China in 2008 Price Drop

Last Wednesday, Amazon dropped the price of China in 2008 to its lowest yet--just over $20 (the price has been fluctuating over the past couple weeks). And the site has also bundled China in 2008 with Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones for about $30, so if any River Town fans never got around to ordering the second book by one of our contributors, now would be a great time to do so.

Amazon's book bundling can be a little hit or miss, so we were wondering who Amazon would pair China in 2008 with, and were hoping it wasn't a book we'd criticized or felt uncomfortable being linked to. Suffice to say, we are delighted by what the web wizards came up with.

Commemoration in 2009

Readers may be interested to know that the new issue of China Heritage Quarterly is out, and it examines the issue of commemoration (a relevant issue at the moment as, having just passed one sensitive set of dates, we are now into the spring--months strewn with anniversaries). As Editor Geremie Barmé writes in the March issue's editorial:

The year 2009 also marks other significant anniversaries. Some of these will be commemorated with due pomp and circumstance in the official media and dissected at length by learned gatherings. Others—those events best thought of as 'dark anniversaries'—will pass by in an atmosphere of heightened alertness, security crackdowns and official anxiety. These dark anniversaries are the silent markers of quelled protests, social unrest and state violence: events like those of 1959 in Lhasa, the closing down of the Xidan Democracy Wall in 1979, the tragedy of 1989 and the religious repression of 1999. They all offer other stories, and a contentious heritage, that play their own role in the unsteady growth of the strong unitary modern state...These years and the days within them offer a penumbra of history; they stand in shaded contrast to the vaunted moments of commemoration, those anniversaries which bask in the merciless glare of publicity and enjoy official largesse. Although formally ignored, or recalled only in verso, dark anniversaries cast a gloomy shadow over the orchestrated son et lumière of state occasions. The Doppelgängers of these dead anniversaries haunt the living.

Articles featured in the issue include a translation of a commemorative essay for the May Fourth anniversary by Xu Jilin (that will also appear in Dushu). A careful recounting of the intellectual issues and causes of May Fourth activists, this paragraph stands out:

By the end of the twentieth century, as a result of the severe damage caused by revolutionary utopias, Chinese thinking people readily reflected on and critiqued utopian ideas. And yet we recognised that although the proximate source of such revolutionary utopias were the forms of May Fourth idealism and romanticist longings, it was clear that which later degenerated into that cruel and merciless 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could not be mentioned in the same breath as the cosmopolitan utopia of the May Fourth era. This cosmopolitan utopia was totally opposed to the blood and iron principles of the politics of power and transcended the narrow aims of nationalism. It had embodied global values that are the common quest of all races, all nations, and all peoples. The 'Eternal World Peace' envisaged at the time by Kant was also a form of cosmopolitan utopia, inspiring the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century, John Rawls, to argue for his 'realistic utopia' in The Laws of the People as a way of achieving global justice. With the rise of nationalism and statism in the modern period, human society required a cosmopolitan utopia to manage global justice, to constrain the tensions and clashes that result from the overdevelopment of statism. Utopian ideals present a global sense of values that are universal and provide the common stipulations for the existence and development of human society. How remarkable was the broad-mindedness of those May Fourth intellectuals, possessed as they were of that brand of cosmopolitan longing, never for a moment seeing the interests of a particular nation or nationality as a gulf to be crossed, seeking always for that 'nation committed to cosmopolitanism', basing the rise of a particular nationality solidly on global human values. This was the patriotic movement of the May Fourth, a patriotism that was possessed of cosmopolitan ideals.

Other selections in the issue include essays by Barmé as well as additional translations and literary analysis. The site also hosts the journal's archives, for those interested in further browsing.

A Reader on Tibet

Tibet has been much in the news the past few weeks, as China attempted to divert attention from the anniversary of last year's riots and protests and reports leaked out of arrests and crackdowns in Tibet. Here are a few of the pieces from this week that we recommend.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Pico Iyer writes about the Dalai Lama’s sinking faith in the Chinese leadership’s desire to resolve the situation in Tibet. Iyer points to the current situation in Tibet as the reason why—the title of his piece is “A Hell on Earth”:

"The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation," I heard the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. "Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent." Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, "I have to accept failure. In terms of the Chinese government becoming more lenient [in Chinese-occupied Tibet], my policy has failed. We have to accept reality."

Accepting reality—first investigating it clearly, and then seeing what can be done with it—is for him a central principle, and now he was about to convene a meeting of Tibetans in his exile home, in Dharamsala, India, and then another, in Delhi, of foreign supporters of Tibet, to discuss alternative approaches to relieving the ever more brutal fifty-year-long suppression of Tibet by Beijing. "This ancient nation with its own unique cultural heritage is dying," he said later the same day. "The situation inside Tibet is almost something like a death sentence."…

Over the decades I've known him, the Dalai Lama has always been adept at pointing out, logically, how Tibet's interests and China's converge—bringing geopolitics and Buddhist principles together, in effect—and at arguing, syllogistically, for how the very notion of enmity is not only a projection, nearly always, but, in today's globally interconnected world, an anachronism. But now, with the skill of one trained for decades in dialectics and personally familiar with the last few generations of Chinese history, he seems more and more to be holding the Chinese government up against its own principles. "Chairman Mao, when I was in Peking, said, 'The Communist Party must welcome criticism. Self-criticism as well as criticism from others,'" he noted pointedly in Tokyo. But now the Party seemed to be all mouth and no ears. Deng Xiaoping, he reminded another audience, always stressed "seeking truth from facts," the very empiricism the Dalai Lama would love to see more thoroughly deployed. "When President Hu Jintao talks of a 'Harmonious Society,' I am a comrade of his," he told the Chinese scholars. "Even today I have points of agreement with Marxist thought."

