Obama Recommendations: VI

Paul French is the Shanghai-based author of Carl Crow, a Tough Old China Hand and keeps the blog China Rhyming, as well as acting as publishing and marketing director at Access Asia. French's next book, Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from the Opium Wars to Mao, will be published June 1 by Hong Kong University Press.

Obama claims to be a break with the past by which, in a very American way of defining the past, he seems to mean the last few years. Instructive as some recent China books may be, perhaps the President would care to go back a bit further and consider the opinions of some older Americans and one Brit with plenty of China experience.

The revival of American extraterritoriality (extrality) in Iraq does not appear to have spurred much interest in historians to go back and look at previous examples of the practise. But in pre-revolution Shanghai, Americans were at the forefront of the debate and history has a tendency to echo. So he might benefit from ploughing through the great American journalist in Shanghai Thomas Fairfax Millard’s The End of Extraterritoriality in China (1931). Millard’s book influenced a whole gang of Americans in Shanghai to oppose extrality – China Weekly Review editor JB Powell did and he was drummed out of the right wing American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (some things never change!) for his position. A more recent examination of the failings of America’s attempts at extrality in China, Ellen P. Scully’s Bargaining With the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China 1844-1942 (2001), might also prove useful.

Obama is about to get bombarded by a thousand and one industry lobby groups and the US-China Business Council about how he must adopt a “trade first” policy towards China as there are millions to be made over there. Hopefully the expensive suits and lavish PowerPoints won’t faze him. To help, he might like to read Carl Crow’s 1937 classic 400 Million Customers: The Experiences – Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him. It should at least remind the Commander-in-Chief that there’s very little new under the sun – in 1937 Crow could confidently write - “China is a market of long receivables, rigid markets, structural inefficiency, impossible logistics and relentless brazen copying and substitution of imported goods with fakes” and conclude that a lot of those PowerPoint projections may not come to pass now as they didn’t back then – “No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so.”

The President is presumably a rather busy chap at the moment and doesn’t have much time for reading so there’s no need to overburden him. Perhaps the most instructive read to prepare him for the “experts” that will inundate him is a book that might or might not have ever existed – Tony Keswick’s Everything I Know About China which has become an old Shanghai legend. Keswick was the taipan of Jardine Matheson in Shanghai up until WW2. He rarely gave interviews and when he did would sit opposite the eager journalist with a coffee table between them upon which was a leather-bound and beautifully embossed copy of Everything I Know About China. Half way through the interview he would excuse himself from the room, go next door and peep through a spy hole in the wall to watch the journalist, knowing they wouldn’t be able to resist opening the book for a peek. Inside were 200 completely empty pages. You get the point hopefully?

China’s Water Woes: Past, Present, and Future

The Chinese droughts have just begun to move onto the front pages of the world's newspapers, but the droughts are just the latest sign of much more dire warnings of water woes in China. Some China experts are talking about this (see, for instance, today's event at the Wilson Center on "Temperatures Rising: Climate Change, Water, and the Himalayas"), but, in China Beat fashion, we're hoping to encourage many more people to do a little more reading and talking about it too, so we invited Ken Pomeranz to reflect on the present news and suggest a few further readings for those who are interested.

By Ken Pomeranz

Water is back in the China-related news lately – and that’s almost always a bad sign. Most recently, we have had stories about the grinding North China drought; this may be the worst since the late 50s drought that exacerbated the Great Leap Forward famine. A bit earlier, we had the report of credible (though unproven) research suggesting that last May’s catastrophic Sichuan earthquake may have been triggered by pressure from the water stored behind Zipingpu Dam. (See here for an early report, and then the slightly later piece, with more about the key Chinese scientist involved, by Evan Osnos of the New Yorker). Late in January, Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a sobering piece (China Dialogue, January 22, 2009) about how accelerating the construction of dams in China’s Southwest – part of the P.R.C.’s ambitious stimulus package to fight the global recession – is worsening the already considerable environmental and social risks involved, with some projects beginning before any Environmental Impact Assessments have been completed. Such a confluence of events is enough to make a historian think back…to about six weeks ago.

When the China Beat crew decided to put together our book China in 2008, I drew what you could consider either the long or the short straw, depending on your tastes: light editorial duties in return for writing an “end of the year wrap-up” piece to go at the end of the book. (Most of the copy had to go to the press by November 1, and a book with the sub-title “10 months out of a year of great significance” somehow didn’t seem right.) And as the last days of the year ticked off and I tried to figure out what things about 2008 to emphasize, water kept winding up at the center. Here’s an excerpt:

“The Olympics briefly focused attention on China’s serious air pollution problems…But China’s water woes are at least equally pressing, and it may be easier to see what effects they will have. Two little-noted news items from near the end of the year may illuminate that – after we review some background.

Water has always been a problem in China, and effective control of it has been associated with both personal heroism and legitimate sovereignty for as far back as our records go…. But water scarcity is probably an even greater problem than excesses, especially in the modern period. Surface and near-surface water per capita in China today is roughly ¼ of the global average, and worse yet, it is distributed very unevenly. The North and Northwest, with over half the country’s arable land, have about 7 percent of its surface water; the North China Plain, in particular, has 10 to12 percent of the per capita supply for the country as a whole, or less than 3 percent of the global average. China also has unusually violent seasonal fluctuations in water supply; both rainfall and river levels change much more over the course of the year than in either Europe or North America. While the most famous of China’s roughly 85,000 dams are associated with hydro-power (about which more in a minute), a great many exist mostly to store water during the peak flow of rivers for use at other times of year.

The People’s Republic has made enormous efforts to address these problems – and achieved impressive short-term successes that are now extremely vulnerable. Irrigated acreage has more than tripled since 1950, with the vast majority of those gains coming in the North and Northwest; this has turned the notorious “land of famine” of the 1850-1950 period into a crucial grain surplus area, and contributed mightily to improving per capita food supplies for a national population that has more than doubled. Much of that, however, has come through the massive use of deep wells bringing up underground water far faster than it can be replaced; and a great deal of water is wasted, especially in agriculture, where costs to farmers are kept artificially low. (Chinese agriculture is not necessarily more wasteful in this regard than agriculture in many other places – and certainly the deviations from market prices are no worse than in the supposedly market-driven United States – but its limited supplies make waste a much more immediate problem.) Water tables are now dropping rapidly in much of North China, and water shortages are a frequent fact of life for most urban residents. (Beijing suffers fewer water shortages, but only because it can commandeer the water resources of a large surrounding rural area included in the municipality.) Various technologies that would reduce water waste exist, but most are expensive. More realistic pricing of irrigation water would help – but probably at the price of driving millions of marginal farmers to the wall, and greatly accelerating the already rapid rush of people to the cities. Consequently, adoption of both of these palliatives is likely to remain slow.

