Making predictions about the oncoming year is second only to making crappy best-in-year lists when it comes to New Years blogging activities. With the economy the way it is, predictions about China’s 2009 are generally downbeat, and range from predicted economic dissatisfaction to complete overthrow of the government.

Or particular interest is this article, regarding Charter 08 (a topic that got this website blocked in China once already and may yet do so again). Daniel Drezner (a Tufts professor) discusses the document (and the official response to it) and then poses this question to readers:

Is 2009 the year that China’s government collapses? Or is it just another year in which there will be a crackdown of a mass uprising? Because those may be the only two options.

Personally, I tend to agree with this response. The age of “Mass Incidents” on the scale of Tiananmen 1989 is over, I think. Although protests occur every day in China, as the above blog points out, most of those protests are over local issues, and often they appeal to the national government for help.

Furthermore, the impact of Charter 08 within China, as far as I can tell, would be difficult to understate. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it; when I mentioned it to some friends they hadn’t heard of it, but brushed it off as the sort of thing that happens frequently and means essentially nothing. Mutant Palm’s blogger wrote “Charter ‘08 arguably has had a more significant impact on readers of the New York Review of Books than it has on China,” and I suspect he’s right.

In short, I don’t see the government being overthrown OR cracking down on a “mass incident” like Tiananmen. While it is an interesting year for anniversaries (the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen, the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC), I think we’ll see a bunch of parades, and not much else. Here’s something I wrote for a paper at Brown about a year ago; interestingly I think it’s fairly apt here:

Although one can never rule out the possibility of a an uprising—after all, few predicted the students in 1989 would take such dramatic action—it seems likely that for the foreseeable future, China is in an age of bottom-up transformation, where social change is affected through the effective resolution of specific local or individual issues rather than by making broad appeals to implement policies uniformly across the vast nation. This shift in focus in undoubtedly part of Tiananmen’s legacy, and it remains to be seen whether the deaths of students and workers may have paved the way for a more effective mode of changing China. The current regime has made it clear that they consider popular nationalist collectivist approaches a threat to their own sovereignty and national stability. Whether the smaller local protest movements that occur in the thousands every year in China will succeed in affecting lasting change remains to be seen.

Happy 2009 everyone. In honor of the new year, here is some terrifying footage of children in a Chinese school, followed by some hilarious footage of a new “song” created by the Chinese Navy’s Political Art Department (oh yes, that exists) to spur on the navy’s efforts to fight pirates around Somalia. [The translations are stolen from China Digital Times and Black and White Cat, respectively]

2009, Go China!
Lead: Snowstorm, freely falling down to earth, like western values
Lead: Despair fills the sky, ice covers the earth

Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Olympics were a success! We are victorious!
Lead: Hot blood and iron will of Chinese people, lighten up the dark world like burning the holy flame
All: The rivers and mountains, ever more colorful and beautiful

Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!

Lead: The happy flowers flourish in the oil fields on Tarim Basin
Lead: The suona [musical instrument] sings aloud in the Tawang district of the Himalayas
Lead: Historically accumulated resentment fill the Ryukyu Trench
All: Smiles in Sun Moon Lake became a miraculous flower in the Pacific Ocean

Lead: Do not waver, do not slow down, do not make big changes
Lead: Do not change the flag, Do not turn back
All: Step ruthlessly over all anti-China forces

Lead: The giant ship full of patches, raise up the brand new sail
All: Spirits are high, crash through the waves, the wind is at our back
Lead: 2009
All: Go China
Lead: 2009
All: China the Greatest

(If the embedded player above doesn’t work, click this link.)
MAKE HASTE TO SOMALIA
Lyrics: Wang Lei
Music: Lei Yu
Make haste to Somalia, cruise the Gulf of Aden
With lofty sentiments, the Chinese navy heads for the deep blue
Braving wind and waves, the warship’s flag flutters,
The Chinese navy, a bright sword to harmonize the ocean.

Chinese warriors, valiant men with iron wills,
Intrepid journey, 600 years after Zheng He.
Heroic sailors, forge bravely ahead,
Bearing heavy responsibility, the motherland will see our triumphant return.

Just recently, a group of 300 prominent Chinese intellectuals released Charter 08, a call for sweeping democratic reform in China. This is a fascinating, historic document and rather than prattle on about it here I’ll just link those interested to some relevant stuff.

Read Charter 08 (Translated into English by Perry Link). It’s not very long, worth the read.

LA Times Report that Literary Critic and Charter 08 Signer Liu Xiaobo has been arrested.

Links to some background info from The China Beat.

Commentary from Chinese philosophy blog The Useless Tree (which is great, by the way).

Voice of America Story (Chinese) [appears to be blocked in China]

Original Chinese Text of Charter 08 [零八宪章]–includes the names of all three hundred who signed at the bottom.

Finally finished translating this, with a bit of help from my good friend Alice. Still not sure why I can’t get Final Cut to export widescreen videos, but this will do for the moment. Enjoy!

(The church at the very beginning of the video is Harbin’s famous St. Sophia)

Anyone remember that Harbin student who was beaten to death a while ago? I reported on it a couple times.

