link and I am sure you cannot, then either you or your imaginary trilingual friend just dragged out that piece out of your rear.

Come again, I will school you every time I see you on CLB by evidence and logic, not by ideology driven rhetorics

Dear Amban,

My use of the word "exact" was no doubt a careless choice on my part, because China's developmental phases have indeed varied from those of other East Asian countries. Neverthless, I think it is reasonable to suggest that it has been generally following the same developmental path.

The path that I am referring to, is of course that of the so-called East Asia Model, which I shall refer to from here on simply as the EAM.

The EAM generally works like this: an emphasis on economic growth rather than civil and especially political rights during the initial stages of development takes place, with a period of rapid economic growth occuring under authoritarian regimes. As the economy grows and wealth is generated, the government invests in human capital and in institutions, including reforms to establish a legal system that meets the basic requirements of a procedural or thin rule of law. As the legal system develops over time, it comes to play an ever greater role in the economy and society more generally. Democratisation, in the sense of freely contested multiple party elections for the highest office is postponed until a relatively high level of wealth is attained. "China will become a democracy around the year 2015," predicts Henry Rowen, who is Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School of Business. "China's grassroots progress toward democracy," he says, "is comparable to that which took place in the early 1970s in Taiwan, when per capita income reached about $2,500, similar to China's income today."

"Growing wealth," he points out, "is accompanied by increased education, the building of business and government institutions with some autonomy, and the formation of attitudes that enable democratic governments to survive when they have a chance at power. If China's economic growth continues at today's rates, it will reach mean incomes of $7,000 to $8,000 by 2015. Spain, Portugal, Chile and Argentina, in addition to Taiwan and South Korea, all made the transition to democracy while they were within this income range."

Constistutionalism also begins to emerge during the authoritarian period, including the development of constitutional norms and the strengthening of institutions, and social organisations start to proliferate and a civil society begins to truly develop. Finally (well, perhaps not "finally", because all East Asian nations are still in the process of development) there is a greater protection of civil and political rights after democratisation, including rights that involves sensitive political issues, although with ongoing abuses of rights in some cases and with rights given communitarian or collectivist interpretation rather than a liberal interpretation.

If we take South Korea and Taiwan as examples, we can see that both currently have high levels of wealth, rule of law compliant legal systems, democratic government, and constitutionalism. Japan does as well, though it is a special case, as Randall Peerenboom has noted, "given its early rise economically and the post-war colonial influence of the US on legal and political institutions."

Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia are also wealthy, with legal systems that fair well in terms of rule of law, but are either not democratic (Hong Kong) or are non-liberal democracies dominated by a single party (Singapore and Malaysia). Japan and South Korea were, until quite recently, also dominated by single party dynasties. In South Korea's case, the authoritarian military dictatorship which eventually allowed a system of free elections to develop after the Seoul Olympics in 1988, continued to rule elected up until 1996/7. Thailand, less wealthy than the others, has democratised but has a weaker legal system along with policies that emphasise economic growth and social order rather than civil and political liberties.

Those countries that tried to democratise at lower levels of wealth have suffered greatly as a consequence, and continue to experience serious problems of stability and hence poor growth and unimpressive rises in living standards: Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Cambodia.

China and Vietnam are following the same developmental path as the more successful East Asian countries, though they are presently at earlier stages. It will no doubt take China a much longer period to follow the EAM trajectory I earlier outlined, as it is by far a much larger, more complex society, with great ethnic diversity (unlike South Korea and Japan for example).

Amban, you are right to say that some variations exist in the way that East Asian countries developed, in that variations have occured in the way that the EAM has been followed, or put into practice. For example, China, as Randall Peerenboom points out, "began the reform era with one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the world", which means it was one of the world's most egalitarian societies. But as the economy grew, so too did inequality, and its rates of social and economic inequality today are comparable to the rates of Kong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, during their take-off periods of rapid growth from 1960-1980, and even to their rates today. Japan and South Korea by contrast, paid much more attention to public health and education, providing for much larger budgets in these areas, and hence they have experienced much lower rates of inequality. China has nevertheless been very successful at raising per capita literacy levels, and in reducing poverty.

Just because a country has a democracy, doesn't of course mean that human rights are well protected. Even South Korea scores an unimpressive Level 3 on the Political Terror Scale (which is based on both US State Department and Amnesty International reports). Malaysia is also a Level 3, as is the Philippines, South Africa and Iran (Level 3 indicates extensive political imprisonment, and that execution and other political brutalities may be common). Even the United States only manages a Level 2 (which indicates some political imprisonment, torture and beatings). China, like India, Indonesia and Russia, is a Level 4, but human rights in China have by most measurements been steadily improving over the past ten years, and there are many, like Randall Peerenboom for example, who believes that China doesn't deserve its Level 4 classification, but rather, shoud be on a Level 3. This may be debatable, but China is nevertheless making human rights progress, and is certainly performing better on human rights indicators than did South Korea when it was at a similar income level to that of China today.

China not only out-performs most lower-middle income countries throughout the world on measurements of political stability, government effectiveness, and rule of law, according to the World Bank Quality of Governance Indicators for 1996-2002 (the findings were released in 2003), but also it out-performs other East Asian countries on some measurements, despite the fact that it's at an earlier stage of development. Aside from out-performing South Korea on human rights (as mentioned in the above paragraph), China also experienced greater rates of success at poverty reduction than all of the other East Asian countries, and because it relies more heavily on direct foreign investment than does South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, its economy is also already more open than the others, as documented by the economist Martin Wolf back in 2005 (Financial Times, September 14). China is now also the most gender-equitable nation in all of Asia. Released in 2005, the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index found China to be ‘the most gender-equitable society in Asia’, with a higher female to male income ratio than in the United States. The development of the service sector over recent decades has created many employment and business opportunities for Chinese women. A study carried out by researchers from both Harvard University and the China Association of Female Entrepreneurs back in 2004 showed that twenty percent of all Chinese entrepreneurs were women, with the total number of female entrepreneurs on the mainland growing by a whopping sixty percent between 1996 and 2004.

As Randall Peerenboom says, "fortunately for Chinese citizens, China is following the path of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - not Laos, Myanmar and North Korea, or for that matter the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and India."

Amban, I hope this adequately clarifies my earlier statements for you.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

I love Stephen's Allard's invention of the word "Chimo", and Jones' elaboration on the theme is just beautiful. Some good criticisms raised by nanheyangrouchan too.

Mr.Jones, I found your last comment about China's following of the EAM to be informative. But you didn't explain why Randall Peerenboom believes that China's Level 4 rating on the PTS is unwarranted? Please explain.

China with love,

Firstly, I like China, I agree with the tone of Dan's post. I also think that if we compare the Chinese leadership with other developing countries it comes out pretty well. If they want China to be a truly developed country, then the current system will have to change further, but it seems pretty clear that the current leadership is aware of this.

I don't like people who throw around incorrect or questionable claims as if they were basic knowledge, and I don't think this does China any good.
This is why I questioned you on your claim about farmers being able to integrate into cities. The children of the vast majority of migrant workers are not educated in the cities at all, hukou restrictions mean that they have to stay at home with the grandparents and receive the same countryside education as their parents. Thus the current wave of migration to the cities from the countryside doesn't really contribute to farmer's "assimilation" into the cities. That will only happen when either the hukou system is scrapped or education in the countryside is as good as that in the city.

About the Tibet railway, I don't think you really thought about what I said. Yes, you can chose not to believe it, but at least you know where I got my information from. I still don't know where the info about no fatalities comes from. In the end it doesn't really matter what you or I think about this, I'm just a foreigner , and by your own admission, yours is the perspective of a "Tsinghua elite". What matters is what the people of Qinghai and Tibet believe, and I know for a fact that some of them believe there were fatalities in the construction of that railway. They won't be convinced otherwise by state media; which is one of the great weaknesses of a system that practices censorship. Even if there actually were no fatalities, people would still believe the rumors that say workers died during the construction of it.

Again, I like China. But liking China is no excuse for sloppy arguing, ignoring real problems and rudeness.

Robin, thanks for yuor question. In his book, China Modernizes, Randall Peerenboom investigates why China is among only a handful of countries frequently targeted for systematic government human rights violations by the wealthy nations in the UN, even though it does so well relative to its level of development on most measures of human rights and well-being. He spends three and a half pages on India alone, demonstrating how its respect for human rights is far worse than China's, though unlike China, it is never censured before the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. Peerenboom sees this double standard as the product of a longstanding bias among Western human rights activists and governments that favour liberal democratic societies and do not want to see a non-liberal nondemocratic regime succeed: "UN resolutions for systematic government violations of human rights have overwhelmingly been meted out against a handful of nondemocratic developing countries with poor civil and political rights records, even though some of them may do better on other human rights measures and indicators of well-being, including physical integrity violations."

India, notes Peerenboom, shares with China a Political Terror Scale rating of 4, though Peerenboom argues that unlike India, China doesn't deserve to be ranked this poorly.

Peerenboom draws not only from his own knowledge about India's human rights record, but also from the US State Department's 2004 Report of India, He cites the report extensively to demonstrate that the US government is well aware of the seriousness of the human rights situation in India - yet it has failed to sponsor any motions against it - hence the double standard when it comes to their attitude towards China.

Very briefly, allow me to outline just a few of the problems in India:

* In 2001 and 2002, security forces killed an average of 1,600 militants per year. Some of those killings occured in "fake encounters" where the security forces summarily executed suspected militants and other civilians offering no resistance. The bodies of many of those killed showed signs of serious torture and bore multiple bullet wounds.

* Estimates of unexplained disappearances in Kashmir and Jammu alone since 1990 range from 4,000 to 8,000, according to NGOs. Military and paramilitary troops throughout India also engage in abduction, torture, rape and arbitrary detention.

* Death in custody is common for both suspected criminals and militants, and according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, torture is "systematically" used. Authorities in India, according to the report, routinely torture detainees in order to extort from them money. Rape in custody is also common.

* India's legal system is plagued by corruption and a serious lack of resources, and an enormous 75 percent of detainees in India's prisons are unconvicted, waiting for trial.

* According to the US State Department report, restrictions on the freedom of the press and freedom of speech are severe, and include the use of defamation laws against journalists along with beatings, detentions, and other forms of harrassment.

* The government in India bans books and censors the media and the internet to a greater extent than does China.

* The Indian government restricts academic freedom, most notably by regulating partnerships between Indian and Western universities in line with Hindu philosophy.

* The Indian government refused a visa to the Secretary General of Amnesty International after it issued a critical report regarding the government's handling of the religious-based violence in Gajurat, and in 2002 it refused to allow the UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and Extrajudicial Killings to enter the country.

* The Indian police routinely refuse to arrest rapists, and the courts fully adjudicate only 10 percent of rape cases, thereby creating a culture of impunity for rapists.

* Dalits or "untouchables" (the lowest caste) make up the majority of bonded labour, face segregation in housing and marriage, and tend to be malnourished and illiterate. Brahmans, by contrast, despite making up only 3.5 percent of the overall population, make up 75 percent of the judiciary and 50 percent of the parliament.

* Massacres sometimes occur throughout India, and with alarming frequency - for example, earlier this year in March the police gunned down fifteen civilian farmers in Nandigram who were protesting against a government decision to evict them from their land in order to make way for the establishment of an Indonesian-owned petrochemical plant. This story was picked up by the Western media (see The Australian, March 20, 2007 for example).

The point is this: India's human rights record over the past 25 years has been, and continues to be, noticibly worse than China's, and yet the US and its Western allies have never once sponsored a motion to censure India for rights violations, yet they sponsored eleven motions to censure China in the UN between 1990 and 2004 alone.

[i]For the record;
The Great Wall cost untold lives and was uneffective, the invaders simply went around it. And it doesn't take an engineering miracle to build a wall that isn't very tall, just alot of bodies. I would give the Grand Canal system a thumbs up though.[/i]

Bull.

Ming Great Wall held up almost perfectly for the extent of the Ming Dynasty. Wu Sangui only opened the gates of the Great Wall once the Ming dynasty was destroyed by southern rebels.

Dan Harris, this site's administrator and chief ideologue, and his lap poodle Mark Anthony Jones, a regular contributor to this site, are among the two most pernicious, virulant forces I have ever encountered in cyberspace. Both continually agree with one another's comments, defending the "progress" of a country that executes more human beings than any other, and which treats women like dirt, their feet still bound, mutilated.

It truly shocks me how these two individuals can tango over the so-called economic miracle that is China, a country without any real legal system, but which is instead ruled by a bureaucratic state capitalist totalitarian regime, the likes of which massacre anyone who dares to challenge their power and authority. Harris, the neocon who gets excited over those few legal developments that promise increasing opportunities for those like him who are out to profit from China, and Jones, the Marxist "thinker" who like Marx, believes that "capitalism is a historically progressive force" are both biased in their opinions. For Jones, "China's positioning of itself within the global economic system" is "progressive" because it supposedly enables China to "raise overall living standards through the wealth accumulated through trade." Jones is a fake Marxist, a neocon in disguise who like Harris and a few others on this site, praises China's bureaucratic state capitalists for their human rights "progress" and for their alleged development of a "fair" and "functional" legal system. Neither of them, quite obviously, have read Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed". The same thing has happened in China, the people betrayed. Harris and Jones, you can bet, were both brought up as bourgeois spoilt little rich kids. Harris was clearly fed a diet of Adam Smith, and Jones every intellectual trend from Marx through to the more bourgeois Foucault, Baudrillard and Freud. Jones should try reading Trotsky or Orwell for once. Maybe then he'll change his tune on China.