Instead, the state has chosen a massive three-pronged effort to move water from South to North China – by far the biggest construction project in history, if it is completed. Part of the Eastern section began operating this year, and the Central section is also underway (though the December 31 Wall Street Journal reported a delay due to environmental concerns). The big story in the long run, however is the Western line, which will tap the enormous water resources of China’s far Southwest – Tibet alone has over 30 percent of China’s fresh water supply, most of it coming from the annual run-off of some water from Himalayan glaciers. (This is an aspect of the Tibet question one rarely hears about, but rest assured that all the engineers in China’s leadership, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are very much aware of it. Tibetans, meanwhile, not only see a precious resource going elsewhere when their water is tapped: they regard many of the lakes and rivers to be dammed as sacred.) The engineering challenges in this mountainous region are enormous, but so are the potential rewards, both in water supply and in hydropower – the electricity water can generate is directly proportional to how far it falls into the turbines, and the Yangzi, for instance, completes 90 percent of its drop to the sea before it even enters China proper. The risks, as our two stories make clear, are social and political as well as environmental…

Call the two news stories the “double glacier shock.” On December 9, Asia Times Online reported that China was planning to go ahead with a major hydroelectric dam and water diversion scheme on the great bend of the Yarlong Tsangpo River in Tibet. The hydro project is planned to generate 40,000 megawatts – almost twice as much as Three Gorges. But the water which this dam would impound and turn northwards currently flows south into Assam to form the Brahmaputra, which in turn joins the Ganges to form the world’s largest river delta, supplying much of the water to a basin with over 300 million inhabitants. While South Asians have worried for some time that China might divert this river, the Chinese government had denied any such intentions, reportedly doing so again when Hu Jintao visited New Delhi in 2006. But when Indian Prime Minister Singh raised the issue again during his January, 2008 visit to Beijing, the tone had changed, with Wen Jiabao supposedly replying that water scarcity is a threat to the “very survival of the Chinese nation,” and providing no assurances. And so it is – not only for China, but for its neighbors. Most of Asia’s major rivers – the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, and Indus – draw on the glaciers of the Himalayas, and all of these except the Ganges have their source on the Chinese side of the border. Forty-seven percent of the world’s people, from Karachi to Tianjin, draw on those rivers.

In short the possible damage to China’s neighbors from this approach to its water and energy needs is staggeringly large – and the potential to raise political tensions is commensurate. Previous water diversion projects affecting the source of the Mekong have already drawn protests from Vietnam (and from environmental groups), and a project on the Nu River (which becomes the Salween in Thailand and Burma) was suspended in 2004. But this project has vastly larger implications for both Chinese and foreigners. If, as some people think, the twenty-first century will be the century of conflicts over water, Tibet may well be ground zero.

Of course, China is hardly the only country that has ever appropriated water (not to mention other resources) that others see as theirs; I am writing in Southern California, made much more livable by denying Mexico Colorado River water it is theoretically guaranteed by treaty. And there is also something to be said, environmentally, for anything that provides China with lots of electricity and isn’t coal…

But that’s where the second glacier shock of 2008 comes in – news that this crucial water source is disappearing faster than anyone had previously realized. A report published in Geophysical Research Letters on November 22 noted that recent samples taken from Himalayan glaciers were missing two markers that are usually easy to find, reflecting open air nuclear tests in 1951-2 and 1962-3. The reason: the glacier apparently had lost any ice built up since the mid-1940s…And since the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the Himalayan highlands will warm at about twice the average global rate over the next century, there is every reason to think the situation will get worse. One estimate has 1/3 of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2050, and 2/3 by 2100. If that scenario is right, then even if all the engineering challenges of South-North water diversion can be solved, and even if China undertakes and gets away with taking water away from hundreds of millions of people in South and Southeast Asia, the resulting fix might not last very long…”

Strangely, these stories have attracted very little press coverage. There is, however, an excellent video at the Asia Society website. And there is a fair amount of stuff that’s worth reading about China’s water problems in general. If you are interested in learning more, here are a few things I would recommend:

1. James Nickum has a nice, short, summary of the South-North water transfer project available online. His December 1998 essay in China Quarterly, “Is China Living on the Water Margin?” (#156, 880-898) seems to me to have held up very nicely for a 10-year old overview of this rapidly changing set of problems (and as regular readers of this blog know, we give extra points for punning titles).

2. Another useful overview from several years ago (more technical than Nickum’s) is Olli Varis and Pertti Vakkilainen “China’s 8 challenges to water resources management in the first quarter of the 21st Century,” Geomorphology 41:2/3 pp. 93-104 (November 15, 2001). If you’re at a place where you can access the web version (i.e., a library with a subscription), you’ll find lots of useful further links to click on. (Here is one link for those with a subscription through ScienceDirect.)

3. Elizabeth Economy’s The River Runs Black seems to me to overstate the problems at some times (and since I don’t have a sanguine view, that should give an idea how, umm, black, her take is), but it’s a very good introduction to some of the relevant policy-making agencies and processes.

4. Dai Qing’s various essays on Three Gorges and other hydro projects are very useful, as is the collection Mega-Project (which included both official and unofficial views of the project).

5. Probe International often has good material, as does the International Rivers project.

6. And since plugging oneself is OK on a blog, I have a long-ish essay on the history of Chinese water management in a forthcoming collection of essays on environmental history: Burke, Edmund III, and Kenneth Pomeranz, editors The Environment and World History (UC Press, forthcoming March, 2009).

Happy 牛Year!

By Christopher C. Heselton

On January 25, 2009, Lunar New Year’s Eve, millions of Chinese watched Zhao Benshan’s comedic stylings on the Spring Festival Gala, but for many, when they turned to check the inbox of their cell phone, they found it full of dozens of unread text messages. No, they weren’t advertising cut-rate travel packages to the latest tourist paradise – for the most part at least. They were messages from friends, family, significant-others, co-workers, and acquaintances congratulating the recipient on the “Happy 牛Year!” (a play upon “niu,” the Chinese word for ox or cow, sounding similar to the English word “new,” of course).

Eating dumplings, setting off fireworks, watching the Spring Festival Gala on CCTV, and now – wait, what’s this? – sending a hoard of text messages on your cell phone? That’s right: sending text message greetings to close ones on Chinese New Year has rapidly become the new New Year’s thing to do. In fact, text message greetings have become a tradition for nearly every Chinese holiday and special occasion: Mid-Autumn festival, Western New Year (now celebrated with great fanfare in China, though still not nearly as much as the other one), even birthdays. Of course, this trend is mostly among young and middle-aged cell users. It has yet to be a popular venue of “new year obeisance” (拜年) with those over forty. Between January 25 and January 31, Chinese users sent a mind-boggling 18 billion text messages according to the three largest telecom companies in China. Over half of those messages were sent on January 25 (Chinese New Year’s Eve) as many sat down watching the Spring Festival Gala. To put it in context, that’s fourteen messages for every Chinese citizen, averaging thirty messages sent from each cell phone and representing one in every forty text messages sent in a year!

These holiday messages are often full of word-plays and poetic rhymes ranging from the witty to the cheesy, the hilarious to the innocuous, the inane to the heart felt. They often involve the Chinese zodiac animal of the year and perhaps national themes; last year, many of these messages made references to the Olympics, such as ones that played off the fact that the characters for Olympics also mean “mysterious luck.”

This year, as expected, the prevalent theme is the ox (牛). One typical rhythmic message I received read:

The ox’s twisted horn always faces forward; the ox’s big round eyes look at the pieces of fortune; the ox’s heavy body is healthy and strong; the ox’s tail sweeps clear to welcome in happiness; the ox’s thunderous call beckons spring’s return; the ox’s hooves stamp intentions into shape. Wish this Year of the Ox to be more prosperous. The flourishing ox carries forth prosperity to fill the heavens. Great luck in year of the ox!

