China Law Blog

Right on. So why or how does Mr. Blair care, is he doing business in China?
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And i don't find that opening ceremony very enjoyful. I'm like, totoally westernized. So i'm expecting London's party. They better make some classical western sense.

You really do hate US politicians, don't you? I mean, I have noticed that as a somewhat recurring theme here on this blog. Why?

bigbogboy,

Last I knew, Blair was some sort of roving ambassador.

CLBfan,

Yes.

Why?

1. They pander.
2. They lie.
3. Americans get hooked in and actually start believing in it, while at the same time (for the most part), thinking that anyone who believes a controlled press is an idiot.
4. They are power hungry.
5-100 ....

There are some exceptions, but they are rare and they almost never get far enough to run for President. I mean, John Kerry and George Bush are not exactly any better.

Tony Blair says that he found the young "men and women" of China to be "smart, sharp, forthright" and "unafraid to express their views about China and its future," and that "Above all, there was a confidence, an optimism, a lack of the cynical, and a presence of the spirit of get up and go..." This was certainly my strong general impression of the Chinese too - so much so, that I made it one of the recurring themes of my China travel narrative, "Flowing Waters Never Stale" - the epilogue is entirely devoted to the sharing of this very same impression. It's one that I think many people travelling to China these days return home with.

I lost a great deal of respect for Tony Blair as a result of his positioning on Iraq, but I find his views on China, as articulated in this Wall Street Journal opinion piece, to be hard to fault. I especially agree with him when he writes:

"No sensible Chinese person -- including the country's leadership -- doubts there remain issues of human rights and political and religious freedom to be resolved. But neither do the sensible people -- including the most Western-orientated Chinese -- doubt the huge change, for the better, there has been. China is on a journey. It is moving forward quickly. But it knows perfectly well the journey is not complete. Observers should illuminate the distance to go, by all means, but recognize the distance traveled."

I couldn't agree more.

It is interesting, because another former Labor Party Prime Minister, Australia's Paul Keating, also expressed very similar views earlier this week, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

"The former prime minister Paul Keating has attacked the Western media's coverage of the Beijing Olympics as condescending, elitist and typical of the developed world's general disdain for China.

Most of the coverage was seen through the prism of T1b*t, Mr Keating told the Melbourne Writers' Festival at the weekend, and disregarded the "massive leaps" forward in areas such as poverty alleviation and declining infant mortality.

"In a Western and elitist way, we have viewed China's right to its Olympic Games, to its 'coming out', its moment of glory, with condescension and concessional tolerance," Mr Keating said.

"The Western critic, feeling the epicentre of the world changing but not at all liking it, seeks to put down these vast societies on the basis that their political and value systems don't match up to theirs."

Regards,
MAJ

Funny thing is I think Bush, of all people, has had the most sensible view on how the US should deal with China. Seeing his interview with Bob Costas almost (almost) made him look intelligent, as if he really understood what China is going through. If only we could forget all the other crap he's done.

Q: Do politicians have to retire from office to speak coherently and sensibly on foreign policy?

Pretty much. A person who is an active politician will get into serious trouble if he says what he or she really thinks, and so active politicians will only say very carefully crafted statements designed to maximize political support and minimize offense. Being an actor playing a role is a huge part of being a politicians which is why actors tend get themselves the job.

Also politicians usually take care to appear much dumber than they actually are. Acting dumb makes your opponents underestimate you, and you aren't going to get any votes for being smarter than the voters or worse yet acting smarter than the voters.

Also every Presidential candidate since Truman has gotten elected bashing the People's Republic of China, but every President since Nixon has found that they have had to moderate their views once in office.

Anything that you read in the media is going to be boring and inoffensive. Republicans are going to vote Republican. Democrats are going to vote Democrats. People in the middle are going to vote based on their particular interests so the job is to take positions on those issues while avoiding the character assassination machine. If you say anything that can be twisted into anything remotely controversial then the machine is going to have attack ads in place within 24 hours.

If you really want to know the candidate's views then you have to dig into their voting records and C-SPAN transcripts.

