Category: China

“Startling” Chinese Government Report Faults Slow and Tepid Reform “Stalemate”

(p. B1) BEIJING — China’s ambitious plan to revamp its economy has bogged down. Flabby state conglomerates have thwarted attempts to whip them into commercial shape. Rules that treat millions of city-dwelling rural migrants like second-class citizens have barely budged.
Such criticisms are common from skeptical foreign economists who have long argued that President Xi Jinping’s efforts to remake China’s economy and fix pernicious social problems have been too slow and tepid.
But these withering findings on China’s reforms come from a startling place: from within the government itself.
Just as striking, this unflattering report card from a Chinese state think tank — published this month with little fanfare — faults misconceived “top-level design” in policies, as well as local bureaucrats and state managers reluctant to change.
. . .
It concludes: “Reform has to some extent fallen into stalemate.”
The report brings into focus a sharpening debate in China about economic priorities. Experts inside and outside China say the country’s economy needs to be overhauled to continue growing fast enough to provide jobs and higher incomes for its people.
. . .
(p. B5) The new report, a 217-page study titled “The Reform Obstruction Phenomenon,” was written by researchers from the Economic System and Management Institute of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which steers policy on industry, energy and many other sectors. The head of the commission, He Lifeng, and his deputy, Liu He, both have ties to Mr. Xi. But nothing in the report suggests that it had their blessing. The authors declined to be interviewed.

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “Still Waiting for Reforms.” The New York Times (Tues., MARCH 28, 2017): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 27, 2017, and has the title “In Rare Move, Chinese Think Tank Criticizes Tepid Pace of Reform.”)

“20 Years in a Labor Camp for ‘Practicing Capitalism'”

(p. 23) “Just talk to any Chinese who lived through that time,” a middle-aged man whose father spent nearly 20 years in a labor camp for “practicing capitalism” tells the radio reporter Rob Schmitz, in “Street of Eternal Happiness,” his new book about some of the ordinary people he encounters in his Shanghai neighborhood. “We all have the same stories.”

For the full review, see:
ADAM ROSE. “‘Shanghai Confidential.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 15, 2016): 23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 13, 2016, and has the title “‘Street of Eternal Happiness,’ by Rob Schmitz’.”)

The book under review, is:
Schmitz, Rob. Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road. New York: Crown, 2016.

Chinese Government Stimulus Inflated Egg Futures Bubble

(p. A1) HONG KONG — China is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into its economy in a new effort to support growth. Some of it is going into roads and bridges and other big projects that will keep the economy humming.
And some of it is going into eggs.
China’s latest lending deluge has sent money sloshing into unexpected parts of the economy. That includes a financial market in Dalian where investors can place bets on the future productivity of the country’s hens.
Egg futures have surged by as much as one-third since March, the sort of move that would be justified if investors believed China’s chicken flocks were headed for an unfortunate fate.
But the market’s usual participants say the flocks are fine. In fact, the actual price of eggs in the country’s markets has fallen from a year ago, according to government statistics.
The reason for the unusual jump in egg futures, they say, is China’s tendency to experience investment bubbles when the government steps up spending and lending. China’s previous efforts to bolster growth unexpectedly (p. B2) sent money into real estate and the stock market — markets that had unexplained rises followed by striking drops.
“Many commodities prices have gone up crazily,” said Du Shaoxing, a futures trader in Guangzhou, in southern China. “We surely hope for a more stabilized trend where futures can reflect economic fundamentals. The way in which recent commodity prices went up is worrisome.”
China’s latest bubble illustrates the potential risks of its newest effort to spur growth. The Chinese economy is already burdened with too much debt, economists say. And sometimes, stopgap measures to help the economy create long-term problems.

For the full story, see:
NEIL GOUGH. “China’s Flood of Cash Roils Egg Futures.” The New York Times (Weds., May 2, 2016): A1 & B2 [sic].
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 1, 2016, and has the title “China Lending Inflates Real Estate, Stocks, Even Egg Futures.”)

