What Do You Think?

[Jojoking]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MJ15Ad01.html


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Is China drinking its own Kool-Aid?
By Peter Lee

This has been a strange and unsettling year for Chinese geopolitical strategists. Like French generals, they seem intent on fighting the last war, even as new challenges appear on their doorstep.

China recently issued a White Paper on "China's Peaceful Development". It revisits the old tropes of the "Chinese way" of apolitical commitment to economic development as the panacea for "win-win" peaceful world progress - and the basis for welcoming China into the world geopolitical order as a key


participant, not a detested competitor.

Peace and development are the two major issues of today's world. Peace, development and cooperation are part of the irresistible global trend. The world today is moving towards multipolarity and economic globalization is gaining momentum. There is a growing call for change in the international system and the world is facing more historical challenges. To share opportunities presented by development and jointly ward off risks is the common desire of the people of the world.

Economic globalization has become an important trend in the evolution of international relations. Countries of different systems and different types and at various development stages are in a state of mutual dependence, with their interests intertwined. The problem is not that China doesn't believe in - or practice - these lofty aspirations. [1]

In fact, while the West has cratered the world economy and blundered into a series of illegal and semi-legal and ill-conceived military ventures that have brought untold suffering to millions of people, the Chinese government has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and hasn't fought a serious military engagement since the disastrous Vietnam incursion in 1979.

The problem is that most of the nations that matter don't, or at least are unwilling to accept a world order that rewards China for its achievements in state capitalism with an important and respected voice in the affairs of the world.

Perhaps the key barometer is the anachronistic European Union arms embargo against China.

At the same time that Greece and Italy are anxiously soliciting economic support from Beijing - and nine years after the West ripped a gaping wound in the Middle East with an illegal war against Iraq and a few brief months after the West armed the anti-Gaddafi forces in defiance of its own UNSC resolution, for that matter - the EU cannot bring itself to end the arms embargo inspired by the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

Sustaining the embargo against all odds in 2005 was one of the greatest achievements of John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations. In retrospect, that may be viewed as a missed opportunity to reset the relationship between China and the West on the basis of the desired Chinese terms of mutual equality and respect.

Now, as China flies stealth fighters and launches aircraft carriers, the efficacy and relevance of the EU arms embargo are even more diminished. But the embargo persists as anxiety over China's rise grows and the West flounders through its self-inflicted political and economic crises.

When it comes to China, geopolitics still runs on zero sum, not "win-win".

But there is more wrong with the Chinese model than its inability to get the Western democracies to acknowledge the global validity of the Chinese economic miracle. The Chinese model itself had its best years when the George W Bush administration was blindly and brutally pursuing hegemony in the Middle East.

Developments in Taiwan, Myanmar, and, of all places, Zambia, send important signals - and they are not merely warning signs of aggressive US rollback under the Obama administration. In each of these countries, China has labored to deliver the economic goods. But in each country, the political system is poised to administer a rebuke.

In Taiwan, Beijing has assiduously attempted to pump up the Taiwanese economy in order to boost the electoral prospects of mainland-friendly President Ma Ying-jyeou. But the perception that China's economic might (and Chinese President Hu Jintao's concern for his own legacy) stand behind Ma (and would not stand behind the government of his challenger, independence-friendly Tsai King-wen ) apparently has little weight in the electoral scales.
China is faced with the distinct possibility that Ma's party will lose the presidency in January 2012, and Beijing will have to write off a considerable amount of political and financial capital. [2]

Meanwhile, in order to demonstrate its sincere desire for rapprochement with the West (and provide the US State Department sufficient political cover to engage with the newly-minted civilian government despite the vociferous complaints of the Free Burma lobby), Myanmar announced it would free some political prisoners and also pulled the plug, at least for three years, on a big, China-funded hydro project, the Myitsone Dam.

The announcement apparently took China by surprise; indeed, it was probably the Myanmar government's intention to leave some egg on Beijing's face in order to demonstrate its new distance from China.

Considering the fact that the project was highly dubious on environmental grounds, was situated in the middle of a tribal war zone, and was supposed to send all its power to China instead of the impoverished locality - and the fact that the US State Department has been working indefatigably to engage with Myanmar in order to wean it from China - it seems that the Chinese government might have seen that one coming.

But it apparently didn't.

