A Year of Telling Tales

"Tales from Taiwan" also celebrated its first birthday recently. Since our inaugural posting on January 14, 2008, Peter Zarrow, Jennifer Liu, Yong Chen, and I have been contributing pieces about various aspects of Taiwanese culture. In terms of readership, here is a bit of numerology provided courtesy of the China Beat's web wizards:

The general page for "Tales" received 1,297 views as of February 5, totaling approximately 500 fewer than the tenth-most viewed post for the China Beat (Five Sites for Lesson Plans and Teaching Materials on China; 1,775 views).

Our Taiwan top five reads as follows:

1. The KMT Backstroke = 453 views
2. The Great Diversion = 372 views
3. Wild Strawberries = 267 views
4. Where Do We Go From Here? = 236 views
5. Trauma and Memory: 228 in Taiwan Today = 217 views

(Note: The category "views" simply records the number of readers who clicked a particular story; our wizardry does not extend to divining how many perused the story on the China Beat's main page when it was first posted).

A few posts attracted considerable discussion, some of it heated:

1. State of Siege = 16 comments
2. Wild Strawberries = 10 comments
3. The KMT Backstroke + The Return of the Two Nationalisms = 6 comments (tie)
4. Taiwan Top Five = 5 comments
5. 2008 Retrospective: Olympics in Taiwan + Trauma and Memory: 228 in Taiwan Today = 4 comments (tie)

It is a bit disappointing that the pieces about Taiwanese culture (movies, sports, festivals, etc.) seem to have attracted less attention than those about politics. However, "Tales" will continue to address both of these topics, while also devoting some space to the plight of Taiwan's underprivileged.

Bill Powell (1919-2008)

Stephen MacKinnon is a Professor of History at Arizona State University whose most recent book (reviewed by Nicole Barnes on China Beat last August) is Wuhan 1938. He has an abiding interest, as this post shows, in the history of Western journalists in China--an interest that led to publication of earlier books such as Agnes Smedley. He sent us this piece from India, but our PRC-based readers might like to know that they can catch him live at the Shanghai International Literary Festival on March 22, where he will give a talk at M on the Bund on “Intrigue and Romance the 1930s--Agnes Smedley's Shanghai.”

Bill Powell (John W. Powell) died suddenly on December 15 at the age of 89. Obituaries (New York Times, 12/17/08) focused on the sedition trial of the 1950s in which Bill, wife Sylvia, and Julian Schuman were pilloried for repeating in the Shanghai English language weekly, China Weekly Review, the charge that U.S. forces used germ warfare in the Korean War. The story of their defense is a remarkable one of personal courage and tenacity – and of course it should be addressed. The ordeal made McCarthy hysteria martyrs of the Powells.

But there is another, more Chinese story to tell about Bill Powell. Bill was a central figure, one of the few who survived into the twenty-first century, among a group of young men and women from the West (mostly American) who reported on the China theatre during World War II. In the face of censorship, language barriers (the country was a check-board of regional dialects), and the horrors of daily bombing raids, Powell and others dug for stories and then found various means to get their stories out and in print. Their reports marked the most extensive news coverage at that point of a non-Western country in the Western press. Bill’s comrades included John Hersey, Teddy White, Harold Isaacs, AT Steele, Til and Peggy Durdin, Jack Belden, Anna L. Jacoby, Stewart Alsop, Mac Fisher, Chris Rand, Graham Peck, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, and Freda Utley.

What Bill lacked in age and experience was made up by the connections of his father in Shanghai (where Bill was born). By the mid-1920s, J.B. Powell – originally from Hannibal, Missouri – was a legend in the Chinese coast English language publishing world. He was editor and eventually publisher of the China Weekly Review, the most widely read and quoted publication (often in the Chinese language press) of its kind in China. By the 1930s , the editorial stance of the Review was virulently anti-Japanese. In December, 1941, J.B. was arrested in Shanghai and badly tortured by the Japanese occupation forces.