Muzzled Chinese Historian Dares to Publish Truth of Cultural Revolution

(p. 7) BEIJING — It seemed that China’s censors had finally muzzled Yang Jisheng, the famed chronicler of the Mao era. Last year, he had finished writing a widely anticipated history of the Cultural Revolution. But officials warned him against publishing it and barred him from traveling to the United States, he has said, and he stayed muted through the 50th anniversary of the start of that bloody upheaval.
Now Mr. Yang has broken that silence with the publication of his history of the Cultural Revolution, “The World Turned Upside Down,” a sequel to “Tombstone,” his landmark study of the famine spawned by Mao’s policies in the late 1950s. The 1,151-page book is the latest shot fired in China’s war over remembering, or forgetting, the dark side of its Communist past, a struggle that has widened under the hard-line president, Xi Jinping.
“I wrote this book to expose lies and restore the truth,” Mr. Yang writes in the book, which has been quietly published in Hong Kong, beyond the direct reach of Chinese censors. “This is an area that is extremely complicated and risky, but as soon as I entered it, I was filled with passion.”
Since Mr. Xi took power in 2012, the Communist Party authorities have denounced historians who question the party’s lionization of its past and exhume grim events like the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started in 1966, opening a decade of purges and bloodshed.
Tens of millions were persecuted and perhaps a million or more people were killed in that convulsive time. But officials say dwelling on such events is subversive “historical nihilism” aimed at corroding the party’s authority.

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “Historian’s New Mao Book Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., JAN. 22, 2017): 7.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 21, 2017, and has the title “Historian’s Latest Book on Mao Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.”)

The English translation and condensation of Mr. Yang’s earlier book, is:
Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

China’s “Ruthless” One Child Policy Forced Some Women to Have Abortions

(p. 15) Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader after 1978, had set a target of quadrupling the country’s per capita national income by 2000. China’s planners decided that they could achieve this goal only if, in addition to increasing the size of the pie, there were fewer people to share it.
So they determined, in their words, to “adjust women’s average fertility rate in advance.” The man who ran the program that treated women as if they were production functions was a rocket scientist, Song Jian, who had worked on ballistic missiles. Song went on to help manage the giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. His was a world in which unintended consequences were not important.
Population control was not unusual in the 1980s. India also had a fertility-­control program. The United Nations gave its first-ever population award to the Chinese minister for population planning in 1983 (along with Indira Gandhi). But China’s application of population control was particularly ruthless.
In 2012, Feng Jianmei, a factory worker pregnant with her second child, was taken to a clinic, forced to sign a document consenting to an abortion and injected with an abortifacient. She was in her seventh month. Pictures of her lying next to her perfectly formed seven-month dead fetus went viral. But hers was hardly an unusual case. In the 1990s, population targets became a major criterion for judging the performance of officials. It is no surprise that they carried out the one-child policy ruthlessly. Reading this account, one wonders why rape as a weapon of war is (rightly) seen as a war crime, whereas the forcible violation of women’s bodies in pursuit of government policy wins United Nations awards.

For the full review, see:
JOHN PARKER. “Little Emperors.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JAN. 10, 2016): 15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 8, 2016, and has the title “”One Child,’ by Mei Fong.”)

The book under review, is:
Fong, Mei. One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Chinese Economic Stimulus Creates Egg Bubble

(p. A1) HONG KONG — China is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into its economy in a new effort to support growth. Some of it is going into roads and bridges and other big projects that will keep the economy humming.
And some of it is going into eggs.
China’s latest lending deluge has sent money sloshing into unexpected parts of the economy. That includes a financial market in Dalian where investors can place bets on the future productivity of the country’s hens.
Egg futures have surged by as much as one-third since March, the sort of move that would be justified if investors believed China’s chicken flocks were headed for an unfortunate fate.
But the market’s usual participants say the flocks are fine. In fact, the actual price of eggs in the country’s markets has fallen from a year ago, according to government statistics.
The reason for the unusual jump in egg futures, they say, is China’s tendency to experience investment bubbles when the government steps up spending and lending. China’s previous efforts to bolster growth unexpectedly sent money into real estate and the stock market — markets that had unexplained rises followed by striking drops.

For the full story, see:
NEIL GOUGH. “China’s Flood of Cash Roils Egg Futures.” The New York Times (Mon., MAY 2, 2016): A1 & B2 [sic].
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 1, 2016, and has the title “China Lending Inflates Real Estate, Stocks, Even Egg Futures.”)

