Issue 50

C H I N A R EVIEW

S u m m er 2 0 1 0
Great Britain-China Centre,
2010. All rights reserved
ISSN: 1359-5091

50th and final issue of the China Review!

After 10 years of regular appearances the China
Review is taking its last and final stand. We have
an impressive line-up of writers, many of whom
have been regular contributors. We take this
opportunity to thank them and many others for their
support over the last ten years of publication.
China Review is published by the Great
Britain China Centre, a publicly-funded
organisation, and the time has come, sadly, when
we can no longer justify the time and expense of
producing a quarterly magazine. We hope you have
enjoyed receiving the China Review and trust you
will continue to take an interest in both the GBCC
and the All Party Parliamentary China Group by
visiting our websites www.gbcc.org.uk and
www.appcg.org.uk.
The China Review Editorial Team

Contributors
David Shambaugh is Professor of Political Science &
International Affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs
at George Washington University
Michael Yahuda is Professor Emeritus of International Relations
at the London School of Economics
Peter Nolan is Director of the Chinese Big Business Programme
at Cambridge Judge Business School
Calum MacLeod is Asia correspondent for USA Today
Rana Mitter is Professor of History and Politics of Modern China
at the University of Oxford
Frank N. Pieke is University Lecturer of Modern Politics and
Society of China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of
Oxford
Dr. Linda Yueh is Director, China Growth Centre and Fellow in
Economics, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
Carl Minzner is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington
University in St. Louis, School of Law
Duncan Hewitt is a correspondent for Newsweek in Shanghai
Peter Hessler is the author of Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and
Country Driving
Laura Rivkin is Information and Office Manager at GBCC

Page 2

China Review Summer 2010

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CHINA : AN UNPREDICTABLE
GLOBAL POWER
BY DAVID SHAMBAUGH
FOR SEVERAL YEARS THE world has been
witnessing Chinas emergence as an international actor, but
has been wondering what kind of global power it will turn
out to be? Following the majestic Olympic Games of 2008,
many hoped that the countrys symbolic success would
breed a new confidence and cooperativeness on the world
stage. But this did not fully emerge, and throughout 200809 Beijing continued to abide by Deng Xiaopings dictate to
keep a low profile (taoguang yanghui) and engaged itself in
a limited fashion abroad. During the autumn of 2009,
many observers discerned a number of troubling indications
that suggested a more assertive but uncooperative China.
Government spokesmen and officials adopted a tough and
uncompromising attitude on a range of issues, displaying a
disturbing dismissiveness and arroganceparticularly
towards the United States and European Unionand
diplomats complained of Beijings extra truculence in
negotiations. More recently, during the spring of 2010,
however, there seems to be a thaw in Chinas icy posture
as Beijing has begun to evince some smile diplomacy and
pragmatism towards the US, EU, and Latin America.
Why the fluctuation and fickleness in Chinese
diplomacy? Of course, Chinese officials deny there has

been any change in Chinas behaviormuch less that China

is anything but always cooperative with others. The answer
lies in the fact that the nation itself is deeply confused about
its international identity and roles it should play in the
world.
Sources of Confusion
China wrestles with a conflicted international
identitya kind of schizophrenic personality. On the one
hand it aspires to being, and possesses many of the
attributes of, a Great Power. But Beijing seems to lack the
confidence to act as a Great Powerparticularly in concert
with other Great Powers. Rather, China remains hesitant on
the international and regional stage, taking baby steps
towards being a confident global leader. In short, China
remains a global actor without being a global power.
While uncertain, it is not unaware. Few nations
have had as extensive, animated, and diverse domestic
discourse about their potential and roles as a major power as
has occurred in China over the past decade. Official, semiofficial, and unofficial circles in China actively debate the
roles, opportunities, dangers, risks, and responsibilities of
being a major global power. The impetus has been to learn

China: An Unpredictable Global Power

the lessons of other rising (and falling) powers, so that

China could anticipate repetitive problems experienced by
other previous powers and manage them effectively. Of
particular Chinese concern is how to avoid the historically
repetitive asymmetry trap between the major established
power and the primary rising power, in which the latter
challenged the formers hegemonic position in the
international systemthus causing tensions, competition,
clashes, even wars.
To be sure, there is still a segment of official
opinion that denies China is a major powerarguing
instead that China remains a relatively poor, developing
(and socialist) country. Another segment of opinion even
denies that China is a global power, arguing the PRC is a
regional power at best. Another tenacious self-identity, still
deeply rooted in the Chinese mindset and frequently
articulated in media and specialist publications, is that of
historical victimization and humiliation at the hands of
other major powers. This traditional weltanschauung has
fueled modern Chinese nationalism, and carries two distinct
aspects: (1) China is an aggrieved nation that has endured a
century of shame and humiliation and various indignities
at the hands of the West and Japan; and (2) China has been
a great power historically and deserves to return to that
status. Deeply held and longstanding aspirations for
restored pride and dignity, wealth and power, animate both
beliefs. These traditional identities reflect existing
insecurities about Chinas potential as a power.

Page 3

China. Selective multilateralism is better than no

engagement.
As Chinas international persona remains a workin-progress, foreigners must be aware of the diverse and
dynamic domestic discourse taking place within the
international relations community in China.
The Spectrum of Views on International Identity
In Chinas international relations community, a
spectrum with different schools of thought and analysis
are evident.
At one end of the spectrum are the Nativists who
distrust the outside world, seek total international
autonomy, and view international multilateral obligations as
traps (laid by the West) to entrap and embroil China in
costly commitments overseas. This cohort bears a strong
traditional Marxist orientation. This group is the twin of the
new left (xin zuopai) in domestic policy debates, as they
believe the reform and opening policy of the past thirty
years has cost China its socialist integrity, corroded its
culture with negative foreign influences, and compromised
Chinas sovereignty and autonomy in world affairs.
The Nativists are a loose coalition spread across a
number of institutions, and indeed a number of its leading
advocates operate independently. After the political
turbulence in 1989, this group argued that reform had
inevitably lead to Chinas restoration of capitalism and
Chinas opening-up (kaifang) policy was seen as
facilitating the destruction of socialism. For them, therefore,
peaceful evolution (heping yanbian)a policy whereby
the West attempts to peacefully evolve China so as to
undermine Chinese Communist Party rulehad become the
main domestic contradiction (zhuyao maodun) and they
argued the main policy priority should be to counter
peaceful evolution (supposed) efforts of the West and
close Chinas doors. For this group, every reform and
opening measure had to be questioned whether it was
intrinsically of socialist or capitalist nature.

Why the Reluctance?

Part of Chinas international uncertainty no doubt
derives from the leaderships domestic uncertaintiesas the
country is beset with multiple pressing challenges
associated with an unprecedented modernization process,
and a cautious and seemingly insecure leadership atop a
transitional political system. When Chinas leaders wake up
and go to bed every day, it is events insidenot outside
their borders that preoccupy them.
Another reason for Beijings tentativeness
likely derives from the Liberal values and norms
that underpin most international institutions.
Beijing professes it seeks a democratic
international order, but it does not share the
Liberal premises of a democratic international
system (although China has benefited enormously
from that system). It is difficult to be a responsible
stakeholder (to use Robert Zoellicks famous
phrase) in an international system with which one
does not share the operating premises at home and
was not present at the creation to shape the
system in the first place. In some key areaslike
non-proliferation and free tradeBeijing has
embraced global norms, but on so many others its
hesitancy is obvious. Chinas continued preference
for multipolarism over multilateralism (states over
institutions) reflects its deeply ingrained Realism
over a nascent Liberalism. Failure to fully embrace
Liberal norms and institutions does not mean that
China cannot be a cooperative partner with others
on a purely pragmatic case-by-case basis. We see
this on North Korea, for example. But it does
suggest that China will continue to act with
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hesitancy on the world stage. Yet, a partially
engaged China is far better than a disengaged
National pride: 60th anniversary celebrations in China

Page 4

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Sino-US Relationship: the key of the key?

China Review Summer 2010

the Sino-US relationship as the key of the

key (zhongzhong zhi zhong). One obvious
reason is demanded by Chinas
modernization drive, i.e. the Western
powers are the major source of advanced
technology as well as of capital and
investment. More recently, however, as
Chinese power rises and frictions in great
power relationships occur more frequently,
Chinese intellectuals and the informed
public increasingly have less tolerance for
emphasizing the United States in Chinas
diplomacy.
Conversely, another group
(which we identify as the South-South
School) argues that Chinas main
international identity and responsibility lies
with the developing world. They argue for a
more balanced foreign policy that takes
account of Chinas longtime partners and
client states in developing countries and should advocate
their interests. This reasoning finds expression, for
example, in Chinas strong support for the Millennium
Development Goals, no strings attached aid programs and
debt relief, placing the climate change burden on
developing countries, and developing the BRIC Group with
Brazil, Russia, and India. The South-South Schools
identity has much to do with Chinas longstanding selfidentification as a developing country (fazhanzhong guojia).
Another group in the middle of the spectrum
argues for China concentrating its diplomacy on its
immediate periphery and Asian neighborhood (the Asia
Firsters). One important sub-group of this cohort are those
who push for multilateral regionalism and East Asian
community building, as distinct from a more state-based
strategy. This school first found expression in Chinas
foreign policy in the late-1990s. During that time, following
the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the Peace and

A secondpredominantgroup are the

Realists. Realism has had deep roots in Chinas
intellectual worldview for several centuries. Chinese
realists have a long and strong tradition, even during the
socialist era of the PRC. Chinese realists take the nationstate as their core unit of analysis. They uphold the
principle of state sovereignty above all else, and reject
arguments that transnational issues penetrate across borders.
Like realists elsewhere, they tend to see the international
environment as anarchic and unpredictablethus placing a
premium on building up a strong state that can navigate its
own way in the world and resist outside pressures. But the
realists are not isolationiststhey accept China must act
outside its borders and participate in the international
community. But they believe in maximizing Chinas own
self-interests while not allowing international actors to
impinge on Chinas sovereignty or core interests (Taiwan,
Tibet). Some realists, such as Tsinghua University
Professor Yan Xuetong, would
even like China to be more
assertive on the international
stagethrowing its weight
a r o u n d , r e s p o n d in g to
American pressures with
similar counter-measures, and
striking alliance-like relations
with like-minded states.
Moving along the
spectrum to the right, another
group, which I label the
Major Powers School,
argues that China should
concentrate its diplomacy on
managing its relations with the
worlds major powers and
blocsthe United States,
Russia, European Union
while paying relatively less
attention to the developing
world or multilateralism. This
group stresses the crucial
importance of relations with
chinafotopress
other great powers in Chinas
Although some tensions remain, Beijings ties with its neighbours have improved in recent years
foreign affairs, and often sees

China: An Unpredictable Global Power

Development Debate of the same year, China began to

emphasize much more its neighborhood diplomacy
(zhoubian waijiao). The result was that China decided to
become much more proactive on its periphery to shape a
peaceful environment. This policy has born much fruit, as
China has managed to dramatically improve and stabilize
relations all around its periphery. Certain tensions remain in
Beijings ties with Japan, Vietnam, and India, but even in
these cases bilateral ties have improved markedly and are
stable overall.
Those that emphasize Chinas ties within Asia do
not do so to the exclusion to relations with other regions or
nations; rather they argue in favor of not neglecting Asia
relative to the major powers or Chinas relations with the
developing world. Indeed China practices the official policy
of daguo shi guanjian, zhoubian shi shouyao, fazhanzhong
guojia shi jichu, duobian shi zhongyao wutai (major
powers are the key, surrounding areas are the first priority,

Chinas international
persona remains a
work-in-progress
developing countries are the foundation, and multilateral
forums are the important stage). But the Asia Firsters do
believe in giving Asia a relatively greater emphasis over
relations with the US, Russia, Europe, or the developing
world.
Moving along the spectrum to the right, another
identifiable group are the selective multilateralists. They
believe that China should expand its global involvements
gradually, but only on issues where Chinas national
(security) interests are directly involved. There are several
variations and splinter factions of this group: one argues
China should only engage in UN-mandated activities,
another argues that China should only become involved on
its periphery and far away, while another believes it should
not so constrain itself from getting involved in multinational
(as distinct from multilateral) actions together with other
major powers. The Selective Multilateralists generally
eschew increasing Chinas global involvements, but realize
that China must be seen to be contributing to global
governance. They have advocated increasing Chinas
participation in UN peacekeeping operations (PKO),
contributing to disaster relief, fighting international piracy
in the Gulf of Aden, being diplomatically involved in the
North Korean and Iranian nuclear issuesbut they eschew
deeper involvement in sensitive and risky areas like Iraq
and Afghanistan. The Selective Multilateralists are wary of
foreign entanglements but they recognize that China must
do some things (yousuo zuowei, as Deng Xiaoping
instructed) in the international arena and not be perceived to
be self-interested free riders in international affairs.
At the far end of the spectrum are a distinct
minority of Globalists, who believe that China must
shoulder an ever-greater responsibility for addressing
international issues commensurate with Chinas size,

Page 5

power, and influence. They are more supportive and

trusting of multilateral institutions than the Selective
Multilateralists, and they believe China should become
much more fully engaged in global governance across the
globe. They see the world in highly interdependent terms,
and believe China to be an integral part of international
society (as advocated by the English School of
international theory). The Globalists are strong advocates of
the United Nations and Chinas activism in the Security
Council. They are also strong proponents of Chinas
participation in regional diplomatic groupings all over the
world (in East Asia, Central Asia, Middle East, Africa, and
Latin America) where China has been centrally involved in
forming new dialogue groupings as well as becoming
observers or full members of existing ones. The Globalists
are of the view that it is incumbent upon China, given its
global rise, to contribute much more to global governance
and to act as a responsible power (fuzeren de daguo) in the
international arena. The Globalists are interdependence
institutionalists in essence, and their analytical starting
point is globalization. As with their Liberal Institutionalist
counterparts in the West, they recognize that in the era of
globalization sovereignty has its limits as various nontraditional challenges regularly cross sovereign borders
and must be dealt with in a multilateral manner. Much of
their analytical focus therefore is on non-traditional
security, e.g. human security, economic security, counterterrorism, public health, organized crime, smuggling,
piracy, etc.
Finding the Equilibrium Point
The fact that China has such a broad spectrum of
opinion says much about the identities that are competing
with each other in Chinas international relations discourse
today. China possesses multiple international identities and
is a very conflicted country when it comes to its global
persona. As a result, we are not likely to see any one school
of thought prevail to dictate or dominate Chinese diplomacy
on the international stage. More likely is that the world will
continue to witness all of these distinct personas in one
place or at one time or another. As in all countries,
however, policy debates tend to cluster towards the
centrewith the peripheral schools of thought being
marginalized. This is the case in China, as both the Nativists
and the Globalists are distinct minority voices.
Thus, we will likely continue to see evidence of
the other schools at the centre of the spectrum represented
in Chinese diplomacythe realists, the major power
advocates, the South/South Cohort, the Asia Firsters, and
the Selective Multilateralists. But within this band, I believe
that we are likely to see an emphasis in domestic arguments
and Chinese global behavior around the lower-left end of
the spectrumthe realists and major power schoolswith
the Asia First, South/South, and Selective Multilateral
groups playing secondary roles.
In the end, it explains why China seems to be such
a confused and unpredictable actor on the world stage.

