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Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread

China and Pakistan need one another, but it's an unhealthy relationship.

Neither "likes" the other. The Chinese, correctly in my opinion, see Pakistan as a hotbed of Islamic extremism and a source of support for the separatist movement (often described as a terrorist movement) in Xinjiang Province. But, Pakistan helps to keep India focused on its own backyard and, the Chinese hope, prevents it from effectively countering China's moves in the region they share. Pakistan knows that China looks down on it as a third rate, uncultured, client state ... and the Pakistanis resent it. There's little real mutual benefit in the relationship; it's based on the deeply flawed notion that the enemy of my enemy is, de facto, my friend. (Sometimes that's true, it's even quite often true, but it is far from be axiomatic.)

But, in Pakistan's favour: it occupies an important geo-strategic position in so far as China's ambitions are concerned: it is on the two of the three silk road paths from China to Europe and it can provide a good deep water port at Gwadar. In China's favour it can provide Pakistan with the financial and technological resources it needs to escape the downward spiral of Islamism ... something I think (just hope?) many (just some?) in leading positions in the military and the bureaucracy recognize as being tghe biggest threat to Pakistan's future.
 
The leaders in Beijing vowing no concessions over Hong Kong's electoral blueprint...a move they may regret as Hong Kongers may get more restless:

Reuters

Hong Kong unveils electoral reform package, vows no compromise

By Clare Baldwin and James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The Hong Kong government gave lawmakers their first look on Wednesday at a long-awaited electoral blueprint for selecting the city's next leader, a plan that reflects China's desire for a tightly controlled poll despite calls for more democracy.

(...SNIPPED)

The blueprint for the proposal that the public vote on two or three candidates pre-selected by a 1,200 member pro-Beijing nominating committee was first outlined by China's parliament,
the National People's Congress, last August.

The Hong Kong government stood by that blueprint, offering no concessions to win over democratic lawmakers who have vowed to veto it when the government seeks formal approval.

The opposition camp holds a one-third veto bloc, but Beijing-backed Leung said he remained hopeful that four or five democrats could be persuaded to change their minds.

(...SNIPPED)
 
Hong Kong deserves complete and total autonomy
China didn't win the first time, what makes them think they can win round 2?
 
The current, print edition of Foreign Affairs is focused on China.

MJ_Cover2.jpg


There are several good articles and I'm going to post an introductory essay and a couple of ones I enjoyed under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the May/June 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143456/gideon-rose/china-now
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China Now

By Gideon Rose
FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

When is an anticorruption campaign not just an anticorruption campaign? When it might be a harbinger of a regime’s approaching developmental crisis.

China’s extraordinary advances in recent decades have dragged the country up from totalitarian poverty to middle-income authoritarianism. The scale and speed of this transformation rank it as one of the great events in human history. But Beijing has now picked most of the low-hanging fruit of modernization, leaving it the unenviable task of trying to reach the upper branches of the tree without falling. So we decided it was time for a deep dive on China’s condition today, and have put together a great package with seven authoritative articles on the country’s politics, economics, demographics, national identity, corruption, and racial and ethnic tensions.

The authors—all top experts, most of them Chinese—have different perspectives, and some are more optimistic than others. But collectively, they paint a picture of a country bumping up against the classic challenges of the middle phases of development, pretty much across the board. China’s existing institutions seem unlikely to be able to manage the country’s problems for too much longer, yet Beijing seems unlikely to adopt the reforms that could help because they would threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. President Xi Jinping’s signature anticorruption campaign emerges throughout as the epitome of the situation—the regime’s attempt to deal (and be seen to deal) with some of the country’s major problems, but one that will have a hard time achieving its ambitious goals.

There is plenty of evidence here to support the view that China’s next decade will be a turbulent one: that the anti­corruption campaign, adopted as a sort of strong medicine to cure the communist regime’s ills, will in fact only hasten the patient’s demise, by heightening the contradictions within the elite.

But there is also evidence to support the view that the regime may be able to muddle through for quite a while. Xi and his government have plenty of assets as well as liabilities, including support from the mass public and key elite factions, vast foreign exchange reserves, a protected currency, control of the banking system, smart technocrats, a large real economy, and the absence of any significant opposition movement.

And it’s possible that the likeliest scenario will be neither crisis nor resilience but rather an eventual gradual political evolution, like those of other former authoritarian regimes dominated by a single party, such as Mexico or Taiwan.

Whatever China’s future holds, it should be fascinating to watch the drama play out. This package provides an accurate snapshot of the situation today—and the material to form educated guesses about what will come next.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143336/hu-angang/embracing-chinas-new-normal
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Embracing China's "New Normal"
Why the Economy Is Still 
on Track

By Hu Angang

FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

It is clear by now that China’s economy is set to slow in the years to come, although economists disagree about how much and for how long. Last year, the country’s GDP growth rate fell to 7.4 percent, the lowest in almost a quarter century, and many expect that figure to drop further in 2015. Plenty of countries struggle to grow at even this pace, but most don’t have to create hundreds of millions of jobs over the next decade, as China will. So understandably, some experts are skeptical about the country’s prospects. They argue that its production-fueled growth model is no longer tenable and warn, as the economist Paul Krugman did in 2013, that the country is “about to hit its Great Wall.” According to this view, the question is not whether the Chinese economy will crash but when.

Such thinking is misguided. China is not nearing the edge of a cliff; it is entering a new stage of development. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called this next phase of growth the “new normal,” a term that Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of the global investment firm PIMCO, famously used to describe the West’s painful economic recovery following the 2008 financial crisis. But Xi used the phrase to describe something different: a crucial rebalancing, one in which the country diversifies its economy, embraces a more sustainable level of growth, and distributes the benefits more evenly. The new normal is in its early stages now, but if Beijing manages to sustain it, China’s citizens can count on continued growth and material improvements in their quality of life. The rest of the world, meanwhile, can expect China to become further integrated into the global economy. The Chinese century is not at the beginning of the end; it is at the end of the beginning.


FOLLOWER TO LEADER

Understanding China’s new normal requires some historical context. As a latecomer to the modern economy, China has followed what one could call a “catch-up growth” model, which involves rapid economic growth following years of lagging behind. From 1870 to 1913, for example, the U.S. economy followed precisely this path, growing at an average rate of four percent. Between 1928 and 1939, Russia’s GDP grew at an average rate of 4.6 percent. And from 1950 to 1973, Japan’s economy grew at an average rate of 9.3 percent. Yet none of those countries came close to matching China’s record from 1978 to 2011: an average GDP growth rate of nearly ten percent over 33 years.


This ascent has helped China’s economy approach, and perhaps even surpass, that of the United States. In terms of purchasing power parity, a measure economists use for cross-country comparisons, China’s GDP surpassed that of the United States in 2010 or 2014, depending on whether one relies on historical statistics from the Maddison Project or data from the World Bank’s International Comparison Program. Yet if one relies on the World Bank Atlas method, China’s economy won’t likely outgrow the United States’ until 2019. And China’s GDP still trails that of the United States if calculated using current U.S. dollars. But the best method for comparing the two economies objectively is power generation, since it is physical and quantifiable. It also closely tracks modernization; without electricity, after all, or at least without a lot of it, one can’t run factories or build skyscrapers, which is exactly what China has been doing. In 1900, China generated 0.01 percent of the power the United States did. That figure rose to 1.2 percent in 1950 and 34 percent in 2000, with China surpassing the United States in 2011. In this respect, China has caught up.


