China | The Atlantic

Books by Friends

2014-10-21T14:48:00-04:00

I give the "by friends" disclosure just for the record. I mention these books because, whether or not I'd known their authors, I would think they deserved attention. And I'll mention each as tersely as I can, both so you can discover their virtues for yourself and because if I waited to do "real" writeups I'd probably never get around to it.

1) All Our Yesterdays, by Erik Tarloff. Erik and his wife Laura D'Andrea Tyson were friends of ours when my wife and I lived for a while in their home town of Berkeley, and when they lived for a while in our current home town of DC. Erik has been a successful screenwriter and novelist, plus a correspondent here. Two of my favorites from his oeuvre are Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book.

His newest book is a love story, heartbreak story, mystery story, cultural portrait, and character study set in Berkeley from the late 1960s through the present. It is carried by its dialogue, which I mean as a compliment, and every few pages I marked a sharp observation or witticism I wanted to remember. You will enjoy it.

2) The Dog, by Jack Livings. I don't know this author, but I do have friends involved with the book at its publisher, FSG. The book is a collection of short stories set in contemporary China, featuring people very different from those who usually come to foreign attention. You can get an idea by reading the title short story as published in the Paris Review nine years ago.

I am wary of harping too often on the gulf between the varied, chaotic, contradictory, simultaneously horrible-and-uplifting, vividly human on-scene realities of China, and the simplified view of either an economic juggernaut or a buttoned-up central-control state that necessarily comes through many media filters. But I'll harp on it again, because one of the rewards of this book is the range of vividly human experience its presents. Plus, Jack Livings is a very gifted story-teller.

3) China's Super Consumers: What 1 Billion Customers Want and How to Sell It to Them, by Michael Zakkour. I do know and like Zakkour, whom I met with while in China. His book is worth reading alongside The Dog, because it depicts what seems to be an entirely different universe from the one of Jack Livings's stories, but which in fact coexists within the same national borders.

For all the problems the "Chinese model" is now encountering, for all of the doubt about when the supposedly reformist president Xi Jinping will switch from merely cracking down on dissenters and enemies and start loosening up, hundreds of millions of people inside China are moving onto a different economic plane. This is a business-minded book about some of the ramifications of that change.

4) The Tinderbox Way, by Mark Bernstein. This is an odd entry, in that the book is not new, and my occasion for mentioning is a podcast rather than a physical or electronic book.

Mark Bernstein is the creator of intriguing idea-organizing Mac software called Tinderbox, which I've mentioned over the years. I have never met him but have often corresponded; three years ago, he was a guest blogger here. This week, in a podcast interview for the Sources and Methods site, he talks not so much about his software but about the larger question of how thinking interacts with the tools of the electronic age. If you find the podcast provocative, you might well be interested in the book The Tinderbox Way, which is equal parts guide to Bernstein's Tinderbox program and meditation on the right and wrong approach to "information farming." As you'll gather from the podcast and see in the book, the kind of farming he has in mind is nothing like mega-scale factory farming and very much like an artisanal plot.

Bonus! 5) Also on the "works by friends" theme, please see John Tierney's latest American Futures dispatch, on the surprising new growth industry of, yes, meaderies in an industrial area of Pennsylvania.

Read, enjoy.

Who's Behind Hong Kong's Counter-Protests?

2014-10-13T16:20:57-04:00

Four days after Hong Kong’s government abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting with student protest leaders, many in the territory appear to be losing patience with the demonstrations: A group of counter-protesters, some adorned with banners reading “Enough is Enough,” clashed with protesters in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district on Monday. Meanwhile, the territory’s embattled chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, whose resignation is a core demand of the protesters, said he would not allow the demonstrations to continue indefinitely.

Hong Kong’s student protesters—particularly the precocious 17-year-old Joshua Wong—have received substantial international press attention in their battle to achieve true universal suffrage in the territory. But in a movement referred to as an “Umbrella Revolution” against unwanted Chinese interference, the protests have not eroded significant political divisions within Hong Kong itself.

Since the 1997 handover, hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese natives have migrated to Hong Kong, where they now comprise more than 10 percent of the territory’s population. The relationship between the mainlanders, who speak Mandarin, and the Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong natives has not been easy. Mainlanders have complained of job discrimination and shoddy treatment in the territory, where anti-Chinese sentiment has grown. In Mong Kok, a neighborhood where protest violence has been especially acute, pro-democracy supporters reportedly shouted at their opponents to “go back to the mainland.”

Not all of the counter-protesters, however, are from the mainland. Hong Kong’s student leaders have accused the triads, organized crime syndicates with significant business interests across the territory, of dispatching thugs to break up the protests. (The police announced that of the 19 counter-protesters arrested in Mong Kok last week, eight had triad connections.) Others have complained that the protests, which have blocked several of Hong Kong’s most important business roads, have disrupted enterprise in the territory.

As protest leaders try to keep momentum alive, Hong Kong’s government has shown little inclination to negotiate: Leung has said that there is “zero chance” that the territory will rescind a new election law that limits eligibility for the 2017 chief executive elections to candidates vetted by Beijing.

"Under the appropriate situation we hope to allow society to return to normal as quickly as possible," he said.

How U.S. Philanthropy Is Inspiring Foreigners to Give

2014-05-15T10:50:47-04:00

The Giving Pledge, the campaign initiated by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 to convince their billionaire peers to devote more than half their fortunes to philanthropy, was born out of a closed-door convocation. Gates and Buffett organized a dinner, hosted by David Rockefeller at the President’s House at Rockefeller University, for some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, where they could discretely discuss their plans for giving away their money. A series of additional meetings followed, expanding the exclusive circle, all shrouded in “a cone of silence.”

But there was also a public, performative side to the Giving Pledge. Signatories—at the current moment, there are 127 of them—were asked to produce personal statements regarding their reasons for giving, which are featured on the Giving Pledge website. “The goal,” the site declares, “is to talk about giving in an open way and create an atmosphere that can draw more people into philanthropy.”

The intended audience was initially domestic, but within a few years, Pledge organizers directed their efforts to an overseas audience as well. Now the ranks of its signatories include individuals and families representing twelve different countries. Bill Gates made courting non-American, and especially non-Western, billionaires a particular project of his; Warren Buffett dubbed Gates’ evangelization of American-style philanthropy to the rest of the world his “trade mission.” The global campaign has had its share of bumps. The fine line that Gates and the other Pledgers have had to walk between pressuring and inspiring those wealthy Americans who have not yet joined becomes an even more precarious balancing act in the developing world, where the effort can take on imperialist overtones. On several occasions, Gates suffered notable public rebuffs from potential recruits.

But the last few weeks have injected new hope into the mission. A trip that Gates took to several Asian nations in April to discuss giving with many of the region’s high-wealth individuals resulted in notable philanthropic commitments from billionaires in Indonesia and Vietnam. The most promising development was the announcement by Jack Ma, the co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, that he would pour much of his personal wealth (which would be significantly boosted by an upcoming American IPO) into what would become one of Asia’s largest philanthropic trusts. This could mean as much as $3 billion directed to the causes of health care and environmental protection in China.

Gates, and the corps of other philanthropic advisers who have seeded these ventures, should be commended for their midwifery. But it is also worth noting that in exporting American-style philanthropy—formalized, systematic, and professionalized giving done in the public eye—Gates was also seeding debates over the relationship between philanthropy, income inequality, and democracy that have tracked his own giving. In this, the American experience is also instructive—and not only because that debate has sprouted up more robustly here than anywhere else. The United States offers other philanthropic models that could spread effective giving beyond the charmed circle of Gates' and Buffett's billionaire peers. Though less-heralded than the Giving Pledge, their impressive spread throughout the developing world is also a campaign worth celebrating--and supporting.

Even before the inauguration of the Giving Pledge, American philanthropists had sought to promote global giving. The massive new fortunes generated by entrepreneurs in emerging markets, through the liberalization, privatization, and globalization of their nation’s economies, set the stage for such efforts. The Rockefeller Family, and the several philanthropic agencies within its orbit (including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors) often took the lead in these campaigns. In 2001, David Rockefeller and his daughter Peggy Dulany established the Global Philanthropists Circle, “a global network for leading philanthropic individuals and families to collaborate and learn from their peers.” The Circle now includes more than 200 participants representing more than 20 countries around the world. Before the Giving Pledge, this Circle could claim the title of the “most elite club in the world,” with invitation-only meetings held at the Rockefeller Family estate and coordinated trips to observe the work of non-profits in the developing world in the company of high-level dignitaries.

Yet Gates could bring to the table financial resources and an ability to command media attention unmatched by any other possible philanthropic ambassador. In a sense, his talents and celebrity amplified both the perils and promise of the global Giving Pledge. On the one hand, the Pledge organizers clearly presented the American tradition of philanthropy, of which Gates is the most notable exemplar, as a model worth emulating. Holding up this model implicitly indicts contemporary modes of philanthropy in the developing world as inadequate or in need of reform. On the other hand, they also had to confront, and at least feign sympathy toward, indigenous philanthropic traditions and institutions, and to recognize the deep cultural divergences between these other countries and the United States that would make it difficult for American patterns of philanthropy to take immediate root. Similarly, they engaged foreign philanthropists as members of a globalized elite, as citizens of Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative, who shared a common understanding of the responsibility of wealth, while also recognizing that these philanthropists were embedded in local communities and were responsive to local and national pressures and imperatives. The originators of the Giving Pledge also had to concede the limits of their own impact, acknowledging that the cultivation of philanthropy in non-Western nations hinged more than anything else on broader economic, political and legal developments. The Pledge, in other words, required an uneasy mix of hubris and humility.

At the start, these tensions threatened to scuttle the overseas campaign. As the Foundation Center’s Brad Smith recalled in a blog post, “wherever my travels have taken me, I have heard Brazilians, Mexicans, Europeans, and Chinese go to great lengths to explain why it would never catch on in their countries.” There was grumbling about American condescension and griping about “efforts to impose Western philanthropic values” on non-Western traditions. The resistance seemed to be most pronounced in China and India, countries that now rank second and sixth, respectively, in number of billionaires, but that harbor legal, political, tax and regulatory systems that have hampered the growth of large-scale strategic philanthropy. The philanthropic sectors of both countries struggle with a lack of accountability and transparency. And there are also strong cultural forces at play that made it difficult for the Giving Pledge to find purchase. According to one recent assessment, “by tradition, rich Chinese keep their wealth within the family and make their donations privately, exhibiting benevolence without self-aggrandizement in the Confucian tradition. The money is meted out by the oldest generation and generally goes to sating immediate and, frequently, local needs—paying for hospitals, relief efforts, basic education and the like—and rarely to more strategic, long-range goals.” The Chinese government has also imposed significant hurdles to the development of independent NGOs and maintains strict limits on the types of programs foundations can fund (work in labor, ethic or religious affairs face special restrictions). Although India boasts a vast array of thriving nonprofits, and has a national government more favorable to an independent civil society, it still relies on an antiquated series of laws governing the sector, which have impeded the growth of philanthropic foundations there as well.

In August 2010, Gates and Buffett announced that the following month they would travel to Beijing to gather together several dozen of China’s wealthiest citizens to promote philanthropy. When some of the invited guests declined the invitation and word leaked that others had staked their attendance on the condition that they not be hit up for donations, the local Chinese media pounced on the story; sometimes they approached it as a gloss on American tone-deafness and arrogance and sometimes as an illustration of Chinese stinginess. No matter the interpretation, it seemed an uncomfortable affair for all involved. As one writer explained the decision of some invitees not to attend: “Attending and making a donation will make them look like greedy cowards who've been taught a lesson. [But] refusing is even worse.” Meanwhile comments posted on a leading Chinese website dismissed the insinuation that wealthy Chinese were not carrying their philanthropic weight as an American “conspiracy.” When the media suggested that only a small handful of Chinese would attend the Beijing meeting, Gates and Buffett issued a statement reassuring invitees that they did not mean to impose a particular model. “We know that the Giving Pledge is just one approach to philanthropy, and we do not know if it's the right path forward for China,” they wrote. Ultimately, some 50 guests did attend. One of them, recycling magnate Chen Guangbiao, claimed that he had amassed a list of 100 Chinese entrepreneurs who privately pledged to him that they planned to devote a significant part of their fortunes to philanthropy.

A few months later, Gates and Buffett added India to their itinerary, holding a closed-door “giving discussion” with 70 of the nation’s wealthiest citizen. They received a warmer reception than in China but there were still some notable no-shows; the country’s wealthiest citizen, Mukesh Ambani, passed on the gathering to attend a cricket match. In India too Gates and Buffett struggled to reconcile the need to show deference to local modes of giving and the drive to reform them. So while Gates praised India’s “remarkable tradition of giving,” it was hard to ignore the fact that he wasn’t consulting that tradition to guide his own philanthropy. And when Buffett announced, “India has historically produced some of the most important philanthropists the world has known. I'm certain it will continue to do so again,” it wasn’t difficult to detect the subtle rebuke in the complement. The visit did seem to produce some immediate dividends though, in the recruitment of Indian partners in promoting the Pledge. So when Gates returned to India just a few months later to talk philanthropy with a number of Indian moguls in a Bangalore hotel, this time the meeting was also hosted by Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata conglomerate, and software entrepreneur Azim Premji, who signaled their willingness to take the lead in establishing their own informal network of high-net-worth Indian givers.

The new year brought more good news for the global Giving Pledge. January 2013 witnessed the first African signatory: South Africa’s Patrice Motsepe, a billionaire mining magnate. The next month, Azim Premji officially joined, becoming the first Indian to do so. Soon after, the Pledge announced ten more non-American signatories, including families from Australia, Russia, Malaysia and the Ukraine. So, this April, when Gates made another trip to Asia, expectations were high. It is safe to say that they were met. While in Jakarta, Gates joined Sri DR Tahir, an Indonesian businessman and Giving Pledge signatory, in launching the Indonesia Health Fund, and in recruiting a group of Indonesian business leaders to pledge $100 million over five years to it. He also announced a similar venture with 10 Vietnamese wealthy families to create a Vietnam Health Fund.

China remained the most enticing target for the Pledge. In some respects, the terrain was even less hospitable to a visit from Gates than before, since the economic downturn there has eroded its philanthropic base; as Gates prepared to make the trip a report was released that documented that giving by China’s 100 biggest donors had fallen by nearly a half over the last year. (Paradoxically, the chief researcher of the report suggested that the drop could be an indication of a pause taken by Chinese philanthropists to determine the effectiveness of past gifts, an embrace of strategic giving that otherwise would have cheered Gates). But there were also some more auspicious signs. The Third Plenum of the Communist Party, held last November, announced a loosening of restrictions on NGOs, and signaled the government’s recognition of the need to bolster civil society.

Media attention on Gates’ trip made clear that, at least when judged against an American model, China still had much work to do. Commentators noted, for instance, that a single donor in the U.S. (Mark Zuckerberg), gave more to philanthropy last year (a little under a billion dollars) than all of China’s top one hundred givers combined. Gates, for his part, did not pull his punches. Soon after arriving in Singapore, he stated candidly that he thought Chinese multi-millionaires and billionaires were not committing sufficient wealth to philanthropy. “When you have something like a disaster [in China], you see the basic generosity,” he told Reuters. “But if you look at systemic things like giving to health causes, giving to universities to do research…it’s not there yet.” Jack Ma’s announcement that he was prepared to devote a significant sum of his fortune to a new philanthropic trust seemed like a direct response to this challenge, especially when Ma explained that he had been inspired and given technical assistance by Gates. Not surprisingly, in those provinces of the press most sympathetic to Gates and his philanthropic endeavors, the news was heralded as a major breakthrough. It could portend, the Wall Street Journal suggested, “the dawn of a new era of giving among China's freshly minted billionaires.” The Economist paid Ma a compliment that also flattered the American model of strategic, large-scale giving, dubbing him “China’s Carnegie.” Ma was extended perhaps an even higher tribute, at least from the perspective of the Giving Pledge organizers, in the suggestion that he would become “China’s version of the charitable Bill Gates.”

Amid the celebrations of Ma’s announcement, and of the rise of global philanthropy more generally, there was little discussion of how it related to the vexing problem of income inequality worldwide. These questions had been asked of Gates’ giving and Carnegie’s before him, and it makes sense that they are asked of Ma’s as well. Here, too, the United States offers an instructive model: the community foundation, the first of which was established in Cleveland in 1914. It was the brainchild of a local lawyer, Frederick Goff, who sought “to consolidate a number of trusts into a single organization that would exist in perpetuity and be governed by a board of local citizens.” Goff promoted the community foundation as a democratic innovation, since the decisions regarding the disbursement of funds would be in the hands of a committee of civic leaders that would face regular turnover, and not in the control of the self-perpetuating boards that defined the foundations associated with Carnegie or Rockefeller. He assumed that the foundation would attract significant contributions from wealthy local citizens, but also hoped it would receive more modest ones from the poor and middle class as well.

Soon community foundations spread throughout the United States—by the end of the century, there were more than 600 of them. This growth was fostered by a number of private foundations, such as the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These funders also sought to spread the model internationally by providing financial resources and logistical support and helping to set up the proper regulatory frameworks. In the early 1990s, for instance, the Mott Foundation focused on establishing community foundations in Central and Eastern Europe, in Russia and in South Africa, and then, by the end of the decade in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, United Kingdom. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of community foundations grew by 86 percent; there are now some 1,700 worldwide.

