MCLC: China battens down the hatches

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China battens down the hatches
***********************************************************

Source: Asia Times (6/2/12):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NF02Ad02.html

China battens down the hatches
By Peter Lee 

An entertaining ruckus over anti-foreign comments by state-run China
Central Television (CCTV) talk-show host Yang Rui obscures a rather
significant trend in Chinese government policy.

It appears that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is winding down its
five-year charm offensive meant to bolster its international legitimacy
and standing, and is turning inward to focus on pressing domestic social,
economic, and political concerns.

Disturbingly, China has a limited number of effective policy levers to
deal with these issues. The few they have are ugly in conception and in
application resemble xenophobia.

China's economic miracle, typified by the spectacle of the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and the titanic stimulus program of 2009-2010 (which is credited
with forestalling a prolonged global recession), never elicited the
Western respect that the Chinese leadership felt was its due.

With the election of President Barack Obama, the West rediscovered the
impeccable moral self-regard it had forfeited during the George W Bush
years and, instead of acknowledging Chinese regional suzerainty, cobbled
together an alliance to "pivot" back into Asia and contain China.

International policy towards China is inseparable from criticism of
China's human-rights record, its neo-mercantilist economic policies, its
heightened security profile in East Asia, and the hope and expectation
that China will fall on its behind before the West (excluding Greece,
probably Spain, and perhaps Italy) does.

"Soft power", in other words, hasn't won China much breathing space. As
the CCP turns its attention to a fraught leadership transition later this
year complicated by smoldering inflation, simmering public discontent,
slowing economic growth thanks to the dysfunctional eurozone, and a spate
of opportunistic bitching over uninhabited island groups by its maritime
neighbors, perhaps xenophobia is the most effective way for the party to
seize the initiative in the public sphere.

In recent weeks, public opinion has been entertained and inflamed by such
diverse exhibition of foreign misbehavior as 1) an arrogant Russian
cellist putting his feet where they didn't belong on a Chinese train; 2) a
brain-melted foreign tourist trying to undress a hapless Chinese woman on
a busy Beijing street; 3) North Korean "pirates" holding Chinese fishermen
for ransom. 

There was a lot of palaver about what the kidnapping said about the North
Koreans and their possible unhappiness with Chinese criticism of their
weapons testing. Remarkably, there was very little discussion of why the
Chinese media chose to give this event (which, quite possibly, was simply
the most recent of many shakedowns by North Korea's
cash-hungry/smuggling-happy coastal security forces) front-page treatment.

The xenophobic piece de resistance, however, was a May 16 mini-rant on the
Weibo microblogging site by CCTV's Yang Rui, sneering at "foreign trash".

One can safely assume that Yang was supporting the party line on pesky
foreigners. It also appears that Yang put a lot of himself, too much, in
fact, into his 140-character invective, including accusations that
foreigners were shacking up with Chinese women in order to make maps and
send out GPS coordinates to overseas intelligence services (coordinates of
what, Yang failed to enlighten his readers). [1]

What caused Yang's anti-foreign assault to backfire, however, was his use
of the term "po fu" to describe Al-Jazeera Beijing correspondent Melissa
Chan. 

Chan, a well-regarded reporter who had aired pieces on black prisons and
illegal land grabs that the Chinese government certainly found
uncomfortable, was expelled (technically, her request for a visa extension
was refused) in early May.

Yang lumped her together with the foreign trash, declaring:
We kicked out the foreign po fu, closed down Al Jazeera's Beijing office,
so those who demonize China shut their mouths and beat it.

Global Times translated "po fu" as "crazy", which is pretty far from the
mark. The Wall Street Journal translated "po fu" as bitch, which is closer
to the truth, if not quite accurate, and helped feed the expressions of
quivering outrage by expats in China who tweet.

Yang tried to explain that his insulting characterization actually means
"shrew" in English, and he does have a point. "Po fu" started out as a
literary term coined by the Qian Long emperor. During one of his southern
tours he saw two women fighting and said something along the lines of
(adjusting for the dense meaning of individual characters in classical
Chinese), "when you're talking about fierce, unreasonable, and incapable
of engaging in elevated moral discourse, that's women." [2]

In essence, therefore, Yang appears not be saying that Ms Chan was a bitch
(a bad woman). Instead, he was saying that an unfortunate but entirely
predictable manifestation of female shrewishness in her reporting
prevented her from scaling the highest peaks of respectable journalism
(already occupied, perhaps, by certain smugly condescending male CCTV
presenters). 