Chicago Liberal Defender - with all due respect, you are way off mark. China's political system is not an example of a "totalitarian regime" for starters. It is best described as a market-preserving federalism that operates under a paternalistically authoritarian one-party system. It does have many faults, true, as does every politcal system, but there is an overwhelming weight of empirically-verifiable evidence to show that the present system in China is, for China, historically progressive, and that the Party is steering the country in a positive direction through its application of the East Asia Model.

Women in China no longer have their feet bound and mutilated - that practice was ended long ago, during Mao's reign, and the last "massacre" in China occured 18 years ago. China has certainly moved on since then.

I have read Orwell's works many times over, by the way, and throughout the last 16 years, in my capacity as a high school and tertiary level teacher of English literature, I have taught both Animal Farm and 1984 on countless occasions, and to countless numbers of students. I also own a copy of Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed - the Pathfinder Press edition, to be exact.

The only things that you got right in your diatribe against Dan and I, is that we do often agree (but not always) and that I am influenced by the works of Marx, Freud, Foucault and Baudrillard. I am also influenced by Michel de Certeau, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and many more, So what? At the end of the day, all of these theorists provide useful tools or anlaytical perspectives, provided that they are used to help explain trends or phenomena that are empirically based. I'm a good old fashioned empiricist, more than anything else, as is Randall Peerenboom, which is why I appreciate his new book so much. And from my undertsanding of Dan's comments and postings on this site, he too tends to base most of his views not on ideology, as you claim, but on what is empirically verifiable. That makes him a scholar whose opinions are worth considering, rather than an ideologue out to indoctrinate.

Liberal Defender,

I have been too busy of late to respond to many of the commments on this post...sorry.

But I cannot resist responding to yours. I have been writing this blog for going on two years now and very few things bother me. But what always frosts my ass is when someone purports to know my worldview. It pisses me off even more when they are wrong. Even worse than that, however, is that you are the first person who purports to know my background and upbringing, and again, you could not be more wrong.

I am not a neoconservative and if you were to read this blog you would know that. I frequently talk about how much the book, The World On Fire has influenced my thinking and the thesis of that book is that we cannot really force democracy on anyone. I agree, which is the antithesis of neoconservatism.

As for my background, I am sure all my friends in my neighborhood and even my friends at college would laugh at that. I grew up in a decidely lower middle class neighborhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Nearly all of our neighbors worked in one of the local factories. When I went off to college, my friends would laugh at how I talked. But nice attempt to pigeonhole people, rather than actually listening. I will admit though that my parents certainly took good care of me so maybe I was a bit "spoilt." It is always easier though just to assume things, rather than have to confront your own obviously stultifying worldview.

I think both Mark Jones and I would laugh at your accusation that he is my poodle. First off, why would you even think we agree on everything merely because he occasionally comments on here? Do you think I agree with nh on things since he is our most frequent commenter? Mark has not even been here for months and we absolutely do disagree on things. But, one of the things on which we do agree is that it is not fair to hold China up to first world standards and then demonize it for not meeting those standards. I would think we also agree that doing that is actually counterproductive if the goal is to get China to liberalize/reform/open up.

I know it makes you feel good and moral to see the world as good and evil (are you Bush's poodle?) and to put yourself on the good side. I am too old for that and I judge my own morality on what might be seen as more mundane things, like how I am doing as a father. That leaves me able to compromise on things like China. Sure China does some horrible things (all governments do), but I simply do not believe that completely isolating China is either practical or would be effective. It might make people like you feel better, sure, but I think decisions like that need to be based on other criteria.

So, yeah, you can act like you just KNOW you are more moral than I am and I will tell you that you just may be (because I know I am no saint and I know pretty much zero about you), and if that makes you feel better about yourself, I have no problem with that. But I tend to be hesitant to judge the morality of others because I see morality as a total package of actions, not just one or two views on a particular issue, so I can assure you that though I may have some opinions regarding your maturity (I'm betting you are quite young), I have no clue as to your morality.

Oh, and BTW, I have never once praised China for its human rights progress, so you are completely making that one up. I also have yet to comment once on Mark Jones' comments on this post, so your statement that I "continually agree" with his comments is not even true, but so what if it were? I am definitely not a Marxist (I don't know if Mark is), but I know we do often agree. But I can tell you (and if you knew me you would know this is true), I don't agree with people, I agree on positions and ideas and even when I don't agree, I appreciate those who actually engage in serious discource by marshalling facts, not just making stuff up and heaping personal abuse.

I do have just one line of questions for you and here goes -- Do you really expect China to just overnight develop what you call "a fair and functional" legal system? Should we give them a day to do this and then cut them off? A week? A month? You tell me.

MAJ,

Now I know we are not supposed to agree on things, but you are right to say that our overall agreement is on the use of facts, not ideology.

I hate to toot my horn here, but a few months ago a couple of Chinese law students wrote me to say they liked this blog so much because they feel like I am trying to find the truth on each issue, as though I am looking at it fresh. They said they look forward to how I see issues because they cannot predict how I will see things because they do not feel like I am either a China lover or a China hater. Go ahead and attack me for this, but that actually made me feel proud because that is exactly what I seek to do. I do NOT seek to come down the middle of issues, but I do seek to view them independently and without preconceptions or ideology.

I am really not all that complicated. I read Marx in comic book form (not kidding), I have never read Foucoult or Freud or Marcuse and I do not even know who Michel de Certeau or Theodor Adorno are. I am more lawyer than anything else, which means I look at the facts and analyze them. To quote from Dragnet (that's my Foucoult), just the facts ma'am.

Dan Harris, it is you who is the lier. You often agree with MAJ on this site. For example, in the thread titled "What if China is right?" you left the follwong comment addressed to MAJ, at 9:09 PM, on November 4:

"MAJ,

Now we are talking about what I meant to talk about all along. I agree with you on all points, but in a long term contest between man and "the invisible hand," I will bet on the invisible hand every time."

And to answer your question, the regime in Beijing should simply give up their monopoly on power and introduce free multi-party elections. ONLY then can a true legal system begin to develop.

And I am NOT a fan of Bush - I am, unlike you and MAJ, a true liberal.

Now to MAJ: just because you read and "teach" Orwell's books doesn't mean you really understand them. Obviously you don't, otherwise you wouldn't support the so-called "progress" that the totalitarians in Beijing have made. And by the way, you referred to me as "Chicago Liberal Defender" in your last comment, but I didn't identify myself as "Chicago" Liberal Defender, only as Liberal Defender. So I take it that you have been reading my comments over at the Peking Duck, where I am pleased to say that there are others who agree with my assessment of you and Dan.

Chicago Liberal Defender,

Dude, you are losing it.

1. "Dan Harris, it is you who is the lier.
You often agree with MAJ on this site." MY RESPONSE: By lier, I assume you mean liar. I did not call you a liar, but okay. You claimed MAJ and I always agree. I would agree that we often agree, but that is not what you initially said.

2. For example, in the thread titled "What if China is right?" you left the follwong comment addressed to MAJ, at 9:09 PM, on November 4:

"MAJ,

Now we are talking about what I meant to talk about all along. I agree with you on all points, but in a long term contest between man and "the invisible hand," I will bet on the invisible hand every time."

Okay, but if you actually understood economics, you would see here that though I am agreeing with MAJ on one point, I am vehemently disagreeing with him on another. By "invisible hand" here I am saying capitalism. And since you say MAJ is a Marxist, I hardly think he is a big fan of the "invisible hand."

3. "And to answer your question, the regime in Beijing should simply give up their monopoly on power and introduce free multi-party elections. ONLY then can a true legal system begin to develop." I wish what you are saying here were true (I really do), but unfortunately I don't think it is.
And I am NOT a fan of Bush - I am, unlike you and MAJ, a true liberal. Singapore has a true legal system and it is not a multi-party democracy. England had a true legal system before it became a multi-party democracy and I am sure there are more such examples.

I find it interesting that you feel the need to point out that there are people who agree with you. Are you not confident enough just to stand by your arguments alone?

What do you even mean by a true liberal? You state that as though it gives you some sort of moral superiority and I am wondering if you think it does.

I would never purport to be a true liberal, mostly because I do not know what it means, but I do think of myself as an American liberal because I am and have always been a big supporter of the first amendement, freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, and civil rights. Is that what you mean? Or is this some sort of private definition you have for those who agree with you on all points and view those who disagree as morally inferior?

Oh, and since you call yourself "Chicago Liberal Defender," am I to take it that you are a liberal in the great tradition of Mayor Richard Daley, who could probably teach the CCP a thing or two about how to hang on to power and how to use/abuse the court system to further his own ends.

Dan, I don't see myself as being a China "hater" or "lover" either. I have just signed a publishing deal to have a collection of my travelogues published. Titled "Flowing Waters Never Stale: journeys through China", the book (due to hit the bookshelves next June) is a peculiar synthesis of travelogue and essay, in which I sometimes examine particular aspects of China in ways that are quite critical, utilising the criticisms made of the culture industry by Adorno and Marcuse, as well as Baudrillard's ideas on the simulacrum. I counter-balance my cynicism by providing alternative perspectives via readings of Michel de Certeau. My impressions, I like to think, are thus quite complex and nuanced. It always amuses me how so many people are intent to slap a label on me, prefering to reduce me to a black or a white, to a god or a devil. As somebody who at least tries to view all phenomena dialectically, I see in things neither good nor bad, but both good and bad, both positive and negative. I always emphasise the unity of binary opposites.

My approach should be clear by now. Had Chicago Liberal Defender actually read any of my pieces carefully enough, he would have noticed all of this. He/she has obviously at least skimmed through my earlier writings on the Nature of Chinese Governance and on Shenzhen Kitsch, since he or she is aware of my use of Baudrillard, etc.

If ulitising such theorists makes me a petty bourgeois in the eyes of some (or many), then so be it! I plead guilty.

Dan - can I just quickly clarify something. I am a Marxian, which means that I am influenced considerably by Marx, and by various post-Marxist thinkers. I am also influenced by many non-Marxist thinkers.

Being a Marxian, does not mean that I am not a "fan" of the "invisible hand". Marx, remember, argued that capitalism was historically progressive, which I agree with because I think this is something that is empirically verifiable. Marx himself was a capitalist, a bourgeois, as was Engels.

The invisible hand that is the market is neither positive or negative, but both. It is in this sense, that I am a Marxian.

Chicago Liberal Defender most probably is quite young and immature, judging from his puerile comments. Having allies like Ivan and Fat Cat to support his reading of this site hardy helps his credibility either!

I suggest you ignore any future comments he makes. They aren't worth responding to, are they?

"Ming Great Wall held up almost perfectly for the extent of the Ming Dynasty. Wu Sangui only opened the gates of the Great Wall once the Ming dynasty was destroyed by southern rebels."

But it did not hold up indefinitely, which was my assertion and it was filled with the bones of countless slaves by a madman (Qin Shi).

Corruption also allowed the Mongols to pass through the wall:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19809

The Qinghai-Tibet railway is already failing and nothing can stop it. Three Gorges is going to be the greatest man-made disaster of all time.

Dan, I am a liberal in the tradition of George Orwell. I actually call a spade a spade, which may offend some people, people like you, but I beleive in telling it how it is, you ain't no liberal. You're a neocon who puts profits and the opening up of "free" markets before human rights. Rather than forcing the regime in Beijing to offer its citizens democracy, you prefer to lick ass cause you eye the China market with dollar signs in your eyes. That's why you celebrate every new little commercial law China passes, every law that opens up further the Chinese economy for your plunder.

MAJ:

Thanks for a lengthy response. I think it is pretty well established that you need some material and institutional preconditions before some form of democracy is possible. But to translate that into a threshold GDP per capita is not very good political science. Are we talking about commensurable units here? Does every country have to through the same stages and reinvent the wheel? And finally: is the purported linkage between GDP and democracy a causal link or just a correlation?

If a peaceful transition to democracy should be possible somewhere along the road there has to be a genuine will on the part of the rulers to devolve power. I just don't see that in the current government in the PRC.

Just one example. Somewhere in your argument you said that the Mainland today is pretty much like Taiwan in the 1970s. I don't think Taiwan in its darkest hours come even close to the Mainland in the regime's lust to execute people. A saw a figure that the total number of executions in Taiwan between 1950 and 2001 is somewhere around 658. That may be too low. But you would be hard pressed to find any province - or major city - on Mainland China today that has fewer executions that Taiwan did in 1970. And even if we do not believe Falungong accusations about live organ transplants, the PRC government openly admits that it allows organ transplants from executed convicts. You don't have to have a degree in political science to see the implications of that.

For all the talk about giving China a chance, the fact remains that the current regime is a world-leader in repression. You can't get around that by talking about India.

And finally: where on earth did you get the idea that China is a federal state? That makes mockery of any meaningful definition of federalism.

JL

"I like China"

I never questioned that and that's not the point here. I love the US and your founding fathers/Lincoln/MLK/TUPAC always give me great inspirations. But I would be the first to pick up an AK or more likely join the technology arm of the PLA if there was a war between the US and China. And you dont have to question that, both of my parents have great service records in the PLA. I might not agree with a lot of what the government is doing, but it's not the point. You fight for your nation when her survival is on the line even the government is evil.