His argument, unexpectedly, was that Communists in China today are not Communist enough, as they ignore Marx's ideas of ethics and equality (which the Dalai Lama has long admired) and move ever further from the purity and self-sacrifice of their early years. "Mao Zedong was a true idealist, a real comrade, initially," he told the Chinese students. "But in '56, '57, that disappeared." The result, he said, was that "the Communist Party in China today is something very special; it is a Communist Party without Communist ideology." At one point, he even said to his Chinese listeners, "Maybe in some ways I'm more 'red' inside than the Chinese leadership!"

The article is worth reading in full for its cogent assessment of the limited options for Tibet’s future, limitations that result not only from Chinese oppression but also from choices by the Tibetan people.

Those in Southern California may be interested to see Pico Iyer speak at CSULB on April 16.

Earlier this week, Evan Osnos discussed “Serfs’ Emancipation Day” (the CCP’s response to last March’s riots) at his blog, noting the similarities between China’s rhetoric on Tibet past and present:

Watching the Chinese government, this week, inaugurate “Serfs’ Emancipation Day,” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Beijing’s direct rule of Tibet, I couldn’t help but notice how little of the Party’s message has changed since the 1963 film “Serfs,” a classic from the heyday of Party cinema…

Are Beijing imagemakers ideologically intoxicated enough that they don’t see how the West interprets an event like this? Not that simple. The central government encompasses a mix of real sophistication and demagoguery, and my guess is that many urbane diplomats at the Foreign Ministry were cringing at the sight of the event…But, ultimately, they don’t hold sway in China, so the celebrations continued.

A BBC report on Tuesday discussed the emerging public profile of the Chinese-selected Panchen Lama and China’s placement of him as a China-positive representative for the Tibetan people:

Although he is only 19, the Panchen Lama has already stepped onto the public stage to praise the Chinese Communist Party.

Tibet expert Professor Robert Barnett, of New York's Columbia University, says this is part of China's efforts to undermine the appeal of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism.

"He will never really replace the Dalai Lama, but his role confuses the picture and can gradually be used to weaken the Dalai Lama's standing," he said.

"I think [China's] Panchen Lama is being built up very gradually as a public spokesman within the Tibetan Buddhist world."

An excerpt from a piece by Elliot Sperling is up at the Far Eastern Economic Review website (the full article will appear in April’s print version), arguing that though China has painted a picture of a historically inequitable and cruel Tibet, actually the post-1949 years have been much harder on Tibetans:

When the Dalai Lama’s first representatives returned to tour Tibet in 1979 cadres in Lhasa, believing their own propaganda, lectured the city’s residents about not venting anger at the visiting representatives of the cruel feudal past. What actually transpired was caught on film by the delegation and is still striking to watch: thousands of Tibetans descended on them in the center of Lhasa, recounting amidst tears how awful their lives had become in the intervening 20 years. These scenes stunned China’s leadership and for some, at least, made clear the depths to which Tibetan society had sunk since the era of “Feudal Serfdom.”

It’s hardly likely that most Tibetans, after all these decades, are ready to buy into the government-enforced description of their past; such ham-handed actions may well make many view the past as far rosier than it actually was. It is also unlikely to win over large foreign audiences beyond those who already are, or would like to be, convinced. Most likely, it will simply reinforce a Chinese sense of a mission civilatrice in Tibet. The colonial thinking and arrogance inherent in such missions when entertained by European powers in the past is obvious. And it is precisely the kind of attitude that will likely exacerbate friction in Tibet and—justifiably—lead Tibetans to view China’s presence in their land as of a sort with the colonialism of other nations.

Though much of the coverage of Tibet in the media in past weeks has focused on politics, a few journalists took time out to look at Tibetan culture as well. Among them, those at The New York Times, who wrote about the growing market for Tibetan religious paintings or thangkas:

The artists here practice the Rebkong style of thangka painting that has flourished since the 17th century. Thangkas from this part of northwestern Qinghai Province are commissioned by monasteries as far away as Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. In recent years, thangkas have gained a following among some ethnic Han Chinese, and individual collectors from Chinese cities and foreign countries have driven up the prices. (For his painting of Chenresig, Lobsang was asking 3,600 yuan, or about $530, a fortune for most Tibetans.)

The commercialization will “drive thangkas far from their origins, from their use as religious objects,” said Zhang Yasha, a teacher of fine arts at the Minzu University of China who specializes in Tibet. “We see more young people learning the art because it’s lucrative.”

China's Way Forward?

Mark Selden, editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, wears many hats, among them, friend of the blog to China Beat. So we are delighted to have the opportunity to reprint his essay, "China’s Way Forward? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Hegemony and the World Economy in Crisis." You can read the original essay and many others at the Asia-Pacific Journal website.