Anyway, the verdict is in, and the police have arrested–drumroll, please–the club owner! Yes, that’s right, in allowing 6 off duty police officers to murder a drunken idiot outside of his bar, the owner of BOX was criminally negligent! The police officers, of course, have been released. (This is all just what I’ve heard from people, haven’t actually checked into it myself yet).

This is more or less what the former-police officer friend of mine predicted, if you recall.

Overall, it seems the vast majority of Chinese people are pleased that Obama won the election. Of my university students, all but two of them said they supported him, and the dissenting two didn’t dislike him, they just wanted to see whether or not he would sell arms to Taiwan before making their decision.

If that isn’t enough for you, though, ChinaSMACK has got a good collection/translation of posts from Chinese messageboards on the internet responding to Obama’s speech. They range from what you’d expect (”amazing”, “moving”) to what you’d expect on the internet (racism, Hitler comparisons), so be warned.
Chinese reactions to Obama’s Speech

For anyone who is living under a rock, Barack Hussein Obama has been elected as the next President of the United States of America. Further coverage of the Chinese perspective will appear here later, but for now I want to encourage everyone (American or otherwise) to read/watch both Obama’s victory speech and McCain’s concession speech. They were both absolutely inspirational.

I have never been more proud to be an American.

“Free Tibet” is a phrase with a bit of a history. More or less since the Chinese army entered Tibet in 1951, some people have complained that Tibet should be its own country. Over time, rhe cause became popular among Westerners, especially students and celebrities. The intensity of the protesting comes and goes as things in Tibet happen (or don’t), but the song has remained more or less the same: “Free Tibet.” Well, in the West, anyway.

Why has this particular cause attracted so much attention in the West? As I see it, there are two reasons. One is Western perception of the Chinese government, which is shaped mainly by the knowledge that they are Communist and that they once killed students in Tiananmen Square. They are, as a result, “evil”. Western perceptions of Tibetans are based on the Dalai Lama, who seems calm, wise, peaceful, spiritual—everything it seems the Chinese government is not. Controversy closer to home is always complicated, but from afar the China-Tibet issue comes off as good-versus-evil to the uninformed.

The other reason I believe Tibet has attracted so much attention is that it appears to a certain nostalgia many Western intellectuals have; a desire to return to a simpler, more “pure” time. Tibet’s “spiritual” traditional society, its ruggedly beautiful terrain, and its ancient, mysterious religion all give it a special sort of “flavor” that Westerners feel is being destroyed by the modernity the Chinese government brings to Tibet.

Unfortunately, those perceptions are grossly misguided. Traditional Tibetan society was essentially a slave society. The vast majority of Tibetans were extremely poor, there was no real justice system, and the political structure of its “spiritual” government was rife with corruption, exploitation, and perversion. In the book The Struggle for Modern Tibet (the autobiography of a Tibetan who has lived in Tibet, mainland China, India, and the United States), Tashi Tsering describes how he was chosen to become a dancer for the Dalai Lama, taken from his family (forever) as a kind of “tax”, and forced into a dance troupe run by a sadistic director and forever plagued by horny Tibetan monks. These monks (not allowed to marry) took out their sexual frustration through sexual relationships with the children in the dance troupe—Tsering describes this as common practice. Anyone who believes Tibet should return to its roots, leave China, and become a religious nation headed by the Dalai Lama should read that book.

Similarly, what China does in Tibet often goes unreported or is misinterpreted by a Western public eager to find fault with the Chinese government. For example, last May, some Tibetans began a violent riot that caused millions of dollars in damage and touched off a series of racially-motivated hate crimes against Han Chinese and Muslims. Non-Tibetans in Lhasa were stabbed, beaten, and even burned alive in the streets. The Chinese government sent in police to stop the riots, and even though there’s no evidence of violence and the Western reporter in Lhasa at the time reported seeing no police misconduct, the story that played in the West was one of a “brutal crackdown” against “peaceful Tibetan protesters”. CNN even doctored a photo of Chinese police vehicles that ran on their website, editing out Tibetan rioters who were attacking the trucks. Myriad other news media ran misleading headlines and photographs, including numerous photographs of police in Nepal beating protesters that were labeled as if they were photos from China.

Lest you think I’m parroting the Party line here, I urge you to read the aforementioned book (The Struggle for Modern Tibet) and do some research about Western news coverage of Tibet yourself. All of this stuff is well-documented.

You might be surprised to learn that even the Dalai Lama isn’t interested in seeing a fully independent Tibet. While he does want more political autonomy for the region, he does not want it to be a separate country. Nor should he. If Tibet became independent, it would be a disaster for the Tibetan people.

Why? Well, as it turns out, Tibet is still quite undeveloped, economically speaking. China pours money in but gets almost nothing back. The Economist reports:

In 2001, for example, for every renminbi of Tibet’s economic growth, central-government spending increased by Rmb2, according to Mr Fischer. In that year alone, state spending increased by 75%. By 2004 the situation had changed only slightly, with Rmb0.65 of economic growth requiring only Rmb1 of increased subsidies and state investment.
-The Economist

Many might be inclined to blame this on government policies designed to keep Tibet weak, but actually NPR reports that in fact, Beijing pays for 90% of all government expenditures in Tibet, and floats gigantic infastructure projects like new highways and a massive hydroelectric dam.