And in Zambia, China's efforts to boost the electoral fortunes of the allegedly compliant and corrupt incumbent, Rupiah Banda, with a major inflow of economic goodies came to naught as Beijing's b๊te noire, Michael Sata, came to power on a populist, anti-China platform. Howard French, who knows the region well, reported in the Atlantic:

China's presence is felt almost everywhere in the country nowadays, from the big Bank of China billboard ads that welcome visitors in Chinese and are among the first sights that any passenger arriving at the Lusaka airport sees, to the city's markets, streets, and shopping malls, where Chinese who were all but invisible just a few years ago now abound. The most politically significant aspect of this presence, though, is the high-profile projects that China rushed to complete in time for the election. These include the newly delivered and fully equipped 159-bed Lusaka General Hospital, and a striking 40,000 seat stadium in Ndola.

During my recent visit, the merits of the hospital were touted in exhausting detail every evening one week on national television, and the stadium has received similarly lavish attention.

Zambians ... have been told that China is good for them, notably by their leaders of most of the last decade, and the least one can say in the wake of their vote is that they haven't been altogether persuaded. [3]

French concludes that the Chinese have done a good job of ingratiating themselves with political incumbents, but not a good job of "winning hearts and minds" among ordinary citizens.

Sata won the election rather handily, leading to some over-the-top vaunting by Paul Bonicelli, the Bush administration's man at USAID, in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine. Bonicelli announced:

Zambians send a 20-year government packing and warn the Chinese they could be next. But a larger and more interesting issue is the fulfillment in Zambia, and in the person of the new president, of the idea that Africa should not become prey to a new colonial power, that of the Chinese.

Sata's election represents the working out of the predictions of some observers that if the Chinese, in collusion with dictators and de facto presidents for life, continued to unfairly exploit developing countries, there would be a backlash redounding to the harm of both the incumbent governments as well as the foreign interests.

Those of us who have worked in foreign assistance often heard how unwise we were to let the Chinese provide visible support such as the building of infrastructure and schools while we supported the intangibles of democracy, the rule of law, fair labor practices and economic freedom. We averred that if we did the right thing, the best thing, in time the fruit of our labor would be the movement of developing states from the category of failed and dependent to stable and flourishing. I trust that we are being proven right in Zambia and that this example will spread.

It is too soon to predict that a backlash is building generally across the globe against the Chinese exploiters and against aid practices that only further dependency, but the ripples of the Zambian election - and what it could mean for development policy - are likely to be felt beyond its borders.

Lest one think this was a matter of resource and economic nationalism, and not pure revulsion at the antics of the detested Chinese presence, Bonicelli declared:

Sata has no intention of closing Zambia for business; rather, he simply is requiring that his country's labor laws and safety regulations be respected by both foreign firms as well as the government itself. [4]




http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MJ15Ad02.html

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Is China drinking its own Kool-Aid?
By Peter Lee

Three huzzahs for business-friendly good governance that kicks China in the behind! Well, two huzzahs, maybe. Because it looks like China was simply the most conspicuous and politically advantageous manifestation of rather widespread foreign malfeasance in the Zambian copper sector:

Zambia will negotiate larger stakes in projects with foreign mining firms and plans to revamp tax collection to improve transparency and maximize benefits for itself, the minister of mines said.

"We would like to increase our shareholding to at least 35 percent in all the projects, but that will depend on how well we negotiate with the mining firms," Mines Minister Wylbur Simuusa told Reuters in an interview.

Foreign mining companies operating in Zambia include Canada's First Quantum Minerals, London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc, Glencore International Plc, Barrick Gold, Brazil's Vale and Metorex of South Africa. [5]

So perhaps it's premature to look for a wholesale exodus of


Chinese from Zambia, let alone the African continent, accompanied by some ecstatic backfilling by the West's finest multinationals.

China's biggest problem is not that Taiwan, Myanmar and Zambia have declined to deliver political endorsements of China's economic penetration.

It doesn't appear that the government's efforts to promote a new ideology of economic growth and national unity inside China have succeeded, either.

The government's over-reaction to the threat of Jasmine Revolution provocations indicated that it didn't have any good ideas for keeping the political lid on beyond the tried-and-true "knock 'em down and lock 'em up" if economic growth, nationalism, and US$40 billion in expenditures for the Beijing Olympics failed to do the job.

The government's difficulty in forging a social consensus was also demonstrated by its efforts to combat "rumors" on the Internet. [6] In particular, the Chinese security apparatus appears to be utterly flummoxed about what to do about microblogs, which were permitted, presumably with a certain amount of trepidation, in 2010 and promptly exploded as a platform for personal expression.

It's one matter to enforce socialist discipline on the Internet manifestations of conventional outlets. It's another thing to grub around the personal microblogs of millions of citizens.