David Shambaugh is Professor of Political Science &

International Affairs and Director of the China Policy
Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University.

China Review Summer 2010

Page 6

CHINA S EMERGENCE AS A
GLOBAL POWER
BY MICHAEL YAHUDA
CHINA HAS EMERGED as a major power on the
world stage only in the last decade. During the course of the
last ten years the significance of Chinas trade and
investment has expanded beyond its own region to include
Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean.
This year its GNP is set to pass that of Japan to be second
only to the United States and last year China replaced
Germany as the worlds largest exporter. China is by far the
largest holder of US dollars as its currency reserve and
American leaders recognize that their country has become
economically interdependent with China. Indeed the Obama
administration regards the relationship with China as its
most important bilateral relationship bar none.
Chinas character as a global power
It is important to recognize that China is not a
global power like the United States. It cannot project

military power far beyond its own borders. It has only

recently begun to feel its way as a maritime power and it
will remain mainly a continental one for the immediate
future. Nor is China a centre of technological innovation
comparable to Japan or Europe, let alone the United States.
Perhaps more significantly, despite much talk of the
Chinese model or the Beijing consensus, neither the
Chinese government, nor its many academics and
international affairs commentators present their country as a
model. China cannot build on its political values of
nationalism and communist party rule to project a universal
message, which can appeal to others in the way that
America can point to the abiding appeal of democracy and
free markets.
The Chinese government tends to project an image
of the country in a number of ways, not all of which are
consistent. China is said to be a great power (daguo) whose

chinafotopress

An armed UN Chinese peacekeeper stands guard near a church during a religious celebration in the Haitian Capital

Chinas Emergence as a Global Power

voice must be heard on every important

global issue. At the same time China is
also said to be a developing country.
Although its aggregate GNP ranks second
in the world, its per capita GNP according
to the IMF ranks 97 in the world just
below Nambia. As one prominent Chinese
scholar told me last year, China has many
faces.

Page 7
chinafotopress

The domestic focus of Chinas leaders

For the last three decades Chinas
approach to the outside world has been
dictated by the need to develop the
economy, to maintain social stability and
to retain the communist partys monopoly
of power. To this end Chinas leaders have
sought to cultivate peaceful relations with
neighbours and beyond that to discourage
ASEAN summits have helped to promote free trade
conflicts that could damage Chinese
interests.
China has been the main beneficiary of economic
what they see as Western interference in their own country
globalization and, as far as East Asia and the Pacific are
and to the need to protect communist party rule, their
concerned, that has depended on the public goods provided
foreign aid is not subject to the kind of conditionality
by the United States. Despite concerns that the United
demanded by Western governments and international
States may seek to limit Chinas rise (many Chinese think
organizations, which has led to much criticism from the
that the American support for Taiwan is designed with that
latter.
in mind), the nations leaders have taken care not to
Chinas leaders may project a newfound
undermine their working relationship with the American
confidence in dealing with the outside world, especially
superpower.
after its success in handling the recent international
Chinas growing economic footprint in East Asia
economic crisis whose ramifications are still being felt in
and in the wider world stems from the way its economy has
the US, the EU and Japan. But at home they project concern
developed at home. The concentration on manufacturing
if not anxiety. A cursory reading of Premier Wen Jiabaos
and the building of cities and infrastructure demanded both
recent report to the National Peoples Congress will show an
export markets and the importing of ever-greater amounts
abiding concern with what he regards as structural
of mineral and energy resources. It was Chinas domestic
imbalances in the economy, pervasive corruption and
economic needs that led to huge surplus trade with the
problems in Tibet and Xinjiang. Social order cannot be
United States and the European Union. As a relative
taken for granted despite the improvements in peoples
latecomer to the extraction of resources abroad, China
living conditions. The number of mass incidents (protests,
through its State Owned Enterprises sought special access
some of them violent, by relatively large numbers of
to iron ore, manganese, copper and other resources
aggrieved people) is estimated to have reached 100,000 last
including oil for which it became the first or second largest
year. Hence expenditure on the organs of public security
importer in the world. It was this need for resources that
has grown at a rate almost commensurate with military
first drew China to Africa in the 1990s and which gathered
expenditure.
steam in the first decade of this century. Chinese companies
Faced with the prospect of shrinking markets in the
had already been engaged in the Middle East, but energy
developed world the Chinese authorities recognize the need
needs soon drove an expansion in import trade and
to shift the emphasis of the domestic economy from
investment. The Chinese quickly found that their expertise
intensive development and over-capacity building towards a
in building infrastructure projects was well received in
more household-led consuming society. That will mean a
Africa and elsewhere.
new and painful transition. China will continue to require a
Chinas aid projects in the developing world also
peaceful international environment for many years to come.
have a domestic orientation as they call for Chinese
technology and often for Chinese workers, as opposed to
China and Multilateralism
local ones. Given the hostility of the authorities in China to
It was in the 1980s that the Chinese began to
appreciate the benefits of belonging to key international
economic organizations, notably the World Bank and the
Social order cannot be
IMF, which helped lay the foundation for Chinas later
taken for granted despite
remarkable economic development. Through the 1990s the
Chinese also became inducted into membership of regional
improvements in peoples
associations such as the Asia Pacific Economic Forum
(APEC) and the ASEAN Regional Forum. From a Chinese
living conditions
perspective, these had the virtue of being non-rulemaking

Page 8

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Chinas Emergence as a Global Power

Page 9

bodies whose decisions were nonbinding and had to be based on

consensus and non-interference.
The Chinese applied the same
approach in helping to establish
the central Asian Shanghai
Cooperation Organization.
The advantage of these
and similar groupings is that
southeast Asian neighbours felt
that China had been socialized
into their forms of regional
conduct and that the Chinese in
turn felt that they could dissipate
lingering suspicions of their
smaller neighbours. In Central
Asia China could present itself as
a stabilizing influence for the
vulnerable new states in opposing
terrorism, splittism and Islamic
chinafotopress
extremism,
while
balancing
Russian influence and promoting
By 2050 the number of Chinese citizens aged 60 and over will have grown from just over
economic development. Beijing,
10 % of the population to just over 30%
of course, had its own interest in
preventing neighbouring regimes from giving support to
for them to resort to force. In that sense China has become a
disaffected Uighurs and others in Xinjiang. China has since
better international citizen.
gone on to develop free trade agreements with ASEAN and
a few Asian countries, while tying the economies of
Conclusion
regional states more closely to its economy and those of
Having arrived as a major global power, Chinas
adjacent Chinese provinces.
particular focus on its domestic interests and its opaque
China has also embraced broader international
authoritarian system leaves considerable ambiguities about
organizations, especially those centering on the United
its future trajectory and behaviour. Most of its smaller and
Nations, where China has a veto power in the UN Security
medium sized neighbours sense that it is advisable to hedge
Council. It has become active in many international
against Chinas continuing rise by welcoming the United
regimes, including non-proliferation, and, reversing its
States as an off-shore balancer, whom they would like to
previous position, China has become an important
draw in closer. For its part the United States and especially
contributor to UN Peacekeeping Operations.
the Obama administration has looked to China to become a
partner in addressing global and regional concerns, so far
without a great deal of success. Perhaps it is best to
recognize that it is possible to work fruitfully with the
the US has looked to China to
Chinese government where interests may overlap, to
become a partner in addressing
explore where differences may be narrowed and to uphold
ones own critical interests as fiercely as the Chinese
global and regional concerns, so
authorities uphold their own.
far without a great deal of
From a Chinese perspective, it is clear that Chinas
weight
in
international affairs is substantial and growing,
success
but that clearly derives in the main part from its growing
economy and the maintenance of the power of the
Communist Party. Despite their successes Chinas rulers are
The jury is still out as to whether or not China has
keenly aware that their country faces a demographic time
genuinely embraced the internationalism implicit in
bomb; by 2050 the number of citizens aged sixty and over
regional and international organizations. Some have argued
will have grown from just over 10 percent of the population
that China has in fact been socialized, pointing to its
to just over 30 percent. The authorities will also have to
observance of various international norms of behaviour.
deal with structural economic and social imbalances and
One example often cited is Chinese forbearance in forcibly
find ways to introduce better ways of increasing public
asserting its claims in the South China Sea since 1995.
political participation. In other words, China may have
Others point to the same example to argue that Chinese
arrived as world power, but it still has a long way to go to
forbearance has less to do with norms and more from a hard
consolidate its position.
headed cost-benefit analysis as to the damage that might
accrue to Chinas broader interests if it were to be seen to
be using force to those ends. However, regardless of the
Professor Michael Yahuda is Professor Emeritus of
precise motives, the longer the Chinese exercise
International Relations at the London School of Economics
forbearance the more difficult and more costly it would be
and Political Science, University of London

Page 10

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

THE END OF
WILD CAPITALISM
BY PETER NOLAN

THE MODERN ERA OF globalisation began in

the 1970s. It was characterised by ever-increasing economic
liberalisation underpinned by an ideological belief that the
free market is the best way to organise economic activity.
The United States of America led this process through its
position at the core of the Washington Consensus
institutions. After three decades of wild capitalist
globalisation the international system of political economy
stands at a crossroads, facing a series of fundamental
contradictions arising from the unconstrained operation of
the free market. Humanity faces a Darwinian challenge of
species survival. Americas interaction with China and the
Muslim world will be critically important in determining
the resolution of the contradictions that confront the human
race. It is an open question whether this interaction will end
in terrifying conflict or in cooperation.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, despite the
fact that the zenith of American power has already passed,

America sits at the centre of global political economy. The

free market policies that lie beneath the comprehensive
global system crisis are the child of the Washington
Consensus. The Social Darwinist policies that America has
promoted globally have produced profound contradictions
within America itself as well as in the relationship between
the United States and the rest of the world.
Constructive engagement
Ever since the publication of Samuel Huntingtons
famous book it has become widely accepted in America that
there is The Clash of Civilisations with both China and the
Muslim world, each of which contains 1.3 billion people. In
fact, neither China nor the Muslim world is hostile to
capitalism. They each have their own rich traditions through
which they can contribute to a sustainable future for
humanity in the twenty-first century. The possibility of their
doing so will be much greater if America is able to develop

Page 11

The End of Wild Capitalism

an evolving pattern of constructive engagement with both

of them. Destructive engagement will lead to disaster.
The essence of capitalism is its propensity towards
universalism. In the pursuit of profit capitalism pushes
beyond local boundaries, whether village, town, region or
country. However, there is a persistent tension between
capitalisms universal impulse, and the nation. In the
process of constructing modern capitalism, against the
expectations of nineteenth century political economists, the
national state propelled capitalism forward and reinforced
the sense of national identity and interests, through the
mechanisms of mass education, the mass media and
government ideology. The rise of modern capitalism in the
late nineteenth century erupted into the international
conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century. Even
in the era of capitalist globalisation, there persists a
profound tension between the national state and the
international impulse of capital. The tension is crystallised
today in the relationship between America and China.
Confucian values
The possibility that the relationship between
America and China might result in terrifying conflict is
attracting increased attention. Political commentators
routinely refer to the Peloponnesian Wars in which the
rising Athenian power fought a long and destructive war
with the dominant power, Sparta: The Peloponnesian War
not only lasted for a long time, but it brought unprecedented
suffering for Hellas. Never before had so many cities been
captured and devastated; never had there been so many
exiles; never such loss of life, both in actual warfare and in
internal revolutions (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian
Wars).
Capitalist development has a long history in China.
Prior to the early modern period Chinas embryonic
capitalism was far more developed than that of Europe.

chinafotopress

Chinese students embrace their duty to society in an

adulthood ceremony in Fujian this year

Chinas capitalist development took place within the

context of a powerful state that, in periods when the system
functioned well, shaped the pattern of capitalist
development in numerous ways to meet common social
interests. This was the foundation of its hugely impressive
long-run economic and social development. Confucianism
nurtured a deeply developed concept of duty which was
the foundation of collective action and social prosperity.
Confucianism was a complete
philosophy. It combined a
carefully thought out system of
morality for rulers, bureaucrats
and ordinary people with a
comprehensive analysis of
concrete ways of both
stimulating and controlling the
market. When the system
worked well the government
attempted in anon-ideological,
pragmatic fashion to solve
practical problems that the
market could not solve.
The fact that the
system went through regular
cycles when these principles
were poorly observed, rulers
and bureaucrats were corrupt
and the economy and society
foundered should not blind us
to the underlying coherence
and lasting benefit from this
integrated system of philosophy
chinafotopress
and public action. Chinas
Taxis queue for 4 hours to get their tanks filled in Zhengzhou, Henan, November 2009.
policy-makers today can gain
Meeting fuel and energy needs remains a significant developmental challenge for China
inspiration from this

Page 12

experience, using the past to

serve the present, as they
struggle to find their own path
through which to relate to
capitalisms surging power and
contradictory character.
In China after the 1970s
the combination of political
stability under the leadership of
the Chinese Communist Party,
and experimental economic
system reform and opening up,
resulted in a remarkable period of
development. China is unique
among large late-comer countries
in its degree of openness to trade,
international capital and business,
and international culture. Chinas
ever-expanding incorporation into
global capitalism has transformed
the countrys productive forces
a n d s o c i a l r e la t i o n s h i p s ,
producing enormous benefits for
Chinese people.