Sometimes, when you're in a hole, it's time to stop digging.

The furor over "po fu" also distracts attention from the more interesting
question of why Chan's visa was not renewed.

The conclusion of Yang's Weibo blast ("so those who demonize China shut
their mouths and beat it") implies that the Chinese government made an
example of a free-wheeling reporter at a second-tier news outlet in order
to pass a message to top-line media outlets: nettlesome reporting will
have consequences for individual reporters and, perhaps, entire news
operations. (In addition to not renewing Chan's visa, the Chinese
government has so far refused to accept a replacement and the Al-Jazeera
Beijing bureau is, at least for the time being, defunct).

The impression of Chinese xenophobia was also accentuated by the
announcement of a three-month drive to crack down on foreigners residing
or working in China without proper documentation.

Needless to say, it is an unpleasant experience to be regarded as
potential "foreign trash" and go through the degrading transaction of
presenting one's papers to the local police on demand. It is also an
indication that the security system's relatively kid-glove treatment of
foreigners is the latest victim of China's growing political and economic
uncertainty. 

Chinese policies toward improperly documented aliens bear a remarkable
resemblance to laws in Arizona and Georgia that have integrated
immigration policy into police operations largely in response to
xenophobic sentiment and political unease in a deteriorated economic
climate. 

The real issue may not be the outraged feelings of foreigners today; it
may be making the scapegoating of foreign troublemakers, journalists and
otherwise, an available option against the day when the political climate
inside China worsens for the CCP.

If and when bad times come, the CCP seems to have a decreasing number of
tools available to deal with the situation. In particular, there are
sticks available, but not a lot of carrots. This restricted toolkit
apparently applies to dealing with domestic dissatisfaction as well as
pesky foreigners. 

A remarkable object lesson in the financial and systemic hazards of
contemporary Chinese authoritarianism is illustrated by the remarkable
extra-legal detention of Chen Guangcheng and other dissidents.





t takes a village, apparently, to button up a lawyer-activist in China,
and the amounts expended on supervising and harassing Chen - estimated at
over 8 million yuan (US$1.26 million) - are a source of wonder.

What is perhaps an even more remarkable source of wonder is the fact that
variants of this extravagant system are applied to perhaps one million
Chinese that no one has ever heard of. As reported by Charles Hutzler of
AP, hundreds of thousands of Chinese activists, dissidents, miscreants,
parolees, and suspicious characters are kept under intensive surveillance
similar to Chen's. 

The operations are funded by "stability maintenance" funds fromthe central
government, part of the $110 billion the government spends each year on
domestic security and order.

The article recounted the case of Yao Lifa, a schoolteacher who ran afoul
of the system when he tried to run as an independent for a local political
office 25 years ago. The current system of tight surveillance has been in
place for a year or so.

Yao told AP how his surveillance is managed, including a significant
outsourcing to gym teachers in the school he used to teach at:

<<Anywhere from 14 to 50 people a day are on the local government payroll
for his round-the-clock surveillance - what he calls the "Yao Lifa special
squad". They get 50 yuan, $8, for a day shift and twice that for night
work. Often, he said, hotel rooms, transport, meals and cigarettes are
thrown in. 

The sums add up in Qianjiang, a city of struggling factories and one
million people set in the center of the country. Basic pay runs about
1,000 yuan, or $160, a month for an entry-level teacher and goes to three
times that amount for a veteran, Yao said.

"This isn't bad for teachers," said Yao. "An English teacher probably
wouldn't take it. They can earn extra money giving private tutoring. But
gym teachers can't do the tutoring. Besides, their superiors have told
them to do this. They can't not do it." Š

He said he heard the school and education bureau were arguing over $48,000
for his surveillance.