By Mark Selden

2008—Annus Horribilis for the world economy—produced successive food, energy and financial crises, initially devastating particularly the global poor, but quickly extending to the commanding heights of the US and core economies and ushering in the sharpest downturn since the 1930s depression.

As all nations strive to respond to the financial gridlock that began in the United States and quickly sent world industrial production and trade plummeting, there has been much discussion of the ability of the high-flying Chinese economy to weather the storm, of the prospects for the intertwined US and Chinese economies, even of the potential for China to rise to a position of regional or global primacy. The present article critically explores these possibilities.

In “China’s Way Forward,” [1] James Fallows offers an astute ground’s eye assessment of that nation’s economic prospects and reflects comparatively on the experience of the United States, Japan and others in the teeth of the storm of 2008-09. Beginning with compelling images of migrant workers in their millions returning to the countryside where they face protracted unemployment while container ships sit idle in port, Fallows explains why China’s industrialization and export-dependent economy will be hard hit by the looming world depression. He believes, however, that China will not only weather the storm, but is likely to emerge stronger from it.

History can provide important clues to future possibilities. Financial specialist Michael Pettis has compared China today with the 1920s when the US, taking advantage of World I, transformed its substantial trade deficit and became the workshop of the world and a major creditor nation. The inflow of gold paid for US agricultural and industrial goods driving the US economy. [2] When the depression struck in the 1930s, the US was harder hit by unemployment than many others, including Europe and Japan, yet it emerged from depression and war as the global hegemon. The geopolitics of war would uniquely worked to US advantage in the first half of the twentieth century, but only then, in fueling industrial advance, in decimating all major rivals, and in extending the US reach through military bases. China today, with burgeoning industry and a huge trade surplus, but five times the trade dependency of the US in the 1930s, faces the daunting prospect of industrial implosion, declining exports and spiraling unemployment. How will China respond? And with what effect on others, particularly the United States, in light of US-China economic and financial interdependence?

China’s trade surplus continued to grow even as its exports fell dramatically between December 2008 and February 2009. As economist Brad Setser documents, that surplus facilitated further purchase of US Treasuries and securities [3] even as China’s Premier Wen Jiabao warned the United States of its need to protect the value of China’s investment against the declining value of the dollar. It is precisely China’s competitively priced exports, now including a strong array of technologically sophisticated high end manufactures, together with its Treasury and agency purchases, which have allowed the US to continue its profligate debtor ways. Or, viewed conversely, the US market was critical to China’s industrial advance. For its part, the US now calls on China to reduce its deficit by revaluing its currency and consuming more. The real worry for both, however, is that a surge of protectionism at a time of recession—signs already emerging in spring 2009—would irreparably damage both nations and the global economy. It could, more ominously, touch off a protectionist wave leading the way eventually to hostilities and war.

Fallows believes that China will not only weather the storm but may emerge from it stronger than before. He offers several reasons: Unlike deficit nations such as the US, China has vast surpluses and it is vigorously allocating part of them to boost production and reduce unemployment. Indeed, not only is China vigorously promoting construction that will boost employment, it has also embarked on massive labor retraining programs. As Keith Bradsher reported, this year Guangdong province alone has begun to implement three-to-six month training programs to train 4 million workers. [4] Many of them combine training with part-time work in factories that are expected to hire them. The low wages paid to trainees are part of a process that is driving down wages so that China will be more competitive when export markets again expand. Nevertheless, the short-term prospects are bleak. China’s manufactures, by World Bank reckoning, account for 33% of GDP, so declining output and exports quickly bring substantial job losses. Significantly, China, the world’s number one steel producer faces plummeting production and exports in 2009. China’s Iron and Steel Association on March 18 projected an 80% fall in 2009 steel exports on top of a 6% drop in 2008. [5] US steel production in the first three and a half months of 2009 fell by 52.8% to 22.5 million tons, with a capacity utilization rate of 42.9% compared with 90.5% in 2008. 6] The critical issue is not, however, whether Chinese investment in industry and training will solve the immediate problem of unemployment. It will hinge on whether these measures simply fuel overproduction leading to sharpening international conflict, or whether investment and retraining of workers can be directed to new industries and technologies that can thrive when economic recovery begins by showing the way toward more environmentally friendly and less destructive forms of development while creating jobs.

Fallows emphasizes Chinese inventiveness, and entrepreneurship, comparing the Chinese national mood to that of a recovering Europe in the 1950s when everything seemed possible. His buoyant views of Chinese entrepreneurship are best illustrated by the case of BYD Battery, a firm whose horizons are not only dynamic but also green. Based in Shenzhen, BYD rose from a household enterprise within a decade to become the world’s leading battery producer. It is now investing heavily in technology that it hopes will drive the cleaner cars of the future. Indeed, it has begun producing its own plug-in electric car and anticipates international sales in the near future.