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. The idea that China is
a superpower is already deeply ingrained in American public consciousness

Explosive growth of inequality

However, Chinas deep integration with global
capitalism has led to wide-ranging problems that threaten
the entire social, economic and political system. These
include the explosive growth of inequality, drastic
deterioration in the physical environment, the harsh
challenge of the Global Business Revolution for Chinese
firms, widespread corruption, and the difficulties of
reforming its financial sector. China faces the daunting
prospect that while it is still a lower middle-income country
it will become grey and will move out of the Lewis
phase of economic development with unlimited supplies of
labour. Within only a few years these developments will
profoundly affect its political economy.

Many people in China hope

and believe that its ancient
civilisation can help ensure a
globally sustainable future for
all human beings

The Chinese government is working hard to

overcome the countrys immense development challenges.
These include policies to equip the countrys leading firms
to compete internationally, to mitigate the unequal
distribution of income, to improve health and educational
for the mass of the population, to improve energy
efficiency, to reduce environmental pollution, and to tackle
corruption. No sector is more vital to the governments
reform efforts than finance. China is groping for a way to
achieve harmonious development, which establishes a

balance between Chinas inland and coastal regions, urban

and rural areas, society and economy, and nature and man.
Harmonious society
Traditional China was the most isolated of the
great civilisations of the ancient and medieval world, cut off
from them by physical barriers. The concept of Great
Harmony is not in principle confined to China. Many
people in China hope and believe that its ancient civilisation
can make an important contribution towards building
cooperative institutions that help ensure a globally
sustainable future for all human beings. The idea that China
is a superpower is already deeply ingrained in American
public consciousness. However, despite its rapid
development China is still far behind the development level
of the high-income countries and has many interests in
common with other developing countries.
China has a highly developed sense of its own
national interests and has numerous urgent domestic
development problems that need to be resolved. However,
since the 1970s, the Chinese government has emphasised
repeatedly its commitment to reform and opening up, and
constructive engagement with the international community
of nations in a non-ideological, pragmatic fashion.
Capitalist globalisation brought enormous benefits
to America. Chinas increasing involvement in the global
capitalist economy contributed greatly to American
prosperity. American firms benefit from their investments
in China. American high technology companies benefit by
their sales to China and by employing large numbers of
Chinese scientists and engineers. American consumers
benefit from Chinas cheap exports. The American
Government benefits from Chinas bond purchases.
However, global capitalism has also given rise to
intense contradictions within American capitalism in
respect to social inequality, energy security, the
environment, and financial fragility. There is a growing
perception that Chinas rise threatens the dominant position

Page 13

The End of Wild Capitalism

of its firms, as well as its social stability, the identity of

American firms, its energy security, its natural environment
and its financial stability. These perceptions influence
decisions taken by the leadership and they can be exploited
by politicians in a time of socio-economic crisis. America
now faces the prospect of a prolonged period of economic
difficulties, which increases the possibility of looking upon
China as the scapegoat. Ever since Independence America
has a long history of achieving internal political stability by
uniting the nation against a perceived external threat.
The degree of inter-connectedness in world affairs
is now so great that it is no longer possible even for the
strongest political economy in the world to establish
national security within its own borders. It is a delusion to
imagine that in a globalised political economy even the
most powerful economy can isolate itself securely within its
own national boundaries while contradictions rage in the
world around it.
If America seeks long-term security it faces a
choice of no choice. It must cooperate with Communist
China to support the construction of a harmonious society
internally within China. The areas of necessary cooperation
include resolving Chinas energy needs, its ecological
difficulties, its financial system reform, and reform of its
health and education system, and supporting Chinas efforts
to establish a just distribution of income. In other words, it
must accept and contribute to Chinas peaceful
development, even if that means accepting that the resulting
system of political economy will look very different from
that of the United States today.
America and China have no choice but to
cooperate to solve the global challenges produced by
capitalist globalisation, and work together to build the
global institutions that are necessary to ensure a sustainable
future for the human species.
Conclusion
Humanity stands at a crossroads. The era of wild
capitalist globalisation has drawn to a close, hastened by
the global financial crisis. The contradictions of capitalism
in the early twenty-first century are, for the first time, global
in nature. In the search for solutions to the multiple threats
to the sustainability of life for the human species, there is no

America faces a choice of no

choice. It must cooperate with
Communist China to support the
construction of a harmonious
society internally within China
alternative other than to work together across national
frontiers, cultures and levels of development, to find a
pragmatic, non-ideological, cooperative way to overcome
these threats. Global institutions are necessary to resolve the
global contradictions of wild capitalism.
Americas relationship with China and the Muslim
world is central to the prospect for global regulation. The
mainstream of neither the Confucian nor the Islamic world

chinafotopress

Cooperation is the only way forward

has sought to destroy capitalism. Rather, it has sought to

regulate the market in the wider social interest. The
Confucian and Islamic traditions can each contribute to the
ethic of the moral economy that sits at the heart of the
regulatory system that is needed to resolve the profound
contradictions that confront the human species. It is an ethic
that combines a concern with individual rights and
freedoms with a concern for duties and responsibilities
towards the collective interest. Polarisation of discussion
into a choice between American Enlightenment values
and Oriental Confucian and Muslim values is destructive
to progress in regulating the capitalist global market to
which all nations now inescapably belong.
The Darwinist threats that face the human species
derive from the nature of capitalist globalisation itself. The
solutions also are immanent within the universal tendencies
of capitalism. America bears a heavy burden of historical
responsibility. It has the opportunity to grasp the nettle of
leadership and build on its own traditions to lead the world
towards cooperation and harmony, or it can pursue its own
self-interest, wrapped in the cloak of ideology, and lead the
world towards disaster. The path taken by the United States
at this crossroads in its own history and in that of the
human race as a whole will determine the outcome for the
whole human species. This is a mighty new frontier in
American history.
Peter Nolan is Director of the Chinese Big Business
Programme at Cambridge Judge Business School. The above
text is a summary of his book 'Crossroads: The End of Wild
Capitalism' (Marshall Cavendish, 2009).

Page 14

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

CHINA S FAST TRAINS INSPIRE

THE WORLD
BY CALUM MACLEOD
ABOARD THE GUANGZHOU-WUHAN
Express, once the speed gauge hits 350 kilometres (217
miles) per hour, passengers charge down the aisle to
photograph the electronic display. "If we go any faster, we'll
take off!" jokes Hu Qing, cracking open another can of beer
on Chinas world record-breaking train.
The opening of the high-speed link between the
south Chinese cities Guangzhou and Wuhan in December
last year is the latest example of massive state spending to
keep China's economy roaring. The fast-expanding network
of high-speed trains is stoking patriotism, too. This train is
the pride of the Chinese people," says Hu, 42, the boss of a
paper factory, who chose the train over a direct flight home
to northeast China.
While American firms await the first round of
government grants announced by President Obama in his
State of the Union address totalling 5.6 billion to jumpstart long delayed high-speed rail in the US, China enjoys a
considerable head start. Last year, Beijing invested $88
billion in the country's railways, according to the Ministry
of Railways, and now operates a world-leading 1,758 miles
of high-speed rail.
An alternative to flying or driving
President Obama said he wanted to study China's
high-speed trains during his November 2009 visit, recalls

the ministry's beaming spokesman Wang Yongping. The

USA "can learn from Chinese rail's speed, comfort and
other aspects," Wang suggests. Like railway advocates in
America, the Ministry touts rail as a greener, more energyefficient form of transportation than driving or flying. For
passengers, it promotes high-speed trains as "fast, safe,
comfortable, convenient and punctual."
With top operating speeds of 221 mph, the new
trains connect cities almost as fast as a jet but without the
lengthy security procedures at airports. Speed and
convenience are paramount for business traveller Zhao
Shiquan. The founder of an environmental equipment
company, Zhao stopped checking in for a Wuhan flight at
Guangzhou airport in late December when a friend
suggested the new train. "I wanted to know which is more
convenient, the plane or the train?" says Zhao, settling into
his reclinable, first-class seat. At 77 one way, the train is
more expensive than flying because airlines such as China
Southern Airlines offer prices as low as 20 to fight the new
competitor.
But many people still prefer the trains. "Planes are
often late, and time is vital to a company," says Zhao, 42,
who employs 100 people in his firm in Changsha, a major
city en route. "In China, you need to meet people in person
to do business, and take clients out for meals, so I often
have to travel. High-speed trains could be the answer."

Chinas Fast Trains Inspire the World

Onboard, in Second Class, Wang Jin, checks his

cellphone. Fast, new rail routes remain a dream for US
commuters, but the reality of high-speed making China a
smaller place is already forcing decisions upon Wang Jin,
a building projects bidder who regularly rides the rails of
south China. My girlfriend wants me to buy an apartment
in Guangzhou, but house prices are too expensive there, and
Id rather live back home in Changsha, where its cheaper
and the nightlife is better, says Wang, 27, who expects the
new route will push him to move and end the relationship.
His parents want him to marry but a bride of their choice.
Mulling his future, in a second class carriage,
Wang compares the train to a comfortable home, and is
surprised by the calm atmosphere. Many trains are noisy,
with people shouting and rubbish thrown on the floor. I
dont know why this train is so quiet, says Wang, but I
like it.
The previous ride for the 664-mile GuangzhouWuhan journey took 10 hours and 30 minutes in cars filled
with cigarette smoke. The new train takes 3 hours, 45
minutes, or 3 hours for the express, and smoking is banned.
The route is an important one. Guangzhou is one of China's
richest cities, an export powerhouse whose thousands of
factories manufacture many of the items found in an
average U.S. home. Wuhan is a Yangtze River port and
central China's major industrial centre.

The US is going to benefit

significantly from the work
that is being done in China
The trains are powered by electricity, so they're not
weighed down by huge engines and hundreds of gallons of
diesel fuel. The carriages of the "Harmony" trains running
between these two cities bear a smart, plane-like
appearance, with restrooms far larger than their airborne
counterparts. Attendants dressed like air stewards push
trolleys of snacks, including beer and peanuts, down aisles
that are patrolled by two armed, uniformed policemen. The

Calum MacLeod

Onboard, in First Class, enjoying beer and snacks

Page 15

C H I N A S R A I L WA Y S

China s railways had an inauspicious start. In

1877, the Shanghai governor bought and tore out
the countrys first line, a foreign-built stretch near
the city. There had been popular discontent at the
way the rail line and its alien fire wagons sliced
up the natural harmony of the earth. By 1949, only
half the nations 14,000 miles of track remained in
operation.

Over 40 new high-speed and inter-city lines are

currently under construction. One of the most
anticipated is the Beijing-Shanghai link, cutting
journey time to just 4 hours. Hong Kong to Beijing
will shrink to 8 hours from 23. For now, China is
sticking to more traditional, although super-fast,
wheeled trains, and not expanding its magnetic
levitation experiment the expensive line to
Shanghais Pudong airport.

By 2012, China will operate over 68,000 miles of

track. By 2020, the total and high-speed lengths are
planned to increase to 75,000 and 11,000 miles.

Chinas first high-speed service, the 73-mile BeijingTianjin line, opened in August 2008, slashing
journey time from 70 to 30 minutes.

The Guangzhou-Wuhan line opened December 26,

2009; China-made Harmony trains complete the
664-mile journey in 3 hours, down from the
previous 10.5 hours. The top speed of 245 mph is a
world record for a train in coupled operation
[double-locomotive], according to China s Ministry
of Railways.
Sources: Chinas Ministry of Railways; author research

dining car, usually a noisy focus of days-long Chinese rail

journeys, appears a zone of quiet. Only microwaved
Chinese dishes and fast food such as beef burgers are
available.
The debate about national and international payoff
While most media coverage in China's state-run
press has been reliably positive, some commentators
complain about prohibitively high ticket
prices. At 48, the second-class fare from
Guangzhou to Wuhan costs far more than
regular trains, and several slower services
have been cancelled to make way for the
new trains.
The focus on infrastructure, and
failure to raise incomes, has created a
"lopsided development model," that may
leave China as "an emerging market
economy without emerging consumers,"
worried You Nuo in the state-run China
Daily. The cost of building high-speed
tracks, at 14 million per mile, is money
well spent, counters Qian Lixin, a veteran
rail expert at the China Academy of
Railway Sciences in Beijing. "China has
met many difficulties in construction, and
gained experience in building railroads at
low cost. But American railways are
owned by individuals, not the
government, so investment is the biggest

Page 16

China Review Summer 2010

problem," Qian says.

In the UK, High Speed One
line, from St Pancras to the Channel
Tunnel, is the only existing high-speed
line, but plans for a new high-speed rail
network linking London to Birmingham
are being hotly debated. Details such as
precise speeds and journey times, costs
and funding of the new line, as well as
the environmental impact (the line will
go through the Chiltern hills, an area of
outstanding natural beauty) are still to be
confirmed. Earlier attempts to increase
speeds to 140mph on the UKs East
Coast Main Line and West Coast Main
Line initially both failed, due to safety
concerns and a lack of investment in
new track. But Virgin Trains have had
some success slashing journey times
between London and Manchester to just
Calum MacLeod
over two hours by investing in new track
and trains.
Excited passengers at Guangzhou North Railway Station pose for photos before
The previous Labour
boarding the worlds fastest passenger train
government were strongly in favour of
investing in a new London-Birmingham high speed train
At the end of the line, businessman Zhao considers
line, arguing that Britains future prosperity depends upon
his trial run a success, and vows to return. "I feel very
investing in technologies that drive economic growth and
proud, as China now has the fastest train in the world. On
that high speed rail has a crucial role to play. The new Tory
average incomes, we remain far behind the West, and it's
government are also keen. They talk of extending the line to
very hard to catch up," he says. "But in some areas we are
the north of England and Scotland, as well as linking the
very advanced."
high speed line with Heathrow airport.
Calum MacLeod is Asia correspondent for USA Today

The British Chinese Law Association (the BCLA) is a bilateral law association recognised by the Law
Society.
The BCLA brings together lawyers from the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China and
aims to encourage business relationships between its members, promote mutual understanding
betweenthelegalprofessionsofthetwocountriesandfosterlegalbestpracticeandknowhow.We
organiseseminars,roundtables,socialeventsandlegallanguageexchangesessions.
ForthelatestinformationonforthcomingBCLAeventspleaseseewww.bclaw.org.uk.
The coincidence of the BCLAs 10year anniversary and relaunch was marked by the BCLA China10
series,launchedin2010toaddressthenexttenyearsoflegaldevelopmentsinBritainandChina.