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China’s rise has also brought massive benefits to the country’s population, although here there is obviously much more to be done. With a population more than four times as large as that of its closest economic competitor, China won’t likely match even half the United States’ GDP per capita until around 2030. To be sure, the country has made major strides in other areas. Its average life expectancy (around 76 years) is nearing the United States’ (around 79 years). Educational levels in the two countries are comparable. And measured by the Gini coefficient, economic inequality in China may now be lower than it is in the United States. Yet since 1979, most of the windfall from China’s rise has accrued mainly to those who live in urban or coastal areas. Realizing Beijing’s ultimate development goal—“common development and common prosperity”—will require not only more sustainable growth but also more evenly distributed gains.


SLOWER BUT STEADIER

To a certain extent, China’s latest slowdown was inevitable. Three decades of breakneck growth have left China with an economy that is simply massive, making marginal increases in size all the more difficult. Even measured using current exchange rates, Chinese GDP exceeded $10 trillion in 2014, which means that growing by ten percent would amount to adding $1 trillion to the economy after one year, a sum greater than the entire GDP of Saudi Arabia, which is among the world’s largest economies. Growth on this scale was bound to become unsustainable at some point. It essentially requires an unlimited supply of energy and puts enormous stress on the environment. China already emits more carbon into the atmosphere than the United States and the EU combined, and its emissions are still increasing.


Given all this, China has little choice but to pare back. Although a seven percent growth rate is still high in comparison to most economies of the world, it will reduce China’s demand for basic inputs, whether coal or clean water, to more manageable levels. It will also allow China to finally address its contribution to global climate change, in part by making good on the U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change, a 2014 agreement that requires China to begin reducing its carbon emissions by no later than 2030. Thanks to slower growth and a host of new energy-conservation policies, China will likely reach that target well ahead of time.


Beijing’s shift toward the new normal has already begun, and so far, the results are impressive. Consider its 12th five-year plan, which was approved in 2011 and will run through 2015. Despite the plan’s unfolding in a time of declining growth, five of its goals have strengthened the economy and improved the lives of Chinese citizens. The first was a commitment to creating 45 million new jobs in urban areas. Beijing has already exceeded the target, creating over 50 million jobs in the country’s cities, a feat that stands in stark contrast to the unemployment crises in the United States and Europe during the same period. The second involved economic restructuring, calling for the expansion of the country’s service sector from 43 percent of GDP in 2010 to just over 48 percent in 2014; in this case, too, the government has already hit its target, diversifying the economy and boosting employment in the process. The third objective, an emphasis on scientific innovation, mandated an increase in state funding for research and development from 1.75 percent of GDP in 2010 to 2.20 percent in 2015. Again, Beijing has hit its mark, turning the country into the world’s second-largest funder of research and development. (The investment is already paying dividends: in 2012, less than three decades after China passed its first patent law, nearly 50 percent more patent applications were filed in China than in the United States.) The fourth priority was social welfare, including an expansion of the health-care system, which now covers more than 95 percent of China’s total population. The last emphasized conservation. It called for improvements in eight environmental indicators, such as the share of nonfossil fuels that make up primary energy consumption and the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in proportion to GDP.


The plan’s growth targets, meanwhile, were relatively modest by China’s standards. The central government set a goal of seven percent GDP growth and aimed to double per capita GDP by 2020 compared with the 2010 level. These targets sent a clear signal, especially to state governments that look to Beijing for guidance: when it comes to growth, focus on quality, not quantity.


The average income in urban areas is still more than twice as large as that in rural regions, but the gap is set to decrease in the coming years—a development that will boost domestic consumption and drive continued GDP growth. Of course, China’s relative slowdown will also pose difficult challenges, particularly in the realm of job creation and food production, where growth rates will likely slow. But this is the cost of structural transformation, and it is a price well worth paying to carry the country forward.


GLOBAL GAINS


The new normal won’t be limited to its effects on China itself: by rebalancing its domestic economy, the country will take on an even greater role abroad. China is already the world’s largest contributor to global growth, and if its economy continues expanding at a rate of around seven percent, the country will likely remain, in terms of purchasing power parity, the most important force driving global growth. From 2000 to 2013, China was responsible for nearly 23 percent of global growth (the United States contributed almost 12 percent). My own forecasts suggest that this figure will increase to 25 percent before 2020, helping keep global growth rates above three percent.


In trade, too, China is already the world’s leader, and it will continue its upward trajectory. According to the International Monetary Fund’s Direction of Trade Statistics database, it is the largest source of trade for some 140 countries, and its trading activities accounted for some 13 percent of the world’s total growth from 2000 to 2012. But if Beijing wants to raise domestic consumption and reduce China’s dependence on exports, it will have to open China’s borders, by cutting tariffs, encouraging Chinese companies to expand internationally, establishing more free-trade zones, and increasing its trade in the service sector. And to attract more foreign investment, Beijing will have to deliver on basic reforms, such as capital account liberalization, which involves easing restrictions on money flows across the country’s borders, and the creation of a so-called negative list, a single document that indicates which sectors of the economy are not open to foreign investment, signaling that all the others are.


China is poised to make greater contributions in the realm of ideas as well. The country is now among the world’s largest generators of intellectual property; from 2000 to 2012, inventors in China were responsible for nearly 62 percent of the growth in the world’s patent applications (inventors in the United States contributed to around 25 percent). And as part of its new commitment to innovation, Beijing will likely adopt stricter intellectual property protections and encourage Chinese companies to apply for international patents and disseminate new technologies, especially to developing countries.


The more integrated China’s economy becomes, the more it will act as a global stabilizer, just as it did following the 2008 financial crisis. It was Beijing’s aggressive stimulus plan that arguably contributed the most to the global recovery after the crisis hit. By ensuring that China kept its growth rate at over nine percent, Beijing helped turn negative global growth positive. China will continue to serve this role moving forward, but it will also act through more formal channels, mainly international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to reform the international financial order in ways that benefit developing countries.


As China increases its economic lead, it will inevitably be called on to assume greater global responsibilities. But in many ways, Beijing is already stepping up, knowing full well that the success of China’s next stage of development depends as much on the wider world as it does on China itself. China can’t thrive without a balanced, rules-based global order, and so the country will continue to advocate for the liberalization of trade, the end of protectionism everywhere, regional cooperation, and a system of global governance more representative of developing countries. The new normal, in this sense, is about building a China strong enough not only to hold its own but also to help others.
 
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Generation Xi: students at a Confucian temple in Nanjing, August 2009 (Reuters / Jeff Xu)[/img]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143333/perry-link/what-it-means-to-be-chinese
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What It Means to Be Chinese
Nationalism and Identity in Xi’s China

By Perry Link

FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

What does it mean to be Chinese? A strong tradition in premodern China held that it meant thinking, behaving, and living in a society in accord with heaven-sanctioned principles exemplifying the best way to be human. Other peoples could learn this Chineseness, and they could also become civilized, but they could never rival China in either defining propriety or drawing people into accordance with it.

For centuries, this way of thinking went largely unchallenged, and even today, its fundamental assumptions run deep. To be Chinese still means to exhibit proper behavior and to be part of a civilization that has primacy in the world. Most modern Chinese would accept this, at least tacitly. Where they would disagree—often sharply—is over just what values Chineseness should stand for today. Is the moral model of premodern times still relevant in the modern political context, or should it be displaced by newer ideas of political morality? Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” is best understood as a backward-looking answer to the question. But in spite of his wishes, the debate will continue, and it could contribute to instability and even violence in the coming decades. 