Now, let’s imagine for a second that tomorrow, Tibet were to become its own country again. What would happen?

Well, the Dalai Lama and the rest of the exile community would probably return. They would arrive to find a society greatly changed from the one they ruled half a century ago, and a people who have had little contact with them for decades. They would also find strong racial tensions that did not exist in the 1950s, and that has frequently erupted into violence in the past. They would also find the embittered remnants of the former Tibetan provincial government, possibly unwilling to rescind control. It seems unlikely that the exile leaders would actually be able to run a modern nation on their own; but even if they were theoretically capable, what money would they use?

As mentioned above, Tibet’s economic output is insufficient to support the region. The removal of all Beijing’s political infastructure would undoubtedly weaken Tibet’s economy further, leaving the new “nation” in the hands of an inexperienced relgious sect with little governing experience and no money.

Tibet would have almost no hope of finding support from other nations, either. China would certainly never support an independent Tibet, and other nations would also refuse support for fear of angering China and harming trade relations.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I can’t imagine any way that a “Free Tibet” wouldn’t quickly devolve into some third-world hellhole, complete with all the starvation and social instability that comes along with that title.

Maybe someone can convince me otherwise, but it seems to me that the first thing we should have in mind here is what’s best for the Tibetan people, and I just can’t see any way it’s good for the Tibetan people to separate from China. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.

Much has been said about China’s famous One Child Policy, which supposedly encourages families to have only one child through a system of fines implemented at the provincial level. Members of Chinese minority groups are not subject to this policy, but are other people really subject to it either?

Plenty of people will tell you that implementation and enforcement of the policy varies from place to to place, and that (as with everything), those with money can easily get out of it. The punishment for having extra children is just a fine, which is scaled based on a family’s income, and a denial of extra social benefits (i.e., a family with two children receives the same benefits that a family with one child receives, not more).

Still, there has been much talk about the detrimental effects of the policy, which has been accused of everything from creating “little Emperors” to being a form of eugenics. Others have praised it, noting that China already has a lot of people (1.3 billion) and doesn’t need more.

If my experience in the classroom is any indication, though, even twenty years ago when my college students were being born, the policy wasn’t being that harshly enforced. In discussing family with them, I have been rather surprised to learn that many of them (at least half, sometimes more) have siblings. Given that some of the only children are probably due to parental preference or other non-policy related reason (there are, after all, plenty of only children in America, too), I’d estimate that between 20% and 40% of the students in my class have actually been affected by the policy (i.e., they don’t have siblings because it’s illegal). That number is a lot lower than I expected, and my classes sort of run the demographical gamut so it isn’t likely just a weird sampling error: there are students from urban and rural backgrounds, from all over China (although most of them are from the northern half).

I’ve been surprised by this; thought you might be too.

As previously reported, Harbin has been abuzz with the news that a college student was beaten to death by police outside a popular bar on the night of October 11. Further controversy erupted when security camera footage revealed that the student instigated the fight–repeatedly–and that his death was not on tape.

The coroner’s report still isn’t in from what I can tell browsing through today’s newspapers, but it may not really matter anyway. An older Chinese man who is a friend of mine and a former Harbin police officer described the justice system to me thusly when we were talking about the situation last night:

What will happen is: the police will go to the family of the kid who died and say, “how much money do you want? However much money you want, we’ll give you. Then they’ll go to the court and say the same thing, and everyone will just forget about the whole thing.

If it really creates a big stir, then the authorities in Beijing will force the court to make a judgement and the police officers will go to jail. Then the police will give money to the jail, and the police officers will be released to their homes for the remainder of their sentences ‘for health reasons’.

Cynical stuff, but this is a guy who knows a bit about the inner workings of the Harbin police force. By way of explaining he also taught me an expression: “大事化小，小事化了.” It means “big issues [naturally] become small, small issues [naturally] disappear.” And indeed that seems to be the case.

The news that the student was the one who initiated the attacks seems to have mitigated anger directed at the police. Although personally I feel there’s no excuse for killing someone who isn’t seriously threatening your life, many people feel the student’s behavior (as seen on the CCTV tapes) was inexcusable. The news that he drove a very expensive car has caused some people to write him off as another spoiled Chinese rich kid, a “punk” that the country is better off without. Still, plenty of people have gotten drunk and done something truly idiotic at some point in their lives; it doesn’t seem fair that this guy had to die for it.

We’re still waiting for the coroner’s report, and to see if justice will be served in the end or not. I don’t know what the chances really are, but here’s hoping.

(As a sidenote, there seem to be more police on the streets since the incident happened. The same Chinese friend and ex-cop I mentioned above noticed it the other day and commented, “Damn, they beat a guy to death, now suddenly they’re everywhere.”)