Page 17

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China Review Summer 2010

Page 18

CHINA S WARTIME PAST

AND HOW IT IS SHAPING THE PRESENT
BY RANA MITTER
WE ARE BEGINNING TO wake up to the
significance of the city of Chongqing in western China. Its
classified as the most populous city in China (some 30
million inhabitants), and is at the head of the Three Gorges
Dam, one of the most important infrastructure projects in
contemporary China. The city is open for business in a big
way: Britain is just one of the countries that opened up a
consulate there in the last decade, confident that the west of
China is going to be the new frontier of development in a
growing economy that even the world financial crisis hasnt
managed to kill. The city is not beautiful, but it has a real
energy and sense of place, sitting on cliffs above the
confluence of two major
rivers, the Yangtze and
chinafotopress
the Jialing. One of the
most impressive, if hairraising rides in China is
the five minute cable car
journey across the river,
with only some slightly
creaky-looking
engineering
preventing
you from dropping into
the fast-flowing waters
below. The whole city
has an air of purpose, a
sense that it is going
places in the new China.
However, one of
the elements of the citys
concentration on the
future
is,
perhaps
surprisingly,
a
new
emphasis on Chongqings
past. For there was a time,
not that long past, when
the city of Chongqing was
in the centre of the
worlds attention. For
seven years, from 1938 to
1945, Chongqing (then
known in the West in the
romanized
form
of
Chungking) was
the
temporary capital of
China, whose Nationalist
(Kuomintang)
government held out in
resistance against the
The war memorial in Chongqing
Japanese invasion; the

second Sino-Japanese War. This story was lost both in

China and the West for most of the period of the Cold War.
Chairman Maos China, the product of the Communist
victory in 1949, did not wish its official histories to tell any
story which might reflect credit on their old enemy, Chiang
Kaishek, who had fled to Taiwan. So the focus of the
official histories in the mainland moved emphasis from the
Nationalist contribution to that of the Communists. Many in
the West shared this perspective. Chiangs government was
perceived not without reason as corrupt and abusive,
and the regimes defeat on the mainland was regarded as
good riddance to a nasty regime. But this interpretation
played
down
the
importance
of
the
Nationalist
regimes
continued resistance to
Japan, without which it
would have been much
harder for the western
allies to win the war in
Asia.
But in recent
years, there has been a
radical shift in China.
The Chinese sense of
nationalism is being
officially nurtured, and
one aspect of the past
that is fuelling the new
patriotism is a revived
memory of the SinoJapanese
War

including the memory of

the contribution made
by the Nationalists. No
longer
regarded
as
enemies
pure
and
simple, Chiang Kaishek
is now regarded in
mainland China as a
figure who did make a
patriotic contribution to
resisting the Japanese.
And the city that has
made the most of this
new freedom for the
study of history is
Chongqing, for decades
denied the chance to
celebrate its own heroic

Chinas Wartime Past

Page 19

past, and now making up for lost time. Former

chinafotopress
sites of wartime activity from the old home of
US general Vinegar Joe Stilwell (who fell out
badly with Chiang and referred to him as the
Peanut) being opened as a museum, to public
sculptures, to literary supplements in the
newspapers.
Over sixty years after it ended, the
rediscovery of Chinas wartime experience is big
business in China, and in Chongqing in
particular. Yet it is a potent combination of
history and contemporary politics that is still
little understood in the west. At the University of
Oxford, we are now making our own
contribution to illuminating and exploring that
combination, with a five-year research
programme which looks at the experience, legacy
and memory of that war on China.
The war was, after all, perhaps the most
devastating event in the history of twentiethcentury China. The Nationalist wartime capital
of Chongqing was subjected to years of terrifying
air raids, many of which dropped incendiary
bombs on an almost defenceless city. Over the
Chongqing: once a backwater, now a motor for the Chinese economy
eight years of the war, tens of millions, perhaps
100 million, Chinese became refugees. The
with business. But by 1945, it was clear that the Chinese
country was faced with ever more stark political choices:
contribution had been real and that the country would no
the increasingly discredited nationalism of Chiang Kaishek,
longer tolerate being under western domination. The British
still holding out against all odds; a Communist alternative
imperial presence in China had crumbled during the eight
that promised (or threatened) to overturn Chinese society
years of war. Although India was much more at the
completely; and collaboration with the Japanese, a fate that
forefront of British thinking at the time, the Foreign Office
affected Chinas great cultural heartland, including cities
cables still hummed back and forth as they adjusted to a
such as Nanjing and Beijing. This was a war that
world in which the Chinese Foreign Minister had equal
transformed the nature of Chinese society fundamentally.
status in the new United Nations Security Council the
Although its often forgotten, there is a very
result of Chinas contribution to the war in Asia.
British side to this story. You may be surprised to find how
There are a wealth of issues that remain to be
close the war in China was to the lives of your parents or
explored
in the history of wartime China and the way in
grandparents, for all that it has faded in western memories
which that history connects to contemporary politics. But I
today. Thousands of British and American missionaries and
still think the most poignant reminder of the connections
businessmen stayed in China all the way up to Pearl Harbor
between the two is in that city of Chongqing. Something of
in 1941: as J. G. Ballards magnificent Empire of the Sun
a backwater (literally) during Maos period of rule,
showed, others had the ill fortune to be caught there for the
Chongqing is now gaining a role as a motor for the Chinese
economic miracle. If you go to the centre of the city, you
will see a wealth of gleaming skyscrapers, of the sort that
have become iconic of the 21st century Chinese cityscape.
Something of a backwater
But still standing there is a monument, just a few metres
tall, that is almost dwarfed by the buildings around it. That
during Maos period of rule,
monument was erected during the war to symbolize the
Chongqing is now gaining a
hoped-for victory in the struggle against Japan. It survived
the years of Maoist revolution and is still there today, a
role as a motor for the
clear reminder in the centre of one of Chinas most dynamic
Chinese economic miracle
modern cities that the past, however long forgotten, can
eventually be rescued from obscurity and play a role in the
present and future.
duration of the war. But delving into the records held at the
National Archive in London show that Chinas wartime role
played an important part in reshaping Britains attitude to
the rest of the world. Winston Churchill famously dismissed
Chiang Kaishek as a leader, hoping that he would go off
and look at the pyramids at the Allied Conference in Cairo
in 1943, while the real powers (US, UK, USSR) got on

For more details on the Chinas War with Japan project,

please visit the website of the Oxford University research
programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, at
www.history.ox.ac.uk/china.
Rana Mitter is Professor of History and Politics of Modern
China at the University of Oxford

China Review Summer 2010

Page 20

chinafotopress

CHINA S IMMIGRANT
POPULATION
BY FRANK N. PIEKE

THE WORLDS EMERGING SUPERPOWERS

China, India, Brazil, Russia demand an increasingly
prominent role in the global migration order, not only as
countries of origin but also, and increasingly, as countries
of destination for international migrants. The Peoples
Republic of China is the largest and arguably most
important of the twenty-first centurys new superpowers. It
is well-documented that Chinas economic development has
given rise to massive flows of domestic migration and
international out-migration. However, as international
migration is now beginning to fill specific gaps in the
labour market and foreigners are attracted by the promise of
a better life, China is also rapidly becoming an important
destination of immigrants.
For decades already, China has had sizeable
foreign student and expatriate communities, mainly from
the West, East, and Southeast Asia. However, in the past
few years immigration to China has become much more
diverse. Many of these new immigrants are not simply
expatriates or short-term visitors, but bring or start families
and expect to stay. In addition, an increasing number of
Chinese return to China after study or work abroad. All are
attracted by the business climate, jobs and life style that
China now offers. Not only have major cities such as
Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou become as cosmopolitan

and culturally diverse as other major metropolitan centres

around the world, but smaller, rapidly growing cities and
towns like Shenzhen, Xiamen, Wenzhou, Yiwu, Shaoxing,
Weihai, Nanjing and Kunming are following suit.
According to United Nations data, Chinas stock of
immigrants was projected to reach 685,800 in 2010. This is
certainly a severe undercount, and a more realistic number
may be around the two million mark. Despite this
seemingly large number, we should bear in mind that
international migrants still are only a minute fraction of
Chinas huge population. Yet the scale and variety of
immigration in China already clearly defies easy and
unambiguous characterizations. Three broad and
overlapping categories of immigrants can be distinguished:
(1) students; (2) middle class professionals, businesspeople
and traders; and (3) cross-border migrants.
Students
In addition to large numbers of short-term students
of Chinese language and culture, China has also become a
magnet for foreign degree students. Some of this is part of
the governments soft power strategy, but many students
from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, India, Bangladesh and
Pakistan apply to Chinese universities also because of the
combination of good-quality education, reasonable fees and

Page 21

Chinas Immigrant Population

corollary of the recent interest in the

connections between China and
Africa, including Chinese migration
to the continent. Starting with a few
enterprising students some fifteen
years ago, currently about 30,000
Africans operate in Guangzhou
purchasing manufactured goods for
export. Many of these traders have
become long-term residents of China,
often with families; quite a few of
them have become very wealthy.
Others operate more in the margin,
searching for the deal that will make
them rich too, often residing in China
illegally or shuttling back and forth
between China and Africa on tourist
visas.

chinafotopress

Banging the drum for Chinese education: numbers of South Korean students in China
have risen sharply.

geographic proximity. The rise in foreign student numbers

is by no means limited to the metropolitan areas of the
coastal region. In Yunnan, the number of Vietnamese
students rose from 89 in 2002 to 515 in 2006. Other sharp
risers in the province included South Korea, Thailand, Laos
and Burma, with a more moderate rise recorded for
Americans and Japanese. Among these foreign students, the
number of non-Chinese language students rose sharpest, for
instance in medicine, art and business. Private universities
saw an especially rapid rise in foreign student numbers.
Professionals, businesspeople and traders
The communities of middle class and elite resident
foreigners in Chinas cities are no longer dominated by
expatriate
employees
of
foreign
multinationals,
international organizations, diplomatic missions and
foreign experts hired by Chinese state enterprise
organizations. Large numbers of foreigners have
independently taken up long-term residence in search of
local employment, cheaper living costs, or to set up their
own company. In addition, we should also include in this
category the very diverse group of traders from Russia,
Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and
Africa. To all of these foreigners, China is the land of
opportunity, not just a stopover on an international career.
In the eyes of many Chinese, (white) westerners are the
paradigm of what are known as yang dagong (foreign
workers). However, numerically this category of foreign
residents is dominated by hundreds of thousands of middle
class Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, South Koreans,
Japanese and Southeast Asians and of course returned
Chinese students and professionals. Very prominent are also
the much smaller communities of traders from Africa,
South, Central and Southeast Asia, Russia and the Middle
East.
Many groups of immigrants who share a common
background tend to concentrate in one particular city or
neighbourhood and specialize in a particular type of
employment or business. The group of foreign traders that
are by far the best researched are the Africans in
Guangzhou, partially because of the visibility of what is
locally known as Chocolate City and partially also as a

Cross-border migrants
Chinas international borders no
longer divide and separate. They are becoming part of
larger cross-border regions defined by complex
relationships of co-ethnicity, religion, legal trade and illegal
smuggling, marriage, employment, study, immigration and
emigration, crime and (particularly in the case of Xinjiang)
terrorism. North Korea provides perhaps the clearest
example. The famine in the late 1990s led to a flood of
immigrants from North Korea into China. The PRC
government has treated illegal Koreans with little sympathy.
In 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
reported massive roundups, detentions and repatriations of
North Koreans, and a crackdown on religious and human
rights groups that assisted them. The issue is made more
complex because of the large ethnically Korean population
that lives in China just across the border from North Korea.
Many North Koreans were taken into rural Korean
households and even irregularly registered as members of
these households by the local authorities.
Fortune seekers and problems of immigration
Neatly dividing foreign immigrants into the
categories such as students, traders, businesspeople,
professionals and cross-border migrants hardly covers
the reality on the ground in China. Migrants are highly
enterprising and proactive in exploring the opportunities
that China has to offer, and there is very considerable
overlap and spillover between all of these categories as a
result. From the perspective of the Chinese authorities, the
dynamic nature of migration has created a further category
of immigrant that does not come to China for bona fide
business, study, or employment, but opportunistically in
search of wealth or survival. Such fortune
seekers (taojinzhe, literally gold panners), do not bring
any skills or capital to China. They come to China not to
contribute to its modernization, but merely to take
advantage of its new prosperity.
In fact, of course, almost every group of
immigrants in China is internally stratified, having both
highly successful professionals and businesspeople and
more marginal groups without formal jobs or fully
registered businesses. New immigrants rely on their own
resources and personal contacts, causing the growth of

Page 22

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

An African woman sells traditional African wares at an Expo event in Wuhan

residentially concentrated urban villages (cun) or

towns (cheng) of foreigners, such as the Burmese and
Vietnamese in Guangxi and the South Koreans in Beijing.
Here we see the beginnings of the ethnic enclave pattern
of immigrant settlement found among many immigrant
groups the world over, where the institutional infrastructure
and employment offered by a co-ethnic community
provides new arrivals with the chance to get established and
ultimately become successful too.
Chinese studies often conclude that fortune seekers
do not deserve the courtesies extended to foreigners, but
should rather be considered part of the floating population
of rural-urban migrants. Increasingly, the problem of the
foreign blind flow (waiguo mangliu) is directly connected
with that of the three illegalities (san fei) of illegal entry,
illegal residence and illegal work. Moreover, the three
illegalities and the foreign floating population are often
discussed together with many other much more serious
problems, including terrorism, organized and petty crime,
drinking, drugs and violence, prostitution and
unemployment, a list that is depressingly similar to
observations on immigration in western countries.
Yet most authors also agree that the lack of
compliance with Chinas regulations regarding foreign
entry, employment and residence should be separated from
more serious law enforcement issues. The illegality of many
foreigners in China often has to do more with the lack of
appropriate regulation, the continued restrictions on travel
and other activities by foreigners, and a general lack of
expertise and coordination within those branches of the
administration that are responsible for foreigners. Even
many professional and business migrants, the kind of
people China says it wants, either often have no choice but
to bend the rules in order to live and work in China, or else

have little incentive to comply with the regulations.