OLD SCHOOL

Traditional Chinese family values, often called “Confucian,” were deeply ethical, although not egalitarian. A father had authority over a son, and the son was bound to obey. But the father was bound, too: he had to be a proper father, treating his son as a father should, and could be held up to public scorn if he did not. 


Political norms were based on the family model. A ruler had absolute authority over his subjects but was morally bound to treat them properly. If he did not, they could flee or rebel, and the ruler might lose his “heavenly mandate” to rule. And how could rulers learn what proper treatment of subjects was? By reading and internalizing texts. Officials at all levels were chosen through examinations in the Confucian classics, the memorization of which was thought to instill a morality that equipped them to be proper leaders.


This system worked, but not always well. Sometimes the exams were corrupted, and sometimes the world of officialdom amounted to little more than routinized bribery—flaws that were clearly in evidence during the mid-nineteenth century. But even with the system at a low point, assumptions about how it was supposed to work held strong. The legitimacy of officials was supposed to be based on their morality, with virtue increasing all the way up the chain to the emperor—the “son of heaven,” whose only superior was nature itself. Non-Chinese peoples who fell outside this system, meanwhile, were considered ethically inferior; their role was to pay tribute to, and learn from, the center. 


The term “Chinese” implicitly meant “Han,” referring to China’s dominant ethnicity. Over the last century, both nationalist and communist governments have tried to counter this ethnocentricity, embracing a definition of “national citizen” that included non-Han peoples as well. This new usage gained some traction at official levels, but in daily life, “Chinese” has continued to be understood, implicitly, as Han. A Han family living in Singapore or San Francisco, for example, is regarded as huaqiao—meaning “Chinese abroad”—even after several generations, but nobody would think to use that term to refer to a Uighur from Xinjiang who has moved to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. In the unlikely event that a Caucasian baby were adopted by Chinese parents and raised in China, the child would not easily be thought of by locals as Chinese. But a Han baby adopted and raised in the United States is normally regarded by both Chinese and American communities as “one of us.” 


Throughout most of China’s history, the traditional moral-political model was able to withstand or absorb outside influences. Buddhism came from India, Mongol and Manchu invaders swept in from inner Asia, and traders from the Near East arrived along the Silk Road and by sea, but the system held fast. Chineseness was too powerful to 
be dislodged; it was the invaders 
who adapted.


The arrival of the industrialized West, however, broke the pattern. When the British, armed with advanced cannons, won a series of starkly unequal battles along the Chinese coast in the mid-nineteenth century, China was shocked in an unprecedented way. Feelings of humiliation grew even stronger at the end of the century when Japan—a “little brother” civilization in the traditional Confucian world, but one that had cleverly learned the Westerners’ tricks—defeated China in another quick and one-sided war. Chinese leaders recognized the need to change, albeit reluctantly, and ever since, their mantra has been “Do what is necessary to rebuff the outsiders—but only what is necessary,” keeping Chineseness intact otherwise. 


One of the first responses by the Chinese to the British cannons was to upgrade their own. But to do that, China needed Western science, and to get that, it needed Western schooling—which meant learning Western languages and traveling abroad. This seemed a slippery slope; the core of Chineseness might fade away. Some Chinese thinkers in the early twentieth century went so far as to call for scrapping the traditional model and opting for all-out westernization. But most stopped short of that. Mao Zedong, for one, used the slogan “foreign things for China’s use”—with China, by implication, retaining its core identity.


Meanwhile, the modern world kept coming: electricity, textile mills, rail and air travel, finance, diplomacy, computers, the Internet, and more. China did not really have a choice about whether to let these things in, even though some of them undermined established patterns. Having to pay lip service to words such as “democracy” while continuing to resist what they actually meant led to hypocrisy. Mao called his rule a “people’s democratic dictatorship” and claimed that it was administered through “democratic centralism.” 


Such language was an attempt to continue the traditional authoritarian model under a fashionable modern label. But other Chinese took the new words and concepts at face value. Early-twentieth-century thinkers, such as Hu Shih and Luo Longji, embraced Western notions of democracy and citizen rights, as did more recent figures, such as the late astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. 


Ordinary Chinese people, too, have moved in this direction; the notion that everyone has rights has spread widely in recent decades. In Mao’s time, simply pronouncing the phrase “people’s rights” in public was dangerous; today, even farmers in small towns organize to assert their rights. The change has been gradual, but it is real.


BACK TO THE FUTURE?


In recent decades, Chinese Communist Party leaders have tried to revive the traditional moral-political model with certain modern adaptations. Xi’s “Chinese dream,” for example, emphasizes wealth, national pride, and obedience to authority. Media and schools stress the idea of patriotism, with “love of country” considered conterminous with “love of the Communist Party.” Ideas such as democracy, human rights, and modernization are mentioned as well, but generally with the appendage “with Chinese characteristics,” to indicate that they have been modified to fit into Communist Party authoritarianism. And a “Chinese model” of development supposedly offers other countries an example of an authoritarian route to wealth and power. 


Underlying all these developments is a vision of China returning to its place at the center of the world, serving as the defining example of how things should be. Yet this vision remains a mere possibility, not a certainty, because strong currents in Chinese society run against it. Foremost among them is the popular perception that the prevailing system benefits a privileged elite more than the nation as a whole. 


The gap between rich and poor in China has grown immensely in recent years, and common people often feel that the wealth of the politically connected elite has been won through graft, repression, and private connections more than hard work and enterprise. Ordinary people see their land confiscated and their savings depleted, and those who resist are bullied by hired thugs. The Internet has made it difficult to keep events of this kind secret, and popular resentment has led to protests, including strikes, demonstrations, and road blockades. Hundreds of them occur every day, forcing Beijing to spend scores of billions of dollars annually on “stability maintenance”—a euphemism for “domestic security.”


On the Internet, meanwhile, there have been recent signs that some Chinese have been moving away from equating the country with the Communist Party. Because Internet censors use filters to track the use of sensitive words such as “government,” regular Internet users have invented sly substitutes. Standard work-arounds for references to China’s rulers have included terms such as “heavenly dynasty” and even “western Korea”—meaning “western North Korea.” Forty years ago, such sarcasm was unthinkable. Twenty years ago, it was rare. Today, it suggests the emergence of new grounds for conceiving of national identity, based on something other than identification with the party.


Xi’s “Chinese dream” stresses party-loving patriotism and materialism, but it does not say anything about the moral treatment of fellow human beings in daily life. This is a major weakness, given the heavy emphasis that Confucian tradition puts on interpersonal ethics. No dream about what it means to be Chinese in the twenty-first century can feel right in Chinese culture if it omits all mention of moral behavior. Democracy advocates who speak of “rights” and “dignity” may be using foreign terms, but they are also answering a very traditional Chinese question about how people should relate to one another. 


China’s rulers surely recognize the lacuna in their dream, but they fear the concept of citizenship because it gives the populace too much autonomy. They want followers, not citizens. This is why they spend so much effort and money pushing the ideas of materialism and state strength, whose shallow appeal has had considerable success. Many Chinese, especially the urban young, have bought into the notion that being Chinese in the twenty-first century means being materialistic, nationalist, and aggressive. Whereas Chinese students of a generation ago admired Western life and values so much that they built a statue, Goddess of Democracy, on Tiananmen Square, today, after decades of government-sponsored anti-Western indoctrination, many see the West more as a hostile rival than as a friend.


LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS

Beijing’s massive domestic security efforts are geared primarily toward keeping a lid on protests by China’s lower classes. But not all sources of contemporary instability are rooted in economic inequality. Power rivalry within the elite, for example, is a perennial concern. Recent factional squabbling has occurred among the so-called princelings (children of prominent revolutionaries), the Youth League faction (allies of former President Hu Jintao), and the Shanghai Gang (associates of former President Jiang Zemin).


Strife among competing factions of the elite differs from friction between the elite and the underclass, but the two levels of conflict can align when members of the elite see opportunities to manipulate popular discontent to their advantage. This occurred in 2009–11, for example, when the Chongqing-based princeling Bo Xilai exploited widespread anger over corruption in order to build support for his attempt to jump ahead of his rival princeling Xi and position himself as the country’s next leader. Bo’s gambit failed: he now sits in prison. Meanwhile, having ascended to the top himself, Xi is using an anticorruption campaign in part to fuel his own popularity and bring down rivals. 


One sign of insecurity within the elite is the eagerness of many to send wealth and family abroad. Many rich Chinese have emigrated in recent years or have at least taken steps to make their future emigration easier; Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and the United States are favorite destinations. The number of Chinese students from prominent families sent to school in the West has risen sharply, as have private Chinese real estate investments in North America. And residents of Hong Kong have complained that maternity wards in local hospitals have become overcrowded because mainland Chinese women come to give birth there, so as to ensure that their babies receive automatic local residency rights.


China’s military bureaucracy is less transparent than its civilian counterpart, but it appears to be just as fraught with corruption and internal rivalries. The danger of military disobedience is indirectly suggested by warnings from civilian leaders (including Xi) against any such actions. 


China has many strong regional identities—in Guangdong, Sichuan, the Northeast, and elsewhere—and patterns of talking back to Beijing, or pretending to obey while in fact going one’s own way, have played out for decades. Yet residents of these regions would have no hesitation in identifying themselves as Chinese; their local actions pose little threat to national unity or the stability of communist rule. The Chinese heartland, therefore, is not in danger of falling apart. But the demands for autonomy by Tibetans, Uighurs, and the residents of Hong Kong and Taiwan do represent a challenge to the official conception of national identity. 


For Tibetans and Uighurs, the desire for self-rule is rooted primarily in differences of ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. For Han Chinese living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the impulse emerges from the past century’s history and politics, which have given them a sense of independent identity. Since party ideology holds that minorities are treated equally and love the motherland, secessionist longings by Tibetans and Uighurs embarrass the authorities in Beijing and pose a threat to their claims of legitimacy. The economic and social success of Hong Kong and Taiwan pose a different sort of threat by making clear, contrary to Beijing’s official line, that Western-style democracy can work just fine with Chinese citizens. 


Beijing’s response to all four cases has been the same, essentially declaring that each area is part of China whether its residents desire it or not. Communist Party leaders have used all four to stimulate nationalist sentiment within the Chinese heartland and to position themselves as guardians of national pride. To hear party officials tell it, the otherwise diverse figures of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, the former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, and the Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong have one trait in common: their desire to “split the motherland.” 


MAO BETTER BLUES

The popular Western view of China 
as a self-confidently rising power is dangerously superficial. The country is certainly wealthier than it was four decades ago, and its military, diplomatic stature, and international economic presence are all much stronger. Living standards have improved, and hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved out of poverty through their own hard work. Beneath the surface, however, insecurity is widespread among everyone from rural farmers to members of the privileged urban class. People fear tainted food, water, and air, and rampant corruption and chicanery sour the public mood and erode trust. The spread of the Internet and the readiness of ordinary people to assert their rights have made it far harder for the government to keep society in line today than during Mao’s regime two generations back. 


Hu, who stepped down as the top leader in 2012, seemed to spend the last few months of his term running out the clock. His successor, Xi, took office knowing that China faced a crisis and that he had to try something different. His response, however, has been to fall back on the familiar revolutionary ideas of his parents’ generation. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was Mao’s confederate in the 1940s and 1950s. He strongly believed that a Spartan, uncorrupt Communist Party organized under a unified command could “serve the people” (in the words of the then-common slogan) and could bring them happiness. Mao later persecuted Xi senior, and the Maoist project failed in spectacular ways. Xi junior observed those failures, but he has nevertheless started to head down a similar path. Since 2012, he has sought to fashion himself as a repeat of Mao—centralizing power, launching anticorruption drives, targeting rivals, and even suggesting a move toward a cult of personality.


This is a dangerous game, for several reasons. Xi is no Mao, in terms of either intellect or charisma, and the society over which he rules is far more refractory than the one Mao dominated. Although Xi’s anticorruption campaign has drawn popular support and hurt some of his enemies, continuing it in earnest will soon require going after his own allies, including relatives and senior military officials, which could produce a backlash sufficient to take down the regime. However, failing to press forward—the more likely prospect—will expose Xi as just another conventional ruler and cause his popular support to drop. In this sphere, as in others, the lessons of the 1950s have limited contemporary utility. 


The scholar Jonathan Spence titled his excellent history of the country The Search for Modern China. The word “search” was an inspired choice. For nearly two centuries, the great ancient civilization of China has been looking for a way to reinvent itself for the modern era. This process has involved fits, starts, and reversals; it has caused trauma and led to at least 70 million unnatural deaths. 


The key questions today are whether the Communist Party’s project to revive Chinese-style authoritarianism in modern clothing will succeed and, if so, what its effects will be—both on China and on the world at large. Taking both global and local history into account, one would have to bet against success; despite occasional setbacks, the long-term trend toward greater popular participation in politics seems clear. But the Chinese government has pulled off unexpected successes in many areas in recent decades, so it could surprise here as well. If it does—if it can engineer its retrograde political vision at home and export authoritarianism abroad—both China and the world will suffer, left waiting for a vision of Chinese identity more suitable for the present age.

 
Part 1 of 2

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Ethnic minority delegates in front of the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square, March 2015. (Reuters / Carlos Barria)[/img]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143330/gray-tuttle/chinas-race-problem
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China’s Race Problem
How Beijing Represses Minorities

By Gray Tuttle

FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

For all the tremendous change China has experienced in recent decades—phenomenal economic growth, improved living standards, and an ascent to great-power status—the country has made little progress when it comes to the treatment of its ethnic minorities, most of whom live in China’s sparsely populated frontier regions. This is by no means a new problem. Indeed, one of those regions, Tibet, represents one of the “three Ts”—taboo topics that the Chinese government has long forbidden its citizens to discuss openly. (The other two are Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989.)

But analyses of China’s troubles in Tibet and other areas that are home to large numbers of ethnic minorities often miss a crucial factor. Many observers, especially those outside China, see Beijing’s repressive policies toward such places primarily as an example of the central government’s authoritarian response to dissent. Framing the situation that way, however, misses the fact that Beijing’s hard-line policies are not merely a reflection of the central state’s desire to cement its authority over distant territories but also an expression of deep-seated ethnic prejudices and racism at the core of contemporary Chinese society. In that sense, China’s difficulties in Tibet and other regions are symptoms of a deeper disease, a social pathology that is hardly ever discussed in China and rarely mentioned even in the West.