Fresh out of college, Bill was 22 years old when he returned to China as a war correspondent. When Bill arrived in Chongqing shortly after Pearl Harbor, he knew only that his father was in a concentration camp. Bill was assigned first to Chongqing, which he found stifling. As soon as possible he volunteered to go to Guilin as an officer in the Office of War Information as well as a stringer for Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Daily News and other publications. His father’s connections gave Bill access at the highest level to Chinese government officials, both Communist and Nationalist (remember China was nominally fighting at this point as a “united” front). These included figures like Chiang Kaishek and the Madame, H.H. Kong, T.V. Song on the Nationalist side and Zhou Enlai and Gong Peng on the Communist side. On the American side, he was part of the press corps covering the tumultuous relationship between Generals Vinegar Joe Stilwell (Army) and Claire Chennault (Air Force) as well as the shenanigans of the Navy Intelligence chief Milton (Mary) Miles.

The high point of his war reporting years, Bill told me, were his years in Guilin (in mountainous Guangxi province, northwest of Canton). He was there from 1942 until the city fell to the Japanese in 1944. Besides being more picturesque than Chongqing (as it still is), Guilin was much freer politically and culturally – free of Chiang Kaishek’s secret police or juntong led by the infamous Daili. A group of different Generals, not Chiang Kaishek, had controlled the province as an independent power base since the 1920s. The most important of these in Bill’s time were Generals Bai Chongxi and Li Jishen. Annual celebrations of General Bai’s mother’s birthday was the biggest holiday of the year. Thus from Guilin Bill got stories out, about dramatic rescues of downed U.S. plane crews, for example. He was able to report with less censorship and in a more balanced way on the battlefield developments and political rivalries going on around him. Bill also thought that the partnership between the U.S. and Chinese allies worked better in Guilin, with a lot going on beneath the surface. Guilin was a center of intrigue between British, American, and Chinese intelligence operatives – in all sorts of ways. For example, Ho Chi Minh surfaced in Guilin, soliciting and winning support from the O.S.S., after a bad spell in a Chiang Kaishek prison (in Chongqing). There were collisions between British and U.S. intelligence about how to best conduct clandestine operations in Burma, and so forth.

At another level, Guilin was exciting because it enjoyed a flowering as a sort of wartime cultural center, attracting prominent Chinese artists, writers, and poets. General Bai bankrolled the major daily paper, Aobei ribao, whose editorial board had strong communist leanings. There were even important western cultural figures passing through, including Hemingway. Bill remembered being amused by Robert Payne, the poet and translator, who was married at the time to the daughter of a Beijing aristocrat, wandering around Guilin with long hair, sandals, and a rope holding up his pants – to Bill anticipating the beat generation he saw in San Francisco in the 1950s.

In 1944 Bill was one of the last out of Guilin before the arrival of the Japanese as part of the Ichigo offensive. He covered the tragic torching of the city before the Japanese advance which included the U.S. forces blowing up the state of the art hospital they had just opened.

Bill never forgot the Guilin (and Chongqing) years. They represented one of the high points of his life (another being his marriage to Sylvia in Shanghai and honeymoon in Lichang in 1947). Bill met Sylvia through Madame Sun Yatsen (Song Qingling). Of course his assumption of the editorship of the Weekly Review after the war (followed by the death of his father in 1947 in New York) was a milestone as well. As editors, Bill and Sylvia had the ideal catbird seat from which to view the Chinese civil war. By 1947 Bill saw the Communists as China’s best hope for the future and the Review’s reporting ran in that direction. (Ironic, because J.B. Powell had been a strong supporter of Chiang Kaishek and founder of the China Lobby in the U.S.).

It is important to remember Bill’s role as a war correspondent and put it on an par with the later life experiences. He was the last of a generation of Western journalist-adventurers for whom China during the war became a romantic, courageous, revolutionary place. Their reporting broke with older styles of “treaty port” journalism because they attempted to report empathically on conditions as a whole in China. It was this generation who inaugurated a new era of much more varied and penetrating Western reporting on the Chinese situation and later on all of Asia– a legacy that still casts a shadow today.