China still does not possess the regulatory
framework and administrative capacity to fully deal with
large-scale immigration. Currently, the trend is towards a
more integrated approach that facilitates the entry and stay
of foreigners. The recognition that foreigners are there to
stay also comes with the necessity to cater to their needs,
such as education for their children and the right to profess
their religion in churches, mosques, or temples. However,
the normalization of immigration also means that,
increasingly, foreign residents are only entitled to the rights
that Chinese citizens enjoy as well, and should no longer
get privileged treatment.
Yet in certain respects, the normalization of
immigration will continue to be less than straightforward as
it touches on some politically very sensitive issues. In these
areas, foreigners are still treated on the basis of the old
exclusionary discourse as carriers of subversive influences
(or spiritual pollution in the CCPs own terminology) that
may harm Chinese society and even the rule of the
Communist Party. In addition, as we have seen, a new
perception is emerging that not all of immigration is
necessarily a good thing. The growth of a foreign floating
population is considered a burden on Chinese society,
while immigration is also associated with terrorism,
subversive activities and international organized crime. As a
result, an increasing emphasis on control and national
security in addition to service and equal treatment is to be
expected in immigration management.

Frank N. Pieke is University Lecturer of Modern Politics and

Society of China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of
Oxford

China and the Global Financial Crisis

Page 23

chinafotopress

CHINA AND THE GLOBAL

FINANCIAL CRISIS :
RESPONSES AND OUTLOOK
BY LINDA YUEH
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS of 2007/08
and the ensuing Great Recession hit China in the autumn of
2008 when exports collapsed. China suffered some losses
from the failure of Lehman Brothers, but did not become
embroiled in a financial crisis and thus only suffered from
the ensuing Great Recession, notably a contraction in global
trade.
No country has avoided the effects of the global
financial crisis. However, the impact on China whilst
significant, has been limited. The two avenues of this impact
were via financial contagion and the economic downturn.
Because China does not have a financial sector that trades
extensively in derivatives, it did not suffer a credit crunch
or have to contend with toxic assets stemming from subprime mortgages and related securitised assets. Its large
state-owned banks registered losses estimated to be in the
billions due to their positions as Lehman creditors, but there
are no ongoing balance sheet impairments in its financial
system, which would have been far more damaging.

The larger impact is from the downturn in the

global economy which caused exports to dramatically
decline during the height of the crisis. The severity of the
financial crisis led to a contraction in global trade for the
first time in 30 years. Exports account for over 30% of
Chinas GDP and the closing of export-oriented factories
resulted in an estimated 20 million unemployed rural-urban
migrants. Although the outlook for trade has improved due
to the global economy and the easing of trade finance
(letters of credit guaranteeing traded goods) by an injection
of funds by the G20 group of major economies, exports
have yet to return as a strong growth engine. Exports grew
again in December 2009 but the external sector continued to
subtract from growth, for example net trade reduced the
annual GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2010 by over
1 percentage point.
China certainly confounded expectations when it
achieved its targeted 8% growth rate in 2009 and avoided a
technical recession during the worst global downturn in

Page 24

China Review Summer 2010

recent memory. Although there are questions about its

credit-fuelled recovery, China can emerge stronger from the
global crisis if it re-orients its economy towards developing
domestic demand and reducing the volatility associated with
being excessively export-oriented. China can be a large,
open economy which reaps the benefits of global integration
but also the stability of growth that is supported by a
sizeable domestic market.
How China escaped the worst of the financial crisis
China injected a fiscal stimulus package of 4
trillion Yuan ($586 billion) in the spring of 2009 which is
continuing to be disbursed in 2010 amidst signs of
continuing weakness in global demand. Chinas fiscal
stimulus was only $200 billion less than the USA whose
economy is three times larger. As a result, Chinas pace of
growth picked up by the second quarter of 2009 and the
economy grew at 8.7% for the year with the 4th quarter
registering an impressive 10.7% year-on-year growth.
But, around half of the stimulus package is on
infrastructure and less than 5% is earmarked for social
spending. This was viewed as inadequate to stimulate
private consumption because it fails to address one of the
main causes of Chinas low level of domestic demand which
is the high level of household saving. China subsequently
announced the latter measures on health and pensions. So,
another $125 billion on health (to work towards achievng
universal health coverage by 2020 by covering 200 million
uninsured people) and another $400 million on rural
pensions were later added.
In one sense, although criticized, Chinas focus on
infrastructure, particularly roads and rail, is necessary and
builds on (though perhaps double-counts) the large-scale
transport project that had been underway in the 11th Five
Year Plan which began in 2006. Such public works can be
quickly implemented and provide jobs for the millions of
workers laid-off from factories who can be re-deployed to
build in not just coastal regions but in rural and interior parts
of China as these projects span the country. Although
joblessness is difficult to gauge because China only counts
the urban unemployed (the official unemployment rate of
less than 5% is unlikely to be accurate), the stabilisation of
migration (and even reported labour shortages) in the first
part of 2010 suggests that jobs are being created. The
investment in roads and rail creates the same type of lowskill, low-wage jobs that migrant workers had done in
factories. Of course, there remains under-employment as not
all of the unemployed found new jobs and some returned to
farming, but the probable employment creation points to the
real success of Chinas stimulus spending. There is certainly
inefficiency as well as waste, which will likely generate
problems in the banking system when those unnecessary
projects become bad debts. Assessing the extent of those
bad debts will be important in assessing the stability of the
banking system.
Becoming a large, open economy
For China to achieve a more stable economic
growth model, it will need to institute reforms that can boost
domestic demand whilst promoting global integration. The
aim of reform in the context of a weaker global economy
has to be two-fold: (1) to improve the structure of the
Chinese economy towards a model suitable for a large, open

chinafotopress

Construction of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway in

Nanjing

economy; (2) to ensure stability. Stability in terms of

economic transition and development means guarding
against external shocks by designing better institutional
integration with the global economy in recognition that
world markets are linked, but not governed. Better
integration limits positive spill-overs and instead transmits
shocks.
The structure of the Chinese economy needs to
evolve to become like the USA and Japan, which are large
countries whose growth is primarily driven by domestic
demand but at the same time are the largest traders in the
world. Small countries in population are more determined
by international trade and must rely on external markets,
which was one of the rationales for the EU single market
that has become the largest economic entity in the world.
China would be less subject to the volatility of the world
economy by following a path that strengthens both internal
and external demand which can cause the proportion of
growth to be driven by domestic demand to increase even
as trade expands in absolute terms. As China affects the
global terms of term (prices of exports to imports),
structuring itself as a large, open economy which recognises
the benefits of global integration whilst maintaining a
strong base of domestic demand to shield it from the worst
excesses of external shocks is feasible.
To orient toward domestic demand means boosting
consumption in China which is to say that there is a need to
reduce the savings motives by households and firms.

China and the Global Financial Crisis

Page 25

chinafotopress

Above: A Sichuanese farmer eyes up fridges on offer under the

home appliance to rural areas scheme. The government has
been offering a 13% subsidy to rural farmers to improve living
standards and boost consumption. Right: Louis Vuitton opens
in Shenyang. Only Japan consumes more luxury goods than
China according to the World luxury association.

Consumption fell from around 50% of GDP in the early

1990s to nearly one-third by the late 2000s. As a share of
GDP in market economies, consumption is typically around
50-66% of GDP (in Japan it is 60%, whilst it was a
whopping 72% in the U.S. before the onset of the global
financial crisis, which was considered to be too high).
For households, precautionary savings motives are
important to address, particularly in rural areas. Increasing
incomes and wealth along with improved social security
provision will be needed. These issues are well rehearsed
and the latter additions to the governments stimulus plan
demonstrate recognition of the challenges, though funding
remains inadequate in some areas such as pensions. Other
measures, such as developing the service sector, will boost
domestic demand by increasing the non-tradable component
of the economy and also create jobs along the low and highends of the skills spectrum. This will suit the Chinese
(urban and migrant) labour force. Increasing income,
including through greater urbanisation, which can improve
the earning potential of rural residents, will be a crucial
driver in boosting consumption.
Savings by firmsstate-owned and non-stateownedare even higher than those of households and
reforms are necessary to reduce business savings. Chinas
distorted financial system that is biased towards stateowned enterprises also leads private firms to save in order
to grow and invest, while even state-owned enterprises save
due to minimal taxation of their profits. This was evident
when Chinas current account surplus surpassed 10% of
GDP after 2004. Investment maintained its share of GDP,
even though investment is typically squeezed when
countries develop a current account surplus. In China,
consumption instead suffered as the motives for saving
were undiminished by the export boom.
State-owned enterprises should be taxed and
dividend payments to the government should be increased.
Private firms have trouble obtaining creditwhether from
banks or the underdeveloped domestic capital marketsso
they rely heavily on retained earnings to finance growth.
With economic growth exceeding 10% annually in the past
decade, the need to finance expansion was high as was

chinafotopress

saving by the non-state sector, which accounts for over twothirds of industrial output.
Complete liberalization of interest rates will
improve credit allocation to non-state sector firms and
reduce the savings incentive as well. Although interest rates
were partially liberalized in 2004 when the ceiling on interbank lending rates was lifted, there are still limits in terms
of the floor as well as a ceiling on deposit rates. Interest
rates reflect the internal rate of return to investment, so such
controls distort lending decisions. Gradual capital account
liberalization, in particular the going out policy, will help
reduce savings if firms can operate in global markets and be
allowed to access funding from better-developed overseas
credit markets. In other words, firms will be able to raise
money on capital markets and not just rely on Chinas
banking system with its controls on credit. This will not
only reduce the motive for corporate savings but also cut
the portion of the current account surplus that is funded
through the purchase of U.S. Treasury bills by allowing
capital outflows in the form of investments instead of
accumulated in foreign exchange reserves. The external
benefits do not end there. The exchange rate should also
become more flexible with greater capital account
liberalization since the capital account as well as the current
account will require the Yuan.
China can be a fast growing, large, open economy
developing domestic demand and upgrading industry and
promoting globally competitive firms that recognises its
wider impact. It is unlike small, open, export-led economies
which do not affect the global terms of trade. Given Chinas
still low level of development, global integration would
benefit its own development as well as that of the world.
These macroeconomic reforms will be important to position
China optimally in a global economy that is significantly
different and more uncertain than before. By doing so,
China can emerge stronger from the global financial crisis.
It is too good an opportunity to miss.
Dr. Linda Yueh is Director, China Growth Centre (CGC) and
Fellow in Economics, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

Page 26

China Review Summer 2010

RESPONDING TO CHINA S RISE

BY CARL MINZNER

THE LAST DECADE HAS witnessed a sharp

citizens for input into the government decisions that affect
their lives, and for effective redress of their grievances.
shift in the fortunes of the West and China. Years of
protracted warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with
While Chinas economy and society have shifted
back-to-back financial crises triggered by American and
dramatically over the past 30 years, Chinas authoritarian
political structure has not. Party authorities have simply
European credit-fueled spending binges have sapped the
power of Western nations. At the same time, China has
placed core political questions in deep freeze. But the
continued to expand economically at a frenetic pace.
tensions dont simply evaporate. Rather, they are bubbling
up in other forms. The rising number of mass petitions,
These changes have begun to shift the perceptions
of Western and Chinese authorities of themselves, and of
riots, and protests are but one example. The emergence of
each other. In China, nationalist pride in Chinas economic
extremist behavior is another disgruntled citizens
resorting to self-immolation or violence against authorities
growth and expanded global role has led to a hardening of
attitudes among officials. Some now question the need, and
in the absence of other outlets for their grievances.
China today resembles a soda can that is being
desirability, of adhering to a relatively cautious foreign
aggressively shaken. In the best case scenario, Party
policy aimed at limiting international tensions with the
West. Changes in relative power have affected Western
authorities will start to relieve the building pressure by
gradually relaxing political controls and permitting Chinese
officials as well. Some view China as the next threat, one
citizens to participate in the rocky process, stretching over
aiming to displace the United States military presence from
the Western Pacific. Others, wide-eyed after viewing the
many years, of shaping the political institutions that will
govern China in the 21st century. But if repressive political
Shanghai and Beijing skylines, view China as the key to
perpetual growth and domestic prosperity, with evercontrols continue, citizen demands for political participation
expanding markets to be courted at the exclusion of all else.
will shift into other, more dangerous, channels. And in that
How should one view Chinas rise? Two key points are
case, China risks explosive decompression.
worth bearing in mind.
First, Chinas rising
influence is natural.
It is a
country of 1.3 billion
people. Until 1800, it comprised
a third of world economic
output. Chinas rapid growth
over the last 30 years reflects a
return toward this long-term
historical equilibrium. Chinas
development, as well as that of
the rest of Asia, will necessarily
alter the preeminent geopolitical
position that the United States has
enjoyed since the end of the Cold
War, and that Western nations
have enjoyed since the 19th
century. The operational question
is not whether we in the West like
it or not. It is how we adapt.
Second, the Chinese
government is much less stable
than it appears. Contrary to the
assertions of state propaganda,
China has not managed to create
chinafotopress
stable institutions to respond to
the political demands of its
While Chinas economy and society have shifted dramatically over the past 30 years,
Chinas authoritarian political structure has not.