牛角弯弯总向前,牛眼圆圆看福篇,牛身重重身体健,牛尾扫扫尽欢颜，牛声震震唤春归，牛 蹄踩踩心意圆。祝愿牛年多财气，旺牛载运福满天。牛年大吉！

Others made humorous word plays off the word “ox.” One such message I received used a vulgar Chinese expression, “the cow’s vagina” (牛屄), which is roughly equivalent to English terms such as “awesome” or “bad ass”:

I wish for your endeavors to be like an ox/awesome! Your work like an ox/awesome! Your home like an ox/awesome! Your health like an ox/awesome! Your wealth like an ox/awesome! Your fortune like an ox/awesome! Yourself like an ox/awesome! Your entire family like an ox/awesome! Your year of the ox like an ox/awesome! Every year like an ox/awesome! Everything all like an ox/awesome!

祝您事业牛!工作牛！家庭牛！身体牛！财运牛！福气牛！个人牛！全家牛！牛年牛，年年 牛!一切皆牛!

Another used black humor to make light of the recent tainted milk scandal by claiming to deliver me several bovine products, including “a milk cow to send you no health” (奶牛为你送不康). The message continued on to say that they sent me “a Red Bull to make your work prosper” (红牛让你事业旺), a reference to the energy drink, and “a cow herder looking to the length of your love-life” (牛郎望你爱情长) – a reference to the ancient Chinese myth of cow herder boy and weaver girl, a pair of, literally, star-crossed lovers.

If all this is news to you, these messages may seem a quaint, creative, or an ingenious incorporation of new technology into the marking of an age-old holiday, but for many these messages are something else – an enormous annoyance! Many people receive thirty, sixty, even ninety messages in a single night, with each requiring a response out of appreciation or mere propriety. The messages also, with rare exceptions, lack sincerity. Most of the ones I received were copied from the Internet, and this is routine. Many are pulled off the web and sent indiscriminately to everyone in a person’s cell phone book. Some people do resist this trend by single-handedly – or should I say “single-thumb-edly”? – writing personalized messages to each friend, but this can take an hour or so, hence the common use of shortcuts.) The idea is a nice enough one, to show that you are thinking of someone fondly during the holiday season although you may not be able to pay a “new year obeisance”; however, the likelihood that one is simply receiving a mass-produced greeting may mean that few bother to actually read what comes onto their screen.

Despite the irritating ring of the cell phone during Chinese New Year, the trend has been ever more popular with the number of text messages increasing at least 50 percent every year, and this year, according to The Northeast News Net, 85 percent. So, although many may be looking to watch this year’s skit by Zhao Benshan, it’s more likely they’ll be spending that time sending text messages to everyone they know, thus furthering their own holiday anguish.

Recommendations for Obama: V

We asked China watchers from a variety of backgrounds to answer the question "What should Obama be reading about China?" While we've already run four installments (I, II, III, and IV), new suggestions continue to arrive. For a few of the cinematic variety, read on...

Jan Berris is Vice-President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and has worked with the committee since 1971.

I suggest that President Obama recover from the lousy week he just had by chilling out in his private movie theater and watching the following movies. None will give him a complete, or even, necessarily, contemporary perspective, but each will give him a piece of the complex, diverse puzzle that is China, and help him understand that there are no easy answers – for the Chinese or for us.

1. Irv Drasnin’s “Misunderstanding China,” a cinematic companion to Harold Isaac’s classic Scratches on Our Minds (which would have been on my list if I were suggesting books instead of films), provides a look at ourselves and how and why we think about China the way we do.

2. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s trilogy of one hour films on Long Bow, which update the village her father, William Hinton, made famous in Fanshen and Shenfan. “A Small Happiness,” focuses on the plight of rural women and has one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes I’ve ever seen: Richard, the cameraman of the talented husband and wife team, says that it was all he could do to hold on to the camera while a woman described smothering her own child because there was not enough food to feed whole family.

3. “To Live” -- Zhang Yimou’s panoramic portrait of one family’s struggle to make it through four decades (the 40s through the 80s) of roiling turmoil in China. .

4. The wonderfully comic, yet profoundly sad “Shower,” shows the confusion and angst that the passing of an era instills in the inhabitants of Beijing hutongs.

5. “Young and the Restless in China” is the latest of Sue William’s many excellent documentaries on China. This one vividly portrays how nine very different young men and women handle their personal and professional lives in a rapidly changing society.

When the Past Catches Up

By Lauri Paltemaa

In December, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 30 years anniversary of reforming and opening up policy that became possible in the now almost legendary 3rd plenum of the 11th Central Committee where Deng Xiaoping defeated his “Whateverist” (read Maoist) rivals in the Party leadership. This coming March, however, we will celebrate another thirty-year anniversary of one of the key policies in reforms. It was then, on March 30, 1979, that Deng Xiaoping announced that the Party would continue to uphold the “four cardinal principles” of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, proletarian dictatorship, party leadership, and socialism. This laid the foundation for the authoritarian Chinese development model, which now faces probably one of its most severe challenges. The model itself was copied form China’s near neighbours, which had been able to pull off their own “economic miracles” through a combination of authoritarian governments and economic reform policies. The Chinese addition to this was to show that a Communist country could also accomplish an “economic miracle” – although by losing almost all features traditionally associated with communism in the process.

Deng’s March 1979 speech on the cardinal principles therefore marked an important decision of how the reforms would unfold. This becomes more visible when we remember that, theoretically at least, Deng had a choice when he gave his speech. He, and his reformist followers in the Party had engineered a political thaw that made possible the emergence of the Democracy Wall Movement, which in turn helped Deng score his victory. The Movement, although never coherent or united over most issues, offered an alternative vision to economic modernization. Its activists all supported the economic reforms and the four modernizations, but they offered an alternative way of getting there by establishing socialist democracy as an integral, and indeed necessary part of the modernization of Chinese society. In his March speech Deng basically rejected this road and chose the authoritarian way.

For the next thirty years the strategy seemed to work well enough. It yielded an “economic miracle” in China when the economy grew, opened up, urbanized, and industrialized at break-neck speed. However successful economically, the regime nevertheless had, and still has, an existential problem, which liberal systems do not face, which is shown in the fact that the debate on democratization has never died out. The Democracy Wall Movement was silenced by 1981, but some of its activists moved overseas and established a Democracy Movement there. In 1989 the question of democratization almost caused the collapse of the regime.

That the debate goes on was last demonstrated in December, when a number of people (originally 303, now reportedly at least over 7,000) published a co-signed petition labelled “Charter 08” where a road to democracy was mapped out for the CCP. The charter shows interesting parallels to, but also important differences from the Democracy Wall Movement thirty years ago. Both answer the same question of “Whither now, China?” The Democracy Movement answered that the key to modernizing socialism was in the direct supervision of the officialdom and the Party by the people and economic reforms. Charter 08 lacks any references to Marxism as its source of inspiration, but also seeks to answer how to create a more just and better-governed society after thirty years of the growing social inequality and corruption that has plagued the economic miracle. The Charter’s signatories answer is grounded in liberal democratic institutions of competitive elections, rule of law and respecting human rights, but also in fairer distribution of wealth, environmental protection and care for the weak.