Readers may also be interested in China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s by Stephen MacKinnon and An American Editor in Early Revolutionary China by Neil O'Brien.

Clinton Plans Visit to China

In just a week, Hilary Clinton will be in China for her first visit as U.S. Secretary of State. What will inform the visit? Here are a few readings that discuss it…

1. Surprise! Many China watchers were caught short by the news that Clinton is headed to China for a visit. The tour has been put together at the last moment, with an as-yet unclear agenda, as discussed by Ian Johnson at WSJ…

2. For an updated analysis of Clinton’s likely goals during her Asia stops, see FEER’s report. One highlight from their analysis of the China visit:

The final stop in China will combine personal and policy tests for Secretary Clinton. Personal, because she has long been critical of China for human rights abuses and trade issues, and Beijing has been trying to puzzle her out. Policy, because President Obama has set high goals for additional cooperation with China, beyond what President Bush achieved.

3. On Friday, Clinton gave a speech at the Asia Society that indicated the direction her visit might take:

Secretary Clinton also said she will "press the case" for greater energy efficiency and clean energy, stating that climate change also has implications on global health care and economy.

4. Clinton has made several high-profile visits to China already. Here is a report on her 1995 visit during the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women.

5. In case you’d like a day-by-day accounting of the Clinton 1998 visit to China (really perhaps more than most of us need to know), here is that detailed account.

6. As some will remember, China was a punching bag for Clinton and Obama during the primaries. If you need a refresher, check out this story from AFP.

7. Back in January 2008, Sufei of Sexy Beijing pondered how she should make a decision between Obama and Clinton…revealing Clinton’s widespread familiarity and popularity on the streets of Beijing.

For Book Lovers and China Enthusiasts…

Tis the season of book festivals, at least around here. A number of China Beat contributors will be speaking at events in the coming months. Here is a list of readings to add to your calendars:

1. The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Scroll through their program to find panels with Xujun Eberlein (Saturday, March 14, 10 a.m., and again on Sunday, March 15, 3 p.m.) and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Monday, March 16, 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday, March 17, 7:30 p.m.), as well as many other commentators and analysts (like Rebecca MacKinnon) and writers (like Zhu Wen) whose publications have been mentioned or linked to on China Beat.

2. The Shanghai International Literary Festival. Jeffrey Wasserstrom will be speaking Sunday, March 15, 4 p.m. Scroll through to find more friends of the blog on the program, including Stephen MacKinnon, Graham Earnshaw, and James Fallows. (Those interested in past visitors can scroll through the archives of Shanghai City Weekend's Book Club, which down near the bottom of the page has podcasts from the 2008 event available for downloading.)

3. Virginia Festival of the Book. Susan Brownell and Kate Merkel-Hess will be speaking at a panel on “Portraits of Contemporary China,” Friday, March 20, 10 a.m.

China in the U.S. Annual Threat Assessment

News agencies have been reporting widely on the content of the U.S. intelligence community's annual threat assessment, delivered Thursday by Dennis Blair (director of U.S. national intelligence) and peppered with language that hearkens back to the Bush era (of a whole four weeks ago, but, still, anyone else tired of references to the U.S. as the "Homeland"?). News stories have focused on the primacy given to the economic crisis in the report and the analysis of threats in the Middle East and what the report calls an "arc of instabilty" from South Asia through the Middle East. However, the report also contains several pages on China specifically (pp. 22-23), as well as mentions of China's impact in Africa (pp. 34-5), its role in cyber attacks (p. 39), and Chinese environmental security (p. 45).

The full report is available at the website of the Director of National Intelligence. Below are excerpts of the included material on China.

From the section on China:

We judge China’s international behavior is driven by a combination of domestic priorities, primarily maintaining economic prosperity and domestic stability, and a longstanding ambition to see China play the role of a great power in East Asia and globally. Chinese leaders view preserving domestic stability as one of their most important internal security challenges. Their greatest concerns are separatist unrest and the possibility that local protests could merge into a coordinated national movement demanding fundamental political reforms or an end to Party rule. Security forces move quickly and sometimes forcefully to end demonstrations. The March 2008 protests in Tibet highlighted the danger of separatist unrest and prompted Beijing to deploy paramilitary and military assets to end the demonstrations.