Responding to Chinas Rise

How should other nations react to Chinas rise?

First, recognize that for many Chinese citizens,
Chinas rise represents a fulfillment of patriotic desires that
go beyond their attitudes towards the existing ruling elite in
Beijing. Many in China are simply (and justifiably) proud
that after 150 years of imperialism, civil war, and political
turmoil, their country is returning to the global stage and
receiving the recognition that it is due.
For this reason, a blanket opposition to Chinas
global rise either out of a quaint desire to hold on to the
fast-receding Western-dominated world of the 19th and 20th
centuries, or out of a knee-jerk distaste for the authoritarian
practices of Chinas rulers carries real dangers. It runs the
risk of allowing the social discontent bubbling in China to
find an easy outlet in anti-foreign nationalism. In that case,
claims that foreigners are responsible for holding China
back may all too easily be used to sidestep real governance
issues, such as a fossilized political structure which allows
local corruption and abuse of power to thrive.
Second, anchor China in multilateral institutions.
Chinese authorities need to be given a role in shaping the
international order, with corresponding responsibilities for
handling international crises. The recent recalibration of
voting shares in the International Monetary Fund to more
accurately reflect Chinas economic weight was exactly the
right thing to do.
Naturally, there is no guarantee that Chinese
authorities will use their increased influence in these
institutions to pursue goals that are identical with those of
other nations. In fact, it is highly likely that China will
make stronger and stronger efforts to push these institutions
in directions of its own choosing. But that is not the point.
Rather, the goal is to get China to exercise its increasing
muscle within the structure of existing institutions
established in the post-WWII era, rather than trying to break
them. Of course, this also means that Western authorities

chinafotopress

House-buyers protest against corrupt practices of property

developers on Consumers' Day in Shenzhen.

Page 27

(particularly American ones) need to reaffirm their own

commitment to these very same multilateral institutions.
Third, do not overreact to individual instances of
assertiveness by Chinese officials, interpreting them as a
complete rejection of international norms and institutions.
Certainly, there is an outside possibility that Chinese
leaders may move in that direction. And other nations need

The goal is to get China to

exercise its increasing muscle
within the structure of existing
institutions
to be on the watch for that. But it is more likely that
individual brash actions (think Copenhagen) simply reflect
Chinese officials feeling their oats as they grapple with
Chinas rise on the world stage. Chinese authorities
actually remain seriously constrained in their ability to
mount a sustained challenge to the international order. Any
such action risks triggering nationalist sentiment that can
easily fuse with popular discontent in a very dangerous,
anti-regime cocktail.
Because of such domestic considerations, Chinese
leaders need a stable international environment and a
modicum of cooperation with other major nations. This is
part of the reason that in May, after several months of tense
US-China relations, Chinese authorities showed a renewed
willingness to cooperate with other nations, such as by
agreeing to the imposition of international sanctions on
Iran.
Third, start to consider backup plans.
The
discussion above is aimed at responding to the necessary
long-term geopolitical shifts resulting from Chinas return
to the world stage. But there are also significant short-term
dangers. What happens if the Chinese government fails?
What happens if Chinese authorities are unable to
manage a gradual political transition, and the country enters
into an extended period of internal disorder? What would
this mean for geopolitical stability in East Asia? For
foreign nations reliant on China to finance their debt? Not
to mention the nightmarish humanitarian, health, and
environmental problems that would ensue. In addition to
thinking about how to respond to Chinas gradual long-term
rise in global influence, policy-makers and others should
seriously consider how they would respond to an alternative
scenario: a rapid short-term descent.
Last, deal with China in a bipartisan
manner. Particularly in the United States, both Democratic
and Republican politicians have all too often viewed China
as a means to score political points with narrow domestic
constituencies, instead of trying to work together across the
aisle to formulate a broader strategic vision. One can do
that with small nations. One can not with a country that
represents a fifth of humanity.
Carl Minzner is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington
University in St. Louis, School of Law. He specializes in
Chinese law and politics. This article incorporates material
from an earlier piece for the Ripon Forum.

Page 28

China Review Summer 2010

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CHINA AND THE

GLOBAL MEDIA
BY DUNCAN HEWITT

THE SUBJECT OF THE debate at a Shanghai

university could hardly have sounded more benign how
did foreign journalists intend to cover the World Expo in
Shanghai, and what aspects of its content were they
interested in? Yet it didnt take long before suspicions were
flying: a Chinese researcher with long experience of
working for the foreign media in China began criticizing the
methods of foreign correspondents: they do things in a
really underhand way, he said, sometimes they phone
people up and dont tell them theyre journalists, often they
dont check information properly. A couple of young
Chinese reporters agreed that foreigners could not
understand China properly anyhow: They might be able to
speak Chinese but their understanding of the country and
its culture is zero, said one man, launching into an angry
attack on international journalists and their organizations,
which he lumped together under the phrase waimei an
abbreviation meaning foreign media, which seemed to carry
a distinctly derogatory tone coming from his lips.
It was perhaps only to be expected. Since 2008 and
the run-up to the Olympic Games, the international media,
and specifically the western media, has been the target of
much criticism in China. Following the riots in Tibet that
March, and the attempts by pro-Tibetan protestors to disrupt
the Olympic Torch relay in Europe, the Chinese
government appeared to reverse its long-standing policy of

playing down or covering up criticism of the country in the

foreign media. Chinas domestic media began to publish a
series of articles complaining about negative reporting in
the international press. A number of errors in western media
coverage of the Tibet situation were highlighted: these
included the use of images of Nepalese police beating proTibet demonstrators, with a caption saying they were
Chinese soldiers; the use of old footage in news reports, and
the cropping of a picture taken in Lhasa, which China said
made Chinese troops look like aggressors rather than in the
fact coming under attack from rioters.
In the Chinese medias view, these were far from
isolated cases they were depicted as part of an
international plot to discredit China, in which the foreign
media played a key role. Shortly afterwards, when the
conservative CNN commentator Jack Cafferty denounced
Chinas leaders as basically the same bunch of goons and
thugs as in the last 50 years, his comments were loudly
condemned by the Chinese government, which described
them as a racist attack on the Chinese people, and
demanded a formal apology from CNN.
These events gave rise to a website, antiCNN.com, which provided a forum for the anger of
millions of mainly young Chinese people towards the west
and its media organizations. They were accused of seeking
to undermine China and promoting the hegemonistic

China and the Global Media

flickr/ ccyber3

Riot police in Xinjiang, 2009: Western media coverage was criticized

for focusing on the grievances of the Uighur ethnic group

Page 29

bias and ignorance.

For journalists working in China, many of
whom have studied the language and lived in the
country for many years, and would see themselves as
doing their best, in sometimes difficult
circumstances, to convey as objectively as possible a
sense of the extraordinary ferment and transformation
underway in China today, such black and white
perceptions can be depressing. Yet they clearly reveal
problems and misunderstandings which can work
both ways. Foreign journalists working in China, and
seeking to bring out the complex and often
contradictory nature of the situation there, can
certainly sometimes find themselves frustrated at the
less subtle perceptions of editors back home, who
may know less about the country, and whose interests
and understanding may be more simplistic.
When the riots in Lhasa took place in March
2008, leading to the deaths of a number of mainly
Han victims attacked by rioters, there did seem to be a
tendency among some editors in the west to assume
that if people had died in Lhasa then the victims must be
Tibetans who had been shot by the Chinese authorities a
perception which may have contributed to the use of
miscaptioned images mentioned above. On the other hand,
what many young people in China are less aware of is the
fact that Chinese troops did shoot Tibetans in Lhasa in
1989, and the indelible memory which this, and the Beijing
crackdown in 1989, have left in the minds of many
foreigners. This is not to excuse sloppy journalism but it
may help to explain the instinctive reactions of people
outside China.

ambitions of the west, which many angry bloggers

suggested had never faded since the Opium Wars in the 19th
Century. Individual foreign journalists whose reporting was
seen as negative were attacked on the internet; a number
received threatening phone calls, a few received death
threats.
This fiery mood eventually died down, but it has
undoubtedly left a legacy. Significantly, some of those
criticising the western media in 2008 were educated young
people who insisted that they had never trusted Chinas own
media and its pro-government line, but said they now felt
The dangers of stereotypes
let down by western media institutions which they had
There can be no question that stereotypes do exist
previously admired and looked up to. Two years later, many
in the west, and, on occasion, these can veer into
students can still recite the official litany of the errors of the
questionable areas: US criticisms of China during the scare
foreign media in 2008. And there have been new targets for
about dangerous Chinese-made toys in 2007, for example,
criticism too: when four staff of the Australian minerals
did sometimes seem to imply that no-one at all in China
giant Rio Tinto went on trial for bribery and stealing
cared about the safety of children. And when a news
commercial secrets in Shanghai in early 2010, western
media including the BBC and CNN were
accused by the Chinese press of loaded
reports which ignored the facts that the main
defendant, Stern Hu, had admitted to bribery
charges, and that Cracking down on bribes
would help clean the field for doing business
in China.
Similarly, western media coverage of
the riots in Xinjiang in 2009, in which
hundreds of Han Chinese civilians were killed,
was criticized for focusing on the grievances
of the rioting members of the Uighur ethnic
group, and ignoring the Chinese victims. In
fact western journalists reported a number of
tragic stories based on the accounts of Chinese
victims, but these apparently had little impact
on the popular, or at least official, perception
in China. Indeed the atmosphere of suspicion
is now such that almost any article on China
published on the website of a major
chinafotopress
international media outlet is likely to attract
Reconstruction of a building in Tibet following the 2008 riots: sloppy Western
criticism in the comments section at the end
coverage of the riots infuriated many Chinese
from Chinese readers railing against western

Page 30

magazine publishes a cover story under the headline

Yellow Peril as one German publication did for a story
about Chinese industrial espionage in 2007 its hard to
avoid recalling the casual racism of the 1920s, when the
phrase was widely used. Yet commentary in the Chinese
press about the stereotyped reports of German
media (which, according to one recent survey, have led
71% of Germans to have a negative view of China) is in
itself somewhat stereotypical, since much coverage in the
German media is perfectly objective and realistic.
And there are still arguably a number of common
misperceptions within China about how the media works in
other countries. It is a common misconception in China that
media organizations in western countries do not necessarily
represent the view of the governments of those countries;
that media organizations do, regrettably, make genuine
mistakes, and that mistaken captions or use of pictures may
simply be due to something as banal as overworked, overtired sub-editors on the nightshift not checking information
carefully enough; that the media in most countries tends to
expose problems and abuses in its own country too,
believing that such reporting will help such problems to be
resolved; and indeed that criticism of problems in China
may not be intended as anti-the Chinese people, but on the
contrary may be motivated, rightly or wrongly, by a desire
to stand up for the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens in the
face of perceived official abuses.
Nevertheless, the Chinese government is often able
to portray any criticism as anti-China: Googles decision to

chinafotopress

Googles withdrawal was depicted in the Chinese media as a

sign of disrespect for Chinas laws

China Review Summer 2010

Flickr/ jakob montrasio

The new CCTV building in Beijing. Billions of dollars are also

being invested in setting up global Chinese television networks

close its China-based search engine in the face of

censorship and alleged hacker attacks, for example, widely
portrayed in the west as a stand for freedom of information
and the internet, was depicted in the Chinese media as a
sign of disrespect for Chinas laws, and thus an insult to the
Chinese people. Not everyone bought this line but many
undoubtedly did, not least because of the patriotic
education campaign of recent decades which, by focusing
on historical grievances, has fuelled suspicion of the
motives of western countries towards China.
And Chinese perceptions are likely to become
more relevant, and potentially powerful, as the country
embarks on a push to expand the global reach of its own
media and thus its own voice. Billions of dollars are being
invested in setting up global television networks, and the
resources invested in these projects means they increasingly
succeed in hiring experienced staff from abroad, thus
increasing their credibility.
In the face of this new reality, the international
media needs to be aware of how its coverage of China may
be perceived or sometimes manipulated in that country.
This is not to call for self-censorship and not everyone in
China wants this anyway: its good to have the foreign
media here revealing problems, a Guangzhou taxi driver
told me recently, to my surprise: It helps us improve
things. There are undoubtedly a number of cases where
international media coverage, whether of the SARS
epidemic, or the AIDS blood scandal in Henan, has
contributed to an eventual change in the Chinese
governments approach. But its clear that in the current
climate, the international media will find itself under evergrowing pressure to show that it is presenting an accurate
and credible picture of China and it may need to pay
increasing attention to engaging with, and explaining itself
more clearly to, people in China.
Duncan Hewitt is a correspondent for Newsweek
in Shanghai, and author of Getting Rich First: Life in
a Changing China (Vintage)

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Page 31

Page 32

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

CHINESE ARTISANS
PETER HESSLERS ENCOUNTERS WITH THE CITIZENS OF LISHUI

IN THE COUNTRYSIDE SOUTHWEST of the

city of Lishui, where the Da River crosses a sixth-century
stone weir, the local government announced, four years
ago, that it was founding a Chinese version of the Barbizon.
The original French Barbizon School developed during the
first half of the nineteenth century, in response to the
Romantic movement, among painters working at the edge
of the Fontainebleau Forest. Back then, the French artists
celebrated rural scenes and peasant subjects. This wasnt
exactly the mood in Lishui: like most cities in eastern
Chinas Zhejiang Province, the place was focused on urban
growth; there was a new factory district, and the export
economy was then booming. But the local Communist
Party cadres wanted the city to become even more outward
looking, and they liked the foreign cachet of the Barbizon.
They also figured that it would be good business: art
doesnt require much raw material, and its popular
overseas. They referred to their project as Lishuis
Babisong, and they gave it the official name of the Ancient
Weir Art Village. One Party slogan described it as A
Village of Art, a Capital of Romance, a Place for Idleness.
In order to attract artists, the government offered
free rent in some old riverside buildings for the first year,
with additional subsidies to follow. Painters arrived

immediately; soon, the village had nearly a dozen private

galleries. Most people came from Chinas far south, where
there was already a flourishing industry of art for the
foreign market. Buyers wanted cheap oil paintings, many of
which were destined for tourist shops, restaurants, and
hotels in distant countries. For some reason, the majority of
artists who settled Lishuis Barbizon specialised in
cityscapes of Venice. The manager of Hongye, the largest
of the new galleries, told me that it had a staff of thirty
painters, and that its main customer was a European-based
importer with an insatiable appetite for Venetian scenes.
Every month, he wanted a thousand Chinese paintings of
the Italian city.
Another small gallery, Bomia, had been opened by
a woman named Chen Meizi and her boyfriend, Hu Jianhui.
The first time I met Chen, she had just finished a scene of
Venice, and now she was painting a Dutch street scene
from what looked like the eighteenth century. A Russian
customer had sent a postcard and asked her to copy it. The
painting was twenty inches by twenty-four, and Chen told
me that she would sell it for about twenty-five dollars. Like
most people in the Ancient Weir Art Village, she described
Venice as Shui Cheng, Water City, and referred to Dutch
scenes as Helan Jie, Holland Street. She said that over the