It is outside the U.S. that community foundations have most often approximated Goff’s democratic vision, attracting small local donors and involving them in the grant-making process. In India, for instance, “more than 5,000 residents across 50 villages came together as members of the Prayatna Foundation. Under the principle of ‘local ownership of local problems,’ they mobilized residents, mostly Dalit and Muslim, to contribute their time, food, money, and other resources to successfully advocate for human rights, housing, employment, government accountability, and social justice.”

In their emphasis on local control, these foundations offer a subtle challenge to the model of Big Philanthropy that has largely defined the giving of Carnegie, Gates, and, most recently, Jack Ma. As Nick Deychakiwsky, a program office at the Mott Foundation, explains, this has often made the support of community foundations a tough sell for large donors, who are reluctant to cede control over a program agenda to the local populations they seek to assist. (He also points out that the idea can be a tough sell to those local populations as well, who sometimes bristle about having to raise money themselves.) But if community foundations represent a challenge, they also present an opportunity. By supporting the growth of community foundations, a new generation of global givers can help extend the prerogatives and privileges of the philanthropist to a larger group of men and women. And by doing so, they just might be able to teach American philanthropy a thing or two as well.

The China Story You Should Pay Attention to, and the One You Should Ignore

2014-05-01T16:11:00-04:00

First, the China stories you should skip. Using up my once-per-lifetime pass for such activity, I am about to show a screenshot of a tweet that I myself put out two days ago.

The backstory here is the newly released result of a big, years-long, international (UN) effort to calculate price levels around the world—and thus to improve the "Purchasing Power Parity" figures for comparing spending power in different countries. Simplest example: a few years ago, 1 U.S. dollar was officially worth about 8 Chinese yuan renminbi, or RMB. That rate is not set on an open market like, say, dollar-euro rates, but instead is carefully "managed" by the Chinese government. But if average prices in China were only half as high as in the U.S., then on a PPP basis the Chinese economy would be twice as large as the official exchange rate made it seem, since the RMB would go twice as far in buying things.

The newest results show (to oversimplify) that effective Chinese prices have been even lower than assumed, and therefore the purchasing power of Chinese RMB has been even greater. After these adjustments, the overall Chinese economy is deemed to be about 20 percent larger than previously believed—and therefore either it already has, or it very soon will, "overtake" the United States to become, in PPP terms, the world's biggest economy.

Thus silly (over)reactions like this, from The Economist:

Just for the record, my initials are the same, but the "J.M.F." listed as one of the authors is not me. And this from Bloomberg View:

Headlines and reactions like these are ridiculous, as I'm sure both publications are aware and as each of the articles concedes further down in the stories. Compared with one week ago, when China's economy was much "smaller" than America's, nothing economic has changed in either China or the United States. With these new figures, we may have a closer approximation of how circumstances for China's recently urbanized hundreds-of-millions compare with others around the globe. But the differences not captured by such figures—freedom to or restrictions on travel within a country, who can and cannot go to school, the still-unfolding enormous effects of mass urbanization, the nature and availability of health-care systems, above all the country's environmental catastrophe—are also part of any serious attempt to understand how "rich" or "poor" China is.

Rather than belabor that point, let me turn you to an excellent ongoing discussion at ChinaFile, whose reaction could not be more different from agog headlines about a new Chinese Century. For instance, this installment from Arthur Kroeber, who has been on-scene in China for many years and understands how little such statistics signify:

...this is a “who cares?” moment. It has been obvious for quite some time that China would soon overtake the U.S. in sheer economic size. If one doesn’t accept the current PPP conversion rate then just wait five or ten years and China will be bigger at market exchange rates. But basically, all that this shift tells us is that China has way more people than the U.S.— 4.2 times as many, to be exact. So, as soon as China stopped being fantastically poorer (per capita) than the U.S., and became simply a lot poorer, its total economy surpassed that of the U.S. (And still lags that of the European Union, which is arguably the world’s biggest economy, if one takes economic integration rather than political boundaries as the criterion.) Big deal....

Fundamentally Damien [Ma] is right that this “who’s on top?” discussion misses all that is truly interesting, namely how China and other countries manage social tensions, income distribution and other problems arising from high speed economic growth. Because of its sheer bulk, China is indeed wealthy and poor at the same time, and the responses to that paradox are a far more fascinating target of study than the mere size of the economy.

There is a lot more nuance in that ChinaFile discussion, which I highly recommend. As a handy guide the next time you see some pie-eyed headline about the PPP:

As a matter of individual or family welfare, this is a reminder of how much poorer the average Chinese person remains than the average North American or European.
Also on the individual or family basis, the average Chinese person is actually further behind than these figures suggest, because (as Arthur Kroeber points out) so much less of the nation's total output goes to individual consumption relative to Europe or North America, and so much more to infrastructure or export.
Still for individuals and families, if there were any PPP-style adjustment for environmental costs—epidemic deaths especially in Northern China from air pollution, the emergence of "cancer villages," increased rates of birth defects, destruction of fisheries and arable land—China's wealth would be much more heavily discounted than that of other large economies.
And if we're considering the national scale, as implied by loose talk of the Chinese Century, then the largest measures of national influence and potential come into play. From universities to global corporations to "soft power" to, of course, the military. No sane person contends that we are anywhere close to the "Chinese Century" in this sense—as Arthur Kroeber and others say in today's discussion, and as I argued at length in China Airborne.
Plus the ongoing mystery of which statistics out of China can and cannot be believed, and when and why.

China is a big, fascinating, fast-moving society that I learn from practically every day, whose continuing rise has done much more good than harm, and that I do my best to interest outsiders in. But Economist and Bloomberg—come on.

Next, a China story you should read. Over the months I've written about allegations that the Bloomberg journalistic empire has defanged its coverage of China (especially corruption stories), to avoid jeopardizing its terminal-and-data business there. Some previous items here, here, here.

No one at Bloomberg has ever agreed to respond on the record to these contentions. The only official reaction I have ever received, via spokesman Ty Trippet (with whom I've talked before or after each installment and again just now), is that the company "has no comment." Over the months I have heard from a very large number of current and former Bloomberg employees, most of whom have been very concerned that I not identify them, their geographical locations, or their exact roles in any traceable way.

Now Howard French—a veteran international correspondent, long with the NYT and now at Columbia Journalism School, my friend and colleague first in Japan and then in China, author of an Atlantic article on and now a great new book about China in Africa—has a much fuller account of the Bloomberg-and-China story in the CJR. It is definitely worth reading.

At the end of his story, French does get a reaction beyond "no comment" from Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg's editor in chief and a man whom French reports to be in the middle of the China-coverage controversies:

Several days after our initial email exchange, Winkler, the editor in chief, wrote back to provide his sole quote for this account. “I’m proud of our reporting and our work speaks for itself,” it read.

Asked via email if that applied to the now apparently dead second investigative take on high-level corruption in China, Winkler replied, “The statement covers our work.”

Here is the problem Bloomberg is creating for itself by refusing to engage in discussion of this issue. The company is full of first-rate reporters and editors, including a lot of people who are my long-time friends. It is one of the great news organizations of the era. In China as everywhere else it has very good people doing very good work.

But: over a long period now, named individuals have made specific and very serious allegations about the organization's trustworthiness on a crucially important ongoing story of these times. Think for a moment of any other institution facing comparably specific questions about its decisions and values: a politician about conflicts of interest, a company about product recalls, a university about controversies over athletics or sexual assault, a tech company about protecting privacy or handling government pressures. In any of these situations, Bloomberg's tough reporters would be among the first pushing for specific answers, beyond "no comment" or "our work speaks for itself."

It is long past time for someone senior at Bloomberg—the former mayor himself, editor-in-chief Winkler, chairman Peter Grauer, or anyone else in a position to speak for the firm—to do what Bloomberg reporters would expect of other institutions, and accept questions and give answers about the allegations that have mounted up.

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Why the Anti-Corruption Drive in China Is So Important, and So Potentially Destabilizing

2014-04-02T10:55:00-04:00

Here is a crude but effective classification scheme that I have used in distinguishing different economic systems. It is between "efficient" levels of corruption in government and business, and "inefficient" corruption.

Through its era of fastest post-war growth, Japan was highly corrupt. Twenty years ago, authorities raided the home of the party boss Shin Kanemaru—and found gold bars and other loot worth something like $50 million. Yet in Japan, and South Korea and Taiwan and even Malaysia, the corruption was efficient. Bridges cost too much and enriched local barons, but they got built. Factories jacked up prices thanks to cartel rules, but they ran and kept people at work. Anybody who has studied the economic/political history of Chicago or Los Angeles will recognize versions of this bargain.

On the other side were countries like Indonesia under Suharto, or the Philippines under Marcos, or North Korea under the Kims, or a lot of others you can think of, with inefficient corruption. The people who could, looted so much that there was not enough left over to keep the system running.

Either sort of corruption has a self-reinforcing nature. When an efficient system is running smoothly, officials have a stake in its long-term survival, which allows them to keep taking their cut. Thus they steal but don't loot. But when an inefficient one is deteriorating, all involved have an incentive to grab everything in sight while the grabbing is good.

Through its 30-plus years of economic modernization, China has seemed to stick to efficient levels of corruption. Connected families got very rich, but most families did better than they had before.

An increasingly important question for Xi Jinping's time in office, which bears on the even more urgent question of whether China can make progress against its environmental catastrophe, involves the levels and forms of Chinese corruption. Has it begun passing from tolerable to intolerable levels? If so, does Xi Jinping have the time, tools, or incentive to do anything about it? Will exposing high-level malfeasance—like the astonishing recent case of Zhou Yongkang, who appears to have taken more than $14 billion while he held powerful petroleum and internal-security roles—encourage the public? Or instead sour and shock them about how bad the problem really is? Is it even possible to run a government and command a party while simultaneously threatening the system that most current power-holders have relied on for power and wealth?

These are yet another set of Big Questions for and about China. Recent useful readings on the theme:

1) Timothy Garton Ash on "China's Gamble of the Century." Thirty-plus years ago, Deng Xiaoping tightened up politically but overall did so toward the end of enacting economic reforms. Xi Jinping is tightening up politically. This piece examines the possible ends.

2) The views of former President Jiang Zemin on the same topic, as reported by Jamil Anderlini and Simon Rabinovitch in the FT and as shown by the headline below:

3) A big piece by Jonathan Ansfield on the front page of the NYT on Tuesday, about the drive against high-level corruption inside the People's Liberation Army, which itself is far more impressive as a business empire than as a fighting force. This is a detailed and enlightening story on an effort whose success or failure will be important in a variety of ways. As the story puts it:

[Xi's] goal, military analysts said, is to transform a service larded with pet projects and patronage networks into a leaner fighting force more adept at projecting power abroad and buttressing party rule at home, while strengthening his own authority over the army.

4) An op-ed in the WSJ by Desmond Tutu and Jared Genser about the ongoing struggles not simply of Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while serving a long prison term for "subversion," but also of his wife Liu Xia (below). Even as her health deteriorates, she too remains effectively imprisoned under a form of house arrest. E.g.:

Despite living in the middle of one of the busiest and most populous cities in the world, Liu Xia, a poet and a painter, is cut off and alone. Chinese security officials sit outside her front door and at the entrance to her apartment building.

Liu Xia, with photo of herself and her husband in better times. AP via WSJ

5) An essay by Perry Link in the NYRB called "China After Tiananmen: Money, Yes; Ideas, No." Sample:

At a deeper level, though, Chinese people (like any) do not feel secure in a system built on lies. The wealthy send their money abroad—and their children, too, for education. In 2013 several surveys and reports showed sharp increases in the plans of whole families, especially among the wealthy, to emigrate, and there is no reason to think that poorer people would not follow this trend if they had the means.

6) Reports like this one from Reuters on the ongoing protests in China against environmental hazards and despoliation. Christina Larson also has a (paywalled) article in Science about farmland in China rendered unusable by pollutants, especially heavy metals.

For now I am not trying to weave these into a larger prospects-for-China assessment. (I did attempt something like that in the second half of China Airborne.) But individually and as a group, items like these suggest the scale, complexity, and importance of the changes the Chinese leadership must undertake.

Exposing corruption without delegitimizing the very system that still runs the country; changing the military without alienating it; controlling disastrous pollution without too noticeably slowing the economy; allowing the growth of civil society quickly enough to satisfy the public but gradually enough not to frighten the party—the obligation to do all these things at once, and more, and fast—makes the challenges for European or U.S. leaders look like easy tasks.

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Bloomberg in China: It's Not About the Terminals, It's About the Data

2014-03-26T15:38:50-04:00

In an item yesterday about the latest Bloomberg-in-China flap, I quoted a note I'd received late last year from someone inside the company:

Outsiders think the worst explanation for this controversy is that it's concerned about selling terminals within China. It's bigger than that. Really it's about continuing sales all around the world, if Bloomberg can't promise having the fastest inside info from China.

Just now this note arrived, in the same vein:

I don't work for Bloomberg. But I do work for a competitor.

The primary reason for the suppressing China investigating reporting is not about terminals. It is about DATA.

Bloomberg terminals are clunky and old, but what makes the terminals valuable is the timeliness of information and data that the terminal delivers.

The data part is the most important asset for financial professionals that use Bloomberg terminals.

Bloomberg is afraid of being shut out of access to economic indicators and statistics for China. Granted this information/data as of today is unreliable and sketchy, but as China is forced to become more transparent (i.e. globalization of the yuan as a currency) it is going to have to provide more transparency on economic/financial indicators and statistics.

Bloomberg pulling back is not primarily because of terminal sales, although this is important, but access to financial information.

For the record: I've asked for on-the-record responses from Bloomberg spokespeople or officials; the one person I have heard back from said that the company declined to comment. Also, check out this ChinaFile conversation on the topic.

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When Chinese TV Rips Off The Colbert Report

2014-01-21T12:53:20-05:00

Xu Mengge/Sina Weibo

BEIJING — He may be an award-winning satirist in the United States, but in China, even Stephen Colbert is not beyond parody: A provincial TV channel in the country has produced a show that borrows rather liberally from the popular American program.

The Banquet, broadcast on Ningxia Satellite TV, lifted the entire opening credits and other graphics from The Colbert Report. Everything from the host’s entrance—flying down the screen as English words buzz past—to the star-spangled background is mimicked, and even the show’s theme music, the guitar riff from “Baby Mumbles” by Cheap Trick, is reproduced note for note.

Online, Chinese were quick to criticize the rebranded show—once known by the staid name Guandian Zhisheng (Comment Matters)— which debuted this January.

“This is down-right plagiarism: Absolutely shameless. I hate this kind of thing,” remarked a young woman on Weibo, China’s Twitter. “Coolgirl1982” was concerned that the show could embarrass China. “With the great popularity of The Colbert Report, don’t you know how easily Colbert can make a laughingstock out of China, and ensure the whole world knows about it?” she asked.

The Banquet isn’t the first Chinese show to be accused of copycatting. In 2012, the American talk-show host Conan O'Brien discovered, with amusement, that the opening credits to his show Conan had been replicated by Dapeng Debade, a cheaply made program on the web portal Sohu. Conan’s good-natured response—and a sincere apology from host Dong Chengpeng, who calls himself Dapeng Dong—did away with any hard feelings. The next year, an advertisement for the luxury liquor brand Jian Nan Chun lifted the entire opening sequence, without acknowledgement, from the popular HBO show Game of Thrones. And to prove that such imitations are not exclusive to China’s mainland, TVB, a popular Hong Kong channel owned by the late tycoon Run Run Shaw, last year planted the CBS series Person of Interest’s opening into its detective show Tian Yan (Sky Watch).

A side-by-side comparison of The Banquet's intro (left) and The Colbert Report's (right). (Xu Mengge/Sina Weibo)

The casual reaction of Americans to these infringements—Conan O’Brien even offered Dapeng a professionally designed replacement intro—may have emboldened TVZone, the state-owned production company responsible for The Banquet.

“[The Colbert Report] can go ahead and sue us!” company spokesman ‘Mr. Tan’ (who refused to disclose his first name) told me on the phone, adding, “We haven’t received any complaints from their lawyers.” But within hours of these remarks, the next edition of The Banquet had replaced some of its opening sequence with hand-filmed footage apparently shot in the company’s office. (The background’s Colbert-esque graphics still remained, though).

***

In China, interest in foreign television is still modest, owing in part to language barriers. According to ttmeiju.com, a popular Chinese-language website for downloading foreign shows, The Colbert Report has a regular audience of about 460 (free and illegal) downloads per week; Comedy Central’s The Daily Show averages about 800, while HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher attracts around 1,200. However, versions with Chinese-language subtitles garner tens of thousands of downloads, and chatter about the shows on microblogs has exploded. Fan sites such as thedailyshowcn.com, which has around 40,000 followers on Weibo, update as often as their American counterparts. And it’s not just satire, either: The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Saturday Night Live have proven so popular that Sohu (the portal that hosts Dapeng Debade) recently signed a deal to broadcast them legitimately.