And No, I don't think there will ever be a war between these two great nations.

"The children of the
vast majority of migrant workers are not educated in the cities at
all"

That's not true. You never heard of "schools for immigrant worker's children?" And there are a lot of them. Secondly, the education in rural China is getting a lot better in recent years. If you follow the current affairs of China closely, you might have heard of some of the initiatives the government is taking to improve
the education for rural kids. And no, don't blame the propaganda department, I get my news from western media.

Please go back read my original post, I never claimed that those immigrant workers' kids get the same education as the city kids. My claim is that those kids can assimilate into city life when they grow up thanks to China's relative homogeneity. You don't have to be a college grad to be settling in the cities. Heck, we need barbers/waiters/ushers/cooks/cab drivers in Beijing and Shanghai as well.

I agree that the HuKou system is obsolete and should be phased out gradually. And if you follow what's going on in China closely, you should know that the government is just doing that. The way to go is to urbanize the small towns and lift the farmers out of their field.

"Again, I like China. But liking China is no excuse for sloppy
arguing, ignoring real problems and rudeness."

Anyone who quotes what his trilingual friend's hearsay without providing any reliable sources is open to ridicule. And I never claimed zero casualties, someone else said that. And the source is shoddy. But you are better, because your trilingual foreign friend has a good track record?

LOL!

PWN?

Oops. A lot has happened in this debate since I last checked in. I just wanted to share some further comments to MAJ's contributions.

A common theme in MAJ's comments is that China is somehow unfairly singled out when it comes to human rights, especially in contrast to India, which according to him does much worse in human rights than China in many respects.

I'm not sure that I accept that description, but even if MAJ is right that is good news for China and bad news for India. Despite the fact that the PRC government would have us think otherwise, the fact is that pressure from both the outside and inside of China does have an effect on China's human rights record. Talk to any dissident (I have!) who has been released from jail in China, and they will tell you that publicity of their case did affect the way they were treated. The fact that China has improved over the years can in part be attributed to outside pressure. The moment the Chinese government feels that it can get away with abuses, the situation gets worse. Just look at Xinjiang after 9-11.

So the extent to which China gets a lot of bad coverage on human rights abuses, that is good news for the human rights situation and people in China stand to gain from that - at least if you think that human rights are important.

Furthermore, I am not sure that China is singled out that much today, Sino-Western trade is thriving as it has never done before. Yes, China gets a lot of bad press, but compare that to the 90s, when there was a strong public opinion in the West in favor of sanctions against the PRC. No one talks like that anymore, and part of the reason is that Western companies make handsome profits in China and do not want anything to distract from business. The PRC doesn't need that much lobbying of its own, corporate lobbies are taking care of that. I don't know if this is a good thing, but we live in a different world today than we did in the 80s and 90s.

Then finally, I'd like to address the following remark.

'...the last "massacre" in China occured 18 years ago. China has certainly moved on since then.'

Apart from the quotation mark, I think this is quite a remarkable statement. Are we supposed to be grateful to the PRC government? Also, we can argue whether there haven't been any mass atrocities in China since 1989. Some people argue that atrocities have occurred in remote areas of China. But more importantly, what are we supposed to make of the point that "China" has moved on? The victims of 1989 or the perpetrators? You may not like the fact that I put it that way, but as long as many of those who ordered and carried out the clampdown of June 4 are still at large, we cannot say that "China has moved on". If something comparable had happened in your own country, you wouldn't think that 18 years was a long time. We have not even seen the beginning of a reconciliation process in China. The longer you postpone it, the harder the healing will be.

Dear Amban,

I will respond in detail to all of your thoughtful criticisms when I get home tonight. I'm at work right now, and am pressed for time.

Dan,

Can I just quickly clarify something: I may be influenced by Marxist thought, but that doesn't mean that I am anti-capitalist or that I don't appreciate the significance of the "invisible hand". Marx argued that capitalism is a historically progressive force, and he and Engels were themselves capitalists. Market economies are neither good nor bad, but are both good and bad, in that they produce both positive and negative outcomes. People experience life in market economies in contradictory ways. It is my belief that China's market-driven economy is, for all of its undeniable faults, a progressive force - for the majority of Chinese citizens, and for the world at large. If Marx were still alive today, I'm quite sure he would agree.

Migrant worker's children can get the same education as city kids. They may have to pay higher fees to the school and more "thank you" gifts to the teacher than rest of the class.

Now, will Chinese parents pay thru the nose for their children's education? I don't think I need to answer that.

China with love,

這樣有點兒沒意思。就民工的孩子而言，好像我們的看法大概一致。我知道那些在城里的民工子弟学校，但我還是覺得它們相對而言不多。我去年在四川遂寧的一個學院教書，大部分學生都是農民，雖然很多他們的父母都在沿海地區打工，他們一律在農村長大讀書。我很想知道在民工子女當中能夠到城里去讀書的到底占多大比例，但是這方面的信息好像不好找，如果你能提供一下，我很感謝你。

就青藏鐵路而言，我的觀點是我們現在都缺乏可靠的證據，不應該說死亡率多高，也不應該說沒有死亡。我的意思從來不是“你應該相信我的朋友”而是“就死亡率而言存在著疑問。”你同不同意？

其實，在這樣地區的外國人比較多，比我想象的多得很，有些很了解當地的情況。不知道你為什么難以置信。你畢業以后可以到哪里去一趟，如果思想開放，和當地人交流，你可以學到很多。

And while I'm procrastinating here, I'm going to weigh in on what MAJ / Amban have been talking about.

It's not very difficult to show that the world media pays more attention to the human rights situation in more developed countries. It's fair to say that if Guantanamo bay had been set up by an African government nobody would know, and if the Tiananmen square massacre had happened in Ethiopia nobody would remember.This being the case, I don't think over-attentive criticism of China vis-a-vis human rights can rightly be interpreted as a sign of Western bias against China. Rather, does it not show that Western media is coming to treat China more as a country that it can recognize as something familiar?
The fact that editors can't be convinced that the suffering of Indians is equally as newsworthy as that faced by Chinese, perhaps says more about their negative view of India than it does about their view of China.

JL:

I think you got me completely right there.

"Migrant worker's children can get the same education as city kids. They may have to pay higher fees to the school and more "thank you" gifts to the teacher than rest of the class."

No, Charles, they can't. They can't even get into the schools. They are simply not allowed as they don't have "hukou". They also can't get access to the courts and have to pay cash in advance for hospital services. They are illegal aliens in their own country.

I think China's internal problems and external meddling wouldn't attract so much media criticism if Wall St. and corporations didn't heap so much praise on the long hours and generally low pay they can inflict in China's population and hold that model up as an example of how the West should treat business (which is how things used to be before the labor riots in the US and Europe).

Dear JL,

Thanks for your interesting perspective. I appreciate your logic, but I'm inclined to disagree. You suggest that the "over-attentive criticism of China vis-a-vis human rights" should be interpreted not "as a sign of Western bias against China" but rather as a sign "that the Western media is coming to treat China more as a country that it can recognize as something familiar?"

But the fact is this: China performs quite well on most measurements of human rights when compared to most of other countries in the world that are in its income group. So why single it out? You suggest that this is due to a lack of empathy on the part of Westerners with Africans, Indians, etc. but if Westerners really lacked such empathy then why all the concern over what is happening in places like Zimbabwe, Dafur, etc.?

When the South Korean government ordered soldiers to crack down on pro-democracy activists throughout the 1980s, when torture was known to be frequently used, the US State Department and the Western media paid only scant public attention to it. South Korea was at the top of Amnesty International's list of countries with the world's worst human rights abuses, and yet little pressure was placed on South Korea in the UN to clean up its act. Why? Because the military regime in South Korea was considered an important ally of the West in its cold war against the Soviet Union. Between May 18th to May 27th, 1980, South Korean soldiers massacred at least 165 people in the city of Kwangju. A total of 65 are still missing, presumed dead. Many of those killed were women, at least one who was heavily pregnant, and many of those killed were not even a part of the protest movement. A passing bus was machined gunned, killing 17 of the 18 occupants, and a young harmless boy who happened to be swimming in the Wonje Resevoir was even targetted and shot to death. The US government did urge the South Korean regime to exercise restraint, but publicly they were mute in their criticism - something that many South Koreans of that generation have yet to forgive the United States for, I might add.

India is another country in point. Massacres occur there with some frequency, as recently as last March, and yet official and public criticisms were mute. India is, after all, an ally in the so-called "war against terror".

It surprsies me the way that the Western media continues to keep the Tiananmen Square massacre so alive, after 18 years. The result is that many people continue to this day to view China through the prism of that terrible event. It's true that the CCP have yet to hold an inquiry into the massacre, or to punish those responsible. But consider this: the South Korean government didn't formally acknowledge the Kwangju Massacre of 1980 until 1996 (16 years after the event) and those who were found to be responsible were all immediately pardoned. The word "massacre" is no longer allowed to be used by the South Korean media to describe the event, which is now officially known instead as the "Kwangju Democratization Movement". No mentioned even of an "incident", let alone a "massacre". As I said, 165 people were confirmed dead according to government sources, most likely 230 if we consider the 65 that are still officially listed as missing. How many were killed in Tiananmen back in 1989? A similar number: 186 confirmed dead (though many human rights activisits in the west continue to use the now discredited figures that those journalists covering the event initially over-estimated, sometimes blowing the number up to as many as 3,000. Exaggrating the figures hardly helps the human rights cause now, does it? If anything, it discredits it.

Surely, JL, we Westerners can empathise and relate to the people of South Korea just as easily as we relate to the Chinese? After all, South Korea is now even a democracy. So why is it that few people in the West even remember or have even heard of the Kwangju Massacre? Answer: South Korea is a democracy, and when it wasn't it was nevertheless an important ally in the Cold War, and one that kept the spread of Communism in check by brutally suppressing trade unions. It was allowed to use brutal force, in the same way the Japan's former fascists were all reinstalled to power under a US administration keen to crush Japan's trade union movement, which threatened architectural plans to revitalise Japan's economy in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

Should I also mention Marcos of the Philippines, or Saddam Hussein (until he got too big for his own boots) - human rights abuses only get the attention of the Western media when and if they are committed by those nation states that are considered a threat - be it ideologically, economically, geopolitically, or a combination of all three, which is more often than not the case. Even Pol Pot was funded by the US State Department (an empirically-verifiable fact) right up until the day he died. And he reigned over Cambodia in such a way as to create what would have easily have been a Level 5 on the Political Terror Scale (the worst possible rating).

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, the Western media now gives China considerable amounts of favourable attention - the images of China that we are now exposed to are much more complex and contradictory. This reflects the fact that the West's relationship with China is now far more complex and contradictory. Those that represent industries that stand to benefit from trade with China, like the retailers of commodities, praise it, those that represent sections of the economy that are in direct competition with Chinese enterprises, like the manufacturers of certain commodities, are keen to play the human rights card as a means to limit China's growing influence on the international stage, and as a means to justify their calls to have trade sanctions placed on China, or for their own governments to introduce various forms of protectionism.

The PR business of keeping China "red" and "totalitarian" ought to be seen as a strategy on the part of certain factions within various Western governments, most notably from factions within the US.

Amban, I shall address your criticisms in my next comment, which I shall write up after I soak for a while in a nice hot bath. It's been a long day!

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

Dear Amban,

I shall now address the criticisms you raised in your last two comments.

(1) You suggest that it is poor political science to translate the material and institutional preconditions for democracy into measurements of per capita GDP. Perhaps, but the point that I'm making is that there is a general correlation between wealth and the ability of a nation state to democratise. Empirical studies demonstrate that democracies are unstable at relatively low levels of wealth. For discussions of such studies, see Adam Prezeworski et al., "Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950-1990", (Cambridge University Press), 2000; and Robert Barro, "Democracy: A Recipe for Growth?" in "Current Issues in Economic Development: An Asian Perspective, (Oxford University Press), 1996.

According to Prezeworski's research, democracies have a life span of just 8 years when their per capita income is less than US$1,000. Of the 12 democracies established prior to 1950 with per capita incomes below US$2,000 for example, 8 failed.

I was not trying to imply that there is a particular point at which countries necessarily become democratic. I was simply pointing out that numerous countries were able to successfully make the transition to democracy once they reached the US$7,000-US$8,000 per capita income range. It's therefore reasonable to suggest that China may be able to make the transition too, once it achieves a similar level of per capita wealth.

(2) Is the link between mean incomes and democracy causal, or just a correlation? Generally, I would say causal. Why? Because as mean incomes grow, so too does the size of the middle class - a section of society with the means to invest in further education, the education of their children, and significant commodities like homes and cars. Once they have a personal stake in the economy, they develop an interest in maintaining the status quo. Social stability is an essential precondition for the establishment of various institutions, such as a system of law, the flourishing of a civil society, and of course, eventually democracy.

(3) Amban, you say that "If a peaceful transition to democracy should be possible somewhere along the road there has to be a genuine will on the part of the rulers to devolve power. I just don't see that in the current government in the PRC." Well, observers of South Korea thought the exact same way back in the 1980s about South Korea's military dictatorship. But come 1988, and they boldly allowed the transition to democracy.