Remember the old adage: Statesmen are dead politicians. Perhaps it's sufficient merely to be retired. What is ugly about politics is the pandering to interest groups, the backbiting and the clever sound bites, the inability to take a larger (or longer) perspective. When you don't have to fight elections, that goes out the window.

A Parliamentary system also has different dynamics than a Presidential system. The fact that there is no divided government (the PM comes from the largest party in Parliament) also produces a level of accountability not found in the US. We don't get games of chicken over the federal budget, vetoes and overrides, or any other type of gridlock. And the ruling party is therefore accountable for everything that goes on under its watch -- there's no passing the buck ("The White House did this," or "If it weren't for those bastards in Congress, we could solve all these problems.").

Such a system also results in a different quality of leader emerging as Prime Minister. Compared to the President or Speaker of the House or the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, he must take a broader perspective.

Also, you should not necessarily credit Tony Blair. Britain in general takes a longer-perspective view of China than America, or even France.

They have two hundred years of history in China. They maintained diplomatic relations after 1949, got their embassy sacked by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and had months of very contentious negotiations to arrange a peaceful handover for Hong Kong. (Looks easy now, but this was right after the Falklands War and Britain had an exaggerated sense of its power.)

Britain also has four centuries of messy empire to remember. How many Americans remember our brutal colonial war in the Philippines? Or our intervention in the Russian Civil War in Archangel? We have this view that history began with World War II, that we are a force for truth and justice and the American Way. The British have had to reconcile themselves to their imperial past, and consequently take a broader perspective of the Third World.

CLBfan, Check out the Federalist Papers. The US was founded on hating politicians and distrusting those who aspire to power. It's our most time-honored tradition. Dan Harris seems to be carrying on the tradition. Also see the Newburgh Address, and see George Washington's abdication of the executive office in 1797. The refusal to seize and hold on to power is why he is still considered one of the greatest US presidents.

MAJ,

But look at how much better Blair spun it. Keating goes after people for their views on China and Blair does not. In a sense, Keating does the exact thing he says is so ineffective in dealing with China: a stream of criticism. Now I hate to overimplify things (actually, I really don't), but one is far more likely to effect change in children, employees and people in general, by giving them a map of where they need to go, as opposed to telling them how much they have already screwed up. In that respect, Blair is a much better politician than Keating.

Shaan,

I agree with you that Bush has gotten China right. I hope that presages whomever is elected next actually coming to his senses on China as well.

Twofish,

I certainly hope you are right about politicians deliberately seeking to appear dumber than they really are, because both Obama and McCain have certainly done a good job with that so far when it comes to China.

Tom,

That is a good line and those are some good points regarding the differing histories.

Will,

Exactly. We the people.

Oh, and I am working on Federalist Papers II, the sequel.

Dan - I agree with you. Both Blair and Keating have similar views, but Blair does indeed express himself in a more positive manner. The way a composer spins his or her discourse is critical, as you say, if the intent is to shape the attitudes of responders.

MAJ

Dan,

Ah, I can see it now: We must beware the trolls, everywhere drawing the blogs into their impetuous vortex. But the founders of CLB have so much merit for the wisdom they display in moderating comments.

Or, subtly less blunt, is it going to be: Beware the Legislature, unless your news network of choice tells you they're doing the right thing. The Executive is way too weak and should be strengthened considerably. Unless a Justice agrees with your morals, they're legislating from the bench and exceeding the scope of the "Constitution".

Dan, you ask the question, "Do politicians have to retire from office to speak coherently and sensibly on foreign policy...?" Tom answered that very well I think, when he said that "What is ugly about politics is the pandering to interest groups, the backbiting and the clever sound bites, the inability to take a larger (or longer) perspective. When you don't have to fight elections, that goes out the window."

I was watching ABC Australia's 7:30 Report last night, which featured an interview with The Guardian's veteran journalist, Nick Davis, who was complaining rather bitterly about the global decline in the quality of mainstream journalism. He used the example of the climate change debate to illustrate his point, but I think the same kind of phenomena equally applies to the ways in which China is reported. Allow me to quote at length Nick Davies, from the transcript provided on the ABC's website, as I think it's worth examining:

"Climate change is very interesting because what you've had there is a kind of three-way battle involving PR overwhelming journalism.