Fallows is at his best in drawing on interviews to convey a sense of that nation’s entrepreneurial energies. To assess China’s prospects within the sweep of the history of capitalism in general and of East Asia in particular, consider the observations of Giovanni Arrighi in a recent interview and his major works. [7] Building on Braudel and Marx, Arrighi observes that the US sequence of deindustrialization and financial expansion since the 1970s, culminating in the crash of 2007-09, is characteristic of the autumn of hegemonic systems. Analyzing five centuries of the geopolitics of capitalism and empire, Arrighi highlights the recurrent pattern of financialization giving rise to a period of chaos and the emergence of a new hegemon. Could China—or perhaps a greater East Asia region—emerge to reshape the world economy in the new millennium? Or, to the contrary, might the US restore its hegemonic position through astute reforms leading to new technological breakthroughs and a sounder financial order? Would transition through a world depression be smooth, or would a new order emerge out of the ruins of economic and financial implosion, protracted class struggles or wars?

Arrighi shares Fallows’ appreciation of Chinese strengths and energies. Drawing critically on the work of the economic historian Sugihara Kaoru on the “industrious revolution” in Europe and East Asia, he notes the specific character of China’s partial proletarianization, which lies behind its dramatic surge of production and export-driven development. Central to this understanding is the dynamic role played by the more than 130 million migrant workers who have fueled China’s low-wage industrialization while retaining land ownership rights in their villages while working, some for decades, in the cities. If China’s migrant workers share much in common with the tens of millions of undocumented workers in the US, including vulnerability to arrest and deportation (from the cities, not across national borders) during periods of economic downturn, there are important differences. Working in the cities but denied the benefits associated with urban citizenship by dint of their rural household registration, many migrants display an entrepreneurial ethos. Indeed, China’s household contract system guarantees equal land shares for rural (including migrant) people, a system that preserves household cultivation rights for all villagers, thus dodging the bullet confronting the scores of millions of landless farmers in other developing countries. The system, with links to the earlier household plots which complemented collective agriculture, provides more than a haven in hard times. Its importance becomes apparent in periods of downturn as a fallback against starvation, but its household-centered character also provides a breeding ground for the petty entrepreneurship that has been among the driving forces of China’s economy since the 1970s.

Far from mythologizing China’s inexorable rise to preeminence, however, Arrighi draws attention to the stability of world structures of inequality, which have preserved the dominance of the North over the South since the nineteenth century with little change in relative per capita incomes. For all the growth and income gains of recent decades, China’s per capita income remains low compared with that of core countries. Indeed, Arrighi finds that China’s per capita income grew only from 2% to 4% of that of the wealthy nations (more, of course, in PPP terms). And, if we exclude China, the position of the nations of the South has actually declined in relative terms since the 1980s; with China included, it has risen only slightly. This underlines both the extraordinary stability of the world order of inequality and how far China is from a position of equity, not to speak of preeminence.

If there has been significant upward mobility over the last half century as measured by per capita GDP, its primary locus has not been China but the East Asia region, led by Japan and including the Newly Industrializing Economies of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong as well as China. From this perspective, a rising China is far from achieving a position of primacy, even in Asia, not to speak of the world. It will not reach the commanding heights in economic, technological or income terms any time soon. And, despite systematic military buildup in recent decades, and even recognizing the vulnerability of the vast American structure of bases, battleships, and nuclear bombs, as indicated by US stalemate and defeat in successive wars, China is unlikely to be able to project its military power decisively on a global or even a regional scale. [8]

The more interesting possibilities, certainly in the short to medium term, center on the rise of East Asia. But can the region respond effectively to the contemporary economic and financial crisis? More important, can it overcome historical and political differences, including conflicting understandings of war and colonialism and deep divisions between its two most powerful nations, China and Japan, to construct a new regional- or eventually world economic order? The challenges of any attempt to do so are illustrated by the heavy inter-national strains that Europe and the Euro face in the context of world depression despite the institutional strengths and accomplishments of the European Union. In economic terms, a critical issue is whether China, Japan and other East Asian nations will achieve pre-eminence in the new green technologies that will critically shape the economies of the future. What is certain is that, while regions have risen and fallen over the centuries, there has been no regional as opposed to national hegemony in historical capitalism to date, an outcome precluded by inter-state conflicts.

It is necessary, moreover, to consider the internal problems confronting China. Fallows, along with many contemporary analysts, notes the proliferation of popular struggles in recent decades, but dismisses the possibility of intense social conflict or revolutionary change in China in the face of economic crisis. While recognizing the potential instability that could arise from large-scale unemployment and falling incomes, he emphasizes the fact that worker and villager discontent has addressed specific grievances, rather than targeting the system or the state. Such a perspective slights both the legacies of history and the significance of strikes and protests that shape societies without precipitating a revolutionary rupture, as in the US in the 1930s and many nations in the 1960s.

It is critical, in particular, to recall that in the course of the last two centuries, China, has repeatedly been in the eye of the world storm of rebellion and revolution. Indeed, it has perhaps the world’s longest and most fully developed tradition of rebellion and regime change from below of any nation. As Arrighi and Binghamton colleagues in the World Labor Group documented, the twentieth century was marked by two massive waves of worker and/or national insurgency, prior to and following the two world wars, giving rise to both national independence and revolutionary movements and transforming the social balance, with China figuring prominently in each. [9] Particularly if economic turmoil leads to regional and global wars, the possibility of tumultuous class struggle should not be ruled out for China, Asia, or other regions.