Micro-Entrepreneur Worked Hard, Saved, and Has No Regrets

(p. 1) PORT HEDLAND, Australia — A lanky, dark-haired surfer, Lee Meadowcroft modeled on the runways of London, Milan and Singapore, then followed his dream of going home to Australia to sell herbal medicines. His store failed — he had chosen the wrong street, he says — and he lost almost all his savings. By then, the fashion world had found fresher faces.
So like tens of thousands of other Australians, Mr. Meadowcroft went to the mines.
It was late 2004. He plowed his last $4,000 into a two-week course on how to operate a crane. He found companies so desperate for workers that they would send chauffeured cars to pick up prospective welders, electricians and crane operators and deliver them to the nearest airport for their flights to mining country, here on Australia’s remote northwestern coast.
China back then was growing at a breathtaking pace and needed all the Australian rocks it could get. Mine workers like Mr. Meadowcroft kept a punishing schedule: 13 consecutive days of 12-hour shifts, a day off, then another 13 consecutive days of 12-hour (p. 4) shifts. Mining fueled Australia’s surging exports to China, which at their peak reached nearly $100 billion a year — a figure representing $4,300 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Resource-rich places around the world prospered thanks to China, and Mr. Meadowcroft and his fellow Port Hedland equipment jockeys were no exception. By 2011 he was earning $250,000 a year.
. . .
The bust came just as hard and just as fast. China’s economic slowdown left too many mines to feed too many dormant Chinese steel mills. Construction of new mines stopped. Port Hedland’s economy slumped. Mr. Meadowcroft lost his job, then lost a second job. Like thousands of others, he went back home.
Mr. Meadowcroft’s tale could serve as yet another boom-and-bust cautionary tale of the limits of China’s rise. From Russia to Brazil, and Nigeria to Venezuela, resource-rich countries that boomed during China’s surge found their economies shaken when Chinese demand slowed.
Except something unexpected has happened to Australia: It has withstood the global rout. Most mines — lower-cost compared with mines elsewhere — have stayed open. But Australia has also kept thriving, against all expectations, with a different kind of money flowing in from China.
Attracted by clean air, a strong education system and worries about China’s future, more Chinese are spending their money in Australia. Thousands of Chinese families have sent their children to study at costly Australian universities, and Australian food exports to China have boomed. Chinese investment in Australian real estate has increased at least tenfold since 2010; Chinese investors have purchased up to half the new apartments in downtown Melbourne and Sydney.
. . .
. . . for people like Mr. Meadowcroft and others in Western Australia who were cut loose by the mining slump, Chinese money is a blessing. He now lives in the Western Australia capital city of Perth and works as an apprentice plumber in new housing developments aimed at Chinese buyers. He earns just $21,000 a year, but that could double or triple when he finishes his apprenticeship.
. . .
(p. 5) . . . for now, Chinese money is still flowing. Many miners who squandered their earnings during the iron ore boom are now trying to catch up in construction jobs. But many others socked away their money from the boom and have used those savings to buy homes or start small businesses.
“They were micro-entrepreneurs,” said Tom Barratt, a University of Western Australia doctoral student who is doing his thesis on labor markets in the Pilbara hills.
Mr. Meadowcroft is among those savers. He bought a house and soon paid off most of the mortgage. He also married his longtime girlfriend after years of commuting to far-flung mines and ports, and is now raising two children as he learns to be a plumber.
Although his savings account is much smaller now, he has no regrets about the boom years. “That was 12 years of really hard work,” he said, “to achieve what a lot of people don’t achieve in their whole lives.”

For the full story, see:
KEITH BRADSHER. “Money From the Dust.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 25, 2016): 1 & 4-5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 24, 2016, and has the title “In Australia, China’s Appetite Shifts From Rocks to Real Estate.”)

Chinese Government Executes Farmer Who Killed Official for Destroying His House

(p. A9) . . . when Mr. Zhou heard last week that the Chinese government had executed the farmer, Jia Jinglong, he was furious. He saw it as a sign that the ruling Communist Party was imposing harsh punishments on the most vulnerable members of society while coddling the well-connected elite.
“The legal system isn’t fair,” Mr. Zhou, 57, said, adding that local officials had “turned against the common people.”
President Xi Jinping has made restoring confidence in Chinese courts a centerpiece of his rule, vowing to promote “social justice and equality” in a legal system long plagued by favoritism and abuse.
. . .
But the furor over the execution of Mr. Jia, who had sought revenge on officials for demolishing his home, has raised doubts about Mr. Xi’s efforts, with people across the country publicly assailing inequities in the justice system and asking why high-level officials often escape the death penalty.
“The perception is that the people are powerless and vulnerable against corrupt officials,” said Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. “What is surprising is that Xi Jinping has been in power for four years, and that narrative has not changed.”

For the full story, see:
JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ. “Villager’s Execution in China Ignites an Uproar Over Inequality of Justice.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 21, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 20, 2016, and has the title “Villager’s Execution in China Ignites Uproar Over Inequality of Justice.”)