So you had a big bunch of corporations led by Exxon who were in the business of denial and who spent a fortune setting up front organisations and academic think-tanks to put out reports to justify their position of denial.

Then you had a breakaway group of corporations by Shell and BP who are much more subtle. They said okay there's a problem with climate but we are part of the solution. And they also generate PR stories to serve their purposes.

And then third corner you have the environmental groups, people like Greenpeace, who even though they have the scientific consensus on their side nevertheless engage in some pretty breathtaking exaggeration in order to manipulate the media to take up their position.

In the middle of this kind of three-way fight you have the equivalent of civilians in a war zone that is to say the readers and consumers of news media, who suffer like civilians do because they're being bombarded with misinformation and how any of us are supposed to know what the truth is about climate change and its implications when actually the news is being subverted by PR from three different directions it's really a very worrying thing when you see the structural likelihood of media being vehicles for PR stories."

What we see, hear and read in the mainstream media about China is also all too often the product of "churnism" (as Davis puts it) rather than quality journalism: human rights organisations and pro-Tibetan and the F*lan G*ng all distort and grossy exaggerate China's human rights problems as part of their PR to the media, and their PR reports are seized upon by those politicians representing those sections of the economy that feal threatened by China's economic rise, while those corporations that are benefitting from Chna's rise (like Australia's mining industry for example) are keen to trumpet China's great progress in modernising itself.

The so-called "Great Firewall" is a real joke in my opinion - hyperbolic nonesense. I lived and worked in China for a little over five years, and I was never starved for information highly critical of China. I was able to access all of the mainstream Western English-language newspapers with great ease, etc. In February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct website in existence. How many of these are blocked in China? Less than 1 percent, I bet. The Chinese, especially youth, are highly internet savvy, and are well connected to the world through their use of the world wide web. They can easily access enormous amounts of information highly critical of their country.

Instead of questioning this notion of a "Great Firewall" for example, the Western media simply churn out the PR of Amnesty International, etc., as if it were all empirically-verified fact.

But back to Tom's point: it is easier for former Prime Ministers like Blair and Keating to express their views on China now that they are no longer in office, because they no longer have to play the political game of pandering to the likes of various lobbying groups.

Regards,
MAJ

One point stuck out for me, and that's the oft reported sense of 'optimism' which comes from speaking with young, urban Chinese working in high-growth or high-tech industries. I have no doubt that this sector, as do many urban middle class Chinese, feel optimistic about the future, they have benefited the most from the economic and social stability policies of the CCP.

This is not to discount those opinions, as they represent an important and growing voice, however the focus on this group tends to minimize the feelings of those not as plugged in to the global economy or to the benefits of the past twenty years, notably rural residents, the urban underclass (and there is much overlap between these two groups) as well as non-Han minorities. In short: groups who don't always find themselves in the position to meet with opinion-makers and former heads of state during major international events.

It is quite possible that these groups share the same level of optimism as urbanites, but it would be nice if they also got a chance to meet a Tony Blair or a Bill Gates and to express their own views to such luminaries on China's current direction.

Awe man, you erased my Lie #51 comment... :-( I didn't mean anything by it, just thought it would be funny...

Blair gets half a mil US$ for 20 minutes at a new Dongguan (Guangdong) villa development, including option for a villa in his name.

I'd be panda hugging too...

Just wanted to acknowledge Jerimiah's comment, which I think is a very important one - the views of migrant labourers and the rural peasantry shouldn't be overlooked. Many such people do share in the optimism, but certainly not all of them. Large numbers of the rural poor actually look back to the Mao era with fondness, correctly perceiving those years as having been a time of greater social and economic equality. China's modernisation efforts, as we all know, has produced many losers as well as winners.

MAJ

Dan: I certainly hope you are right about politicians deliberately seeking to appear dumber than they really are, because both Obama and McCain have certainly done a good job with that so far when it comes to China.

I don't really think so, since nothing that Obama and McCain has said so far has really alarmed me, but then again I don't read any news media reports about what candidates say, since there is often a huge distance between what people said that they said and what they actually said and the context. In particular, when a candidate says something stupid, everyone talks about it, not withstanding the fact that they might have regretted saying it the second it came out of their mouth.