In the face of rising challenges from below, in recent years the Chinese state, with an accent on stability, has demonstrated uncanny ability to limit protest by preventing horizontal alliances, keeping protesters isolated, and channeling most protest into the legal system. [10] But it has done so while riding the wave of economic growth, mobility, and rising prosperity since the 1970s. In the face of world depression, the Chinese state has moved far more boldly than the United States or any industrialized nation to create jobs through funding construction and fostering new industries. Equally important, as Wang Shaoguang has documented, there is evidence that the current Chinese leadership has begun to reconstruct the welfare and health safety net that was largely swept aside in China, as in England and the US, in recent decades: through a basic income program, health care and pension programs, for example. [11] These measures, together, suggest the kinds of flexible response that the Chinese state is capable of mounting in the face of challenges from below.

China nevertheless confronts three formidable immediate and long-term hurdles above and beyond the current world overproduction and financial crisis. The first of these is the specter of famine. North and Northwest China are in the midst of the most severe drought in at least half a century, with precipitation levels 70-90% below normal and water tables ruinously depleted from excessive well drilling. The FAO’s 2009 report on “Crop Prospects and Food Situation” indicates that 9.5 million hectares of winter wheat in seven provinces have been severely affected by drought. [12] In this respect, China shares with other developing nations acute problems of hunger and poverty. Here, too, proactive state policies will be essential if the disaster is to be mitigated. Nevertheless, while the problems are acute, China’s financial and institutional resources appear to be greater than those of many other, and particularly developing, nations. [13]

Perhaps most challenging in the long run is whether China can shift gears to an environmentally sustainable development course. Thus far, with World Bank and US plaudits, it has followed the path of earlier developers to achieve rapid sustained growth but at a price of an environmentally disastrous combination of toxic industrialization, construction of the world’s largest dams, heavy reliance on coal- and oil-driven production, and mass automobilization. Cumulatively, these have taken an immense toll on land, water, and air. If China’s reckless development trajectory followed in the footsteps of earlier pioneers such as the US and Japan, the environmental consequences have been graver. All signs point toward a leadership that remains deeply committed to pursuit of mega engineering projects for damming and water diversion with potentially dire consequences not only for the Chinese earth and Chinese people, but for China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia threatened by water diversion. China may eventually join an emerging consensus that prioritizes green technology and even, perhaps, begins to rein in the God of Growth . . . but with its vast legions of rural poor, this will not be any time soon. Whether China, as exemplified by BYD’s green automotive production can become a pioneer in the emerging new industry remains to be seen.

A second challenge is the specter of rising inequality. In the course of three decades of rapid development, China’s developmental priorities transformed a highly egalitarian income distribution pattern into one of the world’s most skewed distributions, with class, city-countryside and ethnic divisions all pronounced. This structurally determined outcome coincided, moreover, with the dismantling of the nation’s extensive welfare network. [14] Can this genie be put back in the bottle? The state’s recent proactive welfare policies, if deepened and sustained, could help. Strikingly, US programs, and not only its bailouts for billionaires, thus far ignore issue of inequality in a nation in which income inequality soared and the welfare structure was evicerated in the same years that China’s did.

Arrighi argues in light of the history of capitalist transitions and financialization that US hegemony entered its twilight in the 1970s and reached its terminal phase with the collapse of the financial and real estate bubble in 2008, a conclusion made inevitable by the earlier transition from industrial to financial primacy and the neo-liberal regime that gave the latter free rein. Perhaps . . . Yet, while recognizing the formidable problems confronting the Obama administration, in the absence of a serious contender in the form of a new hegemon, whether a nation or a region, such a conclusion seems at least premature. The strengthening of the dollar in the face of the US financial meltdown and huge deficits, and the Obama administration’s attempts to launch the next wave of US growth on green foundations, suggest possible policy alternatives that could help to restore American economic preeminence and prevent, or at least forestall, the imminent demise of its hegemonic power. We should not rule out such possibilities, in particular a protracted muddling through in which the US remains indisputably the most powerful among rival powers for the foreseeable future. This could take place even under circumstances in which attempts to bail out the nearly bankrupt financial sector show few signs of gaining traction, in which a continued war in Iraq and an expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, together with the stable growth both of the military budget and the global network of military bases, are emblematic of US vulnerability rather than of hegemony.

Notes
I am indebted to Andrew DeWit, Gavan McCormack, R. Taggart Murphy and especially Giovanni Arrighi for suggestions of sources and perspectives on the issues.
1. James Fallows, “China’s Way Forward,” Atlantic Monthly, April, 2009. <>
2. “There are monetary echoes from the 1930s too,” China Financial Markets January 21, 2009.
3. “Did SAFE really buy that many US (and global) equities?,” Follow the Money, March 19, 2009. http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2009/03/19/did-safe-really-buy-that-many-us-and-global-equities/
4. “In Downturn, China Sees Path to Growth," The New York Times, March 17, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/worldbusiness/17compete.html?_r=1
5. “Steeling for 80% Export Growth,” Shanghai Daily, March 19, 2009. http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200903/20090319/article_394723.htm
6. “This Week’s Raw Steel Production,” The American Iron and Steel Institute, Steelworks, March 14, 2009. http://www.steel.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Raw_Steel_Production1&TEMPLATE=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=29318

