Links - 17th July 2020 (1) (China's 'Peaceful' Rise)

China enraged by ‘Sick Man of Asia’ headline, but its origin may surprise many - "the derogatory term was not first used by what Beijing calls “imperialist forces”. It was coined by renowned Chinese thinker, scholar and translator Yan Fu, who introduced Western ideas including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to China in the late 19th century.In 1895, Yan wrote an article describing China as the “Sick Man” following its humiliating defeat in The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)... Hong Kong author Leung Man-tao, now a frequent commentator on mainland Chinese talk shows, wrote in a 2015 article that Chinese people are more likely to use the epithet... The person who put the term into the wider public consciousness in modern times was action star Bruce Lee, who, in his 1972 movie Fist of Fury, yells “Chinese are not the sick man of East Asia” as he battles a group of Japanese judo fighters... Since Fist of Fury’s release, the term Sick Man of East Asia has taken on deep racist connotations that instantly raise Chinese hackles... “Liang Qichao was the first to associate ‘Sick Man’ with the Chinese people’s physical health. Due to his great influence … the use of the term was extended from its description of a weak country to that of the population’s weak state of health,” he wrote.“[When North China Daily News used the term], they were not talking about Chinese people’s health. They used it as a metaphor for poor Chinese governance and the Qing dynasty’s failed military and political reform, hoping that the corrupt Qing government would be prompted to mend its ways before it was too late.”... [The WSJ article] could then be taken as a wake-up call to the government to overhaul bureaucratic and health care system failings exposed by the coronavirus pandemic."
Yan Fu was a racist Han traitor!
seeing racism everywhere is a self-fulfilling prophecy