Censored and Walled-Off Internet Hurts Chinese Start-Ups

(p. B1) Two decades after Beijing began walling off its homegrown internet from the rest of the planet, the digital world has split between China and everybody else. That has prevented American technology companies like Facebook and Uber, which recently agreed to sell its China operations, from independently being able to tap the Chinese market.
For China’s web companies, the divide may have even more significant implications.
It has penned in the country’s biggest and most innovative internet companies. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have grown to be some of the world’s largest internet companies, but they rely almost entirely on domestic businesses. Their ventures abroad have been mostly desultory, and prognostications that they will challenge American giants internationally have (p. B2) not materialized.
. . .
In many ways, the split is like 19th century railroads in the United States, when rails of different sizes hindered a train’s ability to go from one place to another.
“The barrier to entering the U.S. or China market is becoming higher and higher,” said Kai-fu Lee, a venture investor from Taiwan and former head of Google China.
The difficulties that China’s internet companies face in expanding their success abroad are epitomized by WeChat, the messaging app owned by Tencent.
. . .
Critics pointed to Tencent’s lack of distinctive marketing, a record of censorship and surveillance in China and its late arrival to foreign markets. Yet the biggest problem was that outside of China, WeChat was just not the same. Within China, WeChat can be used to do almost everything, like pay bills, hail a taxi, book a doctor’s appointment, share photos and chat. Yet its ability to do that is dependent on other Chinese internet services that are limited outside the country.

For the full story, see:
PAUL MOZUR. “Internet’s Great Wall.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 10, 2016): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 9, 2016, and has the title “Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else.”)

“My Fate Lies with Me, Not with Heaven”

(p. A7) . . . Dr. Unschuld, who is as blunt as he is outspoken, stands at the center of a long and contentious debate in the West over Chinese medicine. For many, it is the ur-alternative to what they see as the industrialized and chemicalized medicine that dominates in the West. For others, it is little more than charlatanism, with its successes attributed to the placebo effect and the odd folk remedy.
Dr. Unschuld is a challenge to both ways of thinking. He has just finished a 28-year English translation of the three principal parts of the foundational work of Chinese medicine: the Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, published by the University of California Press. But unlike many of the textbooks used in Chinese medicine schools in the West, Dr. Unschuld’s works are monuments to the art of serious translation; he avoids New Age jargon like “energy” or familiar Western medical terms like “pathogens,” seeing both as unfair to the ancient writers and their worldviews.
But this reflects a deep respect for the ancient authors the detractors of Chinese medicine sometimes lack. Dr. Unschuld hunts down obscure terms and devises consistent terminologies that are sometimes not easy to read, but are faithful to the original text. Almost universally, his translations are regarded as trailblazing — making available, for the first time in a Western language, the complete foundational works of Chinese medicine from up to 2,000 years ago.
. . .
. . . then there is the issue of efficacy. With his extremely dry humor, Dr. Unschuld likens Chinese medicine to the herbal formulas of the medieval Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. If people want to try it, they should be free to do so, he said, but not at taxpayer expense. As for himself, Dr. Unschuld says he has never tried Chinese medicine.
. . .
His purely academic approach, . . . , makes him a difficult figure for China to embrace. While widely respected for his knowledge and translations, he has done little to advance the government’s agenda of promoting Chinese medicine as soft power. Echoing other critics, he describes China’s translations of the classics as “complete swindles,” saying they are done with little care and only a political goal in mind.
For Dr. Unschuld, Chinese medicine is far more interesting as an allegory for China’s mental state. His most famous book is a history of Chinese medical ideas, in which he sees classic figures, such as the Yellow Emperor, as a reflection of the Chinese people’s deep-seated pragmatism. At a time when demons and ghosts were blamed for illness, these Chinese works from 2,000 years ago ascribed it to behavior or disease that could be corrected or cured.
“It is a metaphor for enlightenment,” he says.
Especially striking, Dr. Unschuld says, is that the Chinese approach puts responsibility on the individual, as reflected in the statement “wo ming zai wo, bu zai tian” — “my fate lies with me, not with heaven.” This mentality was reflected on a national level in the 19th and 20th centuries, when China was being attacked by outsiders. The Chinese largely blamed themselves and sought concrete answers by studying foreign ideas, industrializing and building a modern economy.

For the full story, see:
IAN JOHNSON. “The Saturday Profile; An Expert on Chinese Medicine, but No New Age Healer.” The New York Times (Sat., SEPT. 24, 2016): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 23, 2016, and has the title “Gandhi the Imperialist – Book Review.”)

The recently finished book mentioned above, is:
Unschuld, Paul U. Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.