I am indebted to Andrew DeWit for data on Japanese and US steel production and exports.
7. Interview with David Harvey, “The Winding Paths of Capital,” New Left Review 56, Mar-Apr 2009. See also The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2008).
8. Arrighi notes, however, factors which could work in China’s favor: (1) the importance of demographic size should be left open and (2) the possibility that China has more to gain from the US getting stuck in wars that it cannot win—as envisaged in Adam Smith in Beijing (part III)—should be left open. Personal communication March 23, 2009.
9. Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver and Melvyn Dubofsky, eds., "Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870-1990", special issue of Review, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter, 1995. The analysis is further developed in Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
10. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, 2nd edition, 2003.
11. “Double Movement in China,” Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 13, 2009. < http://epw.in/epw/user/loginArticleError.jsp?hid_artid=13017
12. FAO report. http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/MVDU-7PD4Q8?OpenDocument
13. For early rumblings of North China drought, see Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) and Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
14. See Ching Kwan Lee and Mark Selden, “Inequality and Its Enemies in Revolutionary and Reform China,” Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 13, 2009. http://epw.in/epw/user/loginArticleError.jsp?hid_artid=13014

The Dalai Lama and the Nobel Prize: Correcting a Misunderstanding

By A. Tom Grunfeld

As many readers of this blog doubtless realize, everything having to do with Tibet is subject to mythologizing. That the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of Tibetan independence is one of these myths. This notion gets mentioned in the Western press routinely, and it sometimes even shows up in comments by academic specialists. In fact, the prize was awarded to him more because of the events in Tiananmen Square that had happened just a few months before the award than for anything related to the Tibet struggle per se.

Indeed, it appears that if there had been no confrontations at Tiananmen in 1989, the Dalia Lama would not have received the prize. To be sure, the European community began to embrace the Dalai Lama and his cause after his speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1988 when he announced a major concession to Beijing giving up the demand for independence for autonomy. Moreover, the demonstrations and the subsequent bloody suppression in Lhasa in spring 1989 generated additional support and sympathy for the Tibetans. But it appears unlikely that those events alone got him the prize. The situation is described fully in an October 13, 1989, New York Times article "How, and Why, the Dalai Lama Won the Peace Prize." (To read it in full, follow the link.) To give a sense of its take on the situation, which was based on interviews with informants close to the prize selection process, here are some excerpts from it:

People close to the Nobel Peace Prize selection process say that the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, gained the advantage over other candidates, including President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, largely because of the brutal suppression of the democracy movement in China and the international outrage that followed.

As China called the Dalai Lama's honor ''preposterous,'' people in Oslo who are close to the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in telephone interviews that the choice of the Dalai Lama was an attempt both to influence events in China and to recognize the efforts of student leaders of the democracy movement, which was crushed by Chinese troops in June.

The Dalai Lama, as religious and political leader of Tibet, has been waging a nonviolent struggle for nearly 40 years to end Chinese domination of his homeland.

He was named the 1989 recipient of the prize last week and was ''among the favorites from the beginning,'' said Jakob Sverdrup, secretary to the Nobel Committee and director of the Nobel Institute...

Mr. Sverdrup said that the award often swung back and forth between winners who represented humanitarian ideals and those in the trenches of international power politics. The choice of the Dalai Lama was in some ways a combination of both, he said...

In addition to Mr. Gorbachev, front-runners included Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek, prominent Czechoslovak dissidents.The committee settled on the Dalai Lama in mid-September... informants said, three months after hundreds of people were killed in Beijing when the Chinese authorities cracked down on the democracy movement. In the aftermath of the crackdown, there was pressure from Norwegians to have the movement's student leaders named as recipients of this year's award, despite the fact that the Feb. 1 deadline for nominations had long passed...

A. Tom Grunfeld is a Professor of History at Empire State College and is the author of many works, including The Making of Modern Tibet.

New Quiz Winner

Several weeks ago, we announced a brand new quiz for readers to name "The Prettiest" (photo of China), "The Wittiest" (title of a China-related piece of writing), and "The Grittiest" (best muckraking journalist to work the China beat). The award: A copy of China in 2008, signed by as many authors as we could get hold of (which, as one of us went to AAS, turned out to be a lot).

Our winner is Charles Hayford who, in typically fine style, gave us not just answers but a lot of good solid prose to back it up (and added three of his own categories to the mix). Hope you enjoy his answers as much as we did.

1. The Prettiest (photo of China you can find on the web)
Any of the views from outer space: they not only inspire awe but since we can see the “state of nature” from which “China” was made, they remind us of Mark Elvin’s old question “why is China so big?”

The NASA site has hundreds of views, all for free!

2. The Wittiest (title of a China book, article or blog post)
I rather fancy my own efforts, for instance, my study of the influence of radical Hindu music on Mao: “Red Sitar Over China” (which somehow remains unpublished) or “Snow, White, and The Seven ... China Revolution Classics” (Asia Media, December 1, 2006). Shameless puffery aside, Jim Hevia’s recent English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism (Duke UP, 2005) neatly captures his thesis.