The disappearance of Marxism from Chinese democratic activism is hardly surprising, as the international and domestic developments of the past thirty years have made it more or less passé as a source of inspiration for political thinking for the masses of people. However, there is also a notable, and telling, change in the demographics of activists of thirty years ago and at present. The Democracy Wall Movement was predominantly a movement of ex-Red Guard youth who had gone through the Cultural Revolution and developed their thinking about socialist democracy during it. This narrow social basis was one of the reasons why the movement was relatively easy to snuff out. A distinctly high number of the signatories of the original Charter 08 were of middle class and well educated professional origin. This is a development the CCP has been afraid of. Its legitimacy has been based on economic growth, promoting nationalism, and rhetorical devices such as telling the Chinese people that there are no, or only worse, alternatives to the Party. One of its methods in staying in power has been co-opting emerging middle classes to the regime by offering access, perks, and stability to allay its fears of the “mob rule.” For some members of the middle class, at least, this is clearly not working.

Is the past then catching up with the party? Opting for authoritarian growth thirty years ago has paid off, but for how long will it do so? Will there be a revision of the authoritarian development model? It is hardly likely in the near future, but Charter 08 is not the only instance of middle class protest. The recent Shanghai Maglev protests, 2007 Xiamen PX-factory protest, and the 2008 similar protest against a government backed petrochemical plant in Chengdu offer other examples. Of course, one must not make too far-reaching conclusions on this handful of instances, which still count as only a fraction of the staggering number of protest all over this big country, but all of them show how members of the middle class are starting to demand something more than just economic perks – good governance. They want a say in decision-making that affects them and their neighbourhoods. In the Democracy Wall Movement, the members of ex-Red Guard youth who demanded a say in society were relatively easy to suppress, but in 2009 discursively well-developed middle class activism poses a trickier challenge for the regime. Thus far, the official response has been mostly repressive, but as these interesting times continue, we can expect more on this front.

Lauri Paltemaa is a professor and director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland and author of numerous articles on social movements and protests in China.

Starbucks in China: A Top Five List

Starbucks has been a glowing beacon of capitalism-on-Chinese-soil (some might say…) for years now, and many took glee in the opening of a Starbucks outlet at the Forbidden City as quiet proof of communism's impending demise (though the outlet is now closed). Here, a top five list of articles that together tell the story of Starbucks’ development in China from international interloper to home-grown coffeehouse. Read on for more.

1. China is major potential market for Starbucks: “Starbucks Soars in China” (Asia Times Online, June 15, 2006):

In Starbucks' headquarters in Seattle, a group of company executives meet regularly, but not to discuss new items on the menu or what marketing campaign should be adopted. Instead, their topic of conversation is China.

They are part of the "China Club", established by more than 300 senior company officials at the US coffee company. Learning to speak Mandarin recently became a new part of their routine….

Although China accounted for less than 10% of Starbucks' US$6.4 billion global sales in 2005, Schultz says the country will soon become the firm's largest market outside of North America.

"We look at this market in terms of how quickly Starbucks has been accepted in just a few years. The market response has exceeded our expectations," Schultz said.

Since the first Starbucks outlet on the Chinese mainland opened in Beijing in 1999, Starbucks has become one of the most popular brands among Chinese white-collar workers aged between 25 and 40, surveys have shown.

2. A stink over coffee in the Forbidden City: “Starbucks in the Forbidden City” (Danwei, January 19, 2007):

The Starbucks coffeeshop in the Forbidden City might be forced to leave after an online campaign against it started by CCTV anchor Rui Chenggang (芮成钢) on his blogs on Sina andCCTV.com. Jonathan Watts' article in The Guardian is the best English language roundup of the affair. Excerpt:

Starbucks faces eviction from the Forbidden City

According to local media, half a million people have signed [Rui's] online petition and dozens of newspapers have carried prominent stories about the controversy. "The Starbucks was put here six years ago, but back then, we didn't have blogs. This campaign is living proof of the power of the web", said Rui. "The Forbidden City is a symbol of China's cultural heritage. Starbucks in a symbol of lower middle class culture in the west. We need to embrace the world, but we also need to preserve our cultural identity. There is a fine line between globalisation and contamination."...

... Mr Rui said ... "But please don't interpret this as an act of nationalism. It is just about we Chinese people respecting ourselves. I actually like drinking Starbucks coffee. I am just against having one in the Forbidden City."

3. Starbucks detested in Bloomington, Indiana but beloved in Shanghai (where it was managed by a Taiwanese firm)? (“Sipping Starbucks, from Bloomington, Indiana to Shanghai, China” by Jeff Wasserstrom, January 30, 2008):

Located across the street from Indiana University, the Bloomington Starbucks had become a lightening rod for protest during the months before I set off for Shanghai. Protesters had smashed its windows; they decried it as a symbol of all that was wrong with American capitalism. They also claimed that the big green coffee machine would trigger the demise of beloved local cafés. Indeed, some struggled to stay afloat. A couple soon went out of business.

These days, Starbucks’ impact on “mom and pop” coffee operations is an open question, with some arguing that independents are thriving now more than ever. Back then, the protests set me wondering, as I sipped my first cappuccino in the Starbucks that had opened on Huaihai Road (a once and now again fashionable Shanghai shopping street), whether the Seattle-based chain was inspiring similar reactions in Chinese cities.

Striking up a conversation with the manager, I discovered an intriguing aspect to the Shanghai Starbucks story: The company in charge of day-to-day operations was the Taiwanese firm Presidential Coffee. The logic behind Starbucks partnering with Presidential was that the latter—a company that had previously helped introduce 7-Eleven stores to the Philippines—would be able to ensure that any necessary cultural accommodations to an Asian setting would be made.

As I walked the streets of Shanghai and frequented its bookstores (the shelves of which often contained multiple books on topics relating to coffee), I learned that, far from undermining the viability of independent cafés, the arrival of Starbucks in Shanghai contributed to the proliferation of new coffee houses, some of which used signs that mimicked the color scheme or at least the circular motif of the Seattle-based firm. And local Chinese language guidebooks did not present Starbucks as an “American” establishment, but rather referred to it as a “European-style” one, in order to contrast it with Manabe, the high-priced Japanese chain that had made its mark on Shanghai in the late 1990s.

4. In recent weeks, Starbucks launched a new line of Yunnan-grown coffee called “South of the Clouds” (“Chinese-grown Starbucks Coffee: The Next Big Thing?” Shanghaiist, January 15, 2009):

Wang Jinlong, president of Starbucks for greater China, chimed in saying the company "wants to make its coffee from China as well-known and as high-quality as Chinese tea". While Starbucks has been shutting stores across the US, Coles says Starbucks has "so much space for growth in China, we're barely scratching the surface even today of what we think the demand potential is for this market".