I agree with Randall Peerenboom on this one. Allow me to quote him at length: "China will most likely democratise when there is a broad consensus among the state leaders and citizens alike that soft authoritarianism has outlived its purposes. The transition is likely to involve a pact among the elite. There is a reasonably good chance that the CCP, or a sizable faction within it, would be able to reconstitute itself as a social democratic party or some other reformist party and then retain power. There may be single-party dominance for a considerable period, as in Japan, Singapore and Malaysia." And I would add to Peerenboom's list South Korea too.

Amban, this is basically the process that the above mentioned countries went through when they made the transition to democracy, and China most probably will one day follow a similar course. The real contest may be over who emerges as head of the reconstituted CCP, and as Peerenboom predicts, this battle will most likely be Laregly an internal party matter, and not much more transparent or subject to public influence than the current process to choose the leader of the CCP." Once again, one only has to look at how other East Asian democracies experienced the transition for clues as to how China may go.

(4) You have read too much into my statement regarding Taiwan. My point, quite obviously, was that China's current stage in the process towards political and institutional development is similar to where Taiwan was in the 1970s. I wasn't comparing per capita rates of execution!

(5) I disagree that China is a "world leader in repression". You can't be serious? On what empirically-verifiable evidence do you base such a sweeping statement? Chinese authorities do, regrettably, impose often unnecessary and unjustified limitations on its citizens, but the fact nevertheless remains that China out-performs the average country in its lower-middle income-range on every major human rights indicator except civil and political rights (as is generally true for other East Asian countries). I can think of many countries that are far more repressive than China: Zimbabwe, Indonesia, India, Egypt, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Brazil and Russia all have Level 4 Political Terror Ratings, as do numerous other countries. The most repressive are rated Level 5 - countries like Nepal, Sudan and Afghanistan.

(6) Where on earth did I get the idea that China is a federal state, you ask? Well, it is commonly referred to as a form of federalism. Federalism resulted from the decentralisation of government that was initiated by Deng during the early phases of reform, and is key to understanding the economic and political dynamics underlying privatisation. Yingyi Qian, an economist at Stanford University, has written quite extensively on this very phenomenon, if you're interested. See his paper titled, "Federalism, Chinese Style, to Privatisation, Chinese Style", published in 1997.

Amban, federalism can be defined as a system in which the power to govern is shared between the national and state governments. The Chinese system of government is a federal one because it is structured into various levels: there is a central (or federal government in Beijing), and below it various provincial governments that oversee local governments. Chinese federalism requires that first, local governments have the primary authority and responsibility for their local economy, and second, that they are subject to budget constraints, and third, that they are unable to insulate their economies from outside competition. It is simply wrong to think of China as being governed by some totalitarian regime operating out of Beijing. Power struggles are every day and constant between the various levels of government, in what is very much a decentralised system. The wishes of the federal (or central) government in Beijing are very often subverted by provincial and local level governments.

(7) Amban - you argue that China bad coverage on human rights abuses "is good news for the human rights situation and people in China" who stand to "gain from that".

I agree, but I have never argued otherwise. My argument has always been this: that it is morally wrong to exaggerate China's human rights abuses, and that doing so doesn't help the human rights cause. I also argue that in many ways, on numerous measurements, China's human rights progress over the past 20 years has been very impressive.

Allow me to quote from a Chinese dissident, now living in the United States, Fan Shidong. "Even though China's National People's Congress has been making progress legislating laws," says Fan, "human rights abuses and conditions in China's prisons are still terrible. Prisoners do not have enough to eat, with excessive workloads, and the crime rate inside the prison is serious - most of which is perpetrated by the prison guards. I am a personal witness to these lawless behaviours...[but] objectively speaking, Harry Wu's approach of making mountains out of mole hills actually helps the Chinese government to maintain its poor human rights record. The main reason is that by exaggerating China's human rights abuses by 100 fold, gradually people will realise that 99% of the accusations have no basis in fact. At that point the anger towards the actual 1% of real abuses will have dissipated and perhaps turn to sympathy for the Chinese government. Ironically Wu's action serves to confirm that a lot of the world's criticism of China's human rights are based on false premises."

Fan, along with independent researchers Seymour and Anderson, argue that Harry Wu's claims about laogai prisons and what goes on in them are largely untrue. "Equating China's prison system to Stalin's gulag is but one of Wu's many ways of promoting his message to the West," says Fan. However, "Wu does not bother to explain the equivalence with a political analysis nor with a comparison of the per capita imprisonment data, which, in my view, is the most crucial indicator of any national policy towards its prison system. Westerners seeking facts and figures to form their own conclusions will not find them from Wu." The per capita incarceration rate during the Stalin era was 12 times that of today's China.

And then there are Wu's claims to the world (once again, often reported uncritically by the Western media as if fact), that the laogai prisons are so important, that without them China's economy would collapse. According to Seymour's study, all "economic estimates that show output from laogai show that it is but a tiny part of the national GDP."

"Harry Wu is saying that China's laogai is an essential and basic part of its national economy," and that "trading with China is to help China's laogai economy and therefore become accomplices in oppressing China's political prisoners," notes Fan, with some considerable anger, because "exaggerating China's human rights abuses can only be counterproductive...Perhaps many members of Congress in both Houses choose to believe the falsehoods and innuendoes because of the need to influence American policy towards China from a particular historical perspective, reflecting the U.S. mainstream's distrust and doubt toward China during this period of transition and reform."

Not only this, but just because China's northwest region holds laogai prison camps, Wu and his enthusiastic supporters in Congress oppose World Bank financing of irrigation projects. As Fan says though, "this is not justified and can directly harm the welfare of the prisoners detained there. To eat, prisoners need to plant and need to water and need to use advanced equipment and technology to increase yield. Instead of reforming the prison system, Wu's protest will only deprive prisoners of potential benefits."

The US historian Tom Grunfeld, has directed the same kinds of criticisms at the pro-Tibetan Exile lobby groups, detailing the various ways in which they have not only seriously exaggerated the human rights abuses in Tibet, but also how their lobbying does more harm to the Tibetan people than good. The world's most widely recognised authority on Tibet, Melvyn Goldstein, agrees, as does Dr Pamela Logan, of the Kham Aid Foundation, and many others. This isn't the right place to take up space discussing the Tibetan issue, but if you're interested in knowing my views, you can find them articulated on the American Public Broadcasting Service website discussion forum, which was set up to allow viewers of the "China from the Inside" series to share with one another their thoughts on the program. The address is: http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=68073&sid=e96261493a993baca27ae7ea0ad1298f

In sum, I'm not against putting some pressure on China to further clean up its human rights act, so long as all criticisms are fair and balanced, and are based on solid empirically-verifiable evidence. I have yet to see any evidence that shows China's human rights sittuation to be serious enough to warrant economic sanctions. If they were, than, to be fair and consistent, sanctions would also need to be placed against roughly half the world's nation states. And at any rate, sanctions are more likely to cause far more harm than good to the welfare of China's people.

Amban, I hope this at least goes some way towards adequately addressing your criticisms. Thanks again, for your challenging remarks.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

@ MAJ "It is my belief that China's market-driven economy is, for all of its undeniable faults, a progressive force - for the majority of Chinese citizens, and for the world at large. If Marx were still alive today, I'm quite sure he would agree."

You're the strangest Marxist I've ever encountered. Fact is, you're NOT a Marxist at all. You're a trendy petty bourgeois fool who spends too much time masturbating over Freud.

@ Ambon and JL you're both breaths of fresh air. People like MAJ need to be challenged whenever and wherever they raise their ugly heads. He's a fake liberal, masquerading as a Marxist, out to justify every single atrocity committed by the bureaucratic state capitalist cronies who monopolize power out of Beijing over 1.3 billion people, most of them desperate for democracy and freedom. We need to pressure the regime into improving human rights just like you say.

Sanctions sannctions sanctions and MORE sanctions! That's what should be the world's collective response to them assholes in Beijing.

MAJ:

Thank you for your exhaustive reply, you responded to a lot of points I didn't make and didn't intend to make, such as China reportedly low rate of incarceration. Never denied that. But China has a lot of other issues that you prefer not to talk about. And I have no stakes in Harry Wu's campaign. But regardless of his exaggerations, I sense a foul smell when people spend more time castigating eccentric dissidents than the government that actually does abuse human rights. Where are your priorities?

You didn't touch on June 4 once. Why? You say that China does better than other countries in human rights, "except civil and political rights". A lot of abuses can be squeezed into that "except", but more about that later.

Aha, I see what you mean by federalism. The only problem is that the people you quote talk about economic federalism, and you were using the concept politically to argue that China is not a totalitarian state. That's a huge difference. If China was a political federation, the PRC would be the sum of its constituent parts, that would have certain rights against the center. Do you see that in China today? Yes, regions do have a lot of leeway now, but a weak central government does not constitute a federation. Yuan Shikai did not have absolute power over China 1912, but that didn't make him the president of a federal state.

I agree with you that the richer China is the better the prospects of democracy. But there is no automatic connection. What the government and party does and think are part of the equation. What dissidents, grass-roots movements and foreign governments and organizations do are another part of the equation. Yes, some people do exaggerate human rights abuses in China. You say that you are in favor of criticizing China "so long as all criticisms are fair and balanced, and are based on solid empirically-verifiable evidence." That happens to be the official position of the Chinese government; criticism is good as long as it's "correct".

However, the problem is to get "empirically-verifiable evidence" in a one-party dictatorship. Fancy going with me on an unannounced fact-finding tour to some Chinese prisons, MAJ? Didn't think so.

And you trip around one major point that I have made: even if you accept China official execution statistics, China executes more people than the rest of the world does together. And the range of crimes you can be executed for is much wider in China than most countries. That is a huge problem for China's human rights record. There's no talking around that.

Amban, I don't have time to respond to all of your points rights now, as I'm about to head for work. Very briefly for now though: when I referred to China as being a market-preserving federalsim, I was using the term "federalism" both economically and politically. One is not exclusive to the other.

My reason for raising the Harry Wu issue was simply to illustrate the fact that much of what the Western media, as well Amnesty International and the US State Department use as evidence to base their human rights reports on, constitute little more than hearsay, or are seriously flawed at best. The researchers that I mentioned in my last comment, Seymour and Anderson, were allowed to visit Chinese prisons. In 2005, the first visit to China in a decade by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture found improvements in the treatment of prisoners but, according to a concluding statement, "serious shortcoming" in rights protections still exist. Keep in my here that the Rapporteur was also allowed to visit prisons.

This, as I mentioned in an earlier comment on this thread, is more than what India allows. The Special Rapporteur on Torture isn't allowed to visit India at all.

The Rapporteurs’s entourage, according to one report that I read in Law and Rights, "also acknowledged central government efforts to clamp down on infringements of personal liberty. Efforts have been made to define police powers, which previously set no time limit for the confiscation of property, gathering of evidence and investigation and examination of suspects. The Supreme People's Procuratorate has also announced that confessions obtained under duress cannot be used to justify continued detention. Public Security officials in Zhejiang have spearheaded efforts to implement central directives by drafting local regulations that oblige police chiefs to resign if more than two cases of forced confessions, resulting in injury, miscarriage of justice or public order problems, come to light. Other measures to check police powers, including equipping interrogation rooms with audio and video equipment, are a further sign that eliminating torture is being taken seriously."

I have never denied that China executes large numbers of people, and I am totally against all use of the death penalty. But some efforts have been made in recent times to try to drastically reduce the number of executions that are allowed to take place, as regular readers of this site might remember.

As I have always said, and continue to say, serious violations against human right do occur in China, but not to the extent that many Western critics and Chinese dissidents claim. People need to base their criticisms on empirically verifiable evidence, not on hearsay or "estimates" that are really little more than guesses. Information may very well be difficult to obtain, as it is in many other countries, but China is certainly more open than some.

The other point, which you appear to talk around, is that China performs better than most countries in its lower-middle income group on most human rights measurements. When judging China's human rights performance, it is, of course, necessary to be sober and fair, and that means being balanced - that means examining the broader picture.

I did, by the way, touch on June 4 - in my earlier comment addressed to JL. (see above)

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

One more thing Amban, in relation to whether or not China can best be described as a form of federalism, you say that "The only problem is that the people you quote talk about economic federalism, and you were using the concept politically to argue that China is not a totalitarian state."

The people I quote do indeed regard federalism as a political construct. Montinola, Qian and Weingast all argue that federalism provides "the economic and political foundation" for China's market reforms. China has a federal structure of government (ie. a political structure) through which the central (or federal) government was able to introduce and to regulate economic reform, giving up some of their economic (and hence political) powers over to provincial and local level governments.

I think that it is accurate to describe China's political system as a market-preserving federalism that operates under a paternalistically authoritarian one-party system.

You say that "If China was a political federation, the PRC would be the sum of its constituent parts, that would have certain rights against the center." I appreciate what you are saying, though think you are perhaps using a narrow definition of federalism. The definition that I use I have already provided: that it is a system in which the power to govern is shared between the national and state governments. Provinces and autonomous regions do indeed enjoy wide discretionary powers to implement those policy goals that are set by the central government, and provinces and localities are able to actively compete with each other in order to advance economically. At the very least, Amban, you would have to describe this as a de facto federalism, or as a federalism, "Chinese style." Either way, whether China is best described as a federalism, or as a de facto federalism, the fact remains that the central government in Beijing hardly exercises a totalitarian rule.

Amban, I'm now at work, with a few moments to spare, so I shall continue with my response to your earlier criticisms - though only briefly, as I have plenty of essays to mark.