3. And the Grittiest:
Hands down – well, “China Hands” down – it’s Jack Belden, the “grittiest” of the classic wartime China journalists. Sadly, when China Shakes the World was published in 1949, Americans were obsessing about the “loss of China,” but were not much interested in actual reporting. When it was reissued in the 1960s, people mis-took it for a Maoist view, but in fact Belden had gone out into village China to avoid Mao. Owen Lattimore’s Introduction to the reprint recalled that in the 1930s, he and the others relied on Belden to disappear into the countryside and bring back reports on the “seamier” side, fleas and all.

4. Twittiest
Richard M. Nixon 1972: "This is a Great Wall and only such a great people could have such a great wall."
Nancy Pelosi (radio interview c. 1995): "We've been putting pressure on China for five years and they still haven't become a democracy." (paraphrased from memory) [China Beat: if a reader can track down a link on this quote, we’ll publish your name right here.]

5. Spit-iest? "Great Expectorations: Puke, Spitting, and Face," Frog in a Well (12/12/08)

6. Brit-iest? What did Prince Charles say about Chinese architecture? [China Beat suggests this or this.]

Obama to Visit China

After meeting today with Hu Jintao in advance of the G20 in London, Obama accepted an invitation to visit China later this year:

The leaders agreed to "strengthen ties at all levels" ranging from the economy to fighting terrorism, and would expand consultations on "non-proliferation and other international security topics," the White House said.

"The two sides agreed to resume the human rights dialogue as soon as possible," the statement said.

In January and February, China Beat ran a series of reading (and sometimes viewing) recommendations for the new president. [See installments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.] Now that a trip is in the offing, perhaps someone who knows the president could bring the lists to his attention?

A Man Bites Dog Story: Picky Academic Praises Journalist

Well, I don't think I'm actually quite as bad when it comes to giving reporters their due as the title I've selected for this post suggests, as I have recently gone on record praising a variety of journalists based in China. Still, the ones I typically say the best things about are people who have a long-term commitment to the country (though I've been critical of some of these, of course), while the ones I most often pick on for things like missing important aspects of a story or failing to go to the best possible specialists for quotes are those who, like Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times, end up in China while cycling through different foreign bureaus (in her case, based on a very quick web search, it seems she was in the Middle East and Seoul before heading to Beijing). And true to form, when I started reading Demick's "Clocks Square Off in China" in this morning's paper, where it was given the excellent front-page "Column One" feature spot (saved for longer than usual and often somewhat personal pieces) that remains one of the best things about the Times, I was initially on my guard, looking for flaws. I quickly had to admit, however, that the piece handles very well indeed a couple of fascinating issues: the fact that China could easily have five or six time zones, yet officially all clocks are supposed to keep Beijing time, and the cultural divides that tend to separate Uighur and Han residents in this part of China's "Far West" (as the region is sometimes dubbed--including in the retitled online version of Demick's article).

I am sure that there are terms used or ideas broached in the article that could be picked apart by still more specialized readers than me--someone who tends to focus on a city, Shanghai, that lies far to the East of Xinjiang and someone who has not done much on either issues of ethnicity or, for that matter, on what clocks read, aside from co-writing one commentary that used the one time zone curiosity as a lead-in. For me, though, it was a very fine example of smart and accessible journalism, which effectively mixed on-the-spot anecdotes (I particularly like the interchange with the young boy who looked at the foreigner's watch) and analysis on the fly with queries put to just the right academic experts.



I was pleased to see recent China Beat contributor James Millward quoted, and delighted to see that he managed to slip in an allusion to former Association for Asian Studies President and Southeast Asia specialist James C. Scott's important "weapons of the weak" concept--and do so in a manner that made it immediately understandable to those who had never read that theorist's important 1987 book by that title. I was even happier to see a quote solicited from Gardner Bovingdon, a former Indiana University colleague of mine (he's still there, I've just moved on to America's "Far West"). Why? Because everything I know about time zones in China I learned from reading a draft of a very smart paper of his that is mentioned in passing by Demick.

All in all, it was nice to start the day reading a story dealing with China (complete with a map that very nicely showed just how far it is from Beijing to Xinjiang and a good color photo of Kashgar store selling clocks showing different times--not the one included with this post, but similar to it) that seemed right on target. It didn't leave me itching to write a letter to the editor suggesting that something be corrected or some glossed over point be brought into the light.

Still, there's one small issue that I want to bring up, since it has been perplexing me ever since I made my first phone call to India a couple of months ago--and discovered inadvertently, while trying to figure out how to phone a friend there without waking him up, that there's more than one big Asian country with a single time zone. If the way Beijing handles time zones is linked to authoritarianism, which definitely seems correct, why is it that democratic India has a similar chronological approach? Yes, India does not have nearly as wide an east-to-west spread, but there does still seem a story to tell here, even if it is a matter of 3 time zones rather than twice that many being compressed into 1. And while I like Demick's report a lot, it doesn't enlighten me on this, as when she looks to a neighboring country with which to compare China's situation, her gaze goes, not surprisingly and very effectively, to Russia...with its 11 time zones!

Five Quirky Blogs to Check Out

A few blogs we’ve stumbled across in recent weeks that, depending on your interests, may merit your further attention:

1. “China Book Reviews” runs (as you might expect) reviews of an unusual selection of China books, including a few we’ve mentioned or reviewed ourselves, like Jeff Wasserstrom’s Brave New World and Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past (which Kate Merkel-Hess reviewed for TLS last spring).