If you want to know what a candidate thinks (or at least what they want you do think that they think) you can go to their website.

Jones: China's modernisation efforts, as we all know, has produced many losers as well as winners.

There was a wonderful article which I can't find that made the point that even trying to classify people into winners or losers distorts what is actually going on in China. It pointed out that you just can't easily classify them into winners or losers.

For example a migrant worker that leaves his home village for the city, puts up with some official harassment and misses his kids, but is making more money than he ever imagined. Or an intellectual who was badly persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, who is now no longer being beaten, but who has a huge generation gap with his kids and grand kids.

Let's not get too misty eyed over Blair. The man is clever, no doubt about that, but he lacked decisiveness. He should have put his foot down over the leadership challenge, given the way in which Gordon Brown became amazingly unpopular within six months of entering power it would have been much better for the Labour party. Blair entered power with three big projects in mind - bringing Britain into the Euro, reforming the House of Lords, and making the Labour revolution of 1997 permanent - and he failed at everyone of these. His big accomplishments - Scots and Welsh devolution, reforming the NHS and brining in the minimum wage - were all achieved in his first parliament. After that Labour were treading water, and did so with the biggest majority in the House of Commons that any party has enjoyed in modern times. Essentially Blair lacked real leadership skills, as the longest-serving PM since Thatcher he gets compared alo to Mrs. T, but there is no real comparison. Thatcher was ruthless with subordinates who she felt weren't performing, and back-chat was punished severely. Compare this to Labour - Gordon Brown ran a whispering campaign against Blair from at least 2002 - no response, David Blunket was involved in multiple scandals involving abuse of his position - and he was dismissed and then re-hired, Peter Mandelsson made several huge mistakes - and still managed to score an important European sinecure. Blair was simply never firm enough with his subordinates to make real waves in a parliamentary system.

As for the NY Times piece, well, it doesn't say anything any of us didn't already know, and the fact that he had not really comprehended the possible impact of China's rise on the international system whilst in government seems to speak against him. Or maybe he was to busy trying to keep up with the news cycle of the tabloids and keep everyone on message to step back a take the wider view?

Full disclosure: In every election I could I have voted against the Labour party.

FOARP - I see no evidence that anybody here commenting on this thread so far has been "misty eyed" towards Blair.

Twofish - I agree with you, which I why I qualified my statement by noting that many among the peasantry and migrant labouring class do in fact share in the optimism - another recurring theme of mine that I explore in my book. Not all migrant labourers are doing badly for themselves - in fact the majority no doubt feel as though the quality of their lives is enhanced by their labouring efforts. Certainly most of those migrant labourers in Shenzhen that I spoke to (via my spouse's interpretation) felt this way - though admitedly I only ever communicated with a relatively small few. A Channel 4 documentary I saw recently though, on SBS, uncovered widespread optimism among Shanghai's migrant labourers, which supports what was my general impression when last in China. Not all are happy though, that's for sure.

Kindest regards,
MAJ

Re: Jeremiah-
Good point. I also suspect that many Chinese will be less pessimistic about China in front of a foreigner. They may dislike the CCP, but they don't want to make Chinese look bad.
As for presidential candidates, bashing China and then making an about face while in office seems to be a tradition. I don't entirely blame them; if they don't pander they won't get elected. Anyone willing to say something practical about China will be rejected by voters who want a politician who will conform to, rather than challenge their prejudices.

All this upbeat commentary...I guess you guys are raking in the dough in China huh? I want in!!!

What Blair said seemed rather obvious to me (and to many others whom I know) already five years ago and earlier. I was non-plussed by his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism (how about to Atheism?and so even more non-plussed by his teaching at the Yale Divinity school. We need to figure out precisely how to implement his (rather obvious vision) while also improving the world more broadly....(and trying a bit harder to not completely destroy our environment and ecology in the process). And it's not very likely that the "guiding light" for doing that is going to come from a divinity school nor from Divine Intervention. (though maybe if Mc Cain manages to win and then soon dies of cancer, Palin could establish a quick connection)