Amban, you seem to treat my saying that I am in favour of criticising China "so long as all criticisms are fair and balanced, and are based on solid empirically-verifiable evidence" as though I am somehow acting out the role of PR officer on behalf of the CCP, adding that "That happens to be the official position of the Chinese government; criticism is good as long as it's 'correct'".

You also say that you "sense a foul smell when people spend more time castigating eccentric dissidents than the government that actually does abuse human rights. Where are your priorities?"

Methinks you judge me too harshly! I have never suggested that criticisms of the CCP are only valid if deemed to be "correct" by the CCP itself. I think you know very well that that is not what I was trying to say!

My argument is that criticisms need to be balanced and fair, and in order to be valid, need to be based on solid empirically-verifiable evidence. That to me is just plain good old fashion common sense. Even some Chinese dissidents like Fan Shidong (who I quoted earlier in one of my comments above) recognises that. To do otherwsie, as he very rightly points out, would be to seriously harm the human rights cause. Are you going to imply that he too is merely towing the official CCP line?

The view that I have been pushing all along is pretty much the exact same view espoused by the US historians Tom Grunfeld and Melvyn Goldstein, the Australian historian Colin Mackerras (see his book titled "Western Images of China" for example, published by Oxford University Press in 2000), as well as of Kham Aid Foundation director Dr. Pamela Logan, and the legal scholar Randall Peerenboom (who devoted an entire chapter of his new book to this very discussion). No doubt there are many more who hold this view. Dan Harris, our host here on this blog, from what I can tell, also holds this view. Are they all CCP puppets as well, pushing what is "correct" from the point of view of the CCP as if they were paid PR agents?

A few other contributors to this site have recently argued that the world ought to place economic sanctions on China. Apart from the fact that that would cause far more harm to the people of China than good, it would mean placing sanctions on roughly a third or more of all of the world's nation states - that's if the same standard was applied equally by the UN to all. How many nations are there in the world today that have been given a Level 4 or 5 on the Political Terror Scale?

The United States has, as I have mentioned before, been given a Level 2 (based on Amnesty International's findings) but consider this: this rating is based on how well the US State respects the human rights of its own citizens within the confines of its own borders. It says nothing about how the US state respects human rights outside of its borders. If you were to rate the political terror inflicted by the US state on people living outside of its US national borders, you'd have to give it a Level 4 or 5 rating. Think of all of the death and destruction the military intervention in Iraq alone has caused. This nightmare should be enough to warrant a Level 5: the terror unleased in the first few weeks of the invasion alone through aerial bombings resulted in many thousands of documented and confirmed civilian deaths. Should the rest of the world place economic sanctions then, on the United States do you think? (I'm not sure how you think on this issue). Even if we accept the argument that the US and its allies had noble intentions (which I don't) can we still accept the position that the means justify the ends? Try telling that to the people of Iraq? Of course, such a Randian position is inherently immoral.

I raise the issue of America's respect for human rights outside of its own national borders merely to illustrate a point - that while China's respect for human rights IN SOME AREAS OF MEASUREMENT remains far from desirable, it is hardly that serious in comparison to the way that many other nation states respect human rights that it warrants SPECIAL treatment. China needs to be evaluated fairly and soberly. Labelling it the "world's biggest suppressor" is not only factually incorrect, but reflects a double-standard. This is the explicit view of Mackerras and Peerenboom (I'll quote them both for you when I get home if you like) and it is my view too.

I know migrant workers can put their children in city schools:

1) The Ministry of Education change the law in 1996, allowing migrant children to enroll, on a higher fee scale.

2) I know kids like that going to school in Shenzhen.

MAJ:

I may be judging you too harshly, but I Googled and found Fan Shidong's article from 1998, which you are referring to, and it was not pleasant reading. Pure mudslinging. I have no idea why you bring that article up. Apparently Fan has had a rough time too, but this is not the kind of contributions that brings light to the discussion.

You can say what you want about Harry Wu, but he has put many human rights abuses in China on the map. Do you have the kind of courage he has? I don't. We need more people like that, not less. We can correct his exaggerations and hyperbole, but I am not prepared to go on a crusade against people like him. I don't have it in me. The fact that we have the right to vote today can is in part due to the fact that there were crazy people - like Emily Pankhurst - who were prepared to take personal risks. They were regarded as insane by many and said many things that were out of line. Those of us who do not have their courage ought to be grateful to those kind of people.

Melvyn Goldstein is an anthropologist and not a historian. He and Grunfeld are making policy suggestions to the US government, I am not in a position to do that. I know that Goldstein has pointed out that there is a lot of hypocrisy in official US policy towards Tibet, and he's right. I am not coming from that place and in this particular regard, US hypocrisy is not what drives me mad.

"I raise the issue of America's respect for human rights outside of its own national borders merely to illustrate a point - that while China's respect for human rights IN SOME AREAS OF MEASUREMENT remains far from desirable, it is hardly that serious in comparison to the way that many other nation states respect human rights that it warrants SPECIAL treatment."

This is a blog about China, not the US. I share many of your criticisms of the US. But most of the bad news about the US, you can read about in the US itself. The US cleans is dirty laundry so everybody can see. That makes a world of a difference.

If one of areas of measurement that sets China apart from other countries is the enormous number of executions, it pretty much sets off other areas where China has improved. Add to that the fact that the regime openly admits that it uses organ from executed prisoners and it makes you wonder about the nature of the regime. It makes you wonder why some people go to such lengths to defend the PRC government. A lot of people got better living standards in Germany in the 1930s, but many other things were going on too. I am not saying that China today is Germany then, but there are certain types of government actions that cast a shadow on practically anything else that government does.

I remain agnostic whether economic sanctions against any country would work. Usually it is the governments that we can afford to punish that gets that kind of treatment, not always the governments that deserve it. Burma is a convenient target, but no ones care about Saudi Arabia for instance, and so on and so forth. But this is a blog about China and about law.

And yes, you did mention June 4 once, but my remarks were directed at that very comment. And I find it remarkable that for all the names and books you keep mentioning, you do not find any time to explain why you use quotation marks around the word that most accurately describes the event. Neither can you explain why you think "China has moved on" since then. Ever seen footage of that night? You think that 18 years is enough for the people who went through that?

Amban - I discussed June 4 further, in a little more detail, in the comment addressed to JL. Perhaps you missed it.

Melvyn Goldstein is indeed an anthropologist - but he is also an historian. According to his CV, he "is a social anthropologist specialising in Tibetan society, history, and contemporary politics as well as in anthropology and history, cross-cultural gerontology, population studies, polyandry, cultural ecology and economic development/change. He has conducted research in Tibet (Tibet Autonomous Region of China) on a range of topics including nomadic pastoralism, the impact of reforms on rural Tibet, family planning and fertility, modern Tibetan history, and socio-economic change." His current projects include: an oral history of Tibet, a multi-volume history of modern Tibet, and the history of the Nyemo incident in 1969.

Secondly, I am not, nor have I ever, defended the Chinese state's executions of prisoners, use of prisoner's organs , etc. I have, and do question, the extent to which these abuses occur, and I have argued that China needs to be judged by its OVERALL human rights record throughout the reform era, and as it exists today - when you take a wider look, it is actually very impressive in some areas. Very poor in others. The fact remains though, as I keep saying, that China today performs well on most (certainly not all, but most) measures of human rights. It does not, despite the terrible violations that continue to occur, deserve to be singled out for special treatment when there are so many other nations that are performing far worse.

That is my position, and I stand by it. I respect and appreciate where you are coming from, but intrducing Will into Reason is a Randian strategy that I consider to be inherently immoral. Fine, you say you are agnostic when it comes to the issue of sanctions. But you seem intent on viewing China as being somewhat more repressive than it actually is. Why, I wonder? I disagree that China's numerous human rights successes are offset by the number of people it executes, and as I said, legal reforms were introduced last year (as reported on this blog) that are designed to drastically reduce the number of executions that local level courts and authorities can get away with.

I really don't know why you are making such a big deal out of my putting quotation marks around the word "massacre" - I do so for the exact same reason that Colin Mackerras does - because that's how the events that unfolded on June the 6th are normally described by most critics. Authorities in Beijing generally prefer to downplay the event of course, referring to it as an "incident".

China has moved on since then - the people of China don't continue today to view themselves or their nation through the prism of the Tiananmen Square massacre (I left out the quotation marks this time, just for you!) It's simply not an issue to the vast, overwhelming majority of Chinese, and it arguably never was. China is a country in constant states of flux, and it has quite clearly changed very significantly (many would say dramatically) since 1989.

How do most mainstream Han Chinese themselves view human rights? This is a question you need to ask yourself. In his book "China Culture Shock", the British journalist Keith Sinclair essentially takes on board the popular Chinese view of the Tiananman massacre, agreeing that it was "necessary" in order to protect the then status quo in the interests of maintaining economic development and social stability. The decision to send in the tanks, says Sinclair, was quite an understandable one, in light of the fears people had back then of going down the same path of the former Soviet Union. "Why should a few be allowed to spoil everything for the majority?" was the way most Chinese responded, according to Sinclair, and "why should they?" he agrees.

Now, while I personally do not feel at all comfortable with this line of reasoning, it is indeed how large numbers of ordinary Chinese feel. I suspect that it may even be the majority view. Sinclair certainly thinks so.

Instead of preaching to the Chinese about human rights (especially when Western states have no convincing moral authority to do so), it may be useful instead to keep in mind the fact that the Chinese view human rights a little differently from most Westerners, and that's not because they are inherently somehow less moral than us, but because their material realities and modes of living and relating to one another, as embodied in part at least by the Confucian culture, results in a different psychology, and hence a different mix of values from ours.

"One only needs to recall that the very concept of 'rights' is a Western product," as Dingding Chen (a political scientist from the University of Chicago) points out in "Understanding China's Human Rights Policy: The Limits of International Norms". This concept is absent from the traditional Chinese philosophy and culture, which "emphasises duties to the ruler, responsibility to society and obligations to the community as the very basis of the social harmony and order.

To quote Chen, "there is a strong utilitarian element in the Chinese conception of human rights. Rights are not protected for the sake of rights, rather, the protection is based upon the benefits it will produce. Naturally, economic rights are placed before civil and political rights since the latter cannot produce immediate benefits for society as a whole. Secondly, national rights are placed before individual rights."

As Dr. Anne Thurston's interviews and discussions with Chinese villagers showed, "human rights are often construed as the rights to food, housing, and roads in China."

"The Government is justified in setting aside individual rights if it means that the collective good is promoted," argued one post-graduate student from Peking University, the "New Internationalist's" Chris Richards reported, and "this is a feeling that is still prominent."

In short, the Chinese conceptualise human rights as being more collective in nature than individual, more social and economic than civil and political, more need-based than rights-entitled, and more duties-oriented than rights-centered - and such values are consistent with the dominant tradition of Confucian humanism. Placed in these cultural and historical contexts, it becomes much easier to understand why the Chinese government has put so much emphasis on national development and economic rights. As Chen says, "it is not so much that the Chinese government uses developmentalism as an instrument to deflect international criticism, although this might be part of the reason. The more fundamental reason is that they indeed think this way, and their thinking is largely shaped by traditional Chinese culture."

If we were to look then at China's human rights record over the past 25 years through Chinese eyes, then the big picture would look pretty impressive: as the latest United Nation's Human Development Brief reports, "China has registered some of the most rapid advances in human development in history, with its Human Development Index ranking increasing 20 percent since 1990." China is now ranked 84 out of 177 countries.

The report recognises China's massive achievements in poverty relief in the past 30 years, saying that if "China's achievements were not recorded, the world would have actually regressed in its progress towards poverty alleviation." Keep in mind here, that China, since the Deng reforms were first introduced, has managed to lift roughly 250 million of its people out of poverty. Life expectancy has sharply risen, as has per capita literacy levels.

"China was the world's fastest growing economy over the past two decades, with per capita incomes rising threefold," says the report, "although growing inequalities have left Guizhou ranking alongside Namibia (ranked 125 on the index) whereas Shanghai is more comparable to Portugal (which ranks 25 on the index)."

The central government, of course, only recently announced its plans to address what it has identified as the nation's two biggest human rights problems: the growing social inequalities between those who reside in rural and urban localities, and the country's deteriorating environment. As this blog kast year reported, the central government has now allocated a huge budget of 1.3 trillion yuan (US$162 billion) to clean up its environmental problems, to be allocated throughout the period 2006-2010.

Indeed, as Curt Goering of Amnesty International pointed out in a recent interview for NOW magazine, "there is a growing recognition of economic, social and cultural rights as rights: that the right to food, to housing, health care, employment, education, etc. are rights every bit as important as the right to freedom of speech or the right not to be tortured or arbitrarily detained. There is a growing understanding of the interrelationship and indivisibility of rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural." China, as I mentioned earlier, is a shining example to the world when it comes to focusing on the improvement of peoples' access to quality food, housing and education, though sadly it has been failing in the area of healthcare over recent years.

As terrible as the number of executions that take place in China each year are, I really don't see how you can argue that this off-sets China's other human rights successes. It may off-set some, sure, but the fact is, as I keep saying, is that the combined successes and improvements far outweigh the overall failures.