Domestic producers have taken note of the phenomenon. “Thanks to the Internet, [Chinese] people get to know what happens everyday much more quickly than before,” Dong Chengpeng, presenter of Dapeng Debade, told Blog Weekly magazine. But just watching is no longer enough. “Now the public wants to know what we think about these events.”

Dong’s show adopts a more critical approach to the news than most Chinese shows, suggesting that the country’s notorious censors are less strict with light online entertainment. His approach is popular—and has spawned imitators.

In 2012, the celebrity music producer Gao Xiaosong (think a Chinese Simon Cowell) launched his own talk show, Morning Call, on Youku, the country’s most popular video-streaming website. It received 140 million views in its first year. And when Luo Zhenyu, a former state TV producer, broadcast his own ‘webisodes’ of the social-issues talk show Luoji Siwei (Logical Thinking), he earned 1.6 million yuan ($265,000) in subscriptions from an audience of 5,500.

Today, almost all China’s major video sites have their own chat shows. However, most avoid cutting satire. In a 2013 Blog Weekly article about online comedy, one TV presenter suggested, "Most people still view talk shows as simply entertainment, and overlook their critical nature." China’s state-run newspapers, meanwhile, are notoriously gullible when it comes to satire, falling for fake news stories from the likes of The Onion and Andy Borowitz. But sharp, acerbic parodies are still popular in the country.

“Satire is quite common in many traditional performance art in China, such as ‘crosstalk’ [a form of stand-up comedy involving one or multiple performers and salty wordplay],” said Gu Dabaihua, a translator who practically introduced American late-night talk shows to China in 2011 after he began subtitling them on Chinese torrent sites (his witty Sina Weibo feed now boasts 1.4 million followers). And Mark Rowswell, a Canadian performer whose ‘Dashan’ character has made him China's best-known foreigner, told me, “The stand-up comedy that is gradually being introduced into China [is] a much more flexible format [than crosstalk] that is catching on with younger audiences."

But those looking for high-quality Chinese equivalents to Colbert’s biting satire will likely be disappointed. Though The Banquet’s producer claimed in January that the show would be “sharp, humorous, and thoughtful with a lighthearted, offbeat style,” in reality, the writing relies on tired conventions of Chinese entertainment.

In a typical Banquet gag, the host claims he is exhausted because he has so many women to support. But the females in question aren’t mistresses. Instead, he quips that they’re “my mother, my wife, my daughter.” (The joke isn’t any funnier in Chinese.) Elsewhere, viewers suffer through laugh tracks, clownish sound effects (“boink!”), and excruciating ‘joke cues’ that spoon-feed humor to the audience. Producers feel safe deviating from this formula only when relying on a different, proven format—hence Ningxia Satellite’s ill-fated plagiarism of Colbert.

“The original [American] shows are usually highly creative and exciting,” observed Wang Jun, an attorney with the Intellectual Property Rights Committee of the All China Lawyers Association. “By replicating them with only minor changes, the copycats can achieve fairly good ratings. Domestic producers sometimes have little sense of copyright or the law and can easily be tempted by commercial interests.”

Producers are not the only ones to blame, of course. As Gu Dabaihua points out, the political environment in China is at least as important.

“Mocking national leaders and government policies simply won't be allowed,” he said. “So you can probably never expect to see proper American-style talk shows.”

China's Eerie Faux-European Ghost Towns

2014-01-07T11:51:34-05:00

The town of Spring Legend, modeled after a European village, has struggled to attract permanent residents. (Phoebe Storm)

BEIJING — There’s a town on the outskirts of Beijing that might just be the strangest you’ll ever see. The main street looks as if it was based on a child’s crayon drawing—a riotous palette of pinks, blues, and oranges—and the residents are frighteningly still. In fact, most aren’t even real. Instead, the town features such sights as a pair of petrified pigeons, yellow phone booths, and a statue of a sea dog gazing from a bridge.

Welcome to “Spring Legend,” a mock-Alpine town located in Huairou, a designated green-belt district about 35 miles from Beijing. The town has existed for about five years, but it lacks something fundamental: residents.

Spring Legend has the feel of a dream come true. Entering the town’s German restaurant—outside of which sits a statue of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill enjoying a bronze cigar—tables are set with fine china, wine goblets, silver cutlery, and linen, all neatly laid out for diners who never arrive. Then, a waitress dressed as a Bavarian fräulein appears and inquires how many there will be for lunch.

The town’s motto is “The Beautiful Legend From the Alps” and indeed, compared to the livability problems of Chinese cities, Spring Legend has a pleasant environment.

“We named it Spring Legend because it’s close to the river and has a small creek running through it,” explains Liu Xinhu, the chairman of Ding Xiu Zhi Ye (Spring Legend Properties). “It’s extremely beautiful in the spring, too.”

The town was conceived back in 2007, towards the end of a period of rapid development in Beijing that led to an increase in pollution and, correspondingly, a renewed interest among city-dwellers in a serene environment. “Many people wanted to ‘return to the countryside,’” recalls Liu, referring to a Cultural Revolution-era program that sent urban youths to rural China in order to work on farms.

Spring Legend is empty for one simple reason: During the week, hardly anyone lives there. An estimated 80 percent of the town’s homeowners also have apartments in Beijing, and, according to Liu, the general occupancy rate in Spring Legend is only about 60 to 70 percent. Multiple-home ownership among China’s rich is not uncommon; University at Albany professor Youqin Huang has estimated that 15 percent of urban households in the country own two or more houses.

The nature of property ownership has changed greatly in China. Fifteen years ago, state workers (who then comprised much of the population) were assigned basic accommodation. But today, home ownership has become so important that young men struggle to find a girlfriend if they do not own their own home. Buying a place, however, is difficult: Average salaries in Beijing top out at about 4,500 RMB per month (around $750), while the cost of an apartment in the city center is around 43,000 to 52,000 RMB per square meter.

Why has China gone mad for housing? With strict capital controls and a state-controlled stock exchange that is volatile and risky, the tangible reassurance of evergreen property has made it a “fungible commodity,” in the words of Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of Beijing-based equities analysis firm J Capital Research. She says that homes are usually left empty in order to avoid any depreciation in value.

“Renovation costs are very high, so it makes no sense to rent if you are seeking capital appreciation,” she explains via e-mail. “Remember that apartments here are sold bare, without flooring, ceilings, lighting fixtures or wall tiles. They all need to be installed, adding at least 20 percent to the cost [and] people expect to ... custom fit the unit.”

This means that even in successful towns like Spring Legend—where a unit costs an average of 16,000 RMB (about $2,500) per square meter, roughly a third the cost of a typical apartment in central Beijing—the streets and houses remain lifeless. The owners, says Bianca Bosker, author of Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, are “dreaming of what they’ll do with the riches they imagine they’ll get when they one day sell them.” The likely answer? Buy more property. However, “Given how many people have hatched the same ‘get rich quick’ real-estate idea, and how many of China’s gated communities stand empty, betting on real estate looks increasingly risky.”

***

Spring Legend is hardly the only city of its kind. There's also Thames Town, outside Shanghai, which is a $300 million British-style residential complex developed by since-incarcerated Shanghai Communist Party boss Chen Liangyu. And north of Beijing in Hebei Province is Jackson Hole, a wind-swept Wild West replica featuring neighborhoods called Moose Creek, Route 66, and Aspen Land. When developers previewed Jackson Hole in 2003, buyer interest was intense. The homes “sold out in record time,” says Oregon-based designer Allison Smith, who helped create the settlement. Early investors who purchased an “American villa” for around a quarter-million dollars in 2006 have seen their dreams “triple in value,” she estimates.

A bust of Winston Churchill outside a restaurant in Spring Legend, a mock-European community near Beijing. (Phoebe Storm)

Jackson Hole bucks the trend: It is a living community, a mix of older families and retirees drawn by what Smith agrees is a serendipitous confluence of factors—co-operative developers, clever marketing, and a great location. But Smith fears there’s a downside to the speculation. “At this point, the Chinese are in such a rush to buy everything, it may not hold its value down the line,” she says. “Jackson Hole doesn’t have that problem; people want to stay there. People want to live there. We've done something positive—it’s not just for the money."

Not every fake European village is so successful. Luodian New Town, also known as North European New Town, is a development in Shanghai’s suburban Baoshan district supposedly based on the historic Swedish town of Sigtuna. According to Bosker, “its foreign architects [Swedish firm Sweco] failed to take into account Chinese lifestyles or customs—specifically, the principles of feng shui.” The developers at first banned any remodeling but, as homes failed to sell, they caved. On visiting, Bosker “found the neighborhood to be a mess of construction, as homebuyers eagerly carved up the houses to fix their feng shui.”

Anting German Town, a failed experiment located about 20 miles outside Shanghai, is another example. “The [Chinese wanted] half-timbered buildings and medieval romance,” Der Spiegel explained in a 2011 postmortem. “But the architecture firm Speer thought it knew better and built a modern German residential quarter [where] nobody wants to live.” The truth, as the article admits, is more complicated than just aesthetics—the town lacked the life support of proper infrastructure.

“‘Empty towns’ and ‘ghost towns’ attract a lot of public attention, and that has a lot to do with the fact that these are local government initiatives and investments,” says Pan Yingli, a professor of finance at the Research Center for Modern Finance at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

With taxes collected centrally and then redistributed to local governments, land has become the principle source of income for provincial officials, who normally can expect a redistribution of only 50 percent of fiscal revenue after paying 85 percent of the municipal purse, according to Pan. Grandiose land projects, thus, are a ripe moneymaking vehicle for officials.

“This creates bubbles, because the prosperity of properties and cities ultimately comes from the accumulation of people, but developing real estate alone doesn’t create jobs—so [these new towns] don’t attract laborers or their families. As a result, only the land per se is ‘urbanized,’ and so become the ‘ghost towns’ that we see.”

As with many real-estate projects, the key to avoiding disaster relies on several things all going the developers’ way: Connections must be well-maintained, oversight should ideally be avoided, local power structures must be preserved, and the infrastructure needed to breathe life into a remote, self-contained development has to be completed on time.

In the case of Anting, the problem seems to be more of an absence of the latter. A pleasant conurbation of ponds, green space, and wide boulevards, there is nothing about Anting that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to Chinese buyers—a Shanghai city planner praised the concept as aesthetic and “well thought through”—but “the project failed because … the district is cut off and surrounded by industrial districts and wasteland.” It was like a “foreign body,” the city planner told Der Spiegel.

European touches, like these yellow phone booths, are everywhere in Spring Legend. (Phoebe Storm)

To China’s more bearish observers, vacant cities are prima facie evidence of the country’s overcapacity problem, with Ordos, a “ghost town” in Inner Mongolia, being the most famous example. But some economists reject this narrow interpretation.

“It’s possible the ‘ghost town’ problem is exaggerated. China is a big country; different local governments have different governing styles and their leaders have different working abilities,” says Pan Yingli. “Local governments borrow a lot of money [to build these towns] but [these towns don’t create] the industries or population to produce enough fiscal income to pay them off. These debts become bad loans and add to the risks for the banks. And the banks’ solution to this is to extend maturities—in other words, to lend them more money to pay off their old debts.”

***

Stevenson-Yang attributes the faux-architecture phenomenon partly to “a lack of commercial drivers behind development … planners just pluck ideas from magazines.” It’s a description that Spring Legend’s Liu would probably dispute. The decision to build Spring Legend in its unique style was carefully considered, he says, rather than a knee-jerk instinct to copy other successful copycats.

The original concept aimed to imitate ancient Chinese village designs, but the feng shui didn’t quite fit. “[It] required too much space and needed to be built along a river,” Liu says. “We wanted to make use of the scenery and mountainous location and make the property blend in naturally.” (“Bad feng shui can tank a neighborhood’s prospects,” warns Bosker.)

Hence the Alpine approach. The mix of styles and scenery, Liu says, was intentional. In China, “European architecture is largely symbolized,” he observes. (This is especially true in historic cities like Tianjin, where Liu observed that “you see a lot of carriages being pulled by horses [and] that sort of thing”).

The developers sent a team of around a dozen people to Europe, where they spent time in villages and towns. Their findings encouraged focus on “lifestyle” rather than authenticity, with Liu trumpeting “a relaxed style of living environment … the idyllic, rather than the aristocratic side of Europe.”

In Spring Legend, for example, you’ll encounter plenty of benches—a piece of street furniture practically never encountered in Chinese cities—because “We wanted to encourage people to go out more.… [In China], people tend to stay in; in Europe, it’s different,” says Liu. But places to spend money are curiously absent—almost all the stores and bars are artificial. The Toy Shop, for example, has photographs of goodies plastered into its window, but peering through a broken pane reveals a concrete husk littered with debris—rubble, a bicycle, a workman’s leftover lunch.

Businesses take time to prosper, argues Liu: “We didn’t sell the storefronts to anyone yet, because we’re afraid once we do so, it will be out of our control and low-end shops will pervade, which is not what we want.” He may have a point. One of the few genuine shops was a small supermarket, selling typical, low-end domestic fare—duck necks, vacuum-packed chicken feet, potato chips, spicy tofu, beer, and frozen fish balls; items that probably don’t fit Liu’s ‘brand.’

While the shops may not sell foie gras and fine Scotch yet, there are nods to different parts of high European culture all around, even though Europeans themselves are not permitted to purchase any of these properties. According to the town website, the large, swanky but deserted Elischer restaurant pays tribute to the Austrian town where Emperor Franz Joseph is supposed to have met Princess Sisi—in fact, the real town is called Bad Ischl. But that doesn’t matter: The Spring Legend Holiday Hotel finally opened its doors two months ago to an impatient public and purports to be the “First Princess Sissy-themed [sic] hotel in Beijing”—an unproven (but perfectly credible) claim.

This unedited amalgam of different traditions and countries is deliberate, Liu explains: For mainlanders, at least, “it’s enough to get their general approval of the style. They don’t need the absolutely authentic experience.” Indeed, the European dwellings of Spring Legend may boast a range of primary colors, but something they don’t have is one that looks definitively European. That’s because the real thing can come with apparent drawbacks. “Well, German houses are too dark-colored,” Liu argues. “They look depressing.”

Indeed, as China’s confidence grows, the country might sour on foreign styles altogether. “Already, new developments are cropping up with traditional Chinese architecture as their theme,” Bosker observes. “We might have reason to worry when China stops copying our architecture altogether.”

Legalizing Marijuana Does Not Mean the U.S. Would Lose Ground to China

2014-01-05T10:36:00-05:00

Colorado's legalization of marijuana, effective January 1st, has divided opinion in the U.S. (Rick Wilking/Reuters)

The legalization of marijuana, effective New Year's Day in Colorado and Washington, has divided American journalists, who seemed to spend much of the last three days re-litigating the subject. On Thursday, The New York Times' David Brooks wrote a column disclosing his youthful use of the drug and why, as a result, he opposes legalizing marijuana, while the very same day Ruth Marcus wrote practically the same piece in The Washington Post. These two articles then triggered a pushback from writers like Slate's Dave Weigel and Reason's Matt Welch, who argued that Brooks and Marcus (among other legalization opponents) failed to consider the costs of prohibition.

But perhaps the strangest anti-legalization comment came from former Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, who tweeted:

...legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier nation even less able to compete with the Chinese
— Tina Brown (@TinaBrownLM) January 3, 2014

Brown's tweet contains some questionable assumptions. One, that legalized marijuana will worsen America's obesity problem and make the country stupider and sleepier, presumably because high people tend to get the munchies, act like idiots, and fall asleep on the sofa. And two, the United States will lose ground to China, which has no plans to adjust its strict prohibition of marijuana.

Before going any further, it's worth considering: How many people in China smoke weed? Obtaining reliable statistics of illicit activity in China is difficult, but we can be reasonably sure it's less than in the United States. Americans smoke more pot, per capita, than all but two countries in the world, and, while a recent study from the medical journal Lancet doesn't discuss China specifically, it found that Asians consume less marijuana than people from any other continent.

This, of course, hasn't always been so; in fact, drugs have played a central role in modern Chinese history. China fought two different "Opium Wars" against the British in the 19th century, after which a significant percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When Chairman Mao Zedong assumed power in 1949 and formed the People's Republic of China, the newly empowered Communists shut down opium dens throughout the country, arrested smokers, and executed dealers. Within just a few years, China had completely eradicated opium use in the country.

Today, Chinese law has little tolerance for illegal drug use. As in Singapore and Malaysia, traffickers remain subject to the death penalty, and four years ago China marked the occasion of the UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking by publicly executing 24 convicted drug dealers. However, marijuana grows in the wild throughout the country's southwest, a fact I can confirm as a four-year resident of Yunnan Province. (At a wedding I attended in Xishuangbanna, a Yunnan prefecture located near the border with Laos, some foreign guests offered pot to locals only to be told that they preferred store-bought cigarettes.) In Beijing, dealers are a ubiquitous presence in bar districts despite periodic crackdowns by the police, and they sell more than just marijuana: The tranquilizer ketamine has become popular among China's urban youth, and police recently seized three tons of methamphetamine in a rural village. A Chinese journalist was even able to buy marijuana via an online forum.

***

But Tina Brown's tweet has less to do with marijuana than it does with a persistent belief that any sign of American "weakness" must necessarily translate into an advantage for China. In fairness, she's hardly the only person guilty of this: Three years ago, when heavy snow in Pennsylvania forced the cancellation of an NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings, then-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell objected in these terms:

We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.