When placed next to the challenge of maintaining strong economic growth, fighting endemic corruption, and managing tensions in the South China Sea, China’s struggle with the legacy and present-day reality of ethnic and racial prejudice might seem unimportant, a minor concern in the context of the country’s rise. In fact, Beijing’s inability (or unwillingness) to confront this problem poses a long-term threat to the central state. The existence of deep and broad hostility and discrimination toward Tibetans and other non-Han Chinese citizens will prevent China from easing the intense unrest that roils many areas of the country. And as China grows more prosperous and powerful, the enforced exclusion of the country’s ethnic minorities will undermine Beijing’s efforts to foster a “harmonious society” and present China as a model to the rest of the world. 


IT TAKES A NATION OF BILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK


Estimates vary, but close to 120 million Chinese citizens do not belong to the majority Han ethnic group. Ethnic minorities such as Kazakhs, Koreans, Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other groups represent only eight percent of China’s population. But their existence belies a commonplace notion of China as a homogeneous society. It’s also worth noting that, taken together, the regions of China that are dominated by non-Han people constitute roughly half of China’s territory and that if non-Han Chinese citizens formed their own country, it would be the 11th largest in the world, just behind Mexico and just ahead of the Philippines. 


Although Tibetans represent only about five percent of China’s non-Han citizens, their struggle attracts significant international attention and is in many ways an effective stand-in for the experience of the other minority groups. Tibetans have long been treated as second-class citizens, deprived of basic opportunities, rights, and legal protections that Han Chinese enjoy (albeit in a country where the rule of law is inconsistent at best). The central government consistently denies Tibetans the high degree of autonomy promised to them by the Chinese constitution and by Chinese law. The state is supposed to protect minority groups’ cultural traditions and encourage forms of affirmative action to give minorities a leg up in university admissions and the job market. But such protections and benefits are rarely honored. The state’s approach toward the Tibetan language well illustrates this pattern: although the government putatively seeks to preserve and respect the Tibetan language, in practice Beijing has sought to marginalize it by insisting that all postprimary education take place in Chinese and by discouraging the use of Tibetan in business and government.


More overt forms of discrimination exist as well, including ethnic profiling. Security and law enforcement personnel frequently single out traveling Tibetans for extra attention and questioning, especially since a wave of protests against Beijing’s policies—some of which turned violent—swept Tibet in 2008. Hotels in Chinese cities routinely deny Tibetans accommodations—even those who can “pass” as Han, since their identity cards designate them as Tibetan. Worse, since 2008, the state has placed new restrictions on Tibetans’ civil rights, forbidding them to establish associations devoted to issues such as the environment and education—something Han Chinese are allowed to do. 


Deprivations of that kind are part of a broader, more systemic inequality that characterizes life for Tibetans in China. Andrew Fischer, an expert on Tibet’s economy, has used official Chinese government statistics to demonstrate that Tibetans are much less likely to get good jobs than their Han counterparts due to the lack of educational opportunities available to them. Even in Tibetan-majority areas, where Tibetans should enjoy some advantage, Tibetans earn lower incomes relative to Han Chinese.


It is hard to know exactly what role racism or ethnic prejudice plays in fostering these inequalities. In part, that is because it is difficult to generalize about the views of Han Chinese toward Tibetans and other minorities; just like in the West, public opinion on identity in China is shaped by the ambiguity and imprecision of concepts such as ethnicity and race. Still, it is fair to say that most Han Chinese see Tibetans and other minorities as ethnically different from themselves and perhaps even racially distinct as well. 


That was not always the case. In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and officials talked about Tibetans and Chinese as all belonging to “the yellow race.” By the 1950s, however, such ideas had gone out of fashion, and Mao Zedong’s government launched a project to categorize the country’s myriad self-identifying ethnic groups with the aim of reducing the number of officially recognized minorities—the fewer groups there were, the easier they would be to manage, the government hoped. This had the effect of creating clearer lines between the various groups and also encouraged a paternalistic prejudice toward minorities. Han elites came to see Tibetans and other non-Han people as at best junior partners in the project of Chinese nation building. In the future, most Han elites assumed, such groups would be subsumed by the dominant culture and would cease to exist in any meaningful way; this view was partly the result of Maoist tenets that saw class consciousness as a more powerful force than ethnic solidarity.


RACISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS


Perhaps the most striking aspect of contemporary racism and ethnic prejudice in China is its continuity with the past. Throughout the many convulsions China has experienced in the past century, there has never been a watershed moment or turning point in Chinese thinking about race and ethnicity. And regardless of communism’s putative colorblindness, racial and ethnic identity was central to early, pre-Maoist versions of Chinese nationalism, which never ceased to influence the country’s political culture. 


Although traditional Chinese thought posited the superiority of Chinese culture, it was not explicitly racist. But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese intellectuals who had studied in Japan—which, during that period, was self-consciously embracing many Western ideas, including some relating to race—began bringing home new, more essentialist ideas about race and ethnicity. Chinese scholars adopted the Japanese term minzoku-shugi (minzu zhuyi in Chinese), which Chinese speakers use today as the equivalent of “nationalism.” But as the historian Frank Dikotter has argued, minzu zhuyi “literally meant ‘racism,’ and expressed a nationalist vision of race.” 


By the 1920s, the question of China’s racial and ethnic identity began to take on greater importance as the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen sought to transform the crumbling Chinese empire into a modern state. In 1921, Sun declared that China must rid itself altogether of the idea of separate races. “We must facilitate the dying out of all names of individual peoples inhabiting China, i.e., Manchus, Tibetans, etc.,” Sun said. He had a specific model in mind: the United States. “We must follow the example of the United States of America,” he said, in order to “satisfy the demands and requirements of all races and unite them in a single cultural and political whole, to constitute a single nation.” 


Of course, at that time, the United States was hardly a paragon of racial justice and tolerance. But in the decades following Sun’s remarks, the U.S. civil rights movement began the process of eliminating legally sanctioned discrimination and reducing prejudice in society. Although racial inequality remains a serious problem in the United States, individual and official views on race have changed dramatically during the past century. 


The story is far less hopeful in China. Although China’s constitution and ethnic autonomy laws create the appearance of progress, there are no mechanisms for enforcing the vision of equality put forward by those texts. Put simply, there is no Chinese Department of Justice or Chinese Supreme Court to which Tibetans can appeal to fight discriminatory practices.


MINORITY REPORT


It is hardly surprising that Han views of Tibetans include an undercurrent of prejudice and paternalism. After all, Tibet came to be ruled by Beijing through conquest. 


One of the main challenges facing Mao’s Communist forces after their triumph in the Chinese Civil War was the consolidation of the central government’s control of China’s frontier provinces. Between 1949 and 1951, Chinese Communists used the threat of overwhelming military force to incorporate Tibet into China. By that point, Tibet had enjoyed self-rule, if not international recognition as a state, for more than three decades. 


From the beginning, racial nationalism played a crucial role in Beijing’s consolidation of control over Tibet. In this respect, Chinese communism mirrored the European colonialism that had dominated China in earlier eras. In 1954, the state formally “recognized” some 30 ethnic groups, including the Tibetans, as minority ethnicities. Over the course of the next three decades, Beijing would add another 18 ethnic groups to that list. Of course, within the borders of their home territories, many of those groups made up almost total majorities.