Amban - as I said, I really do respect your position, and I know that you are no more a US State Department stooge than I am a CCP lapdog. It all comes down to a matter of perspective, as the title of this thread suggests.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

Oh! One more thing Amban - I think you'll find that organ harvesting in Chinese prisons was outlawed by the Chinese central government - back in July of last year the law came into effect. This does provide a good example of how international pressure and condemnation can lead to positive change - but then one must remember that the central government response turned positive only after more sober criticisms were made, brought to their attention by the World Medical Association.

Those intent on demonising China by exaggerating the numbers and extent of the practice were only able to illicted a denial and a snub from Chinese authorities. Far better to offer constructive criticisms, and to work together with Chinese authorities in order to bring positive about change.

Sorry - I made a typing error in my comment above: I meant to type in June 4 when referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, not June 6 (ofc ourse). Sorry for any confusion.

Dear MAJ,

Thanks for your time in responding.
I have a couple of thoughts.

Firstly, the world media, politicians and celebrities pay attention to Dafur because of the awfulness of the events there. Zimbabwe I think gets attention because it used to be regarded as one of the more developed and prosperous countries in Africa (and we used to play them at cricket.)
With regards to South Korea, I didn't know about the Kwangju massacre. I am too young to know how it was reported in the west at the time, but it doesn't surprise me that people are more familiar with the Tiananmen massacre. I think this is largely because 6.4 still has a presence in China in a way that the Kwangju massacre doesn't in Korea. By that, I don't mean that everything in Chinese politics ought to be, as you say, 'seen through the prism' of 6.4. Rather that by constituting probably the biggest taboo subject in contemporary China, it still has a living legacy. When they eventually do start talking about it, investigating exactly how many people died and who was responsible, then I think it will begin to drop off the radar screen in the West too (except for in history classes).

Aside from this, I think it's critically important here to define the parameters of our discussion a bit more clearly.
If we're talking about what American politicians say about various countries, then, yes, it is important to consider what kind of relationship exists between American and those other countries.
But I'm not sure that this is so relevant to a discussion on, say, why the New York Times decided to carry a story on pollution in Lake Tai that highlights the jailing of an environmental campaigner. If you want to blame this on international realpolitik too, what are we to make of the New York Times's often critical coverage of America's human rights situation?

JL, thanks for your response. I agree that the Tiananmen Square massacre will most likely quite quickly drop off the radar screen once an official inquiry is made, and some redress offered. Although the Chinese government has yet to acknowledged any wrong doing when it came to the event, in April 2006 a payment was made to the family of one of the victims, the first publicised case of the government offering redress to a Tiananmen-related victim's family. The payment was termed a "hardship assistance", given to Tang Deying, whose son, Zhou Guocong, died at the age of 15 while in police custody in Chengdu on June 6, 1989, two days after the Chinese Army dispersed the Tiananmen protestors. The woman was reportedly paid 70,000 yuan (approximately $8,700 USD).

The South Korean state didn't hold an inquiry into the 1980 Kwangju Massacre until 1996, eight years after South Korea first made the transition to democracy (which it did in 1988). A similar story may one day unfold in China in reagrds to what happened on June 4th, 1989.

I take your point about the motivations of the New York Times and other media outlets in reporting human rights abuses - their motivations are of course many and complex. But I don't think this invalidates my argument, because at least to some extent (I suspect to quite a considerable extent) the competing views or attitudes of those who represent different sections of the economy do find their way to the front pages of the mainstream media, just as they find expression in Congress through the tabling of various reports and debates.

I didn't mean to suggest that media enterprises serve merely to give voice to these two competing voices alone - individual journalists and editorial boards bring to the press their own motivations for investigating and reporting on events - and very often such efforts are made out of genuine concerns for human rights.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

MAJ:

Will respond at more length later. I do find the following comment amusing:

"The decision to send in the tanks, says Sinclair, was quite an understandable one, in light of the fears people had back then of going down the same path of the former Soviet Union."

In May 1989, nobody had any idea that the USSR would collapse two years later. As a matter of fact, people were looking up to Gorbachev and were craving some kind of political reform, and the protesters made that point.

And for the idea that people in China don't care or don't even know about June 4, well, if you spoke Chinese, you could talk to any one who lived in Beijing that year and you will get a more nuanced picture. Talk to a can driver, for starters. People have vastly different points of view, but many are angry. Or you could browse the Chinese Internet and see how many websites that are dedicated to the victims of June 4.

It is impossible to say what the public opinion in China is these days, but if people still remember Japanese atrocities seventy years ago and are prepared to take to the streets to make that point, you can safely assume that people also remember what happened to them 18 years ago and that many still are angry. So that's why the PRC government is pretty paranoid of any talk about 1989 at all.

It's good that steps are taken to stop organ harvesting. But I'd like to see actions, not words, to back that up.

More later.

Amban,

You are right about the quote from Sinclair - I should have picked up on that. Obviously he wrote that in hindsight, knowing that that was how many Chinese justified the events of June 4 retrospectively. I will double check the seconday source that quote came from, by referring to the original (if I can track down a copy in the University of Sydney's Fischer Library - which I live a short walk away from. I won't have time today though probably, as I have to teach. Maybe I can call in tonight).

The number of individual Chinese who are still angry about the events of June 4 may very well be large in actual number, and most would reside in Beijing I imagine, but the point I made remains: the majority have moved on, the event a fading memory. Nearly all of my university students in China (and I taught many of the five year period that I was there) claimed to know little about the Tiananmen Square event, and most weren't particularly interested in the topic.

You say in your last sentence that you'd like to see action rather than words. Fine, but how do you know that actions haven't been taken, and that organ removal hasn't already been stamped out, or is close to now already being stamped out? Where is the evidence to show that it is still being practised?

MAJ:

To respond to your point on organ harvesting. Yes, a law was passed in July that bans the use of prisoners' organs without their consent. But many question marks are still there. Importantly, the government has not outlawed the practice of organ harvesting as such. And the extent to which you can exercise any free will under such circumstances is very doubtful. Add to that the incredible commercial incentive to sentence people to death because of organ harvesting - voluntary or not.

We should keep in mind that a lot of cruel and inhuman acts were carried out in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, much of which that was within the bounds of law. Very inhumane laws.

Hi Amban - O.K. I'm in luck. The high school that I work at has a copy of Sinclair's book in its library, which I have just borrowed (one of the many positive things I can say about N.S.W. state high schools, is that most of them do have pretty decent libraries).

The source from which I took that quote had paraphrased Sinclair, and in the process confused his words a little. Usually I quote from the works of the actual author or authors, but not always, and in this case a problem has arisen - I apologise for that. Lesson taken!

Here is what Sinclair DOES actually say, I shall quote him at length:

"China's history since the spring of 1989 has been dominated by the military action that led to the end of the uprising in Tiananmen Square. It's fashionable for the Western press and politicians to blithely label this as 'oppression of democracy-loving students striving for freedom'. Reality is very different to this widely-perceived romantic fiction. A large part of the anger and irritation of the Chinese leadership is directly due to a refusal by the outside world to appreciate the very real likelihood that the so-called 'pro-democracy' movement could have ripped China asunder."

He then goes on to add: "Imagine, if you can, London held under seige for six weeks, with a half-million people crammed into Trafalgar Square. Contemplate Paris brought to near-total halt with gendarmes being lynched in the industrial suburbs and their weapons stolen by riotous mobs. Consider Washington in chaotic shambles with hundreds of thousands of protestors demanding the President of the United States and the chairman of the Republican Party and the Leader of the Senate explain their policies in person....What would other governments have done to save their nations from total collapse? With the regime in peril, with unrest spreading to the provinces, the very darkest nightmare of any Chinese leadership aroused, disintegration of the nation."

Sinclair does mention the collapse of the former Soviet Union, noting that "China's leadership today points back to 1989 and the tanks rolling into the Square with a degree of justification. Look, they say, pointing to a decade of ethnic terror in what used to be Yogoslavia. Look at the economic misery of the former Soviet Union... and look at the civil wars that have broken out in some of the Central Asian republics that border China. And then look at the 1,270,000,000 Chinese people: do you prefer your well stocked shops and your brimming rice bowls and our rigid leadership, or would you risk your future and that of your child on the spinning wheel of reform?"

Now look Amban, I think it is important to seriously consider this perspective, though as I said in my earlier comment, I for one do not feel comfortable with the scale of the shootings that took place on June 4. I'm very uncomfortable with any shootings for that matter, and I cannot and do not support or justify the way in which the crackdown was carried out - though there are certain other factors that need to be taken in consideration when passing judgement, which I shall come to later.

I accept Sinclair's argument that the "so-called" pro-democracy movement had little to do with democracy. I was a second year uni student back in 1989, and at the time I followed the events leading up to June 4 quite closely. I recall watching a lengthy report on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) which I found at the time to be quite insightful: the ABC crew had turned up to Beijing to report on the growing "pro-democracy" movement, but was surprised to discover that few of the assembled students were actually calling for democracy. Some that were interviewed, when asked about democracy, even replied that they thought China was not yet ready for democracy. So what were the protests all about then? The students had perceived the late Hu Yaobang as a reformer who had tried to give China's brand of socialism a human face - they flocked to Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. The gathering, as such meetings tend to do in China, acted as a magnet. Soon the vast square was thronged with shouting, wildly enthusiastic young people. It soon developed into a re-creation of the May 4th protests of 1929, when students demonstrated against the corruption and inefficiency of the former regime. And these were again, in 1989, the main issues of protest.

Sinclair points this out, and is right to do so. He is also right to point out the fact that the authorities had confiscated more than 1,000 guns from those soldiers sent in to control the crowds in an effort to ensure no bloodshed - this measure was taken after significant numbers of students began attacking soldiers. There was a fear that some soldiers might panic, and turn trigger-happy. The response though, was that soldiers were left vulnerable. A number of isolated incidents soon followed, with gangs of students attacking unarmed soldiers - some were actually lynched, others kicked to death. This side of the student demonstrations is very rarely discussed by the Western press.

Keep in mind that the Chinese leadership had tried in vain to offer concessions to the students when they were camped in the square, for a good long eight weeks they tried to negotiate with the students, and some of the student leaders have since admitted they were foolish to reject those concessions. Troops were only sent in to remove the students once things started to get out of hand and the square needed to be cleaned up in advance of a Beijing visit by Soviet leader, Mikail Gorbachev.

Evidence discussed in the US Embassy's Document 30 actually suggests a rather different series of events from that presented by the Western media. According to evidence discussed in this document, there was no real massacre in the square, that almost all the students who had been demonstrating there had left the square quietly in the early hours of June 4, and that the real incident was panicky fighting triggered by crowds attacking troops, initially unarmed, as they headed for the square earlier, on June 3.

In the process a still indefinite number of troops, students and civilians were killed and many military vehicles were torched. "Call it a mini civil war if you like," says Gregory Clark, an Australian diplomat at the time. In an article he wrote for the Japan Times, he added that "the troops eventually got the upper hand over unarmed insurgents. But that is not a deliberate massacre of innocent students."

"Curiously," Clark goes on to say, "the photo that most media use to illustrate the alleged student massacre shows a row of blazing army vehicles, some with crews trapped inside, in a long avenue that clearly is not part of Tiananmen Square. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy material speaks of troops only finally entering the square after some students attacked and killed a soldier in a vehicle at the entrance."

U.S. Embassy (Document 15) supoorts this claim: it details the statement of a Chinese-American who had witnessed the crackdown, and who claimed that, "The beating to death of a PLA soldier, who was in the first APC to enter Tiananmen Square, in full view of the other waiting PLA troops, appeared to have sparked the shooting that followed."

It is important too, as Clark says, to recognise the inexperience of the Chinese leadership and military in dealing with such situations: "Leader Li Peng later admitted that the real problem had been Beijing's inexperience in crowd control. Lacking the devices and trained police squads commonly used in the West for such control, it had had to rely on inexperienced troops."

Final estimates by the US Embassy of the total number of students killed (Document 13) puts the figure at somewhere between 180-500 (a far cry from the 3,000 death initially reported by the New York Times).

It is also worth pointing out that many of the so-called "pro-democracy" students seized the moment to promote anti-Japanese sentiments - not all the banners being waved about protested government corruption.

The point is, Amban, is that there are always at least two sides to every story, and the Western media, in general, have consistently failed to provide a fair and balanced view - they normally present only one side of the story, exaggerating and distorting the facts in their efforts to either sensationalise, or to "confirm" their own ideologically driven discourses.

What events that took place between June 3-6, were very complex, and we ought to adopt a more nuanced and informed view.

But back to my original point: I shall conclude by quoting Colin Mackerras, since he sums up my overall position quite clearly:

"What is striking about this period is that the preoccupation of Western images with matters concerned with human rights and dissidents gained an added emphasis at just the same time that the general standard of livelihood of the Chinese people rose to an extent unprecedented in China's history. This is not to deny the existence of human rights issues, but the focus they received in the Western media was both ironic and unwarranted by comparison with the improvements."

All the best Amban (I need to get on with some work now),

Mark Anthony Jones

Amban, in response to your last comment: once again, where is the evidence to show that the organs of prisoners are still being harvested?

One should never pass judgements on others, without basing those judgements on clear, solid evidence.

Amban, you say: "Add to that the incredible commercial incentive to sentence people to death because of organ harvesting - voluntary or not.'

Two things: firstly, most executions in China over the years had been ordered by courts at the local level. The central government last year (or maybe it was earlier this year) introduced new laws that take away the power of local courts to sentence people to death and to carry out executions - all death sentences now need to be approved by the high court - this is designed to radically reduce the number of executions. I have already pointed this out at least twice, yet you continue to talk about the number of executions as if nothing has changed.