And when in 2011 Amy Chua published her famous "tiger mom" essay in The Wall Street Journal, featuring a description of her draconian, cruel parenting technique, she touched a nerve with Americans who suddenly questioned whether their own parenting might be inadequate. Whether the subject is legalized marijuana, parenting, or canceled football games, the basic message is the same: Americans are fat, soft, and lazy, and the Chinese are lean, disciplined, and hard-working—and that's why they're gaining on us.

However, the focus on cultural issues obscures the point about China's competition with the United States: it's pure geopolitics. Three and a half decades of growth has given China an economy that, barring an unexpected collapse, will overtake the United States in GDP sometime in the next decade. China has parlayed this growth into greater economic, military, and diplomatic power, and now has the means to challenge American supremacy in the Western Pacific. This is where the Sino-American competition exists—not in the pot dispensaries of Colorado or the mountains of Yunnan.

If marijuana use correlated to national health, then the two countries with the highest per capita consumption of the drug—Australia and New Zealand—would not perennially rank near the top in human development indeces. But let's say for the sake of argument that Tina Brown is correct: Legalized marijuana will result in more people smoking more marijuana more often, and that this will have a negative effect on the country as a whole. Whether or not this argument is true, it completely misses the central argument in favor of legalization: The current system, in which people who buy, sell, and use marijuana are subject to imprisonment, poses a far greater cost to society than pot itself ever could. And the disproportional effect of our marijuana laws on minorities and the poor only makes this argument stronger.

As the American competition with China intensifies over the next years and decades, the United States will be forced to confront weaknesses such as income inequality, unemployment, student debt, and high imprisonment. Marijuana use just isn't one of them.

Meet the Chinese Tycoon Who Wants to Buy The New York Times

2014-01-02T08:59:59-05:00

The entrepreneur Chen Guangbiao, photographed last February handing out money to villagers, has expressed an interest in buying The New York Times. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Chen Guangbiao, the 45 year old self-made multi-millionaire who said this week he hopes to take over The New York Times, has been generally dismissed as publicity-seeking, naive and overly-optimistic about his business ventures.

While Chen’s chances at taking over the American paper may be exceedingly slim—executives at the paper say they have no meetings planned with him, and there are billionaires with way more ready cash who would certainly be equally interested—he is in many ways an intrepid businessman whose rags-to-riches story makes him one of China’s most notable entrepreneurs. (But let’s be clear, he has no chance of acquiring the Times, whose stock climbed 90 percent last year.)

Chen grew up so impoverished that two of his siblings died of starvation. He started working at age 10, selling water and later frozen treats to villagers. He eventually earned enough to pay for university in Nanjing. Soon after graduating, he invented a device to be used in Chinese medicine that detects bodily ailments related to a person’s energy, or qi, his first major business venture. Today, he runs a waste management company in Jiangsu province and his estimated wealth of $810 million puts him in the top 400 (number 372) in a September ranking of China’s richest.

But Chen is better known for his eccentric philanthropy, which critics say is mainly for the sake of publicity. Chen pays local reporters to cover his charity efforts like stuffing wads of cash into the hands of villagers or inexplicably tasting fire extinguishing foam to promote disaster relief. He claims to have hauled 200 bodies out of the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, and has handed out envelopes with thousands of dollars in cash on the streets of Taiwan. Cans of “fresh air” that he sold last year have the phrase “Chen Guangbiao is a good man” printed on one side.

Even those stunts may have been a smart business move. According to a report last month by the China Business Daily, once Chen became famous as a philanthropist he began to win profitable government contracts. In 2010, a government directive ordered Chinese media not to run negative articles about Chen. Given the slew of critical stories on Chen, that appears to have been lifted.

Gang Yang contributed additional reporting.

A Jittery China Faces 2014

2013-12-31T17:19:25-05:00

Prediction: Mao Zedong's image will sit atop Beijing's Tiananmen Gate for another year in 2014. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

2014 has already arrived in the People's Republic of China and, while the occasion is celebrated far less there than here in the United States, China's 1.3 billion people will enjoy a public holiday on January 1st. Following a busy, intriguing 2013, the break is welcome: The first year of Xi Jinping's stewardship was an eventful one in the country, and as 2014 begins China faces a number of issues that, in the aggregate, pose a threat to the country's stability. And while the past two weeks have been relatively calm, a glance at recent headlines reveals a lot about the challenges China faces.

***

The most important China story of the moment isn't happening in China at all: Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's decision to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, where many Japanese war dead are interred, has further destabilized an already tense region. James Fallows has written extensively (and cogently) about this topic over the last week, and anyone who wants to understand why Yasukuni is so controversial ought to start with these posts. While Abe's visit has more to do with the logic of internal Japanese politics than with China, the upshot is this: there are no signs that this brinksmanship in East Asia is going to stop.

Yasukuni wasn't the only important headline affecting China this week. Here were the others:

On Defensive, JP Morgan Hired China's Elite

The New York Times's Dealbook section this year has explored how major U.S. financial institutions, like JP Morgan, sought to hire the children of important Chinese officials and businessmen in order to facilitate their business operations in the country. These "legacy" hires are technically not legal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but major banks are plowing forward anyway as securing deals with Chinese companies often relies on making key personal connections.

This story—ostensibly about possibly nefarious behavior at an American bank—touches upon two sensitive issues in China: corruption and income inequality. Politics and big business enjoy a cozy relationship in the country, and a large number of Communist Party elite have leveraged their government connections to secure high-income jobs with big, multinational companies. President Xi Jinping has cracked down on the more ostentatious symbols of official privilege, such as lavish banquet dinners, but the profitability of Communist Party elite is woven into the very fabric of how China works and cannot be undone without major structural changes.

Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food

When we think of Chinese pollution, the image of Beijing's smoggy skies, which grew worse in 2013, prevail. But air pollution is only one aspect of China's environmental crisis, as food safety continues to be an enormous problem in the country, where stories of gutter oil keep Chinese consumers up at night.

Why is food security such a problem? Corruption is one problem, but the central logic of the Chinese political economy—that politicians throughout the system have an incentive to boost GDP at all costs—means the pressure to focus on industrial development is enormous, and environmental safeguards have failed to keep up.

In April, the planned construction of a polyethylene plant near the city of Kunming led to major protests, and while these issues never escalate beyond local problems, Beijing knows that environmental grievances can unite groups across ethnic and class boundaries.

Are You Qualified to Be a Journalist in China? Take This Quiz.

China's crackdown on foreign journalism has gotten so much attention in the Western media (The Atlantic is no exception), that it's easy to forget that the supression of Chinese journalism has been far worse. In January, the annual New Years op-ed by Southern Weekend—considered China's most daring and liberal major newspaper—was censored, and later in the year the Communist government silenced the country's "Big V," or most outspoken, social media users, in order to stifle political debate online.

Now, Chinese journalists who wish to renew their press cards in 2014 must pass a lengthy exam testing them on their mastery of "Marxist" journalist ideals. Though the requirement has elicited snickers from the journalists themselves—not all of whom appear to be taking the exam seriously—the news itself sends a powerful message: The Chinese media is not liberalizing anytime soon.

Chinese Police Kill Eight in Xinjiang "Terrorist Attack"

On Monday, police in Yarkant, a city in China's far-western Xinjiang region, killed eight people who had allegedly attacked them with knives and explosives. In typical form, the Chinese government identified the attackers as "terrorists," while a representative from the World Uighur Congress, a Munich-based advocacy organization, said that the people were non-violent protesters demonstrating against a series of arbitrary arrests. Few concrete details have emerged.

The incident capped off another violent year in Xinjiang, where an estimated 130 people lost their lives in the region, including 35 in a single day in June. Tensions between Xinjiang's native Uighur population and China's majority Han continue to grow, as many Uighurs feel that they are not sharing in the region's growing economic prosperity. Rather than address these grievances, Beijing instead pretends that violence comes from small bands of extremists; or, put another way, terrorists.

***

There's a tendency in the China commentariat, something I'm certainly guilty of, to treat the country as nothing but a series of looming crises, whether they're political, economic, social, or environmental. But it's worth remembering: Even conservative estimates project the Chinese economy to grow by seven percent in 2014 and, while not all of this growth will translate into a commensurate rise in living standards, much of it will. This, ultimately, is what the China story has all been about—the sudden, and unexpected, emergence of several hundred million human beings out of poverty in the last 35 years. Several forces threaten the sustainability of this prosperity, but it's important not to forget that for most of China's population, 2014 will be a year of hope and opportunity.

Xi Jinping Eats Some Dumplings at a Restaurant

2013-12-30T16:00:39-05:00

Chinese president Xi Jinping was photographed last Friday paying for a steamed bun lunch at Beijing's Qingfeng restaurant. (Sina Weibo)

Last Friday, Chinese president Xi Jinping walked into Qingfeng restaurant in western Beijing and, after waiting in line, ordered six pork buns, one dish of fried pig liver, and one vegetable dish. After paying 21 yuan (about $3.50) in cash, Xi ate his meal at a communal table and chatted with customers before departing.

Initially, Chinese Internet users suspected the photos of the event were fake—earlier this year, a story that Xi had personally hailed a Beijing cab proved to be a hoax—but once China's official news agencies confirmed their veracity, the images went viral. The next day, customers flocked to the Qingfeng restaurant, and, after braving a line that snaked out the door, ordered the exact meal their president had eaten.

In China, where important officials seldom mingle with the general public, Xi's casual lunch showed fresh evidence of his populist streak. Though Chairman Mao Zedong cultivated a "man of the people" persona through frequent interactions with the public, modern Chinese politicians more closely resemble faceless bureaucrats than charismatic populists, making Xi's approach all the more startling—and refreshing.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong (R) assists Beijing residents in the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir, in 1958. (NetEase)

Xi's choice of a simple "comfort food" restaurant is no coincidence. Since assuming office, the president has ordered Communist Party officials to curtail lavish banquet meals, which served as a convenient foil for public anger over corruption. Last December, Xi even went so far as to specify what he considered an appropriate amount of food for an official meal: four dishes and a soup.

Whether the president's anti-corruption drive will succeed is unclear, but Xi has certainly shown a knack for public relations that eluded his predecessor, the wooden Hu Jintao. And his pious frugality, at least, has rubbed off on the Qingfeng restaurant itself: When The South China Morning Post asked whether the "Xi Jinping lunch" would become a regular menu item, a staffer named Wang demurred:

“We don’t want to use his visit as a stunt to make money,” she said.

The End of China's 'Ashtray Diplomacy'

2013-12-30T10:40:00-05:00

Chinese supreme leader Deng Xiaoping enjoys a cigarette while talking to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Beijing in October 1984. (Neal Ulevich/AP)

Chinese leaders are now banned from smoking in public, using public funds to buy cigarettes, or smoking or offering cigarettes when performing official duties, the Communist Party said in a circular made public December 29, the latest attempt to curb cigarette consumption in a nation of more than 350 million smokers.

As Quartz has reported earlier, the government’s attempts to get its citizens to quit have a formidable opponent—the government itself. China is the world’s largest manufacturer and consumer of cigarettes, with sales providing as much as 10 percent of overall tax revenue and nearly half of revenues in tobacco-producing states.

The quality (and continued consumption) of cigarettes is so important that China employs state-sanctioned cigarette tasters who smoke all day long for their livelihood. Some of the most expensive state-produced cigarette brands (link in Chinese), like “Yellow Crane Tower” and “Diamond” are made mostly for government officials to give and receive as gifts, contain special ingredients like caterpillar fungus and hand-selected tobacco, and can cost more than $30 a pack.

It’s an imported habit. Although tobacco was consumed in China as early as the 1500s, cigarettes didn’t arrive until the late 1800s, according to the archives of the US’s Duke University, which credit the school’s founder:

Immediately after the invention of the cigarette machine in 1881, James B. Duke (1865—1925) is reported to have leafed through a world atlas to survey the population of foreign countries. Coming to the figure 430,000,000, he exclaimed, “That is where we are going to sell cigarettes.” The country was China, and in 1890 the Dukes exported the first cigarettes to the populous Asian nation.

China’s top leaders took up the practice with gusto. Mao Zedong was often pictured with a cigarette in his hand, as in this often-reproduced 1957 shot of him meeting the all-female Third National Congress of Chinese Communist Youth League, who appear to be vying to offer him a light:

The chairman and his cigarette lighting fans, 1957.

In a tell-all biography, Mao’s personal physician wrote that the leader responded with a joke when he criticized Mao’s chain smoking, saying “Smoking is also a deep-breathing exercise, don’t you think?”

Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, another chain smoker, loved expensive Panda cigarettes, and often proffered them to visiting dignitaries. Here he speaks with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, while preparing to light up:

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in conversation with Deng Xiaoping

China’s current generation of top leaders, though, are a marked contrast to their predecessors ones: none of the current members of the Central Politburo Standing Committee, the all-powerful seven-man group that runs the country, are smokers. President Xi Jinping’s wife is a vocal anti-smoking campaigner.

China’s leaders were far from alone, of course, in their love of tobacco. Tobacco was banned in Britain’s House of Commons in the 1690s, but smoking and snuff-taking were still common in Parliament for centuries after, and tobacco has a long history among Catholic religious leaders. Tobacco use stretches back to nearly the beginning of the U.S. presidency (here’s a comprehensive history from Cigar Aficionado) and until the 1980s, U.S. presidents offered special packs of cigarettes to guests and aboard Air Force One. In this 1963 photo, president John F. Kennedy plays with his daughter next to an ashtray while the first lady lights up behind him:

Then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy enjoys a cigarette, 1963.

Whether the current ban will actually have any effect on smoking rates in China or not is doubtful. An earlier government ban on smoking indoors (which applies to everyone, not just government officials) has been mostly ignored, and while top officials have quit or never started, over half of Chinese men are smokers.

Gang Yang contributed reporting.

How Andy Warhol Explains China's Attitudes Toward Chairman Mao

2013-12-26T14:42:00-05:00

A print of Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin. (Wikimedia Commons)

Today was the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, and as the event is celebrated in grand style in Beijing and around China, images of the Chairman are even more ubiquitous than usual this week: A rumored $2.5 billion was invested in celebrations in honor of the figure whose portrait watches over Tiananmen Square and is fastened to the gate of the Forbidden City.

In spite of the birthday celebrations, Mao’s status is marked by a growing ambivalence. Officially, a Communist Party Resolution dictated by Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, declared that Mao was 70 percent right, and 30 percent wrong (with the most grievous errors being the disasters of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward). And this mixed legacy makes it hard to pin down exactly what about Mao Party leaders want to celebrate, and what about him they don’t. Who could have anticipated this?

Andy Warhol.

Starting in the early 1970s, the Pop artist made hundreds of images of Mao, using a portrait of the leader from the Little Red Book, a propaganda collection of Mao’s speeches and quotations from the Cultural Revolution, as his template.

Warhol’s Maos are endlessly varied—ferocious, parodic, and beautiful—gestures of paint smeared onto the reproduced outline of the Chinese leader’s head and shoulders. In one huge 1973 canvas, over 14 feet tall, Warhol rouged the Great Helmsman’s cheeks, adorned his eyes with blue pigment, and deepened the red of his lips. With these changes, the mole on Mao’s chin was transfigured into the beauty mark of a French courtesan. Warhol dolled Mao up, on the heroic scale of socialist realism.

But this is only one image of hundreds. The sheer number of Warhol’s screen prints of Mao’s face—at once persistent and reinvented—that captures, with unusual clarity, the attitude of China’s leaders today toward Mao, coloring and recoloring this legacy within an enduring outline.

As with each of his predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly harkens back to Mao as a source of both legitimacy and continuity for the Party—in his words today, “forever.” This deference, which the lavish birthday celebrations epitomize, appeases Party conservatives and ordinary Chinese who have not shared in China’s prosperity following market reforms since 1978. Some Western commentators have even termed Xi a “neo-Maoist,” but this impression is difficult to reconcile with the pragmatic, reform-oriented economic policies announced at this year’s Third Plenum.

On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Mao would have criticized what China and the CCP have become. Massive inequalities of wealth, opportunity, and power now define Chinese society, and the country’s ideologically mixed “socialist market economy” seems, at street level, to look like thinly-regulated capitalism. Party rule itself is ill, as deeply entrenched corruption festers and many local officials seem indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. Ironically, one of the best examples of this disconnect is the 120-pound gold and jade statue of Mao on display in Shenzhen, a city where there are more migrant laborers (semi-legal and poorly paid) than legal workers.

Mao’s quotations and ideas are repackaged and recolored to fit the needs of the present moment: a “mass line” that forbids the ostentation of the wealthy, and a “rectification” campaign that snipes off the most corrupt former and current officials. (The tension surrounding Mao’s legacy has even come into direct dialogue with Warhol’s images: When Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum brought a survey show to China earlier this year, officials did not permit his Mao screen prints to appear alongside the rest of his works, because they risked sparking controversy.)

The Party’s use of Mao’s legacy mirrors Warhol’s use of Mao’s face. It is a recurrent and unquestioned outline, an essential structure. But it is precisely because the legacy is so often reinterpreted—and because the image is so often reproduced—that even dramatic changes to its surface do not destroy the underlying core.