Beijing spun this recognition as a sign of China’s respect for minorities. In reality, it was merely a step in codifying inequality. The Communist Party deemed Tibetans and most other ethnic minorities unfit for leadership roles and made it clear that it was not interested in including them in high-level decision-making. In 1958, authorities placed the leading ethnic Tibetan Communist, Puntsok Wanggyel, under house arrest, charging him with the crime of “local nationalism”; he would spend the next 20 years incarcerated. And although Tibetans and other minority groups were subjected to (and sometimes willingly participated in) the radical reforms and revolutionary violence of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, they were never offered positions within the party leadership. 


At the same time, the Communist Party began educating the Han majority in a new form of official racism. Ten “minority films” produced by the government between 1953 and 1966 and screened widely throughout the country depicted ethnic minorities as living in harsh, primitive conditions prior to their “liberation” by Chinese Communists. One of these films, The Serf (1963), is still shown today. It features a mute Tibetan protagonist, an unintentionally apt symbol for the way in which authorities in Beijing have sought to silence appeals for Tibetan autonomy and self-representation. Other official efforts to inculcate racist views included museums that distorted Tibet’s past, depicting it as a “hell on earth” and portraying Tibetans as a savage, backward people in need of civilizing. 


For Mao, instituting an official form of racism was not merely a way to justify quasi-colonial rule in Tibet and elsewhere but also a means for shoring up a Chinese national identity that would otherwise fragment along any number of potential fault lines: rich and poor, urban and rural, coastal and inland. Just as China needed external “others”—the British, the Japanese, the Koreans—to rally against, so the state needed internal others to shift attention away from the party’s domination and exploitation of the Chinese people.


End of Part 1

 
Part 2 of 2

CHAUVINISM OR RACISM?


The level of tension in Tibet today rivals that of the late 1950s, when the Chinese Communists forced unwelcome social, religious, and economic changes on the area. Early Tibetan attempts to drive out Chinese forces were forcefully suppressed, but Beijing has never been able to totally eradicate resistance to its control. For decades, the Dalai Lama has served as a powerful symbol of Tibetan self-determination—and as an intense irritant to Beijing—traveling the world to garner support for greater political, religious, and civil rights for Tibetans. Meanwhile, challenges to Beijing’s control have emerged on the ground as well. During the unrest in 2008, nearly 100 protests broke out in Tibet; around 20 percent of them escalated into violent riots, as protesters looted shops, set fire to police stations and government buildings, and attacked security personnel. 


But the 2008 unrest was something of an aberration from the contemporary norm: generally, the central state maintains firm control of the Tibetan Plateau and enforces its rule with a strong military, police, and bureaucratic presence. And rather than produce doubts among the Han majority about the wisdom of Beijing’s policies toward Tibet, the unrest instead encouraged some Han Chinese, including well-educated elites, to embrace a belief in an essential racial difference between themselves and Tibetans, whom many Han people have come to see as inherently dangerous. 


One reason that attitudes and beliefs about race and ethnicity have changed so little in China is the extent to which the state has blocked discussion of the topic through its control of universities and research institutions and through its obsessive monitoring and censoring of the press and electronic communications. Communist Party ideologues and state media outlets occasionally acknowledge racism by referring euphemistically to “Han chauvinism.” But such admissions usually come only in the wake of campaigns to repress dissent in minority-dominated regions. 


Occasional criticism from within the Communist Party has had little effect. In a speech delivered in Lhasa, Tibet, in 1980, the party leader Hu Yaobang explicitly compared Beijing’s Tibetan policy to colonialism and argued that it had failed to live up to communist ideals: “We have worked nearly 30 years, but the life of Tibetans has not notably improved,” he lamented. He called for the state to make good on its promises of autonomy and “to let Tibetans really be the masters of their own lives,” proposing a series of specific measures: compelling some Han Chinese officials to learn the Tibetan language, replacing Han party officials in Tibet with ethnic Tibetan ones, and creating more opportunities for higher education in Tibet. But the government mostly ignored Hu’s ideas; as with other instances of government recognition of Han chauvinism, this foray into self-criticism was short-lived and inconsequential.

GO WEST, YOUNG HAN


Chinese Communist Party officials have long argued that the government’s “Develop the West” campaign, which seeks to increase growth and create economic opportunities in Tibet and other frontier provinces, is the best way to redress ethnic inequality in China. “Development is the foundation of resolving Tibet’s problems,” declared Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2006. But as Fischer, the expert on Tibet’s economy, has revealed, Beijing has directed most of the development funding toward government administration and massive infrastructure projects that surely help central authorities exercise more control but whose benefit to Tibetans is less obvious. Aside from the small number of Tibetans who serve as Communist Party bureaucrats, very few Tibetans can take advantage of such funding and development, since their levels of educational attainment and Chinese-language abilities generally fall below those of the Han workers who arrive from other provinces to compete for jobs. The result is what Fischer has termed “disempowered development,” which marginalizes Tibetans in their own autonomous region. 


Whatever economic improvements the campaign has created, it has also had a counterproductive effect on Han views of Tibetans. Han people often describe the Tibetans as ungrateful for the largess of the central state. As Emily Yeh, an expert on development in Tibet, has written, many Han Chinese tend to see economic projects there as a “gift” to the Tibetans rather than as an instrument of Beijing’s power and control. This perception fuels a view of Tibetans as lazy, unproductive, incapable of managing their own economy, and dependent on the central state. 


MAKING CONTACT

In the context of the current political environment in China, it is difficult to imagine how the condition of China’s ethnic minorities might be improved. The authorities treat any activism or dissent in Tibet and other minority-dominated areas as separatist incitement or even terrorism. And given the fact that Han Chinese citizens themselves enjoy few political or civil rights, it might be unrealistic to hope for an improvement in minority rights. 


Still, there are officials within the Chinese Communist Party and state structures who recognize the need 
for change. One way they could start improving relations among China’s ethnic groups would be to revive the ideas of Hu Yaobang. Beijing should increase the numbers of Communist Party and government officials of Tibetan descent; put Tibetans in real positions of power, such as party secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region; and create a Tibetan-language educational system, especially in rural areas of Tibet. Beijing should also start protecting constitutional guarantees and enforcing existing laws regarding ethnic autonomy, even if doing so requires creating a new administrative or judicial body to hold officials accountable.


Perhaps what China really needs is a truth-and-reconciliation process through which Tibetans and other minorities could safely air their grievances and the Chinese state could acknowledge the abuses of the past. Of course, such an undertaking will be unimaginable as long as China remains a one-party authoritarian state. But nothing currently prevents the Communist Party from simply acknowledging that its policies and practices have failed to bring minority ethnicities willingly into the Chinese state. Such a concession would cost the party very little and would be a significant first step toward improving relations and creating a foundation for a more stable society.


The best hope for change, however, lies with ordinary Han Chinese. If they could see through the Communist Party’s attempts to divide and dominate, then they might come to realize that all Chinese citizens share a similar desire for freedom from government oppression. The U.S. civil rights movement succeeded only after significant numbers of white Americans, appalled by the brutality and inequality blacks faced, allied with black organizations and movements that had been fighting against racism for decades. Likewise, any substantive change in Beijing’s policies toward Tibetans and other minorities will take a similar change in the views of China’s dominant ethnic group.