The government effort is quixotic, but not just because "information wants to be free".

As a cursory review of the Internet as practiced in the United States (including Yahoo! Comments, one of the 21st century's grimmest monuments to inhumanity), lazy, inaccurate, slanted, and bigoted posts delivered with the advantage of anonymity is what makes the Internet go. Cleaning up the Internet is like looking for champagne in a sewer.

The Chinese government's idea that its problems with the Internet will be solved when it can persuade 500 million users to deliver information accurately and responsibly is charming in its naivete. It's also a bit alarming.

China has come through some major challenges. When Deng Xiaoping visited the United States in 1979, he could scarcely scrape together sufficient cash to give a decent account of himself and his entourage on the trip. Now China sits on $2 trillion in foreign exchange.

It can probably handle the international challenge of a fading but resilient West and an increasingly obstreperous domestic constituency. But will it? Will China's leadership rise to the challenge?

Howard French pointed to what he considered a salient characteristic of the Chinese elite circa 2011: hubris.

"Among all nations, I think China is doing the best at getting resources from countries and putting back into those countries," Zhou [Xiaohua] told me. "Can you find any other country that is doing better?" Several minutes later, when I asked the ambassador what the Americans had contributed to Zambia, he marked a long pause and then fairly sneered, "You employ local people and put them as observers at each and every polling station. What else? I haven't seen any roads being built by them, any schools, any hospitals that really touch people, that can last, that can serve society for long. Maybe training election people is your biggest contribution."

What struck me most about his remarks was the infusion of a kind of creeping hubris that I've seen on numerous stops in my research among Chinese diplomats and business executives. It allowed Zhou little space to consider Zambian perceptions of his country or of their own needs. [7]

Substitute "Chinese popular perceptions" for "Zambian perceptions" and you get an idea of the problem.

It is more important to consider the problem of Chinese hubris, which appears to be shared both by Zhou Xiaohua - who is China's Mr Africa, an experienced and highly skilled diplomat - and the notoriously smug and incurious heir apparent to the whole China shebang, Fifth Generation princeling Xi Jinping.

China's doctrine of economic development as the road to national happiness and world peace, when viewed in the light of the Arab Spring and the rebuffs China has suffered in its rather limited circle of economic and geopolitical allies, looks like a threadbare model of international relations and national development that does little more than provide a fig leaf for headlong economic growth.

Is allegiance to this model blinding China's leadership to important social and political trends - and the need to tweak or discard the model if necessary? It's a pretty big deal if China can't handle the democracy vs authoritarianism hand-off/trade-off successfully.

Democracy is unlikely to be a simple "win-win" panacea for China.

Especially post Arab Spring, anybody who discounts the possibility that democratization in China would not lead to a declaration of Taiwanese independence and an explosion of populist and secessionist activity in Tibet and Xinjiang despite/because of the influx of Han immigration and whatever growth and economic aid numbers the government has chalked up - plus gleeful hooting and incitement by the Western democracies - is whistling past the imperial graveyard.

The case could be made that a Chinese republic would do quite well even if shorn of two-thirds of its landmass, just as Vaclav Havel's Czechoslovakia bid a casual adieu to its eastern half when Slovakia was declared an independent state and the Czech Republic came into being.

But nobody is making that case, as far as I can tell. The Chinese government doesn't want to go there, and it seems Chinese dissidents don't even want to admit it's there - understandable, since raising the issue probably means a quick ticket to the pokey for sedition, in addition to spoiling the whole feel-good democratic vibe with awkward questions.

Between the shared fantasies of "peaceful development" and "democracy" China has a lack of viable political answers. And building Olympic stadiums in Beijing or soccer stadiums in Zambia is unlikely to provide a solution.

Notes
1. China's Peaceful Development, Xinhua, Sep 6, 2011.
2. Hu frets over Taiwanese election, Asia Times Online, Oct 4, 2011.
3. In Africa, an Election Reveals Skepticism of Chinese Involvement, The Atlantic, Sep 29, 2011.
4. Zambians send a 20-year government packing and warn the Chinese they could be next, Foreign Policy, Oct 12, 2011.
5. Zambia eyes 35 pct stake in mine projects: Minister, Reuters, Oct 13, 2011.
6. Rumors are a Cancer that Threatens the Internet and Society, China Digital Times, Oct 1, 2011.
7. In Africa, an Election Reveals Skepticism of Chinese Involvement, The Atlantic, Sep 29, 2011.