In 1982, Warhol finally had the chance to visit China, and see the famous portrait of Mao looming over Tiananmen Square. In a photograph taken by one of his companions, Warhol poses in a crowd of ordinary Chinese people outside the Forbidden City. His arms are straight at his sides, his fingers fidget, and Mao’s face hangs behind him, blurry but still presiding.

The American Who Gave His Life to Chairman Mao

2013-12-26T10:03:00-05:00

Chairman Mao Zedong (L) signs a copy of his Little Red Book for Sidney Rittenberg (R) in Beijing, 1966. (Sidney Rittenberg)

From 1944, when the 23-year-old Sidney Rittenberg first arrived in China with the U.S. Army, to his departure 35 years later, no other foreign national played as important a role in the country. A Chinese linguist and Communist sympathizer, Rittenberg served as a friend, confidante, translator, and journalist for the Communist Party leadership after first encountering them at their Yan'an base in 1946. During the first three decades of P.R.C. history, Rittenberg enjoyed remarkable influence in a country largely closed off to the outside world. However, his high profile came at a grave cost: He was imprisoned twice and held in solitary confinement for a total of 16 years.

Now 92, Rittenberg remains a sharp observer of contemporary China, commenting often about the country that has defined his personal and professional life. A genial man with an easy laugh, Rittenberg betrays little bitterness about his years in China, which he wrote about in his memoir The Man Who Stayed Behind, and has continued to visit since his return to the U.S. In a wide-ranging phone conversation with me last month, Rittenberg recounted his personal memories of Chairman Mao Zedong, born 120 years ago today, and why he believes that, through forging an early alliance with the Chinese leader, the United States might have avoided both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

When did you actually first meet Chairman Mao in person?

It was October 20-something in 1946. I’d just come over land to Yan’an [the Communist Party home base in Shaanxi Province] from Inner Mongolia, and after arriving, I was immediately taken to the weekly dance in the Party headquarters building. When we opened the door to go in, Mao was dancing in the middle of the floor. He saw me and stopped dancing, and after I shook his hand he said, “We’d like to welcome an American comrade to join in our work.” Then, he took me over by the side of the hall and sat me down on a chair, and immediately said that he wanted to invite me to his place and spend a day or two just talking about America. The interesting thing here is—and this is confirmed by Li Zhishui, the doctor who wrote the book on Mao’s personal life—America was the only foreign country that really fascinated and interested him and was one he greatly admired. He would invite left-wing Americans to his place and sit and chat. To my knowledge, he didn’t invite foreign experts of any other nationality—just the Americans.

Why do you think he had such a fascination with America and Americans?

Mao’s modern education began when he went to high school in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan Province. There, he had a very enlightened liberal teacher, one whose daughter he actually married, who taught him about Rousseau, Franklin, Jefferson, and so on, and those first foreign thinkers really interested him. In fact, Mao related somewhere that he once thought Jeffersonian democracy was the future for China. Eventually, he came to believe that foreign backers would not permit China to evolve into a Western-style democracy, and that’s when he turned to Lenin.

What were your impressions of him? What was he like? Was he as charismatic as people say?

He was only charismatic because of the strength of his mind and his ability to put complicated political thinking into very colorful, popular language—which is a talent that seems to be totally lost in China these days. But, you know, he was no Fidel Castro. He was no orator. He didn’t keep people spell-bound—he was a rather slow and bumbling speaker. But the way he analyzed things was fascinating. And he was always careful to make it very simple, to put things in popular terms, not like the mind-numbing stuff that began coming out later.

You know, it was interesting: When you sat and talked with him, he was laid back. He talked as though everything was just a casual conversation and very humorous. Anyone who was talking with him in my experience would be constantly in stitches laughing, and he’d laugh too. So he gave the impression of a kind of sage from the backwoods, who was a great analyzer and a great talker. Nothing threatening at all, nothing tough.

What was the relationship like between Mao and [Chinese premier] Zhou Enlai? Was Zhou more sophisticated and more urbane? Did they balance each other well?

They were totally different. Zhou was a very gregarious, urbane person, an organizational genius who could do two or three different things at the same time without getting mixed up. In the early 1930s, Zhou had led the attack on Mao as one of the students Stalin had sent back from Moscow to run the Chinese Communist Party. But after the near-obliteration of the Red Army—when they took its remnants and started the Long March— Zhou decided that Mao had been right about the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare and dropped his opposition and made up his mind that from now on, he was going to follow Mao—and he did. He acted as Mao’s chief of staff: Whatever the leading team decided, Zhou would be in charge of executing the decision. He was an organizational genius, no question about it. Everyone respected him and looked up to him.

Was Deng Xiaoping a major figure in the Party by this time, or did he emerge later?

Deng only emerged later, really. He came to prominence in the Chinese Civil War, when he was the number one political commissar of the great field armies that wiped out or captured most of Chiang Kai-Shek’s elite troops. He was a little man who carried out Mao’s strategic concepts. Mao would send him a document on how to wage the campaign strategically, and Deng was in charge of making sure it was carried out. You know, one of Deng’s great advantages politically—and it probably saved his life in the Cultural Revolution—was that in the 1930s, he was persecuted for supporting Mao against Stalin’s people. Mao never forgot that. So, in the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi was enemy number one, and Deng was enemy number two. But unlike Liu, who was hounded to death, Deng was protected by Mao.

How did you earn the trust of these men in the 1940s?

[Laughs] Well, you know—that’s a curious question. I’m a kind of open, direct guy, and I think they understood that I was telling them the truth, whatever I said, as I saw it. I was working with the UN relief program and doing famine relief work in the Communist area that was under the command of Li Xiannian, who later became president of the P.R.C., and Wang Zhen, who later became vice president. I was able to give them some important information about the American decision to allow Chiang Kai-Shek to wipe out Communist troops in that area. At the time, the local leaders, Li Xiannian and his colleagues, were in dispute about the intentions of General Marshall and the American role in the Chinese civil war. Some people, including the then-political commissar, felt that the Nationalists would not be allowed to attack them and wipe the Communists, who were outnumbered four or five to one in that area, out. Others believe that Marshall would let them be killed.

I got a very clear statement from General Marshall’s attache, General Henry Byroade, that the Americans were definitely going to let the Nationalists attack and annihilate these 60-70,000 Communist troops in that area. I took that information to the local commanders, Li Xiannian and so on, it proved to be right, and they totally escaped from encirclement. And when they came back to Yan’an, they thanked me and told me how correct my information had been. And in his memoirs, Li recalls this story and my role, which he exaggerates—my role wasn’t probably the decisive factor, but it was helpful. And then, these two commanders, who were both Central Committee members, Li Xiannian and Wang Zhen, became my two sponsors in joining the Chinese Communist Party.

And was this in 1946, as well?

1946. It was all in 1946.

What were the circumstances of your arrest in the 1940s? How did you run into trouble with Mao? And did Mao personally play a role in your arrest or was it someone beneath him?

No, no, no. Nobody could have touched me, or any other foreigner, without the personal approval of Mao. Couldn’t be done. What happened was, the story came out some years ago. Stalin’s foreign trade minister and one of his old Bolshevik allies, Anastas Mikoyan, otherwise known as the “Armenian rug salesman,” made a secret trip to China in 1949, I think in January. He went to

the mountains where Mao and we all were, about 100 miles from Beijing, and held a series of talks with Mao, giving him Stalin’s opinion of what was going on in China. Among the documents that he brought was a personal message from Stalin to Mao, saying that they had identified me as a member of an American spy ring, the queen bee of which was Anna Louise Strong, a friend of mine, whom they had arrested in Moscow. Stalin had her deported and recommended that the Chinese arrest me as well. Of course, they never sent any evidence because there wasn’t any.

And how long were you in prison at that time?

Six years. The first year was in total darkness. It was not good.

Did you think you’d be in prison indefinitely?

Well, I’ll tell you, not this time. That was the second time (from 1967-1977). Because after the horrible first year in darkness, the warden suddenly came and told me that they understood that I was telling the truth. They understood who I was, and that I should forget about all the accusations that were hurled at me. So he gave me two choices. I’d been hollering all along that if they were going to keep me here, let me at least read and study and make some use of my time. He said “we can’t let you go until your case is cleared up,” which I knew meant while Stalin was alive. The other option, he said, was that I could just go back to America and forget about China for the rest of my life. If I wanted to go back, they'd send me back.

But that was not an option for me. I didn’t even think about it. My health was totally broken down. I was in shambles, just trying to get back to normal life. And besides, I didn’t want to go back with this cloud over me. What was I going to do? So I said I’ll stay and study. And I did that for five more years.

And what was it like to be released? How did that happen?

[Laughs] One day, the chief keeper unlocked my little cell and came in and said, “Come with me. Someone wants to talk to you.” So I went outside and into the main prison corridor and he unlocked a little door that I had never seen open and led me in. And there was a man whom later I learned was the first leader of the Chinese version of the CIA, the state security ministry. At that time, he was a bureau chief at the ministry of public security, which was internal.

Anyway, they had a chair there. I sat down and I knew immediately something big was happening because you don’t sit counter-revolutionaries down. He then issued a formal apology in the name of the central government, and said: “We were wrong. You’re a good man. We mistreated you, we misunderstood you. We’ll do everything possible to make it up to you.” After that, we went through the process of picking jobs that I wanted to do. He said, “Well, if you want to go back to America, we’ll send you back and we’ll give you enough money to start up whatever you want to do. If you want to travel in Europe, we’ll send you to Europe. If you want to stay in China, we’ll give you a villa in the south. You won’t have to work.” And of course, that was the funny thing, because what you want most when you’re locked up in solitary is the chance to do something, to work. So anyway, I told him, I said I want to go back to doing what I was doing on the day I was arrested.

What was that?

I was working at the Xinhua news agency, correcting English, teaching a little journalism, and doing some writing and some pinch hit announcing. But mainly just helping the Chinese journalists who were working in English just straighten their stuff out.

In 1955 when you were released from prison, did your relatives and friends think you were crazy for wanting to stay in China? Did they petition for you to come back?

They knew nothing about it. They had no idea. My brother-in-law was a flying Colonel in the Marine Corps and he stuck his neck out in the McCarthy days to get the government to figure out where I was, what happened. But they were only able to find out that I was somewhere in prison. They didn’t know where or why or what. So when I got out, they still knew nothing about me. They didn’t know what was going on.

When did they learn that you were released from prison?

As far as I know, the first time they got word was when Israel Epstein, who was working in the foreign languages press in Beijing, went to America and met my niece. He told her the story and then my niece got in touch with me, and then my sister, and so on. Oh, my goodness, but by then, that was after my second arrest. By then, it was 1977. In between, they didn’t know anything about me, and I didn’t try to contact them because in those days it was tricky for an American to be in touch with, you know, “Red China,” quote, unquote. It wouldn’t have been good for them.

Was there any criticism of Mao in the mid-50s? Was there a sense of euphoria in China at this time? When did his so-called abusive power begin, in your mind?

I think there was a fundamental change that began as he was coming into power. He gave a speech in 1949 just before the proclamation of the P.R.C. on the people’s democratic dictatorship. Previously, he said that the government of the new China would preside over a pluralistic economy. He even once said, “China doesn’t suffer from too much capitalism; it suffers from too little.” So when the new regime took power, they'd develop socialism, collective economy, private capitalism, individual artisans; six different forms of economy, altogether.

But in this 1949 speech, he shifted his emphasis to one-party dictatorship. I remember feeling aggravated at the time because I thought if the U.S. had played its cards better, maybe he wouldn’t have gone that far. We may have been able to influence the kind of government that finally formed in China. In 1946, I translated a message from Mao to the United States saying that in five years, the Communists planned to be in power in China and wanted to have normal relations with the United States by then. They knew Americans supported Chiang Kai-Shek, but that once Mao took power, that would be over.

Mao cited two reasons why he wanted normal relations. The first one was that China was in shambles: They'd been fighting wars for over a century and everything needed to be rebuilt. They needed a major input of capital. And the only country in the world, after World War II, that had that kind of money was the United States. So China want to get construction loans from the U.S. Mao added that the Chinese were not asking for a handout. They had gold and they could pay at the ongoing rates of international interest. So that was point one, which was not surprising to me.

But point two really bowled me over. He said after the Communists came to power, they didn’t want to be unilaterally dependent on the Soviet Union. They wanted to have good relations with both East and West. Mao said, of course, the Soviets were China's comrades. "We’re all Communists, but there are many of their viewpoints that we do not share, and we have our own way of looking at things. And we don’t want to be shut off from you, from America, and dependent on them."

I think if America had taken those remarks seriously, it could’ve been different. I even think that we may not have had to fight the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But we totally ignored it.

And was that just because of the McCarthyist spirit in the U.S., the fear of a Red China?

Yeah. It was not just McCarthy, it was people like Dean Rusk—Secretary of State [under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson], undoubtedly a man of strong principle, a good man, but very, very ideological, and, in my view, bigoted. In Rusk's view, a Communist was a Communist was a Communist. The differences between the Chinese and the Russians were not that important.

After your first arrest from prison, how did you get involved again with Chairman Mao? How long did that process take?

Actually, I didn’t sit down and talk with him again until 1963, when I had been working for two years on the translations of his works into English. Four Americans plus Israel Epstein, who was stateless, met with Mao to discuss some questions of translation, which turned into a long talk about everything under the sun, and then dinner. And then I saw him every year after that until my arrest in 1967.

What were the circumstances of your second arrest? They were very different from the first, is that right?

Very different. My wife and I were supporting young people who were trying to dismantle the dictatorship of the proletariat and establish a kind of town hall democracy in China. And I was making speeches in support of them all over the place. And, well, Mao lost his sense of humor about it and put me back in prison.

And you were imprisoned for how many years this time?

Ten years.

And solitary again?

Yeah.

My goodness.

But this was better than the first time because I knew why I was there, you know. The first time, I had no idea what I was doing there. There was this terrible hurt, this feeling of being misunderstood. But the second time, I was not being misunderstood, so it was different.

You were in prison until 1977—how did you learn about the death of Chairman Mao in ‘76?

I had the People’s Daily in prison so I had the news.

And what did you feel when Mao died? Were you relieved? Were you delighted? Were you sad? It must’ve been complicated.

No, no—I still thought he was a revolutionary leader that had answers to the world’s problems. I thought his death was this terrible loss ... but you know, here’s the thing, Matt. It was very strange. When Zhou Enlai died, in January that year, I was distraught. I thought he’d been a very dear, very warm and caring friend on a personal level. And I felt like I’d lost my father almost, I really, literally sat in prison, you know, and just cried and cried.

When Mao died, intellectually, I felt that this was much more important. A much greater tragedy, this was the leader, with a capital L, who had been lost to the world. But I didn’t have a single tear. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: why is this? What’s going on? And I didn’t have the answer.

I think my emotional intelligence, if there is such a thing, was smarter than my intellect at that point. Intellectually, I mourned him, but emotionally, I didn’t.

You moved back to the United States in 1980. What prompted that decision? Did you think you were through with China? Was it exhaustion?

No, no, not at all. When I was in the Army class at Stanford in 1943, I had this idea of learning to be a bridge-builder between Americans and Chinese. If I had both languages and both cultures, I could help these two peoples understand each other and to learn to work together. So by 1980, I decided there was nothing more that I could do on the Chinese end, and I needed to go back and work from the American end. What brought it about was my disgust at the corruption that was already rampant. It wasn’t yet like it is today, but it was already very much in evidence.

I was disgusted by the fact that Deng Xiaoping, after bragging to Robert Novak about the Democracy Wall, about how the government allowed people to put up posters and express their opinion and criticize freely and so on, he shut it down once he consolidated his power. He suppressed the Democracy Wall. We had lots of young democratic activists coming to our home every weekend and we had a kind of forum discussion, and we were living at the Friendship Hotel, where most foreign experts lived, and when they came in to the hotel compound, they had to register their names. So once Deng began suppressing democratic opinion, these people were all going to be in danger. I didn’t feel that my wife and I would be in danger because they weren’t going to fool with us anymore, but I thought these kids were going to be in danger.

But mainly, I was just disgusted by the shutting down of democratic activity and the corruption, and I just said to Yulin you know, it’s time to go to America and off we went.

I imagine that when you arrived in America after 35 years, the culture shock must have been incredible.

It was such fun! When I got back, the op-ed editor of the New York Times asked me to write a piece on July 4th on how it felt to come back after being away 14 years longer than Rip Van Winkle. And I did. And you know, we got a terrific welcome from the press. I was on the Today Show the day after we got back. And, unfortunately, Tom Brokaw wasn’t there that day, so it wasn’t a great program. But, then, the next day, Linda Charlton of the New York Times wrote a feature that took up the whole of page 2. And the headline was something like: "Native Son Returns to Tell His Folks About His In-Laws." And they had a picture of Yulin and myself. Then, everything was coming up roses. That week, I was invited to go to Washington and was formally received by the assistant Secretary of State for Asia, who was Richard Holbrooke. I spent two days talking with the guys on the China desk at the State Department. Everyone was very courteous and friendly. Nobody tried to put me on the spot or ask embarrassing questions. And I felt right at home. I felt great.

It was around this time that Deng Xiaoping made his famous assessment of Mao, saying that Mao was 70 percent correct and 30 percent incorrect. How do you feel about that?