Chinese Artisans

past half year she had painted this particular Holland Street
as many as thirty times. All the pictures have that big
tower in it, she said. I told her that it was a churchthe
steeple rose in the distance, at the end of a road bordered by
brick houses with red tile roofs. I thought it might be a
church, but I wasnt sure, she said. I knew it was
important because whenever I make a mistake they send it
back.
Through trial and error, she had learned to
recognise some of the landmark buildings of Europe. She
had no idea of the names of St. Marks Basilica and the
Doges Palace, but she knew these places mattered, because
even the tiniest mistake resulted in rejection. She worked
faster on less iconic scenes, because customers didnt notice
slight errors. On average, she could finish a painting in
under two days.
Chen was in her early twenties, and she had grown
up on a farm near Lishui; as a teenager, she learned to paint
at an art school. She still had a peasants directness she
spoke in a raspy voice and laughed at many of my
questions. I asked her which of her pictures she liked the
most, and she said, I dont like any of them. She didnt
have a favourite painter; there wasnt any particular artistic
period that had influenced her. That kind of art has no
connection at all with what we do, she said. The Barbizon
concept didnt impress her much. The government had
commissioned some European-style paintings of local
scenery, but Chen had no use for any of it.
Like many young Chinese from the countryside,
she had already had her fill of bucolic surroundings. She
stayed in the Ancient Weir Art Village strictly because of
the free rent, and she missed the busy city of Guangzhou,
where she had previously lived. In the meantime, she
looked the part of an urban convert. She had long curly
hair; she dressed in striking colours; she seemed to wear
high heels whenever she was awake. On workdays, she
tottered on stilettos in front of her easel, painting gondolas
and churches.
Hu Jianhui, Chens boyfriend, was a soft-spoken
man with glasses and a faint crooked mustache that crossed
his lip like a calligraphers slip. Once a month, he rolled up
all their finished paintings and took a train down to
Guangzhou, where there was a big art market. That was
how they encountered customers; none of the buyers ever
came to the Ancient Weir Art Village. For the most part,
foreigners wanted Holland Streets and the Water City, but
occasionally they sent photographs of other scenes to be
converted into art. Hu kept a sample book in which a
customer could pick out a picture, give an ID number, and
order a full-size oil painting on canvas. HF-3127 was the
Eiffel Tower. HF-3087 was a clipper ship on stormy seas.
HF-3199 was a circle of Native Americans smoking a peace
pipe. Chen and Hu could rarely identify the foreign scenes
that they painted, but they had acquired some ideas about
national art tastes from their commissions. Americans
prefer brighter pictures, Hu told me. They like scenes to
be lighter. Russians like bright colours, too. Koreans like
them to be more subdued, and Germans like things that are
grayer. The French are like that, too. Chen flipped to HF3075: a snow-covered house with glowing lights. Chinese
people like this kind of picture, she said. Ugly! And they
like this one. HF-3068: palm trees on a beach. Its stupid,
something a child would like. Chinese people have no taste.

Page 33

French people have the best taste, followed by Russians,

and then the other Europeans. I asked her how Americans
stacked up. Americans are after that, she said. Well do
a painting and the European customer wont buy it, and
then well show it to a Chinese person, and hell say,
Great!
Attention to detail
Lishui is a third-tier Chinese factory town, with a
central population of around two hundred and fifty
thousand, and, in a place like that, the outside world is both
everywhere and nowhere at all. In the new development
zone, assembly lines produce goods for export, but there
isnt much direct foreign investment. There arent any Nike
factories, or Intel plants, or signs that say Du-Pont;
important brands base themselves in bigger cities. Lishui
companies make pieces of things: zippers, copper wiring,
electric-outlet covers. The products are so obscure that you
cant tell much from the signs that hang outside factory
gates: Jinchao Industry Co., Ltd.; Huadu Leather Base
Cloth Co., Ltd. At the Lishui Sanxing Power Machinery
Co., Ltd., the owners have posted their sign in English, but
they did so from right to left, the way Chinese traditionally
do with characters:
DTL ,.OC YRENIHCAM REWOP GNIXNAS IUHSIl
The degree of detail often impressed me. The
outside world might be distant, but it wasnt necessarily
blurred; people caught discrete glimpses of things from
overseas. In many cases, these images seemed slightly
askewthey were focused and refracted, like light bent
around a corner. Probably it had something to do with all
the specialisation. Lishui residents learned to see the world
in parts, and these parts had a strange clarity, even when
they werent fully understood. One factory technician who
had never formally studied English showed me a list of
terms he had memorised: Padomide Br. Yellow E-8GMX
Sellanyl Yellow N-5GL Padocid Violet NWL Sellan
Bordeaux G-P Padocid Turquoise Blue N-3GL Padomide
Rhodamine In the labyrinth of the foreign language, hed
skipped all the usual entrances the simple greetings, the
basic vocabularyto go straight to the single row of words
that mattered to him. His specialty was dyeing nylon; he
mixed chemicals and made colours. His name was Long
Chunming, and his co-workers called him Xiao Long, or
Little Long. He would consult his notebook and figure out
the perfect mixture of chemicals necessary to make Sellanyl
Yellow or Padocid Turquoise Blue.
The more time I spent in Lishui, the more I was
impressed with how comfortable people were with their
jobs. They didnt worry about who consumed their
products, and very little of their self-worth seemed to be
tied up in these trades. There were no illusions of control
in a place like Lishui, which combined remoteness with the
immediacy of world-market demands, people accepted an
element of irrationality. If a job disappeared or an
opportunity dried up, workers didnt waste time wondering
why, and they moved on. Their humility helped, because
they never perceived themselves as being the center of the
world. When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she
didnt expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she
expected to find new abilities that matched the available

Page 34

jobs. The fact that her vocation was completely removed

from her personality and her past was no more disorienting
than the scenes she painted if anything, it simplified
things. She couldnt tell the difference between a foreign
factory and a farm, but it didnt matter. The mirrors
reflection allowed her to focus on details; she never lost
herself in the larger scene.
Whenever I went to Lishui, I moved from one selfcontained world to another, visiting the people I knew. The
associations were different when you came from the
outside. There were many products I had never spent a
minute thinking about, like pleathersynthetic leather
that in Lishui suddenly acquired a disproportionate
significance. More than twenty big factories made the stuff;
it was shipped in bulk to other parts of China, where it was
fashioned into car seats, purses, and countless other goods.
In the city, pleather was so ubiquitous that it had developed
a distinct local lore. Workers believed that the product
involved dangerous chemicals, and they thought it was bad
for the liver. They said that a woman who planned to have
children should not work on the assembly line.
These ideas were absolutely standard; even
teenagers fresh from the farm seemed to pick them up the
moment they arrived in the city. But it was impossible to
tell where the rumors came from. There werent any
warnings posted on factories, and I never saw a Lishui
newspaper article about pleather; assembly-line workers
rarely read the papers anyway. They didnt know people
who had become ill, and they couldnt tell me whether there
had been any scientific studies of the risks. They referred to
the supposedly harmful chemical as du, a general term that
means poison. Nevertheless, these beliefs ran so deep that
they shaped that particular industry. Virtually no young
women worked on pleather assembly lines, and companies
had to offer relatively high wages in order to attract
anybody. At those plants, you saw many older menthe
kind of people who cant get jobs at most Chinese factories.
The flow of information was a mystery to me. Few
people had much formal education, and assembly-line
workers rarely had time to use the Internet. They didnt
follow the news; they had no interest in politics. They were
the least patriotic people I ever met in Chinathey saw no
connection between the affairs of state and their own lives.
They accepted the fact that nobody else cared
about them; in a small city like Lishui, there werent any
NGOs or prominent organisations that served workers.
They depended strictly on themselves, and their range of
contacts seemed narrow, but somehow it wasnt a closed
world. Ideas arrived from the outside, and people acted
decisively on what seemed to be the vaguest rumor or the
most trivial story. That was key: information might be
limited, but people were mobile, and they had confidence
that their choices mattered. It gave them a kind of agency,
although from a foreigners perspective it contributed to the
strangeness of the place. I was accustomed to the
opposite a world where people preferred to be stable, and
where they felt most comfortable if they had large amounts
of data at their disposal, as well as the luxury of time to
make a decision.
In Lishui, people moved incredibly fast with
regard to new opportunities. This quality lay at the heart of
the citys relationship with the outside world: Lishui was
home to a great number of pragmatists, and there were quite

China Review Summer 2010

chinafotopress

Factory workers moving with the times: a factory near Lishui

a few searchers as well, but everybody was an opportunist

in the purest sense. The market taught them thatfactory
workers changed jobs frequently, and entrepreneurs could
shift their product line at the drop of a hat. There was one
outlying community called Shifan, where people seemed to
find a different income source every month. It was a new
town; residents had been resettled there from Beishan, a
village in the mountains where the government was
building a new hydroelectric dam to help power the
factories. In Shifan, there was no significant industry, but
small-time jobs began to appear from the moment the place
was founded. Generally, these tasks consisted of piecework
commissioned by some factory in the city.
One Saturday, I spent an afternoon watching Wu
Zengrong play computer games. He was a very skinny man
with a nervous air; his long, thin fingers flashed across the
keyboard. Periodically, his wife, Lili, entered the room to
watch. She wore a gold coloured ring on her right hand that
had been made from a euro coin. That had become a fashion
in southern Zhejiang, where shops specialised in melting
down the coins and turning them into jewelry. It was
another ingenious local industry: a way to get a ring that
was both legitimately foreign and cheaply made in
Zhejiang.
The next time I saw him, he was applying for a
passport. He had some relatives in Italy; he had heard that
there was money to be made there. When I asked where he
planned to go, he said, Maybe Rome, or maybe the Water
City. I stood with him in the passport-application line at
the county government office, where I noticed that his
papers said Wu Zengxiong. He explained that a clerk had
miswritten his given name on an earlier application, so now
it was simpler to just use that title. He was becoming
somebody else, on his way to a country hed never seen,
preparing to do something completely new. When I asked
what kind of work he hoped to find and what the pay might
be, he said, How can I tell? I havent been there yet. Next

Chinese Artisans

to us in line, a friend in his early twenties told me that he

planned to go to Azerbaijan, where he had a relative who
might help him do business. I asked the young man if
Azerbaijan was an Islamic country, and he said, I dont
know. I havent been there yet.
After I returned to the United States, I did some
research on pleather and learned that its made with a
solvent called dimethylformamide, or DMF. In the United
States, studies have shown that people who work with DMF
are at risk of liver damage. Theres some evidence that
female workers may have increased problems with
stillbirths. In laboratory tests with rabbits, significant
exposure to DMF has been proved to cause developmental
defects. In other words, virtually everything I had heard
from the Lishui migrant workers, in the form of
unsubstantiated rumor, turned out to be true.
It was another efficiency of the third tier factory
town. People manufactured tiny parts of things, and their
knowledge was also fragmented and sparse. But they knew
enough to be mobile and decisive, and their judgment was
surprisingly good. An assembly-line worker sensed the risks
of DMF; a painter learned to recognise the buildings that
mattered; a nylon dyer could pick out Sellanyl Yellow.
Even the misinformation was often usefulif Christ
became more relevant as a Taoist sage, that was how He
appeared. The workers knew what they needed to know.
Mayor Williams
Back in the United States, I became curious about
the small town that Chen Meizi and Hu Jianhui had spent so
much time painting. At the Ancient Weir Art Village, I had
photographed the artists in front of their work, and now I
researched the misspelled signs. All of them seemed to
come from Park City, Utah. I lived nearby, in southwestern
Colorado, so I made the trip.
In Park City, it was easy to find the places that the
artists had painted. Most of the shops were situated on Main
Street, and I talked with owners, showing them photos.
Nobody had any idea where the commission had come
from, and people responded in different ways when they
saw that their shops were being painted by artists in an
obscure Chinese city six thousand miles away. At Overland,
the manager appeared nervous. Youll have to contact our
corporate headquarters, she said. I cant comment on
that. Another shop owner asked me if I thought that
Mormon missionaries might be involved. One woman told a
story about a suspicious Arab man who had visited local art
galleries not long ago, offering to sell cut-rate portraits.
Some people worried about competition. Thats just what
we need, one artist said sarcastically, when she learned the
price of the Chinese paintings. Others felt pity when they
saw Chen Meizi, who, like many rural Chinese, didnt
generally smile in photographs. One woman, gazing at a
somber Chen next to her portrait of the Miners Hospital,
said, Its kind of sad.
When I visited, the Park City mayor kept his office
on the first floor of the Miners Hospital. His name was
Dana Williams, and he was thrilled to see the photo of Chen
Meizi with her work. Thats so cool! he said. I cant
believe somebody in China painted our building! And she
did such a great job! Like everybody else I talked to in
Park City, Mayor Williams couldnt tell me why the
building had been commissioned for a portrait overseas. It