5. And on the subject of making the global local, with Starbucks as part of the mix, Pico Iyer from Japan (“One Man’s Junk Food,” New York Times):

Yet when my friends visit me, from New York or London, they never seem very delighted when I bring them to this McDonald's parlor (admittedly a tiny one) at my local train station, in the suburbs of Nara, the ancient Buddhist capital of Japan. And they don't look much happier when I tell them that we can eat the Chinese cabbage and broccoli au gratin that Colonel Sanders is dishing up downstairs, or sample a strawberry mille-feuille crepe at Starbucks near the platform entrance. The places I'm inviting them to could not be more indicative of life in Japan, or almost anywhere, today: Live globally by eating locally. Yet our minds have not always adapted to the fact that many of the essential restaurants in the world these days are not indigenous and not American, but a wild and shifting mixture of the two—a floating café of a whole new global order.

Obama Recommendations: IV

By Kate Merkel-Hess

The search terms “Obama China” have brought a lot of readers to China Beat over the past two months. We are by no means the only ones experiencing an Obama-related reader boost (though we are the second hit on Google, right behind the BBC for a search of "Obama China"!), nor the only ones getting an Obama-related content surge. If you are looking for smart commentary on the recent Obama administration's China snafus, for instance, check out James Fallows’s analysis from last week (hat tip: kuluyi). Those interested in live (as in right now) discussion of Sino-American relations under Obama may want to listen in to the Japan Society's panel (including Howard French, who weighed in on our last recommendation list) on "The U.S. & East Asia Under the Obama Administration" (it will be webcast live at 6:30 p.m. EST). 

Below, our fourth installment of reading recommendations for Obama (though this time with a little twist in answers to our "what should the President be reading" question).  Feel that you've got too much to read already? If so, you may want to bop over to Huffington Post where Jeff Wasserstrom has posted a list of recommendations for Obama, in which he admittedly offers up titles of yet five more books, but he pairs each one with a relevant, China-related film or video that you might have missed.

French Sinologist Marie-Claire Bergere is professor emerita at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) and author of, among many other books, the recent Capitalismes et capitalistes en Chine, XIXe - XXIe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2007).

Thank you for asking, but I mostly follow the writings on China in French, and I would hate to think of suggesting that a busy President learn a new language. But if in an alternative universe the Francophone John Kerry had been elected instead of Bush in 2004 and was now starting a second term, here’s what I would advise him to read about China.

1) Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949, by Lucien Bianco , Paris, Gallimard, 2007 (This recent French edition was thoroughly revised and completed by a one-hundred-page essay entitled:"La révolution chinoise: une interprétation.")

2 et 3) In Mireille Delmas-Marty & Peirre-Etienne Will, La Chine et la démocratie, Paris,Fayard, 2007 , two contributions:
"Principe de légalité et règle de droit dans la tradition juridique chinoise" by Jerome Bourgon, and
"L'accession de la Chine à l'OMC et la réforme juridique: vers un État de droit par l'internationalisation sans la démocratie? " by Leila Choucroune.

4) Jean-Pierre Cabestan et Benoit Vermander, La Chine en quête de ses frontières: la confrontation Chine Taiwan, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2005.

5) Comprendre la Chine aujourd'hui, by Jean Luc Domenach, Paris, Perrin, 2007.

Daniel A. Bell is professor of political theory at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and his latest book is China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton University Press, 2008).

1) Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennet, The Man Who Stayed Behind (Duke University Press, 2001). A gripping read by an American who spent decades in China, including sixteen years in solitary confinement. Rittenberg has somehow emerged from his experience with unparalleled understanding and balance. In his late 80s, as lucid as ever, he would also make an excellent ambassador to China.

2) James Fallows, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (Vintage, 2008). Clear and insightful writing from different parts of China. Shows the good and the bad and anybody reading the book cannot but be impressed by the diversity and complexity of the country. Fallows is a sensitive and reliable observer who somehow managed to write an in-depth and accessible account of major developments after only two years in China. Obviously a sign of great intelligence!

3) Randall Peerenboom, China's Long March to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The book provides an empirically grounded and comparative perspective of legal developments in China. Points to the possibility of different models of law and human rights appropriate at different levels of economic development. This book should be read in conjunction with Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2007) – a reliable guide to the key political challenges in China and how the US should respond to them – but I would guess the President already knows about this book so there is no need to mention it.

4) Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (University of California Press, 1986). A fascinating account about a Confucian-inspired thinker who also tried to implement educational and agricultural reforms intended to benefit the poor. Had Mao taken his views more seriously, China would have been better off today. I would suggest reading this book in conjunction with Gloria Davies' Worrying about China (Harvard University Press, 2007), a reliable guide to the latest intellectual debates in China which also shows how age-old concerns about moral improvement and public-spiritedness still animate those debates. Ideally, the President should also read the works of influential Chinese intellectuals, but most remain untranslated into English. One exception is Wang Hui's China's New Order (Harvard University Press, 2006).

5) Tim Clissold, Mr. China (Collins, 2004). An intelligent and often hilarious account of what can go wrong when doing business in China. Yet Clissold never loses his sympathy for the people at the source of his troubles.

"Big Pants" Unveiled

Alex Pasternak has written a couple pieces for China Beat in the past (such as "Beijing's Olympic Forecast"), and so we were interested in his piece published a few weeks ago at The National, "Strange Loop: Is Rem Koolhaas's gravity-defying Beijing monument the world's most important building?"

Here is a snippet from the article, well worth reading in full:

It was only after the design emerged in public that the nicknames surfaced, and they were starkly devoid of any references to traditional Chinese culture. At the beginning, wei fang, meaning condemned building, was one oft-heard option. Later, “twisted doughnut”, “drunken towers”, and “big shorts” became the most popular sobriquets in Beijing. The latter, a reference to the building’s two rising towers, had special appeal to many online critics, young urbanites who despise CCTV: the word for “shorts” can also be translated as “underpants”.

“Our building is no longer a single square,” a young CCTV employee told me. “I don’t know what it symbolises. Desire? Ambition? Stupidity?” Later, he said plainly: “it’s a big hole in terms of content, and twisted in terms of fact.” I asked Chen Shuyu, an architect in Beijing, about the building. “Big mouth,” she said, “big lie.” The building’s central hole has inspired more vulgar suggestions. 

Concerned that one of these monikers could stick, CCTV recently asked employees to vote for a more positive one, like “Harmonious Gate” or “New Angle”. According to one Shanghai newspaper, “Knowledge Window”, another option, quickly became a favourite among internet critics, largely because the Chinese name, zhichuang, is a homophone for “haemorrhoids”.

Koolhaas is a fierce admirer of contradictions, and it’s easy to imagine that the only complaint he would have with the catalogue of monikers is that they are too obvious. Scheeren insists this “history of names” is actually a sign of the building’s greatest strength, its ambiguity. “It really undermines all characteristics of the traditional icon,” he says. 

At once forcibly futuristic and demode, spectacular and brooding on the outside, the CCTV headquarters will remain truly untested as an office building until employees move in next December. But many are reluctant to do so. One told me that the building’s size and maze of 75 elevators are a widespread source of concern, threatening to turn the building into the setting for a Kafka story. “We’ll spend half the day getting to the top,” he said. “What we need is a new building that is larger and practical, not an extravaganza.”