"I have many acquaintances. Some of them work in police stations," Yao
said. "They tell me 'Really we could use a Yao Lifa. If we had one, we
could make more money.'">>[3]

According to Hutzler, an article in Caijing reported on a village in south
China in which a quarter of the local government personnel were on the
stability payroll. 

This would appear to be more than "stability maintenance". It's a form of
central government support to shore up the finances and legitimacy of the
local government, ie, the local communist apparatus.

Call it CCP welfare, or "workfare". Well, maybe call it "goonfare."

It is, to put it mildly, not a good thing for the CCP when the local face
of the party is a crew of musclemen hassling schoolteachers. To add to the
problem, and the perception, for many local officials, the temptation to
graft off the imperfectly supervised "stability maintenance" funds is
reportedly irresistible.

Now that this system is in place, it is difficult to see how the central
government can abolish it - unless, in addition to howls of protest from
local cadres, it is interested in dealing with a surge of local unrest and
disgruntled petitioners, and a legal system that is not up to the task of
protecting the rights and serving the aspirations of its citizens.

The fundamental problem is that, contrary to the party's hopes, breakneck
economic growth over the last decade has not translated into an outpouring
of gratitude or support for the Chinese Communist Party. "Socialism with
Chinese characteristics", like another triumphant economic system we all
know and love, has inequality built into it.

In Western capitalism, the power of the "1%" is diffused, anonymous,
entrenched in every institution, and embedded in every political party.
Even after the colossal rich man's cock-up of the 2008 financial crisis,
for instance, 99% of Americans were unable to summon up the united
political will to confront Wall Street, let alone engage in a satisfying
politico-economic jacquerie against the moneyed elite.

However, in China, the political problem is much more severe, because
inequality clearly benefits party members - and princelings within the
party - disproportionately. Overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth,
that scorecard of economic success that infatuates state planners, foreign
businesses, and economists alike is, for China, a two-edged sword, since
it ineluctably widens the perceived income and social justice gap.

Therefore, there is a lot of anxiety inside and outside the party about
closing the wealth and justice gap ranging from traditional command
economy nostrums like subsidized housing to fancy free-market panaceas
such as reforming the pampered, cash-rich state run corporations through
private corporate competition and public wealth sharing through increased
stock ownership. 

In fact, it would be useful to consider that China is now trying to turn
away from macro-economic management of the economy, with its implication
of passively waiting for the tide to lift all boats, to politically
targeted financial and investment policy meant to selectively grow
vulnerable sectors of the economy at the expense of industries and
institutions that have emerged as political liabilities.

However, these solutions don't go very far in addressing the
disgruntlement that suffuses Chinese society like a toxic fog: the idea
that Chinese wealth creation is primarily an exercise by which the CCP
enriches and entrenches itself.

It's not easy - or perhaps even feasible - to remove the dead hand of the
party from economic and political life, or from the consciousness of the
Chinese citizenry under the current system.
Things are less than ideal even after - and, to some extent because of - a
decade of rampant growth. Now, of course, China is looking at a period of
slowed growth as a matter of policy as well as necessity, one that will
presumably leverage even greater perceived economic and social injustice
onto the shoulders of the resentful Chinese citizenry.

The West's faltering effort to free itself of the incubus of its failed
economic policies means a eurozone crisis and bad news for China's export
economy. At the same time, China is still dealing with the inflation and
real-estate bubble hangover from its massive 2009-10 stimulus and cannot
risk fueling inflation by dumping a lot of money into the economy.

If the CCP finds itself unable to finesse the looming economic and
political crisis through a savvy combination of political and economic
policies, the alternative - a bout of xenophobia and domestic repression
that reveal the party in its least attractive light both to the world and
its citizens - is not going to be pretty.

Notes
1. CCTV host Yang Rui: Arrest foreign thugs, shut up those who demonize
China and send them packing
<http://shanghaiist.com/2012/05/19/cctv-yang-rui-foreign-thugs.php>,
Shanghaiist, May 19, 2012.

2. Click here <http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E6%B3%BC%E5%A6%87> for the text
(in Chinese).

3. Watching dissidents is a booming business in China
<http://news.yahoo.com/watching-dissidents-booming-business-china-140236692
.html>, Yahoo! News, May 28, 2012.

Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection
with US foreign policy.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.