Secondly, you claim that there are strong commercial incentives to execute people - local authorities may have had such incentives in the past, but not any more - the fact that local courts can no longer easily pass death sentences, together with the fact that to exploit the organs of prisoners is now illegal, must surely have dampened the incentives of prison authorities, as well as reduce greatly their opportunities to exploit prisoner organs. The risks of doing so for prison authorities would surely be now deemed too high?

MAJ:

Yes, there are still strong incentives to pass such sentences because the Chinese government is a world leader among corrupt governments. And things have been going worse.

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=16803

Corruption hollows out people's confidence in the government, as you are undoubtedly aware of. The last couple of years, more and more people have been taking to the streets, exercising their nominal political rights under the constitution. Things are still under control and we probably remain under control as long as most people gets their slice of the cake. But current rates of growth are unsustainable and the moment we see a slow down there is an increased risk of more protests. Rising food prices triggered protests in the 1980s, then came demands for political rights. The contours of the next wave of protests are discernible already. Land use rights, working conditions, environment, food prices and corruption are on peoples minds right now, judging from press reports.

We can hope that the number of executions will drop given recent changes. But then, the real number is a state secret, so it is hard - even dangerous - to try to find out verifiable evidence in that regard.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/10/07/china17046.htm

The lack of transparency is a good reason to be suspicious that any real improvement will take place.

Dear Amban,

I disagree that China is a "world leader among corrupt" governments. That statement is simply not supported by the empirical evidence. I have already pointed out that China scores well in comparison to most other lower-middle income countries throughout the world on measurements of good governance - something that Peerenboom discusses at length and in detail. (refer to the World Bank Good Governance Indicators - 2006 is the most recent data available). Good governance is measured according to political stability (China scores comparatively well), rule of law (China scores comparatively well), Government effectiveness (China, once again, scores comparatively well).

When it comes to control of corruption (China scores comparatively well when measured against other countries in its lower-middle income range: ranked 142 out of 212 countries). It's not great, but then, it's hardly fair to compare China to countries like Australia, Britain, Canada and the US, is it? At any rate, China can hardly be said to be a "world leader among corrupt governments" - not when there are about 70 countries that are ranked lower. Although corruption has increased in China over the last few years, the overall trend over the past 10 years has been one of improvement.

I agree that it is not easy to obtain reliable information about the actual number of executions that are carried out in China. This is a problem.

No response to my reply to your concerns over my position on the Tiananmen Square events of 1989? I'm wondering what you make of Sinclair's pointof view?

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

MAJ:

First of all, you like to quote people. I hardly see a posting from you without you mentioning Randy. I have looked at his book. I respect him, but I didn't like the book. Too much punditry for my taste. I have seen dozens of books like that. You seem to be on a reading streak, so try to branch out a little and read what pundits wrote about China in 1987, 1967. 1947, 1927 - or even 1897. Some of it is wide of the mark, some of it isn't. The warlord Wu Peifu was on the cover of Time Magazine in the 1920s, then Chiang Kai-shek got rid of him. And then someone got rid of Chiang. There has always been a China book of the year that people have been raving about, that seem to have it all figured out. But how many of them outlast a decade? Not that many.

My response to Sinclair's comment is that I visited China one year before 1989 and then four years after. You do not have that experience and I don't know about Sinclair, but it was two worlds apart. It is one of those things you have to have experienced to believe. My conclusion is that people were s**t-scared by what the government did on June 4 and that they still are. No one at the time had any idea that China would turn into what it is today, so any retroactive justifications do not impress me.

Right now the best course of action is to shut up and go with the flow. If your students didn't want to talk about events that happened when they were busy learning to walk, I don't blame them. And a lot of people that went through 1989 or events prior to that don't want to talk either. But silence is not acquiescence.

As long as there is money to earn or at least the prospect of making a descent buck, yes, a lot of people will try not to think about 1989. I don't blame them. But June 4 remains a scar in the Chinese psyche - if there is such a thing - and it will haunt the present government until it does something. The protests of April 1989 were largely fueled by disaffection with government corruption, spiraling inflation, and they inspired by what was happening in the Soviet Union. History will not repeat itself, but none of the fundamental problems that the leaders of June 4 tried to answer have been resolved.

It is very difficult to make any statement of the durability of any system of government when the rate of growth is more than 11 per cent. When you had similar rates of growth in Japan people said all kinds of stuff. Let's see what people say when China has a year of two per cent or even negative GDP growth. That's when we can make educated judgments.

MAJ:

"I accept Sinclair's argument that the 'so-called' pro-democracy movement had little to do with democracy"

I don't accept it. I was in Beijing the year before. Yes, many student were immature, but they were genuinely interested in democracy.

"...the US Embassy of the total number of students killed (Document 13) puts the figure at somewhere between 180-500 (a far cry from the 3,000 death initially reported by the New York Times)."

"A far cry." Spare me the arithmetics. Even though 180 is accurate figure, which I doubt, it is enough to justify the calling the event a "massacre". And we all know that most of the killing did not take place in Tiananmen square, but in downtown Beijing. That is old hat.

You should watch Carma Hinton's "Gate of Heavenly Peace" before you make judgments of the movement in June 4. The student movement was not perfect, we all know that, but that does not justify what happened. Here is part of it (in Chinese only, sorry):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igsW5yQ6428&feature=related

Amban - you once again seem to be reading into my statements more than what I actually intended to imply. At no stage did I ever suggest that what happened in Tiananmen Square wasn't a "massacre". Nor did I ever pass any judgements about the event. What I did say is that there are a number of other factors that need to be taken into consideration when evaluating the events that took place, and that it is necessary in order to be fair and balanced, to take a more nuanced approach, because the story is somewhat more complex than what many people seem to realise. I stand by that.

The official Chinese government figure is 165, though many do suspect the number of deaths to be around the 200 mark. An estimate of between 180-500 seems very sober to me. That is a far cry from 3,000.

Amban - you say that you were in Beijing back in 1988, and that "many student were immature", but "genuinely interested in democracy." In what way were they generally interested in democracy? And what do you mean by "many"? As I said, the ABC crew struggled to find students in Tiananmen who were actually calling for democracy, in the sense of wanting to have free multi-party elections introduced. A statue of the "Goddess of Democracy" may have been waved about, together with a number of slogans such as "Long Live Democracy" - but as the ABC report revealed, the way that students articulated their understanding of democracy was varied, sometimes even bordering on the bizarre: many students linked "democracy" to mass consumption, to Michael Jackson and Malboro cigarettes. It was more of an anti-government protest, than a stand for pro-democracy. The Chinese students knew that by describing their struggle as a "democratic" one, that they would be able to win international sympathy for their cause. The "Goddess of Democracy," was instrumental in pulling the emotional heartstrings of millions of Westerners who drew a connection to the Statue of Liberty and assumed that Chinese aspirations were identical to their own. Most of those students who were genuinely interested in ideas of democracy drew their understanding from Liang Qichao, who is often attributed for having been the first person to introduce the idea of democracy to China, roughly a hundred years ago, during the Qing period. He attempted to fuse Western concepts of democracy with Confucianism, producing a very different concept of democracy to that of the European Enlightenment. Liang argued that there was no difference between individual interests and public interests; individual citizens he argued should be granted rights in order to better strengthen the state. There was no need for individual rights in the Western sense, whose purpose was to protect the individual from the government. In his attempt to understand and implement democracy, then, Liang himself inadvertently set down justifications for the authoritarianism that would characterise China's "democratic" era. Even the most vocal and strongest advocate of "democracy" among the student leaders of 1989, Wei Jingsheng (a Beijing electrician and son of two high-ranking Party officials)struggled to make any sense of democracy, drawing his inspiration from Liang.

I have to strongly disagree with your assessment of Peerenboom's book by the way - rather than merely being a book of punditry, it is instead very much an empirical study - which is why it's such a breath of fresh air.

When economic growth in China slows down to a mere 2 per cent, it will most likely be a sign, and a product of, a somewhat more mature economy. China may even have already made the transition to democracy by then.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

Amban - I read very few books that are written by pundits. I prefer empirically-based studies that simply examine societies as they are (or were, if I'm looking at historical perspectives). I really don't understand how Peerenboom's book can be described as a work of punditry. Perhaps you would care to eleborate.

Also, not all of the justifications that Sinclair lists were retrospective from the point of view of the CCP - most, he says, reflected genuine fears at the time that instability would spread. In fact, instability was beginning to spread throughout the country - this was a reality at the time. The other question that I raised in my earlier comment is this: was the decission to fire on students made from above as a callous act of murder? Or did soldiers begin shooting as a response to student provocation and violence? As I mentioned in my previous comments, there is quite a bit of evidence now available to suggest that the latter was the case. This evidence needs to be taken into account when evaluating the events of June 1989.

I sense that our discussion here is now starting to run out of steam, but I have enjoyed our dialogue, and I do appreciate the time and effort that you have taken in order to challenge me on some of my views. You have raised a lot of valid questions, and have raised a lot of interesting points - but in doing so you have also made a number of rather sweeping statements that I know simply cannot be supported empirically - statements that seem to be emotive, rather than objective. Your level of emotion, I suspect, is also what leads you into sometimes misreading my comments, by reading too much into me. You shouldn't assume that my concern for human rights is somehow any less real or genuine than yours. I know that you haven't actually made such a feeling explicit, but you have certainly, at times, implied it. Or have I been misreading you too in this respect?

Pity we can't simply sit down together in some nice quiet pub and discuss all of these matters in person over a few beers - maybe then we'd more fully appreciate the nature of one another's character and the differing ways in which we articulate our concerns for human rights in China, and for the world (including an appreciation of one another's past and present material commitments to human rights causes.) When it comes to evaluating human rights in China, I have, as I have indicated a number of times throughout my earlier comments on this thread, tried to incorporate into my perspective that of the mainstream Han Chinese, with its stong utilitarian emphasis. This, I think, is essential if one wants to exercise fairness in one's judgements.

All the best,
Mark.

MAJ:

I find your comment that the soldiers may have started "shooting as a response to student provocation and violence" rather disturbing. I leave it at that. Rather than trying to refute this point, I think you should read Black & Munro's book Black hands of Beijing instead.

I find your choice of verifiable information rather inconsistent. I note on that on one hand, you cast doubt on reports in "Western media" about human rights abuses that "constitute little more than hearsay, or are seriously flawed at best". On the other hand, you rather approvingly refer to "the ABC crew [which] struggled to find students in Tiananmen who were actually calling for democracy".

You may have an explanation for that. Anyway, I find discussing ideas more interesting than discussing different indexes or rankings. Those numbers keep shifting and changing as we speak. The other day, I read an article that casts serious doubt on the statistics on the average purchasing power of the Chinese. Next week, someone will surely try to refute those figures as well.

I don't claim any moral high ground in this discussion, and I have no idea about your commitment to human rights in China. But I feel intensely provoked by many of your statements and I respond accordingly.

And then we have some facts that you could have checked easily. Don't get me started about Liang Qichao's rapidly shifting views of government. As for Wei Jingsheng, he was indeed an electrician and the son of cadres, but he was not a student leader and played no active role in 1989 because he serving a fifteen-year sentence in Qincheng prison then.

The reason for his sentence was that he had advocated the "Fifth modernization" - democracy - on a big character poster at the Democracy Wall in late 1978.

I just went back and reread his big character poster and it turns out that Wei had a pretty clear idea what he meant by democracy. I found no evidence that he had read Liang Qichao or that he "struggled to make any sense of democracy". What I find is a rather sober analysis. This was his definition of democracy:

What is genuine democracy? It is a system that allows the people to
choose, at their own will, representatives who administer in the name of
the people, in conformity with the people's will and interests. The
people must retain the right to dismiss and replace their representatives
at any time, to prevent them from abusing their powers and turning into
oppressors. (Schell & Schambaugh, The China Reader, p. 170.)

Wei also anticipates our discussion here, when he cautioned against the belief that democracy will somehow develop organically as "the necessary product of a certain
degree of development":

Will democracy emerge by itself at the end of a natural and necessary
evolution? Certainly not. On the way toward democracy, the smallest
victory will exact a terrible price; let us have no illusions; democracy
will be reached only after bloody sacrifices. The enemies of democracy
try always to deceive the people telling them: "The emergence and the
disappearance of democracy are phenomena that result from an inner
necessity; there is thus no need to spend any effort to bring it into existence...." (p. 173)

A rather chilling prediction. He spent more than fourteen years in prison for having said that.

I think this is my last word, unless you come up with something really exciting. But I agree that would prefer to have this discussion in a pub over a pint of ale...

Gees, I have been arguing with another cut-and-paste operation of MAJ. I thought I was arguing with a person, not a thread that was pasted together more than a year ago by someone, someone that may or may not be MAJ himself.

Now come on Amban - I'm allowed to copy bits and pieces of my own work into my current online discussions, am I not? It does, after all, save me considerable time - I do work full time you know, and I have a fiancee to come home to, and a social life to maintain.

Most of what I have written here on this thread is new, and the piece you refer to above I Iinked to in my review of Peerenboom's book, published on this site earlier this year, and which you yourself commented in response to. I assumed then, that you would most likely had already read my Thoughts on the Nature of Chinese Governanace and Society.