Such a stark shift might be catalyzed by more person-to-person contact between Han Chinese and Tibetans; according to the so-called contact hypothesis, such interactions make it easier for people from different ethnic groups to overcome their prejudices and fears. Such contact is now happening more than ever before. Owing to the Develop the West campaign, migrant workers now travel to and from Tibet in huge numbers. And since the opening in 2006 of a train line that connects Lhasa to the city of Xining, in Qinghai Province (the first railway to link Tibet to another Chinese region), Han Chinese tourists have poured into the region; this year, 15 million are expected to visit. Meanwhile, even as mainstream Han views of Tibetans have hardened in recent years, a growing number of Han Chinese—especially young people—have begun to demonstrate a sincere and respectful interest in Tibetan society, culture, and religion. 


But those developments hardly provide ample grounds for optimism. Barring fundamental changes in Beijing’s policies, it is likely that ethnic and racial prejudice against Tibetans and other minorities will remain a serious weakness in the fabric of Chinese society.
 
Despite enmity between these two parties that dates back to the Chinese Civil Wars/unrest that happened before and after World War II, the current round of cross-strait overtures continues to have momentum:

Reuters

Taiwan ruling party says chief to meet China's Xi Jinping
Thu Apr 23, 2015 11:10pm EDT Email This Article |

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Chinese President and Communist Party chief Xi Jinping will hold talks with the chairman of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang (KMT) in Beijing next month, the KMT said on Friday, in what would be the first meeting between the heads of the two parties.

Business ties between Taiwan and China have improved to their best level in six decades since Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008. But both sides remain political rivals, with China viewing the democratic island as a renegade province.

Taiwan's pride in its democracy helps reinforce the unwillingness of many to be absorbed politically by China, which has not ruled out force to ensure unification.

(...SNIPPED)
 
The PLA-N preparing for a future amphibious invasion of Taiwan or one of the South China Sea atolls held by neighbouring nations?

Janes

LHD model hints at potential Chinese requirements
Richard D Fisher Jr, Washington, DC - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
23 April 2015

1634440_-_main.jpg

A company-produced model of what could be China's first landing helicopter dock amphibious assault ship. Source: Via CJDBY website

An apparent company-produced model of a landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious assault ship may offer an indication of the configuration and capabilities of such a ship that is expected to be produced for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).

An image of the model appeared on Chinese military web pages on 22 April. A subsequent online search found the same image on a model manufacturer's website with the designation Type 081.

<snipped>

However, for nearly a decade Chinese and other sources have projected that the PLAN would acquire an LHD, with up to six platforms in the class. These would complement an expected force of six Type 071 landing platform

p1634441.jpg

The LHS has three sponsons featuring vertical launchers, possibly for SAM systems. (Via CJDBY website)
 
More news about China's lone carrier:

Shanghaiist

Operational fighter jets loaded onto China's first aircraft carrier

China's first aircraft carrier has become equipped with operational fighter jets, reports Want China Times.
Leaked photographs reportedly show four J-15 fighter jets being loaded onto the Liaoning - China's only aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier's 180 metre long hangar will eventually be able to house 24 jets of a same size as the J-15, a fighter plane which can attain speeds of nearly 3,000 kilometres per hour and is equipped with four missiles.

(...SNIPPED)
 
More to add to China's reclamation activities/"Great Wall of Sand" in the South China Sea:

Popular Science

CHINESE SHIPYARD LOOKS TO BUILD GIANT FLOATING ISLANDS
By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer


This CGI shows one of JDG's floating islands, which is likely the largest 120m X 900M configuration. The floating island can support both civilian and military missions, including supply, landing aircraft and basing of amphibious vehicles.
China, not just satisfied with turning South China Sea reefs into airports, is looking to expand its naval basing activities by building giant floating islands.

The April 2015 press conference of the Jidong Development Group included interesting guests, like this PLA officer. Considering that the first floating island will be based as a deep sea support project in the South China Sea, the PLA could have dual use interests in JDG's technology.
The Jidong Development Group (JDG), a construction company, and Hainan Hai Industrial Company (Hai is Mandarin for ocean) are proposing to build a floating sea base for multipurpose usage, such as tourism, shipping, power generation and offshore fossil fuel extraction. The floating sea base would be based in the South China Sea, for logistical support activities.
(...SNIPPED)
 
This concept looks like Kirkhills conception of floating supply/deployment bases (and seems to be used for much the same purposes). It might actually be a worthwhile project for Canada to look into, seeing as gigantic concrete pontoons are relatively quick and easy to make while building new Canadian warships is likely to be another "trail of tears" experience. With a few of these and a couple of sea going tugs at least we have something to bring to the table when the next crisis arrives...
 
More recent Qinghua/Tsinghua University alumni gaining influence in the party and Chinese govt; the next generation of Chinese leaders after Xi Jinping and other Politburo standing committee members are already positioning themselves.

Diplomat

The Rise of a New Tsinghua Clique in Chinese Politics

Three Tsinghua alums with strong ties to each other — and to Xi Jinping — are climbing the ranks in Chinese politics
.

Since Xi Jinping took power in November 2012, a new Tsinghua Clique has risen in Chinese politics. In contrast to members of the old Tsinghua Clique, who just happened to be graduates of the same university (such as Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Huang Ju, and Wu Guanzheng), members of the new Tsinghua Clique have strong personal ties with one another.

A key member of the new Tsinghua Clique is Chen Xi, executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department. A native of Fujian, Chen went to Tsinghua University along with Xi Jinping in September 1975 as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier student (gongnongbing xueyuan). Chen and Xi were enrolled in the same department — the Department of Chemical Engineering — with different majors. Chen majored in materialization, and Xi in basic organic synthesis. The two reportedly were roommates for three and a half years, and Xi recruited Chen as a CCP member in November 1978.

After Xi became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee in charge of personnel affairs in October 2007, Chen was quickly promoted from Tsinghua University to the Ministry of Education as a vice minister and deputy party group secretary. Chen was transferred to Liaoning as deputy party secretary in less than two years and was promoted again in seven months to the rank of full minister as the party group secretary of the China Association for Science and Technology, replacing Deng Nan (daughter of Deng Xiaoping).

After Xi became president of the PRC, Chen was appointed as the executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department in April 2013, where he controls the Party’s personnel affairs on behalf of Xi.

Two other members of the new Tsinghua Clique are protégés of Chen Xi at Tsinghua University. Both Hu Heping and Chen Jining have had long association with Tsinghua University. Both went to that university as undergraduates in the early 1980s and then obtained their master’s degrees there. Then the two went abroad for doctoral degrees. Chen went to the United Kingdom for a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering, and Hu studied in Japan for a doctoral degree in river basin environments. Hu returned to Tsinghua as an associate professor in the Department of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering (Hu Jintao’s old department) in December 1996. Chen returned to Tsinghua as an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering in March 1998.

Apparently, Hu Heping was closer to Chen Xi. While Chen was party secretary of Tsinghua University, from February 2002 to November 2008, Hu served under Chen in several different posts. Hu was appointed director of the Organization Department of the Tsinghua University Party Committee in November 2002 and was made dean of the Office of Academic Affairs in September 2003.

In February 2006, both Hu Heping and Chen Jining were appointed vice presidents of Tsinghua University. Hu later succeeded Chen Xi as party secretary of Tsinghua in December 2008, and Chen was promoted to president of Tsinghua in February 2012. Five months after Chen Xi’s appointment as the executive deputy director of the Central Organization Department, Hu was transferred to Zhejiang as a standing member and director of the Organization Department of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee. Chen Jining was also promoted to the Ministry of Environmental Protection as the party group secretary in January 2015. Chen Jining was appointed minister of Environmental Protection one month later, and Hu was promoted to deputy secretary of Shaanxi in April 2015.