Page 35

was a kind of symmetry between the Chinese Barbizon and

Park City: the people who painted the scenes, and the
people who actually lived within the frames, were equally
mystified as to the purpose of this art.
Mayor Williams poured me a cup of green tea, and
we chatted. He had an easy smile and a youthful air; he
played guitar in a local rock band. Its the yang to being
mayor, he explained. He was interested in China, and he
sprinkled his conversation with Chinese terms. You mei
you pijiu? he said. Do you have any beer? He
remembered that phrase from a trip to Beijing in 2007,
when hed accompanied a local school group on an
exchange. A scroll of calligraphy hung beside his desk; the
characters read Unity, Culture, Virtue. He told me that he
had first thought about China back in the nineteen-sixties,
after hearing Angela Davis lecture on Communism at
U.C.L.A. There was a copy of The Little Red Book in his
office library. When the Park City newspaper found out, it
ran a story implying that the Mayors decisions were
influenced by Mao Zedong. Mayor Williams found that
hilarious; he told me that he just picked out the useful parts
of the book and ignored the bad stuff. Serve the people,
he said, when I asked what he had learned from Mao. You
have an obligation to serve the people. One of the reasons
Im here is from reading The Little Red Book as a teenager. And being in government is about being in balance. I
guess that has to do with the Tao.
Peter Hessler wrote this article using material for Country
Driving, published later this year by Canongate Books; read
Laura Rivkins book review on page 38. Peter Hesslers
previous books include Rivertown and Oracle Bones

Page 36

China Review Summer 2010

GBCC PROJECTS
I N D E P E N D E N T M O N I TO R I N G O F
CHINAS DETENTION CENTRES
36 POTENTIAL LAY VISITORS, from a diverse
range of work places from Zhejiang and Henan, travelled to
Beijing to participate in training for monitoring detention
centres. EU experts Ian Smith, CEO of the UK Independent
Custody Visitor Association, and Nicola Macbean, Director
of The Rights Practice facilitated the training on the UK
side. On the Chinese side Professor Chen Weidong opened
each of the two training sessions by providing a powerful
case for legitimizing lay visiting in China. In his
presentation, he cited the recent opening of 10 detention
centres to the public by the MPS as a very encouraging
development.
Dr. Wang Long, a Chinese Medicine doctor and
lay visitor from the pilot project run in Jilin in 2008, also
offered advice based on his experience of monitoring visits.
The training is part of the EU-funded Preventing Torture
project, the overall aim of which is to move China closer
towards signing the UN OPCAT. The OPCAT requires
regular, independent, unannounced inspections of detention
centres. The training emphasized that visits should cover
detailed, practical criteria covering all aspects of treatment
and conditions with a clear guide for inspectors on evidence

Trainees enact a scenario as part of the training

to look for. This activity took place in Beijing at the end of

March 2010 and was funded by the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office Strategic Programme Fund.

BALANCING POWER BETWEEN

L AW Y E R S A N D P R O S E C U TO R S

Participants debate the implementation of the new lawyers law

AT AN FCO SPF-FUNDED workshop organized

by the Research Centre for Criminal Science at Renmin
University in March, prosecutors, judges and academics,
discussed the development of two pilots in Jiangsu and
Chongqing. The pilots have tested new models to promote
stronger co-operation between prosecutors, police and
lawyers and thereby better guarantee the rights and
safeguards for criminal suspects and defendants.
Senior participants, Chen Guangzhong, the
Honorable Director of Criminal Procedural Law
Department at the Chinese Law Association and Li
Guifang, the Deputy Director of the China Lawyers
Association praised the projects achievements, namely the
innovative cooperation between detention houses, the
procuratorate and lawyers, which has enabled defence
lawyers better access to their clients. In the final session
Zhang Fusen, Director of Social and Legal Division of the
National Political Consultative Committee, and Yu Ning,
the Head of All China Lawyers Association also praised
the pilot activities.

Great Britain-China Centre

Page 37

GBCC PROJECTS
J U D I C I A L D I S C R E T I O N I N A P P L I C AT I O N
O F T H E D E AT H P E N A LT Y
THE GBCCs THIRD DEATH penalty project
(co-financed by the EU and the FCO's Strategic Programme
Fund) is proceeding smoothly. Evidence and sentencing
guidelines are currently being piloted in three pilot courts in
Yunnan province (Dehong Intermediate Court, Kunming
Intermediate Court and Yunnan High Court). The pilot is
scheduled to run for 6 months (January-June 2010), during
which the Wuhan project team will pay several monitoring
visits to the courts. To ensure the quality of pilot
monitoring, the Wuhan team underwent a series of training
sessions on social science research methodology in March
2010. Pilot courts have also been trained in data collection.
The highlight of the project's second component,
the judges training component, included a workshop on
training methodology for judges in Wuhan in March 2010.
Participants included Professor Sun, Director of the training
department of the National Judges Training College, judges
who had already taken part in training in November 2009,
and representatives from other organisations conducting
legal training. The workshop included an opportunity for
judges to feedback on training methodology and techniques
which revealed a strong appetite for the effectiveness of
practical training. There were also wide-ranging discussions

Judges attend a training workshop in Wuhan in March

on more general methodological questions. The workshop

has resulted in improved training materials and curriculum
for the next training sessions, planned to take place in
Yunnan and Guangzhou in September 2010.

PUBLIC FINANCE MANAGEMENT

Speakers take questions during the final session

THE FINAL SEMINAR OF the FCO SPF-funded

public finance management project took place in Beijing in
March. The meeting was well attended and was an
opportunity to review the projects achievements and
disseminate project findings regarding local finance reform
in China. 74 participants took part in lively discussions,
including VIP speakers former Vice-Director of the Bank of
China Mrs Wu Xiaoling, currently Vice Chairman of the
NPC Financial and Economic Committee, and Mr Zhu
Shaoping, Director of the Legal Office of the NPC
Financial and Economic Committee. A number of local
government representatives also took part, keen to glean
knowledge and advice from the positive experience of
Jiaozuo (the pilot locality). 19 journalists covered the event
a sure sign of the significant interest in reforming public
finance management. Unirule used the results from the field
research to produce a comprehensive report advocating
inclusion of the transparency principle in the constitutional
reform, while the local pilot provided a wealth of lessons in
two essential aspects of budgeting practices (continuous
budgeting and gender budgeting). The full transcript of the
final seminar (in Mandarin) is available upon request.

Page 38

China Review Summer 2010

PETER HESSLERS

COUNTRY
DRIVING
REVIEWED BY LAURA RIVKIN

This is a terrific book, and there arent many

terrific books on China. But do not be deceived by the title.
Apart from the oddly sterile short first section where
Hessler writes about his road trips along the Great Wall,
this is mostly a tenderly drawn account of the lives of
country people caught up in rapid social change who are
doing their best to adapt. Having said that, littered through
the book are some very funny vignettes on the vicissitudes
of driving in China.
The emotional heart of the book is Hesslers
relationship with the Wei family. Around 2000, Hessler
rented a weekend getaway in the tiny village of Sancha, a
two hour drive north of Beijing, in the shadow of the Great
Wall. The Wei family are his near neighbours, the only
young people left in a dying village. When he meets them
they are trying to make ends meet farming their smallholding. But they gradually become successful
entrepreneurs catering to the growing weekend crowd from
Beijing. They have a young boy, Wei Jia, who they must
send away to school aged six. They care for a mentally
handicapped relative known only, brutally, as the Idiot, and
must fight with the local authorities to get him a disability
allowance. The terse descriptions of the Idiots life in the
family are subtly, poignantly heart wrenching. You so much
want this family to do well; to prosper and be happy.
In the third section, Hessler leaves Sancha and
travels to southern Zhejiang, to the boomtown area around
Wenzhou and the small town of Lishui. It was hard to leave
the denizens of Sancha and it was with reluctance that a
new chapter must be started among the low-margin
assembly towns of southern China. We dont want to read
about the over-development, the land grabs, the pollution,
and the low-paid workers, when what we really want is to
find out what happens next to Wei Ziqi and his new start-up
in Sancha? But Hessler cunningly draws us into the lives of
the workers in Lishui, introducing us to migrants who have
made the move from their rural communities to the
urbanising industrial zones of coastal China. Boss Gao, with
magnificent hubris, starts up a brassiere ring manufacture
knowing nothing of the industry or the market. Master Liu

Country Driving by Peter Hessler, published by

Edinburgh: Canongate Books 2010 priced 14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84767 436 4

is a self-taught engineer from Guizhou. He is the only

person who can run the ring-making machine. There are
the factory workers Mr Tao and his rebellious daughters,
under-educated but street-smart and ambitious. The selfconfessed second-rate acrobat troop, that travels the
factory towns of southern China entertaining the bored
workers, provides a melancholy lesson that not every
migrants story is a successful one.
Eventually Hessler gave up his long sojourn in
China (15 years more or less) and returned to the USA in
2007. We must hope for a return and an epilogue to
assuage our curiosity as to the fate of our new proxy
friends.
Laura Rivkin is Information and Office Manager at GBCC

Page 39

APPCG

APPCG
NEWS

A FAREWELL MESSAGE

Ben Chapman signs the MOU with Ji Peiding in 2006

ONE OF MY PRIORITIES as a Member of

Parliament was to ensure that my colleagues in the
Commons and the Lords were keenly aware of the
opportunities and challenges developments in China present
for the UK. In 1997, with this aim in mind, I was the
founding Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary China
Group and since then the group has grown to become one of
the largest and certainly the busiest in Parliament and one
which, I like to think, is highly regarded in the legislatures
and governments of both China and the UK.
Modern China needs to be seen to be believed, and
to that end the group has taken every opportunity to send
delegations of parliamentarians to experience the country
first hand. Such exchanges present unrivalled opportunities
for dialogue, and are an effective way of alerting members
to the shifts that are re-shaping the balance of global power
and prosperity. Given the importance of regular
engagement, the group signed an Memorandum of
Understanding in 2006 with its counterpart group in the
National Peoples Congress, the China-UK Friendship
Group.
In addition to regular bilateral exchanges the group
has hosted a wide variety of meetings, conferences and
discussions, all of which have maintained a healthy level of
debate in Westminster and have raised awareness of the
China phenomenon and the questions it poses. In 2007 the
group hosted a series of Hearings examining the China
impact in conjunction with the China Media Centre of the
University of Westminster which examined areas such as
urbanisation, research and development, corporate
governance and foreign direct investment. These have

since been built upon by events held in partnership with the

China Policy Institute of the University of Nottingham and
the Great Britain-China Centre, examining both the global
financial crisis and the progress of democratic reform.
The development of the group since 1997 has of
course been set against the background of changing
relations between the UK and China. For example, during
that period the group has incorporated the All Party Group
for Hong Kong, thereby mirroring in a loose form the One
Country, Two Systems formula, and on these matters ViceChairman Tony Baldry has ably taken the lead. The most
important area of progress has been the growth in the range
and depth of bilateral links. Members of the group have
benefitted from regular dialogue with Chinas legislative
body, and at the Party and the provincial level.
Reflecting on the success that the Group has
enjoyed my thanks must go first and foremost to those at
the Chinese Embassy. I am extremely grateful for the
cooperation and support the Group has received from
Ambassadors Ma Zhengang, Zha Peixin, Fu Ying and most
recently Liu Xiaoming. I would also like to thank warmly
Professor Zhao Yongren, whose dedication and hard work
as the parliamentary counsellor has been invaluable.
Professor Zhao has played a key liaison role and is popular
with members of the Commons and the Lords. I would also
like to thank the officers of the Group for their unfailing
support: Ian Stewart, Tony Baldry, Jeff Ennis, Lord
Clement-Jones and Lord Cotter. Last, but certainly not
least, I am extremely grateful to Katie Lee and her team at
the GBCC for the indispensible support and guidance they
have provided since the formation of the Group.
I am especially grateful for the support that the
Group has received from organisations such as the ChinaBritain Business Council and the 48 Group Club, with
which we enjoy a very beneficial relationship, and of course
from those in the business community who have sponsored
the groups efforts to raise the profile of China in
Westminster. I need also to thank the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office and its Ministers for their
contribution over the years. Although I will not continue as
Chairman, I am nevertheless delighted to have been invited
to remain associated with the group as Honorary President.
Relations between our two legislatures are a key part of the
bilateral relationship and I have every confidence that, as
we enter a new Parliament, the group will continue to play a
vitally important role in this context.
Ben Chapman is the former Chairman and current President
of the All Party Parliamentary China Group

The GBCC and APPCG

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Editors:
Orlando Edwards
Simon Butler
Previous editions of
the China Review can
be downloaded from
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The Great Britain-China Centre promotes understanding between the UK

and China and is the leading UK body in the development of
non-governmental relations. We deliver projects and exchange programmes
to encourage best practice in legal reform, good governance and sustainable
development. We also work to develop close relations between parliaments
in China and the UK. Our close relationships with Chinese ministries and
educational establishments are based on over 30 years of engagement and we
are the trusted partner of both sides in a wide range of exchanges.
The All Party Parliamentary China Group is the parliamentary body
dedicated to playing its part in deepening and widening the UKs relationship
with China and specifically with the National Peoples Congress and to hold
a dialogue with the Chinese Ambassador in London. The group is one of the
largest of its kind and regularly holds meetings at which speakers are invited
to talk on topical matters and to engage in discussion with members of the
Houses of Parliament. Members of the group regularly receive and host distinguished visitors from China and exchange delegations with their Chinese
counterparts. For more information please visit www.appcg.org.uk.
The views of contributors to China Review should not be taken as representing those of the Great
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contributions for the Review please contact orlando.edwards@gbcc.org.uk

F O RT H C O M I N G C O N F E R E N C E :
THE MUSIC OF CHINA AND EAST ASIA
15th International CHIME
Conference
Theme: The music of China and
East Asia, Theory versus Practice
Organised by the European
Foundation for Chinese Music
Research and the Swiss festival
"Culturescapes"

Venue: Basel, Switzerland

Contact: CHIME, tel 071-5133974 /
5133123
Website: http://home.wxs.nl/~chime

CHIME is a foundation for the promotion of Chinese music research,

based in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was founded early in 1990 by
European music scholars from four different countries.
CHIME serves as an active world-wide network of researchers of
Chinese music.