I don’t buy that. I think of it more as before and after. I think Mao was a great leader up to coming to power in 1949, and maybe for three or four years afterwards, when they carried out these great social reforms in China. You know, the eight-hour day, jobs for all the intellectuals, and eliminating opium, eliminating prostitution, equality before the law for women; just ordinary social reforms, which really were a transformation in the China of that day.

It started going bad around 1955. Initially, he encouraged the set up of co-ops, which worked very well. Farm production went way up. It was based on continued private ownership of the land, but the farmers helped each other to till the land. The harvest yield was distributed 60 percent in terms of how much land one had, 40 percent in terms of how much work one put in, or different proportions like that.

But then, Mao got overexcited and got into his build-Rome-in-a-single-day mode. They went from the co-ops to collective farms, so the farmers who had got their own land after centuries of hunger now lost their land to the collective. But being good Chinese patriots, most of them didn’t complain about it. They went along, but farm production, per capita, never went up again until the Deng Xiaoping reforms, when the land was de-collectivized. So that’s when it all really started going bad, really. So, in other words, what I’m saying is I think of it more in terms of Mao before power and after power, rather than a particular ratio.

Do you think there was something personal that changed him? Did he get drunk with power, to use the cliche?

I do. I do think that. In 1968, I think it was, he was up at the Tiananmen gate with Edgar Snow. I was in prison then, but I read about it. He told Snow that China was mostly a peasant country and needed an emperor figure. He was endorsing the kind of adulation and emperor-worship that was going on with him at the center. I think he consciously did get drunk.

It’s strange, Matt, because before coming to power, he wrote and talked constantly about the dangers of the arrogance of power. I remember in 1944, before I got to China, he had reprinted a little pamphlet about a peasant uprising in the Ming dynasty, where the peasant leaders drove the emperor out of Xi’an and assumed the throne. But as soon as they got into power, they became drunk with power and corrupt. And they lost power very quickly. The emperor brought his armies back and chased them away. Mao ordered every functionary in the party to study the pamphlet as a guard against being corrupted by power later on. And he kept constantly preaching this kind of sermon, and yet he was corrupted by power worse than most people.

Jung Chang in her biography of Mao in 2006 argued that he was a megalomaniac who was after more than just power of China—that he wanted world power. What do you think about that idea?

Well, first of all, in my personal opinion, I think that whole book is pretty much garbage. It’s a terribly one-sided—well not really one-sided, but a lot of it is just fiction. You know, like the story she tells about the Long March being a conspiracy hatched by Chiang Kai-Shek and Stalin, working together. It’s ridiculous. Anyway.

Did Mao want to be a more consequential figure than just the President of China? That was one of her arguments.

No, I think that’s nonsense. You know, Mao, he had two sides. One, he was a great military strategist and tactician. I could cite endless examples of brilliant strategies that most people wouldn’t even dream of. But the other side of him was that he was a terrific individualist, and sort of an anarchical populist. I remember after the border war between China and India in 1962, Marshall Chen Yi, who was also foreign minister, came back from the Himalayas and he brought a big cobra back with him. And he invited my wife and I to come eat the snake with him. And I remember asking him, playing devil’s advocate, I said look: the Indians were beaten, you’re at the peak of the Himalayas, you could have swept down, and in 200 hundred miles, you’d be in Calcutta. So why did you turn back?

He looked at me like I was crazy. He said: Lord, we have so many problems managing China, you think we want to have to manage India? I don't think Mao or anybody else was really interested in anything but China.

If Mao were alive today, what would he think about China’s progress? What would he think about the country? I mean, I know it’s impossible to answer in a way, but would he be satisfied? Would he be disappointed? Is today's China what he had in mind, in a strange way?

I think it’s a two-sided thing. I’ve thought quite a lot about this, actually. He would be very proud to see the strength of the economy and the change in the world position of China. He’d be thrilled at that. On the other hand, he’d be really disgusted at the breakdown of morality and values. And I think he would be very happy with the way Xi Jinping is starting out by trying to restore some of the old values. But, at the same time, I don’t think he would be happy about the added emphasis now, after the recent Third Plenum meeting, on letting market forces decide things and getting the government increasingly out of economic management. That was certainly against his fundamental views. Of course, he might have changed.

Does it surprise you that Mao is still the face on all the Chinese banknotes, that his portrait is still at Tiananmen, that he is still revered in China?

No, not at all, because the young people that are growing up now, including young Party members, have no idea really who he was and what he wrote and what he did. All they know is he’s sort of the George Washington figure. He was the founder of the country, the unifier of the people, and so on. And that’s all they know. And I wouldn’t expect that to change in the near future.

This Proposed Chinese Train Picks Up Passengers ... Without Stopping

2013-12-23T13:00:00-05:00

China is a train lover's paradise. In contrast to the United States, where even modest high-speed rail initiatives face serious opposition, fast new trains connect most of China's major cities—or will soon. And for the last decade, a magnetic levitation train has ferried passengers from Shanghai's Pudong Airport to the city center at speeds faster than any other rail service on earth.

But even these fancy Chinese trains have not solved one necessity of rail travel: Heist movies aside, trains must stop so that people can get on and off.

Via Shanghaiist, a possible solution to this problem has arrived: This concept train features an elevated compartment in which passengers enter and, after the compartment attaches itself to the train car itself, board without the train having to stop. The nifty video demonstration is here:

Aside from various logistical questions, there's the question of utility: Is it really a problem to wait a few extra minutes at each stop? Perhaps not—but for those who believe the usual line that the Chinese lack an innate ability to innovate, this is, at least, evidence to the contrary.

Why a TV Show About Celebrity Fathers Has Enraptured China

2013-12-20T12:25:51-05:00

The five celebrity dads—and their kids—on the hit Chinese TV show Where Are We Going, Dad? (Hunan Television)

Five celebrity fathers and their children traipse around China, riding camels through the western deserts, fishing off the east coast, and selling vegetables for their bus fare home in remote southwestern Yunnan province. One dad doesn’t know how to do his daughter’s hair, but give him a couple of episodes—he’ll figure it out. Another one must survive with his son for three days in the desert, where, because neither can cook, the two only eat instant noodles.

These story lines are part of Where Are We Going Dad? which, since its debut in October, has become one of China’s most popular television shows, averaging more than 600 million viewers each week (and more than 640 million downloads online). Sponsorship rights for the show’s second season sold for 312 million yuan (about $50 million), more than ten times higher than the rights to the first season. And searches for Where Are We Going Dad? turn up over 40 million hits on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter.

What accounts for the show’s popularity? The show features a new generation of Chinese fathers, who, as part of the country’s burgeoning middle class, have faced more exposure to modern child-rearing techniques such as taking an active role with their children.

“In traditional Chinese culture, the conventional conception of parenthood is that the father is stern and the mother is kind. But on the show, we see fathers who are much gentler on their kids and more involved in their upbringing,” said Li Minyi, an associate professor of early childhood education at the leading Beijing Normal University. “This show raises an important question for modern Chinese society—what is the role of fathers in today’s China?”

Confucian tradition dictates that there is no human trait more important than filial piety: obeying your parents’ wishes and looking after them in their old age. But Chinese parents increasingly realize that discussing and respecting their children’s choices may be a more appropriate way to prepare them for modern society. “As they raise their children, parents are growing up at the same time,” said Wang Renping, a popular education expert, in an interview with the Qianjiang Evening News. “They cannot use parenting styles from 20 years ago to guide the development of children born 20 years later.”

“There’s a huge difference between the way our parents raised us and how we are raising our children. This is an extreme example, but I remember my friend telling me that growing up, her mother would tie her to her bed and go to work,” said Zhou Lingling, one of the co-founders of Daxiaoaiwan, a new media magazine on WeChat which, in contrast to traditional Chinese techniques, encourages parents to let their children play. In just five months since its founding, the magazine has attracted over ten thousand subscribers.

Part of the appeal of Where Are We Going Dad? is the chance to peek into the lives of popular Chinese celebrities and their children. Audiences revel in watching the failed attempts of celebrity dads making dinner, braiding hair, and disciplining children—tasks often left to mothers in a society still influenced by the notion that “men rule outside and women rule inside.”

The children—and their bumbling fathers—show remarkable candor. “I’m best at washing up, I can’t do anything else,” confides one dad to another as they squat, doing the dishes after everyone had eaten dinner. “My wife is great—she’s been raising our son for six years. I’m exhausted and it’s only been three days. I’m buying her a bunch of flowers when we go back,” confesses another.

The popularity of the show is measured in more than just advertising revenue. T-shirts, jeans, jackets, accessories, suitcases, and backpacks used in the show are selling out on e-commerce websites, and featured locations have become travel hotspots, with fans eager to sleep in the same beds as the celebrities and their children. A spin-off movie may be released in conjunction with Chinese New Year, and government websites predict that the all-important civil servant interviews next year will feature questions about the show. Television stations across China have jumped on the bandwagon, launching talk shows and reality programs about the relationship between parents and children.

After each episode goes to air, the Chinese internet explodes with commentary on each celebrity’s parenting style. “The five fathers on the show all have very diverse parenting styles, which is great because it shows people there isn’t just one way to raise a child,” said Li Minyi.

Zhang Liang, a cook turned supermodel, is an audience favorite for treating his son, Tiantian, more like a friend. Actor Guo Tao tries hard to communicate with his son, Shi Tou, but is seen as a more traditional Chinese father, and has been criticized online for being too harsh. The show’s most famous celebrity, Taiwanese race car driver-turned-actor Lin Zhiying, was originally praised as progressive and patient with his son Kimi. But as the season progressed, fans began to criticize him for raising a spoiled, undisciplined boy.

The behavior of these fathers have caused ordinary Chinese people to reflect. “As I watch the show, I find myself reflecting on how I am raising my own child. I think that’s part of the show’s appeal,” said Yan Jiangning, another co-founder of Daxiaoaiwan.

Even the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese government, is pleased at the success of Where Are We Going, Dad?. “The deep affection on display in the show is heart-warming and ignites a desire in people to return home to loved ones,” it said in an op-ed. In 2012, the Ministry for Education issued, for the first time, a roadmap for teachers and parents about how to raise 3-6 year olds, indicating a growing emphasis on early childhood education.

The success of Where Are We Going Dad?, adapted from a Korean show by Hunan Television, is especially remarkable considering China’s tightened regulations against foreign-sourced television. This year, Beijing banned foreign programs in prime-time (between 7 and 10 pm), and beginning in 2014 domestic satellite television channels will only be allowed to purchase the rights to one foreign program a year.

Hunan Television isn’t fazed. Where Are We Going Dad?, has thrived despite airing in an unfavorable time slot: 10-12 on Friday nights.

Chairman Mao's Everyman Makeover

2013-12-19T14:41:00-05:00

A display at the Comrade Mao Zedong Memorial Museum in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, shows the leader's personal effects and a snapshot of his bathroom at Zhongnanhai, China's leadership compound in Beijing. Over the past decade, the museum, which once presented the leader as a revolutionary hero, has increasingly emphasized Mao's personal incorruptibility. (Comrade Mao Zedong Memorial Museum)

As the 120th anniversary of his birth approaches this month, Mao Zedong has been reinvented. Shaoshan, the village in Hunan Province where the Chinese leader grew up, has spent over 1.9 billion yuan (about $312 million) to restore his former residence and a nearby memorial plaza, and is planning festivities such as a mass singing of the Cultural Revolution anthem, “The East is Red.” However, at Shaoshan’s Comrade Mao Zedong Memorial Museum, a subtle reinvention of Mao’s legacy—from revolutionary to incorruptible government official—has gone unnoticed.

The cult of the individual in Communist China is nothing new. As historian Daniel Leese points out in his work on Maoism, a revolution shaped by the masses and against personal worship sanctioned and encouraged the proliferation of Mao memorabilia and monuments, even before the chairman’s death. During the Cultural Revolution, for example, local governments built “Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought” halls, which Leese argues were precursors to the Mao Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

After Mao’s death in 1976 and well into the subsequent economic reform era, his image continued to dominate Chinese popular culture—even after the Communist Party’s official resolution in 1981 admitted that he had made mistakes. Visitors to Shaoshan approach a statue of Mao, bow three times, and then circumambulate its base, making a wish in his name. Taxi drivers even hang Mao talismans from their rearview mirrors.

The museum has also hewn the revolutionary line. As Kirk Denton explains in his forthcoming book, the museum’s 2003 exhibit, entitled “In China There Appeared a Mao Zedong,” presented a “conventional, eulogistic view of Mao’s life, with no questioning of the mythic narrative or of Mao’s political career and the implementation of his radical policies.” Reflecting standard Mao commemoration, the museum portrayed him as the revolutionary hero and founder of the People’s Republic of China.

But on the eve of this 120th anniversary, Shaoshan’s museum has undergone a significant shift in emphasis. The exhibits of a previous era were gone: the room depicting the whole world weeping at Mao’s death, statues of martyrs from the Mao family with pistols in hand, and the garden with miniature replicas where important early Party meetings took place. Now, the museum features artifacts of Mao’s everyday life. There are his dishes and personal effects, bathrobes and suits, books and stationery. The displays are professional and high tech; before a glassed-in library, a visitor can page through electronic texts with Mao’s marginalia by waving his hands over a book-shaped screen.

The display of personal effects is not new to Chinese museums. But in Shaoshan, the relics narrate a story not of Mao the revolutionary, but Mao the exemplary official. Tooth powder, for example, demonstrates that Mao was both frugal and conscious that most Chinese people could not afford toothpaste (never mind that toothpaste appeared later in other glass cases). His receipts were presented to show that Mao was abstemious and did not allow waste. Mao’s account books showed his finances were in order, and his letters suggested that he never obtained special favors or jobs for his relatives.

The reinvention of Mao as the good official comes at a time when the public views corruption as one of China’s biggest problems, and it is impossible to open a newspaper without seeing an article on the latest official ensnared in a probe. Indeed, Chinese president Xi Jinping has, in the year since he assumed power, launched a campaign to rid government of “flies and tigers,” referring to low-level officials and those in the highest positions of power, respectively. But while the Comrade Mao Museum tells us that Mao was a good official, it does not explain how to be one today. You can sing red songs, the museum seems to suggest, but for the truly great men of a previous age alone.

Despite the museum’s emphasis on Mao’s frugality and honesty, its entrance hall presents an entirely different image. The hall consists of a room decorated as an imperial palace, including vermillion doors with golden ringed handles, red columns, and colorful brackets. Roped off in the center of the room is an enormous replica of one of Mao’s seals, projecting an imperial stamp of authority.

But perhaps this contrast—between Mao the good official and Mao the emperor—are not as incongruous as they might seem. If Mao was a good official—whatever that may have meant in his times—it was in the context of his position as paramount leader. He did not earn his power through virtuous conduct. Instead, righteousness is the privilege of one whose power is already given, whether it was granted by heaven or seized in revolution.

How Should the U.S. Respond to China's Bullying of American Journalists?

2013-12-19T12:23:00-05:00

Bloomberg News reportedly spiked an investigation into the wealth of Wang Jianlin, pictured above, due to fear that publication would threaten the company's access to China. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

With two weeks left in the year, it's safe to say this: For the foreign media in China, 2013 has been the worst year in decades. And things could soon get worse: As of this writing, only some of the 24 China-based reporters with Bloomberg News and The New York Times have received press cards from the Chinese government, and have yet to receive visas stamped in their passports. Should the visa renewal deadline pass, these journalists will be expelled—and two of the world's largest news organizations will not have a single full-time reporter based in the country next year.

Even if the journalists eventually get their visas renewed, the climate surrounding foreign reporting in China has changed. In November, The New York Times reported that Bloomberg News spiked an investigation into the assets of China's wealthiest man, real estate developer Wang Jianlin, in order to maintain its access to the country. This type of self-censorship exists also for individual journalists, who have an incentive to avoid sensitive subjects that may jeopardize their livelihood.

Within the United States, China's crackdown has forced Americans to come to terms with an unsettling reality: As China grows wealthier and more powerful, it is becoming less tolerant of foreign media. And more broadly, the idea that a developing China would inevitably become more liberal—dubbed the "China fantasy" by author James Mann in his excellent book of the same name—isn't happening.

So what should the U.S. do about it? Washington has rebuked Beijing for its restrictions on media, most notably earlier this month when Vice President Joseph Biden lectured China on the virtues of an open society. But the U.S. has yet to pursue practical measures to compel the Communist Party to ease its crackdown, for two reasons. First, no one can agree how, exactly, to retaliate. And second, it's unclear that retaliation would even work.

Washington's principal retaliatory tool would be to restrict Chinese journalists operating in the United States, a process known as "reciprocity." In recent years, the Chinese government has expanded its media presence in the U.S., employing several hundred journalists in organizations like CCTV and Xinhua. This expansion—and others elsewhere—have formed part of Beijing's attempt to increase its "soft power," defined as a country's influence minus military and economic coercion. The logic behind reciprocity is that by expelling Chinese journalists in the United States, Washington would impose a real cost on Beijing, which would then be more likely to compromise.