Obama Recommendations: III

By Kate Merkel-Hess

We aren’t the only ones with advice in regards to China for President Obama of late. For instance, Rebecca MacKinnon recently recommended to the President that he make sure to communicate with regular Chinese folks, as well as government leaders.

Meanwhile, book recommendations to kick off the new year are cropping up elsewhere as well — Jeff Wasserstrom, for instance, listed some of his favorites at Far Eastern Economic Review.

Here are a few more responses to our question, “What Should Obama Be Reading About China?” If you haven’t been following this feature, check out the first and second installments.


Howard French is an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University and formerly Shanghai (and Tokyo) bureau chief for The New York Times.

Africa’s World War, by Gerard Prunier
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, by Nicholas Shaxson

Why two books that are nominally about Africa for a conversation about China? Because unheralded though it is, Africa will be the great economic and political frontier of the next quarter century, and China, which has understood this far better than the United States and Europe, is building an immense lead in terms of its relations with the continent.

The first book paints a compelling picture of how badly the U.S. has gotten Africa policy since the Clinton Administration, reaping death and destruction through reckless policies in Central Africa, and helping create the big openings China enjoys today.

The second book explains the pitfalls of the African oil sector, which has been America’s principal draw to the continent, and could help reinvent policies in ways that help African countries to use their very real wealth for development.

China: Fragile Superpower, by Susan L. Shirk
China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh

Neither Obama nor any of his top advisors seem to have any deep history of involvement with China. Shirk and Shambaugh’s books are as good a primer on the way the country’s politics work as any I’ve seen recently, and would be a very solid starting point for understanding the country.

Struggling Giant, China in the 21st Century, by Kerry Brown

In the same vein of advice, this slim volume provides a very good feel for the upside potential of China as a fast-rising world power, but also of just how creaky the whole enterprise remains.

Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian
The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, by Liao Yiwu

When the “other half” amounts to 650-800 million people, depending on who is doing the counting, it pays to have a sense for how they live. Ma Jian, the novelist, and Liao Yiwu, the New Journalist, will place you firmly in their midst, and give you some real and unforgettable people’s history along the way.


Dorothy J. Solinger is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and author of Contesting Citizenship in Urban China.

1. David M. Lamptom: The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money and Minds. This book gives a great assessment of just how much miliary power, financial capacity and intellectual resources China actually has and gives a very balanced view of things from the Chinese side.

2. Andrew Mertha, The Politics of Piracy. Shows how the central government has really attempted to bring intellectual property rights under control and just how complex it is.

3. Kellee Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy. Explains how basically satisfied the new capitalists are with the Chinese state as it is now and why.

4. Susan Shirk, Fragile Superpower. Analyzes the domestic weaknesses of China, despite the external strength.

5. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The Plight of the Laid-off Proletariat," The China Quarterly, June 2002. [Link may only be available with a library subscription.] Reveals the difficulties of the unemployed in China and the inadequacy of the unfinished social security net there to assist them.


Merle Goldman is professor emerita of history at Boston University and author of numerous books and articles.

John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History. It is a big book, but the last section deals with the post-Mao regime and might be a way for Obama to catch up on what has happened to China since Mao's death in 1976. This section views the post-Mao period in an historical context.


Sara L.M. Davis is the executive director of Asia Catalyst, and author of Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China's Southwest Borders. Asia Catalyst keeps a blog on human rights in China.

President Obama is more than just a sophisticated politician – he’s also an excellent writer. I doubt he’ll have much patience with some of the overhyped books on China currently weighing down the shelves at Borders. Instead, I’d recommend readings that will give the president insight into the people of China while making his long flight to Beijing pass a bit more quickly.

1. It’s hard to accomplish much in China without understanding Chinese tradition. Patricia Ebrey’s Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook is full of excellent, readable snippets from primary sources – everything from the Confucian classics to household handbooks to diaries by pilgrims on the Silk Road. Best of all, each text is only a few pages long, so the president can dip into it in between global crises.

2. If he enjoys Ebrey, the president might be ready to tackle Burton Watson’s translation of the Tso Chuan, an ancient collection of anecdotes about wars and allegiances between Chinese warlords. The Tso Chuan is a little stodgy, but is frequently enlivened with harrowing acts of violence. And it might give the president some useful ideas about how to conduct trade negotiations.

3. President Obama will want some insight into China’s troubled relations with the Uighurs and Tibetans. I'd suggest starting with Stevan Harrell’s wonderful essay, “Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” from Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, then moving on to Robbie Barnett’s The Tibetans. (In return, Chinese leaders could spend a useful hour listening to Obama’s famous speech on race.)

4. Minky Worden’s edited volume, China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges, is an excellent overview of human rights issues in China.

5. As a former community activist, President Obama may be curious about the view in China from the bottom up. To help him understand the lives of working people, I suggest spending a few hours on the plane with some of the films at which China excels. One of my favorites is Woman Sesame Oil Maker, which shows China’s tumultuous economic changes through the tragic lives of two rural women. Beijing Bicycle and Not One Less are also tremendous. If President Obama just watches these three films, he'll know almost everything he needs to know about life in China.

Incense Power, Incense Peace

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Chapter 1: Lines 1-2, 11-12

Taiwan's pilgrimage season, which tends to peak around the third lunar month (Chaucer's April) has long been a time of intense religious devotion, with moving scenes of worshippers (especially elderly women) walking for days from one sacred site to another. There are also mammoth processions, fireworks, dramatic performances, etc. Pilgrimage season is also big business for the island's leading temples, which compete to attract worshippers and enhance their financial and symbolic capital, referred to as "incense power" (香火權威).







One of the most famous temple rivalries involves the venerable Chaotian Gong (located in Beigang, Yunlin County; 雲林北港朝天宮) and the Fengtian Gong (in Xingang, Jiayi County; 嘉義新港奉天宮). While these two temples stand a mere three miles apart, tensions over which one could lay claim to being this nation's oldest Mazu 媽祖 temple (開台媽祖) ended up sparking a religious cold war that has lasted 60 years, with neither temple willing to support or take part in the other's activities.

Now a historic reconciliation is at hand. On February 4 (the tenth day of the first lunar month, which also happens to be 立春), the Fengtian Gong will reroute its annual procession to stop by the Chaotian Gong, where representatives of the two temples will exchange incense in a rite known as "會香" (a neutral term that avoids any hint of spiritual hierarchy). Taiwan's impressive technological know-how will be devoted to documenting the joyful moment, including minicams on Mazu's palanquin (a palanquin-cam?), GPS, and live broadcasts on temple websites that can be played on 3G cell phones).

One of the most striking aspects of the 甲子-long rivalry between these two sacred sutes is the role played by the another famous Mazu temple, the Zhenlan Gong (located in Dajia, Taizhong County 台中大甲鎮瀾宮). This temple gained increasing prominence during the 1970s, a time of successful economic development (meaning more money for religious activities) that also coincided with the rise of new group of local elites with links to KMT, most notably Yan Qingbiao 顏清標 (shown here with Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jinping 王金平 and Taizhong City Mayor Jason C. Hu 胡志強). As the Zhenlan Gong's incense power increased, it chose to challenge its supposedly subordinate relationship with the Chaotian Gong, and when negotiations stalled rerouted its annual procession to stop at the Fengtian Gong instead.