In your earlier comment, you wrote: "...you cast doubt on reports in 'Western media' about human rights abuses that 'constitute little more than hearsay, or are seriously flawed at best'. On the other hand, you rather approvingly refer to 'the ABC crew [which] struggled to find students in Tiananmen who were actually calling for democracy'."

This is a fair enough remark, although at no time did I ever argue that everything published in the Western press was poorly researched and distorted - I actually made a point of noting, if you remember, that the images of China produced by the Western media have, over the past ten to fifteen years, become more complex and contradictory. I also noted earlier, that much of the human rights discourse found on the pages of many Western newspapers express genuine and sincere human rights concerns.

The problem with me using the ABC report the way I have, is that it is purely qualitative in nature - I don't have any quantitative evidence to back it up with. This is a problem that you too have, when you say that many of the people you met and knew back in 1989, expressed strong interests in and understandings of democracy.

Most of my arguments on this thread are empirically based though, and are of both a qualitative and quantitative nature - are they not? This does not necessarily mean that the results of such studies are without their flaws, but they do cast serious doubts on the popular, clearly emotive claims, that China is the "world's worst" this, and the "world's worst" that, etc.

Wei Jingsheng was in prison at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre - I know that. He was nevertheless widely regarded at the time as being the chief ideologue of the Chinese pro-democracy movement, the "leader", and the advocate most often quoted by those students in Tiananmen who were interested in sloganeering democracy - regardless of how well they articulated his ideas. Most of his ideas on democracy he initially derived from his readings of Liang Qichao. Liang's views did shift, as did Wei's.

One only has to read Wei's essay on the Fifth Modernisation (which you quoted from, and which was written in 1979), to get some idea of just how limited he was back then in his understanding of democracy. In the section of his essay sub-titled "The March Towards Modernisation", he says:

"To accomplish modernisation, Chinese people could first practice democracy and modernise China's social system. Democracy is by no means the result of social development as claimed by Lenin. Aside from being the inevitable outcome of the development of productive forces and the relations of production up to a certain stage, it is also the conditions for the existence of productive forces and the relations of production, not only up to that certain stage but also at much higher stages of development. Without this condition, the society will become stagnant and economic growth will encounter insurmountable obstacles. Therefore, judging from past history, a democratic social system is the major premise or the prerequisite for all developments - or modernisations. Without this major premise or prerequisite, it would be impossible not only to continue further development but also to preserve the fruits of the present stage of development. The experiences of our great motherland over the past thirty years have provided the best evidence."

Notice how he begins by arguing that Lenin was wrong to think that democracy was the result of social development, and then in the very next line he argues that democracy is indeed the result of social development, that it is "the inevitable outcome of the development of productive forces and the relations of production", but qualifies this by adding that this is the case "up to a certain stage" only, and that democracy also creates "the conditions for the existence of productive forces and the relations of production, not only up to that certain stage but also at much higher stages of development." He then straight away resorts back to his view that Lenin was wrong, saying that "a democratic social system is the major premise or the prerequisite for all developments - or modernisations."

So does democracy have prerequisites (reliant on the development of productive forces and social relations) or is democracy itself necessary for all developments or modernisations? He seems to actually be agreeing with Lenin (though he says he disagrees) that there are developmental prerequisites to democracy, whilst also arguing that democracy is itself a prerequisite for development to further occur, once development has already reached a "certain stage". This would make sense, but that's EXACTLY what both Marx and Lenin themselves did in fact argue. He has clearly misread Lenin - perhaps he relied on a poor translation.

Wei then moves on to link democracy with prosperity, saying "that people need prosperity so that real goods are available, and so that there is a full opportunity to pursue their first goal of happiness, namely freedom." That line could have almost come straight from Marx, who regarded capitalism and its jurisprudic institutions as historically progressive, although marx also recognised that democracy is a product of the class system, structurally in existence to support the status quo. Increasing prosperity and democracy only deliver limited forms of freedom, together with certain degrees of coercion, entrapment and alienation. Despite his use of Marxist terminology and theory, Wei nevertheless "advise[s] everyone not to believe such political swindlers anymore" - those swindlers he lists include not only Mao but also Marx and Lenin.

And the real source of all of Wei's anger and bitterness: "People have tightened their belts for decades since liberation. They have worked as hard as they could and actually produced much wealth. But where has all the wealth gone? Some say that it has gone to fatten some comparatively small autocratic regimes like Vietnam. Others say it has fattened those 'new bourgeois elements' like Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. There they are all correct."

Widespread anger over corruption, rising inflation and gowing inequality is what inspired Wei to examine ideas of democracy, just as it was these concerns that led most of the students who assembled in Tiananmen back in 1989 to play around with the word 'democracy" in their chanting and slogans - what they wanted was a greater share in the new prosperity, and the equating of democracy with wealth and consumption shows just how superficial their real understanding of democracy was. This is why Wei could claim democracy as the "premise" for "all development" and "modernisation."

I am in no way trying to suggest that Wei is not a decent person, with genuine interest and concerns for the human rights of his fellow citizens - I'm simply asserting my belief that his understanding of democracy was rather limited, and that those students who particpated in the Tiananmen Square protests who drew on his thoughts and advocated his ideas, shared in his limited understanding of democracy, and that most such students, like Wei himself, were motivately largely by issues or corruption, rising living costs, growing inequality, etc. Not all of the students who participated in the demonstrations of 1989 were even calling for democracy though (my original point) - many swere imply calling for political reforms designed to ensure greater government accountability when it comes to spending public money. Many also saw the new corruption, growing inequality and rising living costs as a product of Deng's new capitalism, championing instead the Maoist past - something that also surprised the ABC crew I mentioned in my previous comments.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

Sorry for the all the typos in my last comment -"motivately" shoud read "motivated" (of course). I was in a hurry.

I just don't see where a long expose about the students supposedly shallow understanding of democracy is leading. At the end of the day, responsibility for what happened on June 4 rests on the PRC government.

Amban - I agree with you that responsibility for what happened on June the 4th ultimately rests with the PRC government. However, I also believe that the students who took part in the protests also need to take some of the responsibility, especially those among them who behaved wrecklessly and with barbarity. As I mentioned, there is evidence that PLA soldiers began the initially shooting not from orders but as a response to student provocation - and I'm talking about murder here, the killing of soldiers. This is the picture one gets after reading through some of the US Embassy documents. There are always at least two sides to every story, and both need to be taken into account when making assessments and when preparing judgements.

My purpose in talking about the nature of the student protests does have a purpose, which is to show that the events of 1989 are more complex and nuanced than what most people seem to appreciate. Many people have the impression that the CCP's top leaders, in an act of cold blooded murder, ordered soldiers to massacre "thousands" of peaceful demonstrators whose only ctime was to challenge the right of the CCP to govern by calling for democracy, all of whom were trapped within the confines of a public square sealed off by tanks and soldiers. That I think is quite a distortion: most students were not calling for democracy, most of those killed were not killed in the square, not all of the students had been peaceful, numerous soldiers had been murdered by student gangs in the days leading up to June 3rd, when the main violence began, the government had tried to avoid violence by confiscating over one thousand guns from PLA soldiers in the hope of avoiding bloodshed, but rearmed them very quickly after some soldiers were lynched, others kicked to death. The government also tried to negotiate with the students over a long eight week period. Soldiers and government alike were inexperienced at dealing with such events - all of this needs to be taken into account, not left completely out of the picture.

The way that Western politicians and media exploited that event through their representations of it, needs to be viewed in the context of the Cold War.

The original point that I made regarding the events of 1989, is that it all happened 18 years ago, and that China has moved on since then, that it is a very different place now. It was you, Amban, who continually steered the conversation back to Tiananmen Square, insisting that I account for my use of the word "massacre" in quotation marks.

Before we put this topic to rest, let me just clarify my overall position: what happened in Beijing back in June 1989 was terrible, and horribly tragic. Yes, at the end of the day, far more students were killed (nowhere near as many as what the New York Times reported) than the number of PLA soldiers who were killed - not surprising, since the PLA was much better armed - and at the end of the day most of the responsibility does indeed rest with the government of the day. Some of the responsibility also needs to be taken by those more militant students who indulged in violence and murder, though no doubt such militants existed in relatively small numbers.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

So June 4 was just a misunderstanding then? Why did Deng Xiaoping himself turn out in national TV thanking the PLA for what they had done? Truly inexplicable if we accept the idea that June 4 was just another tragedy.

And there are two sides to every story? What is the Japanese side of the story of what happened in Nanjing in December 1937?

Where did I ever suggest that the Tiananmen Square massacre was a "misunderstanding"? I simply said that there are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration when evaluating what had occured.

Deng's motives for publicly thanking the PLA were no doubt varied, and were no doubt politically motivated by the need to put a positive spin on a situation that had not turned out the way he would have hoped for or expected.

I'm afraid I cannot comment on the Nanjing massacre, as I do not know enough about that event. I appreciate your point though - let us say then, that where most conflicts occur, that there are normally at least two sides to the story.

A positive spin? If you saw the PLA shooting into unarmed crowds one day and the following day you saw the paramount leader thanking the troops on TV - would that seem like a positive spin to you? I would take it as a thinly veiled threat. Add to that the fact that you saw another wave of summary executions in the wake of the clampdown. If that isn't coldblooded, what is?

Amban - remember, as the English journalist Kevin Sinclair rightly points out, a significant portion of the overall Chinese population supported the government crackdown back then, and many still do. The spin that the central government put on the event was intended to make positive light of the PLA response, and many ordinary Chinese, like Sinclair himself, and the Australian diplomat Clark, see the PLA response of 1989 as having been largely provoked and terribly unfortunate, but sadly necessary. That is NOT how I feel about the violence (I have already explained all of this, have I not?) but it is how many Chinese feel (very possibly even the majority).

The crackdown that occured in the aftermath of June 3-6 was thorough and ruthless, I agree. The central government was clearly determined to make sure that such an event would never happen again. If the actual events of June 3-6 can be interpreted as having been the result not of a cold-blooded and calculated decision on the part of the central government or of some of its individual leaders (and it's possible to interpret events in this way given some the existing available evidence) then the same certainly, as you say, cannot be said about the crackdown that followed.

"...it is how many Chinese feel (very possibly even the majority)."

I don't accept that description and under current condition it is impossible to verify that. But even if you were right, does that justify the brutality?

I know that you will say that is not what you mean, etc, but that is how you come across when you approvingly quote two controversial figures who portray the massacre as "sadly necessary".

Amban - be reasonable! I do not "approvingly" quote two controversial figures, as if I agree fully with them. I quote "approvingly" only in the sense that I think that their viewpoints need to be considered, and that the events of June 3-6 1989 are considerably more complex and nuanced than what most people think, and that all the evidence and all of the various interpretations and perspectives need to be included as part of one's overall equation when evaluating those events. To not do so would be a mistake, in that it would result in a superficial and distorted understanding, in bias. As an empiricist, I believe in taking all of the existing available empirically-verifiable evidence into account, and making assessments based on that evidence - one must always strive to be fair and balanced when formulating assessments and when passing judgements.

Amban, many Chinese do feel as though the PLA response was justified - that I think can be empirically demonstrated using qualitative evidence. As to whether or not such a position represents the majority view, well, I agree that this is almost impossible to quantify - which is why is used the word "possibly". Because Sinclair and others (like my fiancee, or many of my previous tertiary level students in China) think that this is the majority view, doesn't mean that it is the majority view - hence my caution.

MAJ:

A belated response.

Be reasonable? The fact that the PRC government wants to put up a smoke-screen is nothing to be surprised of. But it frightens me when I find people - like you - who should know better giving credence to that version. Please forgive me if

It remains an incontestable fact that the mass movement in April-June was peaceful until the night of June 3. Some rioting occurred, but nothing that would justifying shooting into unarmed crowds who barricading themselves against the onslaught.

Take a look at the following footage (in Chinese), from 5.30:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOKwpNvz-nU&feature=related

The movement was far more peaceful that the student movement in Kwangju in 1980 or many of the movements that the PRC government has canonized as patriotic movements, including the May 4 movement.

Many of the leaders of the 1989 movement, such as Wang Dan and Liu Xiaobo, made their utmost to keep the movement peaceful and thanks to people like them, Tian'anmen square was evacuated peacefully at the night of June 3-4. A couple of days later, the CCP thanked them by calling for their arrest for "counter-revolutionary" crimes.

That is the verifiable reality. If you want to ignore it, do so. If you think that the PRC government did the right thing, say so. But don't pretend you don't know what happened.

And as to whether the movement was for democracy or not, I just sat down looking at a collection of photographs from the demonstration, which was published in Hong Kong in the fall of 1989. You see photograph after photograph with slogans calling for democracy and human rights IN CHINESE.

MAJ:

I made some typos in my earlier post, sorry about that.

Another thing:

"many Chinese do feel as though the PLA response was justified - that I think can be empirically demonstrated using qualitative evidence."

You can't prove that. But you can prove that anyone who dared to speak to foreign journalists about what they had seen in Muxidi on the night of June 3 would be hounded in state-controlled media and then sentenced to ten years in prison. There is footage of that on Youtube too, if you are interested. That's how you manufacture consensus about an event, or at least make sure that possible dissidents shut up.

But let's assume that you are right, that many Chinese at the time felt that the PLA crackdown was justified. Does that make it right, then? I guess that your response would be "Oh, no! That's not what I'm saying". But why do you insist on making that point?

I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!

Your blog is interesting!

Keep up the good work!