2. Anna Greenspan wrote a piece for China in 2008 about the tainted milk scandal in China last fall. Now she is keeping her own blog about her experiment with placing her three-year old in local Chinese preschool rather than sending him to international school.

3. Mark Anthony Jones has become one of our most regular commenters, but he also has his own website, where he has just started a blog with some great images from his visits to his students’ dorms.

4. Crystal Mo keeps an entertaining food in Shanghai blog at City Weekend.

5. Chinese historian Jim Millward keeps his own blog called “The World on a String,” that includes musings on everything from the history of the pipa to the Jonas Brothers.

Living the Game: WoW-China

Last fall, we ran an interview with UCI Professor of Informatics Bonnie Nardi, who was conducting research on the different ways World of Warcraft (an MMO-RPG, Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) was used in China and the US.

Recently, a reader drew our attention to interesting images where Chinese players envisioned themselves in the game (often quite playfully). In honor of Chinese New Year (a game players celebrate in-game as "Lunar Festival"), WoW-China invited players to submit photos of themselves "blending their Lunar New Year celebration with their enthusiasm for World of Warcraft." The contest received more than eight thousand submissions and almost 1.5 million votes. Winning photos have been posted at WoW's website, for those who'd like to learn more.

Blogging AAS

From Paul Katz (3/28/09, 2:27 p.m.):

Saturday morning was a disaster, or at least full of fascinating panels about disaster and resulting relief efforts. Panel #139, alluded to by Kate Edgerton-Tarpley in her earlier post, explored the sociocultural impacts of the Great Leap Famine. Relevant research has also been done by Steve A. Smith in his "Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts" article, published in The American Historical Review in 2006, and he has also written on this topic for the China Beat. There was also Panel #167, organized largely by a group of German scholars, which builds on the pioneering work of scholars like Kate, Pierre Etienne-Will, Fuma Susumu 夫馬進, Joanna Handlin-Smith (whose book is at last out!), and Angela Leung (梁其姿) in examining philanthropic responses to natural disasters. It would also be interesting to learn more about the extent to which such activities were inspired by religious beliefs, not to mention organized by religious associations.

In addition to disasters, there was also extensive border crossing, this time in the world of art. This could be seen in two panels (#126 and #149) that focused on the international dimensions of Asian art, including its links to cultural nationalism.

Finally, a word about the book exhibit: One cannot help but be amazed at the number of high-quality studies of Chinese religions now being published by Harvard University Press, including works by Vincent Goossaert, C. Julia Huang, David Johnson, Liu Xun, Rebecca Nedostup, James Robson, and Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke. HUP is clearly joining the ranks of other prestigious presses that continue to contribute to the growth of this field, including California, Leiden, Hawaii, and Stanford.


Pictures from Jeff Wasserstrom (3/28/09, 3:52 p.m.):

The Second Annual Blogger's Breakfast
L to R: Par Cassel (who blogged about the term "Tiananmen" in June 2008), Benjamin Read (featured in a CB interview on homeowners), Paul Katz (Taiwan, Taiwan, Taiwan--and Chinese religion), Susan McEachern (the Rowman & Littlefield editor who made China in 2008 happen), Julia Murray (who hasn't blogged for us but is in the book with a piece on the revival of Confucianism), and Shakhar Rahav (who wrote about how the Olympics were covered in Israel for CB). Haiyan Lee is not shown, due to the limitations of the photographer...


China Beatnik Goes from Writing about Prizes to Winning One
Speaking of Haiyan Lee, whose last piece for CB was about a book prize, won her own prize last night. Lee was awarded the Levenson Prize for 20th Century China (there's also one for pre-20th century topics).


Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (But Cool Cover...)
Here is Paul Cohen, who was featured in a CB interview, posing beside a display for his book. Like many authors, he doesn't want his book to be judged by its cover, but there's widespread buzz here that it is wonderful cover indeed (the cover of another book we've talked about on the site, Susan Mann's Talented Women, shows up in the photo as well).

AAS Blogging

Jeff Wasserstrom (3/28/09, 7:41 a.m.):

This is, of course, the first AAS meeting at which a book associated with the China Beat has been displayed. And nicely displayed it definitely is, as the accompanying photo illustrates (and note that it is shown in the company of books like Voices Carry, China Ink and The Subject of Gender, which have been discussed on our site before).

More than that, though, this is also a conference that, overall, has some features that run in tandem with some of the goals of China Beat. For example, just as we've tried to encourage more interchange between academics and other kinds of writers, there have been some sessions here that, thanks to generous support from the Luce Foundation, have already included or will include reporters and freelance writers. China Beat contributor Lijia Zhang (shown below posing with a poster for her memoir) and Ching-Ching Ni of the Los Angeles Times (shown below sharing her thoughts on the challenges of covering Chinese topics in the field), for example, were both part of a lively session on the Olympics, during which they shared the stage with Beijing-based specialist in Olympic studies Jin Yuanpu (shown below giving his presentation in Chinese), Susan Brownell (who did double duty as both moderator and Jin's translator), and Korea specialist Bruce Cumings (who gave a very smart summary of all the problems with thinking of the Seoul Games as a major contributing force in South Korea's democratization).

Lijia Zhang
Ching-ching Ni
Jin Yuanpu and Susan Brownell