It is also interesting to note that these temples have been prominent actors on the political stage. During the 2000 presidential election, supporters of candidate James Soong (Song Chuyu 宋楚瑜), including Yan Qingbiao, held divination rituals at the Zhenlan Gong to demonstrate that the goddess was solidly behind Soong. Even though Soong's bid was unsuccessful, these same elites then proceeded to pressure Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁's DPP government to allow a direct pilgrimage to Mazu's ancestral temple in Meizhou 湄州 (located in Putian 莆田, northern Fujian), efforts that have now finally borne fruit. For its part, the Fengtian Gong played a leading role in supporting Taiwan's bid to rejoin the United Nations.

Elites from the Chaotian Gong and Fengtian Gong were instrumental in achieving this year's reconciliation, especially their two Chairmen of the Board, Zeng Cai Meizuo 曾蔡美佐 and He Huangda 何煌達. As Cai put it, "There is only one Silent Maiden Lin (=Mazu). Our gods haven't met in decades. It's time for them to drink tea and chat together" (林默娘也有一個，已經幾十年沒有見面，讓祂們喝喝茶、聊聊天). Local worshippers are ecstatic as well, often quoting the expression "Where Mazu goes, peace and harmony follow" (媽祖到，平安到).

There are high hopes that the peace-making between the Fengtian Gong and Chaotian Gong will extend to other rivalries. However, it remains to be seen whether the Zhenlan Gong will resume its annual pilgrimage to the Chaotian Gong, or whether the Chaotian Gong will choose to stop by the Fengtian Gong during its own annual procession.

Note: For more on the temples described above, please see the work of Chang Hsun 張珣, Huang Mei-ying 黃美英, Lin Mei-rong 林美容, Murray Rubinstein, Stephen Sangren, and Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (楊美惠).

FAQ#8: Was there a Master Plan to use the Olympic Games to Promote a Positive Image of China to the World ?

(And What was the Strategy for Dealing with the International Criticism on Human Rights)?

(This is a shortened version of a paper presented at the conference on ““The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: Public Diplomacy Triumph or Public Relations Spectacle?” organized by the Center on Public Diplomacy, US-China Institute, and Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, January 29-30, 2009.)

There was a common perception outside China that the Beijing Olympic Games involved a master plan to promote a positive image of China to the outside world and that this was one of the major goals of hosting the Olympic Games, if not the major goal. I want to argue that while there was widespread agreement in China that the Olympics were an excellent opportunity to promote an image of China to the world, the vast majority of the attention and effort was focused on the domestic audience; that there was never a concrete communication strategy for dealing with the human rights issue; and that in both instances, China’s ability to communicate a positive international image was hindered by the domestic political structure.

The People’s Olympics

Many Western journalists and Amnesty International accused China of failing to keep its promises with respect to its human rights record. But China had not made any such promises, and if journalists had read chapter five of my recent book, Beijing’s Games, they would have known that there was a big internal debate about even the one sentence about human rights that was made in China’s bid presentation in 2001.

However, in its bid China did make one promise that it arguably kept, and that was its promise to host a “people’s Olympics.” There were three main themes for the Olympic Games: the High-tech Olympics, the Green Olympics, and the renwen (人 文 奥 运 ) Olympics. Renwen is difficult to translate. It was sometimes translated as the “humanistic Olympics,” but after some debate, the preferred official translation was the “People’s Olympics.” This theme was originally intended as a response to the West’s criticism of China’s human rights, but this was never made explicit to the West.

One of the central concepts of the People’s Olympics was 以人为本 , “take people as the root,” or “people-orientation.” This phrase had appeared in political rhetoric when Hu Jintao named it in his address to the Third Plenum of the 16^th Party Congress in 2003. This preceded the inclusion of a passage on human rights in the revision to the Constitution in 2004. It is interesting that as early as 2001, 以人为本 had already been written into the guiding thought for the Beijing Olympic Games.

In 2000, Beijing Mayor Liu Qi began commissioning a number of groups with the task of developing the basic thought behind the 人 文 奥 运 because he felt that, unlike the other themes, it was unclear. The People’s University formed the Humanistic Olympic Studies Centre to study it. One of the non-Communist Parties, the Democratic League, was commissioned by Liu Qi and began developing working papers in 2001. Forums were held, dissertations and books were written on the topic, working papers were drafted, websites were created, and by the start of the Games it was estimated that at least ten thousand pages had been written on the topic of the “People’s Olympics.”

Faculty members of the Beijing Sport University and the Humanistic Olympic Studies Center of the People’s University were particularly involved with the relevant sport, educational, and cultural organs of the central and Beijing government. Although they had travelled abroad, these intellectuals were all largely focused on the domestic audience and not the international audience. They gave dozens if not hundreds of interviews to Chinese media, appeared frequently on CCTV, and were influential in shaping domestic media opinion. They seldom gave interviews to foreign media and on occasions when they did they were belittled as Party-liners (see these characterizations of Beijing Sport University’s Ren Hai and People’s University’s Jin Yuanpu).

As a result of the orientation of the intellectuals who designed it, the guiding thought of the People’s Olympics was largely diverted away from any focus on China’s international image and into a debate over culture and education. In my interactions with BOCOG and the intellectuals who were working with it, I felt that about 80-90% of the effort that went into this symbol-making was directed toward the domestic audience. The main focus was on the questions of how to manage the “combination of Eastern and Western cultures” （东西结合）that the Games were supposed to facilitate, how to promote Chinese culture within China and to the world, how to use the enthusiasm for the games to raise the general quality (素质) and civility (文明) of the Chinese people, how to prepare the next generation of young Chinese to take their place in the international community.

These discussions and debates formed the intellectual context for Zhang Yimou’s opening and closing ceremonies, the Olympic education programs in the schools that reached as many as 400 million Chinese schoolchildren, the training programs for the 70,000 Olympic volunteers, the cultural performances in the Cultural Olympiad, and the myriad of other cultural and educational activities that surrounded the Games.

Perhaps the major way in which the guiding thought about the promotion of China’s national image was generated was through three keypoint research projects commissioned by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science, which is administered by the Central Propaganda Department. These grants are the government’s way of channeling academic research in directions that serve its needs. The relative unimportance of the Beijing Olympic Games is indicated by the fact that from 2003 to 2008, only five related projects were funded, of which three were “keypoint” projects with a competitive application process. By way of comparison, in the same time period the number of funded projects that fell under the rubric of “Marxist-Leninist Services” was 190, and under “Party History and Construction” was 178. The first relevant Olympic project was the 2003 project entitled “Improving China’s International Position and Reputation through the 2008 Olympic Games.” The Beijing Sport University won the bid for this project and in April 2007 published the results in Research on Improving China’s International Position and Reputation through the 2008 Olympic Games　(《２００８年奥运会提升中国国际地位和声望的研究》). Its 65 chapters contain thorough summaries of the issues that provoked negative media reports in past Olympic Games, such as delays in venue completion, transportation problems, media information glitches, terrorist acts, and so on. The lesson that Beijing clearly learned was that these particular problems should be avoided at all costs, and ultimately they avoided all the problems that got negative media coverage in previous Olympics. The analyses of Western media coverage of the Beijing Games since 2001 indicated that “political” issues – as they are called in China - would dominate coverage. However, the resulting recommendations merely emphasize the importance of treating the media and other leading opinion-makers well.