In September 2011, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced the China Media Reciprocity Act, a new law that would require the U.S. to issue visas to journalists from state-run Chinese media in equal number to journalists working for U.S. government-funded media companies (like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia) in China. But because the VoA and RFA presence in China is tiny (far more American reporters in China work for private companies like The Times), the act would effectively shut down Chinese journalism in the United States. The bill didn't pass—but earlier this year, Rohrabacher again urged reciprocity in an article for Foreign Policy, with the logic that many Chinese journalists are propagandists and possibly spies.

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However, it's far more likely that ejecting practically all Chinese journalists from the United States—the very people most likely to sympathize with the institution of a free press—would backfire. However, Washington has other ways to retaliate. Rather than issue a reciprocal number of visas to Chinese journalists, the government could target particular news bureaus or else match the percentage of total journalists expelled. Alternatively, the U.S. could revoke visas for Chinese academics, business leaders, or diplomats. (It's worth noting that journalists are far from the only Americans who get in trouble with China.)

For Paul Mooney, an American journalist who had been based in China for 18 years, the issue is personal. Earlier this year, Reuters hired Mooney as a features reporter based in Beijing, but the Chinese government—aware of his reporting on sensitive human rights issues—refused to grant him a visa. In a recent conversation at ChinaFile, Mooney defended reciprocity as the only way to pressure China over its treatment of journalists.

I’m not in favor of limiting the freedom of expression of Chinese journalists in the United States, but if the U.S. State Department also delayed the approvals of visas for Chinese journalists and media executives trying to work in the United States, there’s no doubt in my mind that Beijing would soon get the message, and that Beijing’s unacceptable behavior would stop.

But would this "unacceptable behavior" actually stop? Probably not. The underlying idea—that China bullies journalists because it can get away with it—makes a certain amount of sense, but in practice it ignores how the changing media landscape in the country, rather than old-fashioned chest-puffing, explains Beijing's actions.

First, the rise of Sina Weibo and other micro-blogging platforms has reduced China's ability to control the flow of information, even with the country's increasingly sophisticated censorship apparatus. In July 2011, two high-speed trains collided near the city of Wenzhou, killing 40 passengers and injuring almost 200. Almost immediately, survivors and passers-by uploaded photos of the incident, preventing the government from burying the story. That same year, Beijing watched as regimes across the Middle East fell to spontaneous protests not unlike the Tiananmen Square demonstrations that came within a hair's breadth of bringing down the Communist Party in 1989.

Foreign journalists have covered events in China for many years, enjoying a freedom unimaginable to their Chinese counterparts. But the finances of Communist Party leaders—the issue that landed The Times and Bloomberg is so much trouble—is seen as especially sensitive in Beijing. Official corruption has inflamed public opinion in the country, where the gap between the rich and poor has widened and Party cadres leverage their power to obtain wealth and privilege. President Xi Jinping has cracked down on ostentatious displays of government privilege, but the relationship between money and politics continues to pose an existential crisis to Communist rule. As a result, investigations into the wealth of top Party leaders—even in the English-language press—are considered off-limits.

China's crackdown on The Times and Bloomberg has come at the expense of the country's international reputation, but it seems, as The New Yorker's Evan Osnos has written, that China is less committed to soft power than it once was. As a result, it's unlikely that a reciprocal push against U.S-based Chinese media, while damaging to Sino-American relations, would force any movement on the Chinese side. "We will likely never win a tit for tat against the Chinese government, simply because they are willing to go much further than us," Robert Daly, a China expert at the Wilson Center, told me. "We would be playing the game on their terms." Given their investments in expanding their media presence in the U.S, China would have a lot to lose from reciprocity. But the alternative, Beijing figures, would be far worse.

So the United States faces an unappetizing choice: either pursue a policy of reciprocity that won't work and will probably backfire, or simply do nothing. But however this incident turns out, it's time to acknowledge that media repression in China is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Speaking out against Chinese treatment of foreign journalists, as Vice President Biden did this month, won't coerce the Communist Party to loosen its crackdown. But punishing Chinese journalists for a situation beyond their control not only won't work, but would signal to the world that the American commitment to free speech is skin deep.

Why China's Former Security Czar Is in Serious Trouble

2013-12-18T12:21:00-05:00

This man is in deep trouble. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

Pin Ho, co-author of Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China:

[Zhou Yongkang’s downfall] is the second chapter of the “Bo Xilai Drama”—a drama begun at the 18th Party Congress. The Party’s power transition has been secret and has lacked convincing procedure. This [lack of transparency] has triggered unimaginably huge debates within the Party. Every retiring Politburo Standing member has been trying hard to pick their own successors. Zhou Yongkang picked Bo Xilai as the Secretary of Political and Legal Affairs. There was a hidden attempt behind this arrangement—a challenge to Xi Jinping’s power. Now, the Party is done with Bo Xilai and has started to handle Zhou Yongkang.

Xi Jinping plans to use Zhou Yongkang as a sacrifice in his anti-corruption campaign. If Xi failed to break the unwritten rule that the Politburo Standing members are immune to any legal punishment, his anti-corruption would have no teeth. Zhou Yongkang’s corruption has been well-known and people both inside and outside of the Party hate him. Thus, he has become the best tool to build up Xi Jinping’s power.

Richard McGregor, Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times and former Beijing bureau chief:

Through the fog of factional war that invariably envelopes any top-level corruption investigation in China, we can be clear about one thing if Zhou Yongkang is in fact the target of an official graft probe.

Xi Jinping’s willingness to take on a once-serving member of the Politiburo standing committee will confirm the assessment a number of China experts have already made of him—that he is a singularly powerful leader; certainly the most powerful General Secretary of the CCP since Deng Xiaoping.

Equally, a formal graft probe, if confirmed, will not be evidence of something else being bandied around by some commentators—that Xi is finally “getting serious” about corruption.

Under CCP rules—in which the party catches and kills its own, through its own internal justice system, free of any of the constraints of the law (such as it is)—corruption probes inherently are political decisions. An investigation of someone as senior as Zhou is thus a high wire act, requiring Xi to not only get the support of serving members of the inner sanctum but also the informal council of elders who are consulted on sensitive issues. To secure such consensus, Xi clearly has lots of power, and balls.

Zhou is no small fish. The trail of the investigation so far has walked the world through his power bases—the sprawling province of Sichuan, where he was once the top official; the “petroleum mafia,” once-impregnable fortresses of the big state-owned oil giants, which have deep military connections; and finally in the state security establishment, which he oversaw under Hu Jintao.

I suspect the threshold decision to take on Zhou was made concurrently with the move against Bo Xilai. Bo’s unforgivable sin was to buck the system and campaign openly for a position on the standing committee. Zhou’s apparent support for him meant that Bo’s fall made him a marked man as well. But still, Xi has clearly let the investigators have their head, as evidenced by the detention of various senior executives in the oil industry, and also Zhou’s own son.

Why, then, given the audacity of Xi’s move, could anyone suggest he is “not serious” about corruption?

Prosecutors, and prosecutions, even in democratic systems, can be tainted by politics. But in China, politics trumps all other considerations. Certainly, Xi’s anti-corruption rhetoric seems to have put some five-star restaurants out of business, as state and private businesses cut back on ostentatious entertaining. In Wang Qishan, he has an exceptionally tough head of the CCP’s anti-graft body. But still, there is no good reason other than power politics for why Zhou and his family should be investigated instead of, say, that of the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, or perhaps even members of Xi's own family. Both have amassed enormous wealth, chronicled in detail by The New York Times and Bloomberg News, yet they remain untouchable.

So while we shouldn’t shed any tears for Zhou Yongkang—it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, as the saying goes—let’s equally not pretend Xi is ushering in a new era of fearless prosecution of graft.

A version of this post first appeared at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site.

China and Russia Aren't the Only Major Countries Repressing Journalism

2013-12-17T14:54:00-05:00

Bloomberg News' reporters in China have yet to receive visas enabling them to remain in the country in 2014. (Eduardo Nunoz/Reuters)

While much of the recent attention focused on journalism has been about how to make this venerable trade financially viable in the digital age, as 2013 draws to a close, news gathering faces challenges that money cannot resolve. Governments around the globe are moving seriously to restrict journalism. Here, in brief, are observations about how three of the most powerful nations have been putting pressure on the media.

In China, the attempted intimidation of foreign correspondents is at a level unprecedented in the country’s decades-long ascension to superpower status. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s contempt for a free-wheeling media has reached the point where he summarily shut down the country’s respected state news agency. And, in the United States, the Obama administration has imposed harsh legal penalties on officials suspected of leaking to the press. The policies of the Chinese and Russian governments, reflecting the deeply ingrained, ideological, and political character of those states, represent a tradition of media suppression. But it is astounding to read the extent to which reporters in Washington are being denied access to officials who run serious risks for talking to them.

The notion that actions in the United States could bear any comparison to China and Russia seems inconceivable. Yet the opening paragraph of a report this fall for the Committee to Protect Journalists by Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, was devastating by American standards:

In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.

Yet, for all the disappointment and frustration journalists express about these Obama administration policies, and the dire implications of widespread surveillance of Americans revealed in the documents disseminated by the ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, there is a powerful force pushing back against this restraint of our media.

Ultimately, in the tug-of war with the Bush and Obama administrations over access, the media in the United States has shown that it can withstand efforts at repression. American journalism has a spirit of resilience that can and will defy official efforts to curb its impact. There is also good reason to believe that self-criticism among American journalists, as well as public complaints about shortcomings in coverage, actually motivate reporters to do better work. With impassioned eloquence at this year’s CPJ dinner, Paul Steiger, its long-time chair, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, founder of ProPublica, and deserving recipient of a lifetime achievement award, declared:

We can’t rest. We need to fight hard whenever the First Amendment is challenged at home. We need to speak out, even more vigorously than before when journalists are abused around the world. We need to keep finding more inventive ways to fund and carry out serious reporting. And, of course, we need to keep supporting CPJ.

Amen.

***

China, in retaliation for reporting by the New York Times and Bloomberg News about corruption among families at the highest levels of Communist Party leadership, has so far withheld renewal visas for correspondents in the two organizations and blocked their websites. (Update: Reuters reports that China has given Bloomberg reporters press cards—but not yet residence cards—and some Times reporters have press cards also.) Bloomberg, which has the largest number of journalists assigned to operations covering China among international news organizations—and a major business in its lucrative terminals—seems deeply conflicted about how to respond. One of its best investigative correspondents, Michael Forsythe, lost his job after internal disputes at Bloomberg led to a front-page story in the Times. For now, the Chinese clearly have Bloomberg executives in a major bind—how much can they report before it damages their access and their bottom line? Bloomberg News has the potential to be a truly great and innovative news organization, but its stature is endangered by this test of fortitude with the Chinese authorities.

As for the New York Times, it is hard to imagine the Chinese choosing to shut out the world’s most prestigious news organization. But so far, every effort by the Times to engage the Chinese in talks about a resolution has apparently failed. China’s inclination to bully the foreign media is a discouraging symbol of its central contradiction—a dynamic economy and an authoritarian internal security apparatus—that, for now, is proving to be a shameful throwback to an earlier era.

Vladimir Putin’s abrupt closing this month of RIA Novosti, an official news agency, was a measure of his intention to drive Russia increasingly in the direction of his Cold War–era predecessors. Instead of RIA Novosti, which was regarded as an example of how a state-run news operation could provide reliable, relatively independent coverage of Russia, Putin has established a new media organization called Russia Today (Rossiya Sevodnya). This new agency is led by a crony with a deplorable reputation—Dmitry K. Kiselov, a television host whose commentaries are notable for their vituperative assertions of foreign conspiracies and strident homophobia. Russia Today will now be the dominant voice of the country’s image abroad, while the other state agency, Itar Tass, focuses on domestic news. RIA Novosti’s own description of its downfall said that it appeared “to point toward a tightening of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector.” The headline over a column in the Times by Serge Schmemann, one of its long-time Russia specialists, called the dissolution of RIA Novosti “A Case Study of Rule by Paranoia.”

To fulfill its most important mission, journalism confronts the instincts of official authority at every level—both to shape the way it is perceived by the public it is meant to serve, and to protect its secrets. China and Russia have ignominious histories on that score. Barack Obama needs to do much better than he has in fulfilling his pledge to make this administration a paragon of transparent government. In practice, it is quite the reverse. In his CPJ report, Leonard Downie quoted Mohamed Elmenshawy, an Egyptian columnist and director of regional studies at the Middle Eastern Institute in Washington:

As journalists from Third World countries, we look at the U.S. as a model for the very things we want: more freedom of expression and professionalism. We are fighting for free news and not to be threatened, and when we see some issues here regulating news and reporting, it is bad news for us because usually our governments, especially undemocratic ones, use this as an example in a very negative way.

How Fixed-Gear Bikes Made Cycling Cool in China

2013-12-16T12:30:00-05:00

Natooke, located in Beijing's Wudaoying Hutong, was the first shop in China to specialize in fixed-gear bicycles. (Ines Brunn)

Dozens of upscale bars, restaurants and boutiques line Wudaoying Hutong in Beijing’s Dongcheng neighborhood. Sometimes billed as the capital’s Brooklyn, the narrow alleyway features a nightly mix of hip young locals and foreign expatriates. With its hot pink sign featuring a yellow banana logo, Natooke matched the neighborhood's colorful aesthetic. But its business revolves around a product that, as recently as a few years ago, would have been unthinkable in China: fixed-gear bicycles.

A neatly organized, wood-floored space, Natooke’s walls are mounted with racks of bike parts—everything from frames and wheels to hubs and handlebar grips—in a range of bold colors. Buyers, guided by the expertise of Ines Brunn, the shop’s founder, and her staff of young hipsters, select each element to create a custom-built, fixed-gear bike.

Shops like these are common in the big cities of North America and Europe, but Natooke was the first such business to arrive in China. Today, it’s the epicenter of the youth bike scene in Beijing, and its impact has been felt across the country.

***

Brunn, a physicist by training, first visited Beijing in 2001 and relocated full-time in 2004 for a job with a German telecommunications firm. A long-time cyclist and trick-bike performer, Brunn appreciated the flat, tree-lined streets that snaked around the city. She rode everywhere, favoring a fixed-gear bike she’d brought from home, while most of her fellow riders were perched atop old-fashioned Flying Pigeon commuter bikes or low-end mountain bikes.

A heavy, single-speed bike with a basket attached to the front, Flying Pigeons are an iconic image in China. In the 1970s, a propaganda slogan defined wealth as a “Flying Pigeon in every household,” and through the 1990s the bikes were so common that they became the most popular vehicle of any kind, ever, in the world.

But while other countries developed world-class bicycle infrastructure over the last decade, China’s bike culture stalled. Cars, first made available to private buyers in 1994, became the de rigeur possession for the country’s growing middle class, and in 2009 China became the largest auto market in the world. As more cars hit the roads, Brunn noticed that bicycle commuters were disappearing, and that the city had begun to remove bike lanes.

Natooke founder Ines Brunn demonstrates a bike trick outside of the shop. (Ines Brunn)

“I saw bikes really fading from the public scene,” Brunn told me. Even the Flying Pigeon encountered problems: The company slashed its manufacturing workforce from 7,000 to 300 in the early 2000s. Cycling had become the mode of transportation for old people, or those who had no other options. “The bicycle stood for poverty,” Brunn said.

But she saw potential: cycling had become a trendy, healthy hobby elsewhere in the world, and offered a solution to Beijing’s pollution problem. To encourage Beijingers to ride bikes, changing the image was critical, and the perfect tool for doing so, she decided, was fixies.

“No one cared about health,” she said, “Coolness was what mattered.”

***

Coolness is not something Brunn lacks. At a recent dinner in San Francisco, she performed a series of tricks on a fixed-gear bicycle, riding the bike around in a tight circle while upside-down, backwards, on one wheel, sitting on the handlebars, and standing on the seat. Stunts like these have earned her an international reputation, and she travels regularly to perform in exhibitions and events. So if anyone in China could separate cycling from its stodgy image, it was Brunn.

At first, she tried to recruit other fixie riders to a Beijing Fixed Gear Bike Group. She organized rides and meet-ups and passed out flyers and business cards to everyone she met. But the numbers just weren’t there. “No one was making or selling fixies in China at the time,’” Brunn recalls. Finally, someone told her: “If you want to build a community, you will just have to open a shop.”

In 2009, she did just that, with her business partner Federico Moro, a unicycle enthusiast, juggler, and performer. At first, the duo imported a limited inventory of foreign components for fixies, as well as unicycles and juggling equipment, selling mostly to the city's expats. But in order to make products affordable, Brunn knew she would have to manufacture locally.

She began working with Chinese manufacturers to produce her own “Flying Banana” brand components, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the nation’s most iconic bicycle brand. “My motivation was to get people on bikes,” she wrote in an email, “If it was way too expensive, then hardly anybody would want one.”

But cost wasn’t the only reason Brunn turned to Chinese manufacturing partners. “There are some things which can only come out of such a place with rich history,” she explains. The quality of the manufactured products and the locally-made branding make a big different for Brunn’s key market. “I think more and more people appreciate ‘Made in China,’ as the average quality has gone up,” she says.

***

To promote the fledgling shop, Brunn gave a talk at the first TEDx Beijing in 2009, describing the re-emergence of bike culture in China. “The foreign trend of urban cycling has come to Beijing,” she told the audience.