The three men now have been placed in strategic positions for further promotions. Chen Xi is a good candidate for the position of Central Organization Department director in two years. If he can secure this position, he would be guaranteed a seat on the Politburo and the Secretariat. Chen Jining is a good candidate for a senior position in the State Council and also a good candidate for a membership on the Politburo. Hu Heping also has a good chance to be promoted as party secretary of one of the four centrally administered municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing) and could enter the Politburo in that capacity.
 
S.M.A. said:
More recent Qinghua/Tsinghua University alumni gaining influence in the party and Chinese govt; the next generation of Chinese leaders after Xi Jinping and other Politburo standing committee members are already positioning themselves.

Diplomat
'


This ought not to be totally surprising ... think 19th century Britain and early 20th century America, and, indeed, 21st century France.

Universities in China are ranked: 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th class, and entry is dependent on a rigorous (and, largely, honest) examination system. Above the 1st class we find two universities: Peking University (also know as Beijing University) and Tsinghua which are something like China's Oxford and cambridge or Harvard and MIT. They are magnet schools; they attract (and accept only) the very, very best and brightest. (There's a reason Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard: she's very smart, an excellent student, by all accounts, but she wasn't academically smart enough for Peking or Tsinghua so a prestigious foreign school was thought to be a better choice.)
 
E.R. Campbell said:
(There's a reason Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard: she's very smart, an excellent student, by all accounts, but she wasn't academically smart enough for Peking or Tsinghua so a prestigious foreign school was thought to be a better choice.)

Then there's also those princelings like Bo Guagua, the son of ousted Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, who apparently have the pull and cash to get into Harvard's Kennedy School of government but still live the reckless, party playboy lifestyle typical of such princelings.

One would think with their parents' connections, they would get into "Bei da", "Qing da" or other top Chinese schools, but even the cram schools used by many rich kids to try to get into university apparently aren't enough for them to squeak through the rigorous exams -that are probably as hard as those that tested scholar-official candidates from the Qing Dynasty and earlier.. 
 
My impression ~ and I really need to emphasise that word ~ is that the conduct and privileges of the princelings is a cause (more than just a symptom) of real, measurable dissatisfaction among ordinary Chinese people, including at least some Party members.

Most Chines people, the ones that I know, anyway, including those who are in the Party and who work in the government, want to live quiet, peaceful, productive and (increasingly) prosperous lives ~ just like most of us. Most Chinese people, Party members and soldiers included, are honest, hard working, very family oriented folks who work hard (and honestly) and expect to be treated reasonably fairly. Most Chinese people that I have met expect a certain amount of capriciousness from the government, and they are not surprised when Chinese officials, like their Canadian counterparts, feel "entitled to their entitlements;" but they really want Xi Jinping's attack on corruption to work.

I don't know how far Xi Jinping wants to push the anti-corruption campaign. My guess is that he wants to purge the top levels of the PLA and the bureaucracy (national and provincial) of the supports and allies of his opponents (real, immediate and potential). That guess is based on a hunch that Xi Jinping does not intend to resign at the end of his nominal ten year term in office. I suspect he wants to stay in office for as long as it takes to become another Deng Xiaoping: someone who fundamentally changes China, for the better. My feeling is that a more honest, more transparent, better governed China is part of his "master plan."

I think that cracking down on the princelings, and their wealthy parents, may be part of the larger project; in my opinion it would be a very popular part.
 
Cantonese language could disappear, says UBC linguist Zoe Lam

The Cantonese language could disappear within a couple of generations because of social pressures and the actions of the Chinese government, according to a UBC linguistics researcher.

Zoe Lam says while there are an estimated 70 to 100 million Cantonese speakers around the world right now, the Chinese government's preference for the Putonghua language — also know as Mandarin — is threatening the survival of Cantonese.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cantonese-language-could-disappear-says-ubc-linguist-zoe-lam-1.3053933

BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.

Even Teochew (a much smaller "city" dialect) isn't taught anywhere and there are still millions of speakers in SE Asia and overseas.  If anything, the last line about native speakers' children in Canada and elsewhere losing Chinese altogether to the predominant language in their country is more of a possibility.
 
Dimsum said:
Cantonese language could disappear, says UBC linguist Zoe Lam

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cantonese-language-could-disappear-says-ubc-linguist-zoe-lam-1.3053933

BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.

Even Teochew (a much smaller "city" dialect) isn't taught anywhere and there are still millions of speakers in SE Asia and overseas.  If anything, the last line about native speakers' children in Canada and elsewhere losing Chinese altogether to the predominant language in their country is more of a possibility.


I have a friends who used to teach in a university in the USA but who transferred to a very prestigious private elementary/grammar/high school for a large increase in salary/benefits (the really first class health insurance, alone, was persuasive). She is very well paid to teach Mandarin to the children of the really rich folks in a very rich city ... But her pet project, which she subsidizes from her own purse, is a programme for the adopted ethnic Chinese children of middle class families: she teaches them both language (Mandarin) and Chinese culture so that they understand, as they grow, that, while they are Americans, their genetic heritage is Chinese and they learn that "heritage" from another person who looks like them. She assures me that she is not alone in this project ~ that other Chinese-American teachers are doing very similar things in other American (and Canadian?) cities, probably in Cantonese, too.
 
Dimsum said:
BS.  HK, Macau and the millions in the Chinese diaspora will ensure that Cantonese will remain spoken even if mainland China doesn't.  I wouldn't underestimate the power of the HK media, which is overwhelmingly in Cantonese.

Aside from Cantonese, the other dialect spoken by a lot in the diaspora is Hokkien, or Fujianese (福建話 Fu jian hua), the dialect of China's Fujian province.

The fact that both Cantonese and Hokkien are spoken by the diaspora throughout the world indicates which provinces that most overseas Chinese trace their roots: Fujian and Guangdong (where they speak Cantonese)

Hong Kong used to be part of Guangdong province before 1840s Opium War and virtually all the social media there today is in Cantonese.

Most of the overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, such as in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia speak Hokkien. This includes a sizable part of the Chinese in Singapore.

Because Fujian province is right across from Taiwan, Hokkien actually has some similarities with the Taiwanese dialect spoken by Taiwan's benshengren/本省人.
 
Some China watchers fear this may be the result if Xi's anticorruption drive is "too successful" :

The Diplomat

The Anti-Corruption Drive and Risk of Policy Paralysis in China
Could the anti-corruption drive be encouraging government inaction?


Like it or not, President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is extremely popular among Chinese people. According to an online survey, “combating corruption” trails “income distribution” as the top two concerns of the Chinese public. There are already reports suggesting that the campaign has helped reduce the transaction cost for ordinary people to get things done in China.

But from the perspective of the more than eleven million government officials in China, this also means reduced opportunities to access “grey income” (i.e., bribes), which accounts for 12 percent of China’s GDP. Consequently, civil servant jobs are increasingly losing their attractiveness in China. According to a recruitment website, more than ten thousand civil servants had quit their jobs in the three weeks following the Spring Festival in Feburary. The exodus of civil servants poses particular challenges for the operation of the judicial system. Already burdened by heavy caseloads, high risks, and government interference, judges are leaving in droves. As aura of appeal for civil service fades, China faces growing pains in policy making and implementation.

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