These same domestic priorities are central to Chinese foreign policy. China’s desire to secure access to the markets, commodities, and energy supplies needed to sustain domestic economic growth significantly influences its foreign engagement. Chinese diplomacy seeks to maintain favorable relations with other major powers, particularly the US, which Beijing perceives as vital to China’s economic success and to achieving its other strategic objectives. But Beijing is also seeking to build its global image and influence in order to advance its broader interests and to resist what it perceives as external challenges to those interests or to China’s security and territorial integrity.

Taiwan as an area of tension in US-China relations has substantially relaxed since the 2008 election of Ma Ying-jeou. The new Taiwanese President inaugurated in May has resumed dialogue with Beijing after a nine-year hiatus, and leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are now cautiously optimistic that a new period of less confrontational relations has begun. Many outstanding challenges remain, however, and the two sides eventually will need to confront issues such as Taiwan’s participation in international organizations. Beijing has not renounced the use of force against the island, and China’s leaders see maintaining the goal of unification as vital to regime legitimacy.

On the modernization of the PLA:

Preparations for a possible Taiwan conflict continue to drive the modernization goals of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese defense-industrial complex. It will likely remain the primary factor as long as the Taiwan situation is unresolved. At the same time, we judge that China over the past several years has begun a substantially new phase in its military development by beginning to articulate roles and missions for the PLA that go well beyond China’s immediate territorial interests.

• For example, China’s leaders may decide to contribute combat forces to peacekeeping operations, in addition to expanding the current level of command and logistic support.

• China’s national security interests are broadening. This will likely lead China to attempt to develop at least a limited naval power projection capability extending beyond the South China Sea. This already has been reflected in Beijing’s decision in December to participate in anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.

Missile Capability. China continues to develop and field conventional theater-range ballistic and cruise missile capabilities that can reach US forces and regional bases throughout the Western Pacific and Asia, including Guam. China also is developing conventionally armed short- and medium-range ballistic missiles with terminally guided maneuverable warheads that could be used to attack US naval forces and airbases. In addition, counter-command, control, and sensor systems, to include communications satellite jammers, are among Beijing’s highest military priorities.
Counterspace Systems. China continues to pursue a long-term program to develop a capability to disrupt and damage critical foreign space systems. Counterspace systems, including antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, also rank among the country’s highest military priorities.
Nuclear Capability. On the nuclear side, we judge Beijing seeks to modernize China’s strategic forces in order to address concerns about the survivability of those systems in the face of foreign, particularly US, advances in strategic reconnaissance, precision strike, and missile defenses. We assess China’s nuclear capabilities will increase over the next ten years.

And on Africa:

China’s presence has grown substantially over the past decade. Total bilateral trade between China and the continent has increased from less than $4 billion in 1995 to $100 billion in 2008, but the EU and US still remain far larger economic partners for the region. China’s objectives are to secure access to African markets and natural resources, isolate Taiwan, and enhance its international stature, all of which it has made progress on. Nevertheless, China’s role has generated local resentment as Chinese firms are seen as undercutting African competitors in securing commercial contracts and falling short of standard local labor practices. Moreover, there is little discernible evidence of Chinese investments being used to incorporate Africa into the industrial “global value production chains” that are becoming the hallmark of integrative trade and FDI flows, especially in manufacturing in other regions of the world.

On cyber attacks:

We assess that a number of nations, including Russia and China, have the technical capabilities to target and disrupt elements of the US information infrastructure and for intelligence collection. Nation states and criminals target our government and private sector information networks to gain competitive advantage in the commercial sector.

On the environment:

China’s high incidence of chronic disease stemming in great part from heavy tobacco use threatens to slow economic growth by incapacitating workers and incurring heavy health-care costs. The health effects of environmental degradation are an increasing source of discontent in China.

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.