Natooke has tapped into a market opportunity. Air pollution has grown worse in China's cities, and as a result many young urbanites have embraced environmental consciousness. With China's state-media promoting cycling as part of a happy, healthy lifestyle, bikes are now seen as an eco-friendly choice.

And as Natooke grows, so has the domestic market for fixies. Chinese buyers now make up half of Natooke’s customer base, and the shop has dozens of competitors in the city. Flying Banana products are sold in stores around China, including a second Natooke location in the southwestern city of Chengdu and through the company’s online shop. Wholesale business is booming, too, with sales growing even faster than in retail.

But while Brunn is satisfied with Natooke's success and expansion, she believes the company has a broader mission.

“My motivation is to promote cycling and to get people to understand about bike culture and integrate bikes into their lives.”

A Question for 60 Minutes: Why Would China Want to Destroy the Global Economy?

2013-12-16T10:23:29-05:00

Chinese workers inside a Shenyang factory that exports cameras. (Reuters)

On Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a story about the National Security Agency. It focused in part on the role the NSA plays trying to thwart cyber attacks against the United States. It's good that America has smart people focused on our cyber-vulnerabilities. Foreign adversaries certainly have an incentive to exploit some of them, just as the U.S. and Israel used Stuxnet to exploit vulnerabilities in Iran's cyber-security.

What confounds me is the plot that 60 Minutes presented as one that the NSA has thwarted. In their telling, the agency may well have saved the global financial system from a viable Chinese attempt to destroy every computer in the world!

The transcript shows how 60 Minutes presented this part of its story:

John Miller: Could a foreign country tomorrow topple our financial system?

Gen. Keith Alexander: I believe that a foreign nation could impact and destroy major portions of our financial system, yes.

John Miller: How much of it could we stop?

Gen. Keith Alexander: Well, right now it would be difficult to stop it because our ability to see it is limited.

One they did see coming was called the BIOS Plot. It could have been catastrophic for the United States. While the NSA would not name the country behind it, cyber security experts briefed on the operation told us it was China. Debora Plunkett directs cyber defense for the NSA and for the first time, discusses the agency’s role in discovering the plot.

Debora Plunkett: One of our analysts actually saw that the nation state had the intention to develop and to deliver, to actually use this capability—to destroy computers.

John Miller: To destroy computers.

Debora Plunkett: To destroy computers. So the BIOS is a basic input, output system. It's, like, the foundational component firmware of a computer. You start your computer up. The BIOS kicks in. It activates hardware. It activates the operating system. It turns on the computer.

This is the BIOS system which starts most computers. The attack would have been disguised as a request for a software update. If the user agreed, the virus would’ve infected the computer.

John Miller: So, this basically would have gone into the system that starts up the computer, runs the systems, tells it what to do.

Debora Plunkett: That's right.

John Miller: —and basically turned it into a cinderblock.

Debora Plunkett: A brick.

John Miller: And after that, there wouldn't be much you could do with that computer.

Debora Plunkett: That's right. Think about the impact of that across the entire globe. It could literally take down the U.S. economy.

John Miller: I don't mean to be flip about this. But it has a kind of a little Dr. Evil quality—to it that, "I'm going to develop a program that can destroy every computer in the world." It sounds almost unbelievable.

Debora Plunkett: Don't be fooled. There are absolutely nation states who have the capability and the intentions to do just that.

John Miller: And based on what you learned here at NSA. Would it have worked?

Debora Plunkett: We believe it would have. Yes.

There's a lot of sly hedging in there, but the impression 60 Minutes leaves its viewers with is unmistakable: that China has the capability and intention to destroy every computer in the world, but the NSA stopped its dastardly plot, averting the possible collapse of the United States economy, or perhaps the world economy.

But wait just a minute.

Why would China want to bring about global economic collapse?

As Marcy Wheeler notes:

If that happened, it’d mean a goodly percentage of China’s 1.3 billion people would go hungry, which would lead to unbelievable chaos in China, which would mean the collapse of the state in China, the one thing the Chinese elite want to prevent more than anything. But the NSA wants us to believe that this was actually going to happen. That China was effectively going to set off a global suicide bomb. Strap on the economy in a cyber-suicide vest and… KABOOOOOOOM! And the NSA heroically thwarted that attack. That’s what they want us to believe and some people who call themselves reporters are reporting as fact.

Let's take a closer look at one particular exchange in that segment:

John Miller: I don't mean to be flip about this. But it has a kind of a little Dr. Evil quality—to it that, "I'm going to develop a program that can destroy every computer in the world." It sounds almost unbelievable.

Debora Plunkett: Don't be fooled. There are absolutely nation states who have the capability and the intentions to do just that.

There isn't any hedging there.

The NSA employee is saying there are multiple nation-states that have both the capability and the intention to destroy every computer in the world. Which countries? As noted, it seems incredible to suggest that China has that intention. It seems less crazy to imagine North Korea wanting to destroy every computer on earth ... and highly unlikely that they have the capability. Who has the capability and the intention?

Again, there are plenty of plausible cyber-warfare scenarios that are worrisome, and it's perfectly plausible that the NSA is doing good work to protect us from some of them. But 60 Minutes seems awfully credulous in the way they've presented this example. If there really are multiple countries that have the intention of destroying every computer on earth, and the ability to do so, perhaps that should've been the lead of the story rather than an example given in passing!

A Coming Golden Age for American Companies in China?

2013-12-13T15:11:30-05:00

Will recent reforms—and a new treaty—make it easier for U.S. firms to compete in China? (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

At the recent Third Plenum political gathering, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made headlines around the world by committing to a greater role for the market and for competition in China’s government-directed economy. Whether and when the Party will translate that rhetoric into reality is a critical question for the future. But a vital related question is this: Will the Party allow American companies to compete—freely and fairly—in China?

In its Plenary announcement, the CCP said that in the future the market should have a “decisive” role in resource allocation, instead of a “basic” role as set forth in past Party pronouncements. Though seemingly innocent, this linguistic shift was, in fact, a big deal—and possibly even radical. In an important related point, the Party also indicated that market reforms would constrain the powerful State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) which are subsidized, promoted and controlled by the Chinese government. Private Chinese businesses will be allowed to compete more directly against SOEs and to help reform them, and management of these companies will be made more professional and separated from government.

The potential for American companies to compete more freely in China is a fundamental issue in a related Chinese government action: on-going negotiation of a China-U.S. Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). In theory, this treaty would allow U.S. companies to invest with fewer restrictions in a much broader range of important Chinese industries, such as autos, financial services, transportation, chemicals and energy. It would also diminish Chinese favoritism for domestic businesses, especially the SOEs. The U.S. would reciprocate by allowing greater Chinese investment in American sectors and companies, unless clear U.S. national security interests were threatened.

Although there are many obstacles to the BIT, the newly announced Chinese market reforms improve its prospects. An influential segment of the CCP now believes that market pricing and competition will accelerate the innovation needed to sustain economic growth and liberty, both considered integral in avoiding political instability. This is a new form of an old strategy: Use growth to satisfy the people, suppress broad movements for more accountable government, and maintain CCP control. And competition, innovation and growth in the economic sphere would be more robust with unconstrained international—not just Chinese—players operating in the nation’s economy.

This is why, before the Third Plenum reforms, China and the U.S. in July announced a breakthrough in the BIT after five years of stalled talks. First, China agreed, in theory, that U.S. companies investing in China would be treated like Chinese investors, with impediments for foreigners lessened or removed. Second, China agreed that “non-discrimination” for foreigners would apply in all sectors of the economy, unless China negotiated exceptions such as the defense industries. And, in related action, China and the EU have recently announced an agreement to negotiate their own Bilateral Investment Agreement.

In addition to treating all investors the same, the BIT deals with other key issues that concern foreign investors in China. It could, for example, protect against expropriation of assets, assure fair payment if expropriation occurs, allow transfer of investment funds into a country without delay, give investors the rights to select foreign country management using market rates of exchange, and direct disputes to international arbitration. A completed treaty could also restrict performance requirements like local content, mandated technology transfers, or export quotas that manipulate markets.

The motives for such an investment agreement are clear on both sides. China, which invests about $5 billion a year in the United States, nonetheless faces opposition on many proposed U.S. investments or acquisitions. While Lenovo can buy IBM’s computer business and Shuanghui can acquire Smithfield Foods, the U.S. has stymied deals involving Chinese purchases of, or investments in, American oil companies, wind entities, and telecommunications businesses. U.S. companies, which spend about $50 billion on foreign direct investment in China per year, nonetheless face a daunting array of regulatory restrictions, political risks and unfair competition from Chinese corporations, especially the SOEs.

***

But the barriers to the China-U.S. BIT are major—and, in the short term, hard to overcome. In China, there is growing suspicion of “national champion” enterprises (especially the SOEs) against international companies as well as growing strains of broader nationalism. There is also great uncertainty about the shape and pace of the new reform, due, in part, to the possibility that market freedoms will lead for demand for the rule of law, a force which can undermine Communist Party authority. Moreover, a whole variety of controversies in other dimensions of the bilateral relationship (such as the recent air-defense identification zone crisis between China and Japan) can impede progress in the negotiations.

Similarly, many Americans are suspicious of China on issues like cyber-security, intellectual property, currency manipulation, unfair competition from state capitalism, and a growing projection of military power and diplomatic leverage in the region. Some of the most suspicious voices reside in the Senate, which most approve any bilateral agreement by a two-thirds vote and must, before that, pass trade promotion authority legislation allowing the President to submit trade agreements for an up or down vote, and disallowing amendments on Capitol Hill. Such legislation has historically undergirded successful international trade talks since other nations don’t want to negotiate twice—once with the executive and then with Congress.

The specific hard issues in the BIT negotiation—for example, which sectors are not included, how to constrain SOEs, limiting performance requirements like technology transfers—are thus hostage to the fortunes of the China-U.S. bilateral relationship and the tectonic forces of geopolitics.

Yet, it is possible—if uncertain—that the recently announced Chinese economic reforms are truly a break with the past and presage significant changes in the Chinese economy, especially because they were given such prominence and because President Xi Jinping or Premier Li Keqiang will lead a new economic coordinating unit. And it is possible—and also uncertain—that international competition will have a role in a reformed Chinese economic order.

In addition to the China-U.S. Bilateral Investment Agreement, two other major trade talks involving the United States, but excluding China, are taking place: a EU-U.S. negotiation and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Both talks are driven by the need for more economic growth in the affected regions, but they are also stimulated by a desire to counter China’s economic prowess by agreeing to non-Chinese regulatory and product standards (which will, effectively, become world standards).

As with all trade talks that threaten vested domestic interests, both talks are problematic, with results in the TPP negotiations due, optimistically, early next year and in the U.S.-EU negotiations by the end of 2014. But their existence, or better yet their completion, provides an incentive for China to have investment agreements with the U.S. and Europe.

The mere phrase “trade talks” makes our eyes glaze over. Immediate negative problems—Iranian nukes, the Syrian civil war, disputes over airspace between China and Japan—will always dominate media reports and attention. But the prospects of genuine economic reform in China, a deepening of China-U.S. investment, significant trade talks in both the Atlantic and the Pacific—while slow in process and uncertain in outcome—are among the important, potentially positive developments which we could just as profoundly affect the world in the years ahead as those other, more high-profile perils.

Tibet's Tense New Reality

2013-12-13T12:32:00-05:00

Chinese soldiers on patrol in Lhasa, capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region. (Anastasia Corell)

From nearly any point in Lhasa, capital of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, you can see at least two police checkpoints.

At each one, police officers stand by, wielding a metal pincer devised for handling people who are on fire. The pincers consist of a pole, approximately six feet in length and with a large hook or hoop at the end, and allow policemen to seize burning protestors by the waist or neck. The devices, which resemble an oversized surgical instrument, are intended to deter any would-be protestors by ensuring that they can quickly be subdued and concealed.

Large military trucks drive down the streets of Lhasa in groups of two, often accompanied by armored police vans that double as holding cells. In a city famous for its exotic, otherworldly charm, the police presence is jarring.

Ever since the People’s Republic of China established control over Tibet in 1951, Beijing has viewed the territory as a major security risk due to periodic ethnic unrest. In 2008—the same year the Beijing Olympics served as a symbol of Chinese renewal—an uprising in Lhasa resulted in a crackdown that has left this city in an effective state of martial law ever since.

For foreign visitors, travel to and within Tibet is heavily restricted. Arriving alone is not allowed, and pre-approved tourist groups must present passports and permits in order to enter. At entry points, security personnel—uniformed soldiers and riot police armed with weapons and fire extinguishers—stand on alert and stare visitors down with an intensity unusual elsewhere in China.

Within Lhasa, tourists caught taking a picture of a police checkpoint are immediately approached and ordered to delete it. Even visitors on organized tours attract scrutiny: At the Ganden Monastery just outside of the city, policemen reported our group’s positions to each other on walkie-talkies, unaware that we could speak Chinese. Closed-circuit video cameras—high-tech, 360-degree-view devices mounted on horizontal beams that resemble streetlights—blanket Lhasa’s streets. These, at least, are an improvement over what used to be there: rooftop snipers.

***

The Chinese government claims that Tibet has been an integral part of China since the Yuan Dynasty invaded the territory in the 13th Century. For much of the ensuing centuries, Tibet, though received in Beijing as part of successive Chinese empires, was not subject to the same laws. After the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, Tibet established diplomatic relations with other countries and was largely separated from the turmoil within China until the Communists arrived in 1951.

An unattended checkpoint, with fire extinguishers, at Ganden Monastery outside Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. (Anastasia Corell)

In 1959, following a failed uprising, The Dalai Lama fled across the border to India, from where he has led the Tibetan government in exile ever since. Over the years, as he became an international icon, The Dalai Lama has moderated his political demands: He no longer wants independence for Tibet but simply greater autonomy. Nevertheless, the Chinese media still assails him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,”—a separatist unworthy of Tibetan adulation. Images of the Dalai Lama have been banned in the region since 1996.

The conventional Chinese belief toward Tibet is that the Communist Party liberated Tibetan people from an oppressive, feudal government under the Lamas and, through development, have improved their material welfare and provided them with opportunities in the modern world. Beijing’s investments in the territory are substantial: In 2011, China announced a five-year plan that includes $21.4 billion in infrastructure projects such as road, rail, and hydropower. Tibetans argue that these improvements have come at a great cost to their culture and way of life, and that the migration of Han Chinese settlers—lured by government incentives—is turning once-traditional Lhasa into an ordinary Chinese city.

Tibet’s strategic importance to China is great. The territory is the source of Asia’s most important waterways, including the Yangtze, Yellow, and Mekong Rivers, which irrigate China’s fertile central plain and most of Southeast Asia. It also serves as a buffer between the country and an emerging rival, India. Beijing feels that any compromise with Tibetans would encourage separatist movements elsewhere, particularly among the Uighur population in China’s far-west Xinjiang region. It is essential to China’s domestic security that Tibetans come, eventually, to regard themselves as Chinese.

Police in Lhasa use these pincers to deter would be self-immolators. (Anastasia Corell)

Meanwhile, the Tibetans have grown increasingly desperate. Over the last two years, tensions have led to a spike in self-immolations, resulting in over 120 deaths, and the possibility that people may set themselves on fire explains Lhasa's tense police presence. In Jokhang Square, the physical center of ancient Lhasa and a holy Buddhist pilgrimage site, soldiers carry fire extinguishers instead of guns. At gas stations, everyone must register and report exactly how much gasoline they take, and to which destinations. The government monitors siphoning—after all, it may be a possible prelude to self-immolation.

Religious sites offer little respite. In the dim, incense-filled halls of monasteries, military police in orange fire-resistant jump suits stand against the walls while monks chant in prayer. The monks themselves are not entirely trustworthy—the Chinese government has planted spies disguised as monks in important Tibetan monasteries, while others cooperate with the police.

***

But the dominant aspect of life in Lhasa remains the checkpoints. Some consist of a folding table with two security guards, squeezed in between shops on a crowded street. Others are large pre-fabricated buildings that host teams of Chinese police and are equipped with riot gear including helmets, shields, and fire blankets. Checkpoints on Lhasa’s major roads are surrounded by knee-high spiked metal barriers, protecting the buildings from vehicles.

Leaving the city by car, the checkpoints appear on the highway nearly every half hour. At one of these stops, our Tibetan driver encountered an old friend inspecting papers, a rare sight in a place where authority figures are almost entirely Chinese. Even so, the inspector spoke to his fellow Tibetans in Mandarin. Our guide explained that the inspector had attended college in China—his only chance for a decent job—and now acted more Chinese. “They come back brainwashed,” he said.

In July 2011, now-president Xi Jinping visited Lhasa in his role as vice president, handing out solar-powered lamps inscribed “Celebrating 60 years of Tibetan liberation.” The lamps were a hit in rural Tibet—a region with sporadic access to electricity—and they quickly became known, sarcastically, as “Xijinpings.”

This exchange epitomizes Beijing’s position on Tibet: The Communist Party regularly works to improve the well being of its poorest people. Yet do the Tibetans themselves feel this way?

At the China/Nepal border, I asked a Tibetan friend what he thought would happen to his homeland.

“It will all be gone soon, it will disappear. I think we will all just die out, and there is nothing we can do about it.”