The most daring chapter, “Beijing Olympics Speed Up the Transformation of the Functioning of the Government,” analyzes the promises made under the rubric of the “People’s Olympics” - and improving human rights is not listed as one of them.

A second keypoint project of the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science was the 2006 project “Construction of the Humanistic Concept, Social Value and National Image of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games” (《2008年北京奥运会的人文理念、社会价值与国家文化形象构建》), which was awarded to the People’s University. Through this project and elsewhere, the People’s University promoted its concept of the “Cultural Olympics.” The final report has not been completed, but in a summary of their conclusions on CCTV in February 2008, they argued that research shows that culture constitutes the core of national image, and “therefore in the construction of a national image, we should hold the line on ‘Cultural China’ （坚持走“文化中国”的路线）in order to make the idea of ‘Cultural China’ into the core theme for dialogue between China and the international community in Olympic discourse.”

So my first point is that if the “People’s Olympics” was the response to the West’s human rights accusations, then that response was delivered in the form of culture and symbols - the “look and image” of the Games, the “branding” of China, the display of “Chinese culture” – and not in the form of verbal debate or dialogue. They were very successful in the former, but the absence of the latter led critics to characterize the Games as one big show orchestrated by the Party-state. This simple-minded view does not do justice to the passion with which the producers of the People’s Olympics threw themselves into fulfilling their mission of promoting Chinese culture and achieving its integration with Western culture. I believe we should accord them more respect.

If the People’s Olympics was to be the response to Western criticism of China’s human rights record, then it probably needed to directly address the issue of human rights, but the topic was never directly taken on in the reports and research devoted to the topic. But now we run into the structure of domestic control over discussions of human rights. The sports scholars, philosophers, and members of non-communist parties who were developing these documents were not likely to address such a sensitive topic as human rights because it was not their job. The job of communicating China’s position on human rights to the outside world one is one of the official responsibilities of the State Council Information Office, which is simultaneously the Office of Foreign Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This organ’s function is to act as the media conduit between China and the outside world. The Information Office is under the Party Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, which is the nerve center of China’s thought control system. But the factionalism between the various “systems” （系统）of the Chinese government is well-known, and the propaganda system is a different system from the sport, cultural, and educational systems involved in creating and implementing the People’s Olympics; its power base is in media and communications circles. I did not see evidence that it had an active role in conceptualizing the People’s Olympics.

National Image

While the other systems were doing their work, the Information Office was involved in a separate effort, which involved a different group of intellectuals in the field of communications, whose core was located at the Communications University of China. The question of China’s national image had been the subject of a fair amount of intellectual work, though not nearly as much as the multidisciplinary effort behind the “People’s Olympics.” The third relevant keypoint project designated by the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Science was the 2005 project, “The Design of China’s National Image in Communications with the Outside World (对外传播中的国家形象设计),” which was awarded to the Foreign Communications Research Center (对外传播研究中心), a unit administered by the Foreign Languages Publishing Bureau, which is in turn under the Party Central Committee. The major results of this project, which involved scholars in communications at China’s top universities, were published in April of 2008 (Communication of a National Image, 《国家形象传播》). Among the 60 chapters, there is not one on the Beijing Olympics. The chapters that touch upon the Olympics agree that Olympic Games are an excellent opportunity to promote a national image; but they use the examples of the Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988 Olympic Games as models for a promoting a positive image, and they do not offer the possibility that the Games can promote a negative image. And so three years of work by China’s top communications intellectuals failed to produce a strategy for dealing with attacks and criticism.

Olympic China National Image Ad

If there had been a master plan for using the Olympics to promote China’s image, it would have been developed by the Central Propaganda Department. The single person most responsible for coordinating everything would have been Li Dongsheng, who was simultaneously a member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, and – more to the point here - Deputy Director of the Central Propaganda Department, chief of BOCOG’s Media and Communications Coordination Group, and president of the China Advertising Association. Western media tended to make a big deal out of the American (Hill and Knowlton) and British (Weber Shandwick) PR firms that had worked for BOCOG, but in fact the non-Chinese viewpoint that they provided to BOCOG was only one among many collected, and probably not the most influential – and in any case, BOCOG was not empowered to discuss “political” issues.

So the major reason that there was no master PR plan was due to the strict division of labor with regard to communications with the outside world, with only the organs under the Central Propaganda Department empowered to speak about “political” issues. While the sport, educational, and cultural systems were crafting their “cultural” messages, the Information Office was engaged in a completely independent effort to produce a television commercial for “China” at the end of 2007. The difficult eight-month birthing process of the “Olympic China National Image Ad” indicates that if Li Dongsheng were trying to develop more proactive communications with the outside world, he may have had his opponents. The ad had been approved at the start of 2007, but it was not finally pushed through until just before the end of the fiscal year. Pressure was exerted via a long article entitled “Raise China’s Face – Where is China’s National Image Ad?” （《扬起中国脸—中国国家形象广告在哪里》）which appeared in November 2007 in Modern Advertising Magazine, a publication of the China Advertising Association of which Li was president. The article was written with the help of scholars at the Communication University of China and demonstrated the widespread support of the heads of China’s major advertising firms. One section, “Using the Opportunity of the Olympics to Build a National Image,” reviews the risk of negative media coverage but, like the other publications discussed, it does not develop a communication strategy for responding to it.

I was invited to be on the panel of academics that evaluated the bid presentations by eight of the top advertising agencies with offices in China. After leaving the hotel where we were sequestered, I never heard anything further about the project until the ad was shown on CNN and BBC on August 8, the day of the opening ceremony. I have still not seen it. Its release had been delayed from the original planned date of April because of the torch relay protests and the Sichuan earthquake disaster. Local reports on the internet make it seem that the project was not finally awarded to one of the advertising firms, but instead to a production team formed by the Information Office. It was also apparently cut to 30 seconds from the originally planned 90.

At the time, we were told that we were making history, because for the first time China was reaching out to the world to try to shape its image, rather than waiting for the world to come and understand it. Those involved in the process seemed to feel that it was an extremely important first step. In December 2007 the Information Office already expressed to me that it knew it was not effective in communicating a positive image of China to the world. It evidently felt it needed a new strategy for dealing with the human rights issue because in December 2008, it announced that together with the Foreign Ministry it was spearheading China’s first-ever “Action Plan on Human Rights,” which would be prepared for release in January by a panel including 50 institutions and NGOs. That this effort was spearheaded by the Information Office and Foreign Ministry, and not by the ministries and offices that actually control human rights, has led Western critics to describe it as a public relations ploy. However, another way of looking at it is that because they are the interface with the outside world, these organs are probably better versed on human rights debates than any others in China. Also, the Information Office’s close connection with the Central Propaganda Department is necessary in dealing with a very important ideological issue. The Chinese announcement states that it will not be just another white paper on human rights, but an actual action plan with benchmarks. A more optimistic interpretation of this measure might be that China’s international image is now being enlisted in a strategy to name and shame the other state organs into closer adherence to international human rights standards. I believe that the momentum for the action plan was strengthened by the difficult experiences surrounding the Beijing Olympics.