Macau: lessons for Hong Kong from Beijing’s ‘good student’ | Financial Times - "The former Portuguese colony, which was returned to Chinese rule 20 years ago this week, was praised by a senior official on December 3 for having grasped the “spirit of the central government”. The implicit message was that Hong Kong, after months of often violent pro-democracy protests, had not. On the surface Macau and Hong Kong have a lot in common. The two former colonies are the only parts of China governed under “one country, two systems”, which grants them a “high degree of autonomy” including freedom of speech, a free press and a more robust legal system than mainland China. But during the past 20 years, Macau — one of the richest places on earth in per capita terms — has trodden a different path to its neighbour, which is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades... Government officials from mainland China have long used Macau to hide and launder money, says Icy Kam, head of the pro-democracy group New Macau Association. That role acts as an added incentive to pacify local residents... “In theory we can criticise the government, but in reality we don’t,” says one veteran Chinese journalist in Macau who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’ve learnt that criticising the [Macau] government, the Chinese Communist party and Beijing only brings us trouble. They can pull advertising or send the triads to beat us up; it’s been really bad since Xi came to power.”... Local activists have tried to hold demonstrations in Macau in support of the Hong Kong protests on four separate occasions this year. All were banned, including one against alleged police brutality. Macau’s Court of Final Appeal ruled in September that allowing such a demonstration would interfere with Hong Kong’s internal affairs.“The ruling was totally absurd. If a group of people want to demonstrate in favour of or against the police, they are not interfering in decisions made by the Hong Kong government,” says Paulo Cardinal, who was the chief legal adviser specialising in constitutional affairs in Macau’s Legislative Assembly for 26 years before his contract was cancelled last year. “This is the first time we saw a CFA decision rely on such weak legal grounds. It’s a decision that worried many in Macau’s legal and academic communities.” Neither Hong Kong nor Macau has universal suffrage so freedom of protest plays an outsized role in enabling residents to voice their discontent. The last large-scale protest in Macau, in 2014 against lavish retirement packages for top officials, forced the then chief executive to withdraw the proposal. Mr Cardinal and Paulo Taipa, who was the chief legal adviser on gaming laws, were both dismissed last year by Ho Iat Seng, the then head of Macau’s legislature, who said their departures were due to “restructuring”... “The two Paulos were excellent, brilliant advisers. These were political sackings, no doubt about it,” says Mr Menezes. “Neither of them were able to find jobs anywhere in Macau afterwards, not at casinos, not in the government, not in law firms, not at universities.” Mr Taipa, who helped write many of Macau’s gaming laws in the 1990s, is now an adviser to the Portuguese government. “How could Paulo Taipa not find a job in a casino? He’s one of the best gaming lawyers in Macau. It’s because the casinos were all afraid because politics and business are one and the same here”... In 2013 Mr Menezes was the victim of a premeditated attack as he walked his son to school. The assault, which he blames on the triads, almost cost him his life. One person was convicted and Mr Menezes subsequently moved his family to Portugal. “The police never investigated the person who ordered the attack because this person was too powerful to be investigated”... Multiple pro-democracy lawmakers, lawyers, activists and scholars from Hong Kong have been barred from entering the territory. Immigration officials in Macau even blocked a baby who shares the same name someone on the blacklist. Two senior figures from the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong were also prevented from entering Macau this month following the passage of legislation in Washington to scrutinise China’s human rights record in Hong Kong. “The people in power in Macau are more loyal than the king himself and will go an extra step just to please the powers that be. It happens all the time,” says Eric Sautede, a politics professor sacked in 2014 from a university in Macau for expressing his political views. “I was told that my outspokenness was preventing the university from receiving HK$50m of government funding to develop part of the campus.” Macau’s 1966 riots — an anti-colonial uprising influenced by the cultural revolution — is now widely seen as a victory for the Chinese Communist party, with the Portuguese authorities in effect succumbing to Beijing and the CCP chapter in Macau becoming the territory’s de facto rulers. Similar riots the following year in Hong Kong resulted in a different outcome: the British colonial government consolidated its power.As a result, says Ching Cheong, a veteran China watcher, Macau’s mini constitution, known as the Basic Law, has no provision outlining a path towards universal suffrage, in contrast to Hong Kong’s version of the legislation... “The young generation here isn’t like the young generation in Hong Kong,” says Mr Sou, who studied public administration at National Taiwan University. “Most of them don’t know about the importance of critical thinking, democracy and the protection of human rights.”More than half of Macau’s residents were born in mainland China and a University of Hong Kong survey conducted in 2018 showed a strong sense of identity as citizens of the People’s Republic. A separate HKU poll found the number of people in Hong Kong who identified only as Chinese dropped to a record low in 2019. “The most important event in Macau over the past 20 years has been the way it has improved its social welfare policies to deal with the excesses of casino capitalism, which is highly exploitative and highly socially divisive,” says Mr Lo, the political scientist.Since 2008, Macau has offered annual cash handouts to its residents. Those who live there permanently received 10,000 patacas ($1,245) each in 2019. But many in Macau, where unemployment is less than 2 per cent, still feel they have not been able to share in the city’s rapid economic growth, according to Mr Sou, and Ms Kam, as inadequate and unaffordable housing, poor public transport and skyrocketing medical costs — among the same ingredients that have fuelled the anger in Hong Kong — remain problems. “If Beijing thinks 100 per cent control over society means it has been successful, this is a good lesson for the people of Hong Kong,” says Mr Sou. “Despite having a national security law and being totally obedient to Beijing, we still don’t have universal suffrage here. Why obey Beijing when Macau, the so-called ‘good student’, doesn’t get good results?”"

The unease of the Chinese diaspora | Spectator USA - "Ever since it embarked on its modernization program, China has been subtly cultivating and influencing the Chinese diaspora to its cause... The word ‘Chinese’ can refer to the citizenry of a country, a race, a language, and even a culture, ambiguities that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits in order to appeal to the diaspora via the sentimental heartstrings of heritage via ‘flesh and blood’. It exports and reinforces the concept that there is only one politically-correct way of being Chinese: loyalty to the party first and foremost, above all else. In effect, it’s like the ummah, an Arabic term that describes the supra-national global community that unites all Muslims as one. Only this one is based not on religion but on ethnicity, where Tibetans, Uigher Muslims, Chinese dissenters, Hong Kong protesters, are excluded and marginalized like infidels. Almost nothing embodies the scope of China’s attempts at a global soft power offensive more as the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, where there are 480 branches operating on six continents around the world... These institutes ostensibly offer language classes and promote cultural education and diplomacy, but in reality they are de facto fronts for generating good Public Relations and patriotism to the CCP. In 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a report urging colleges to close the institutes or renegotiate their mutual agreements to guarantee a certain degree of academic freedom and control... It is in this climate of deep mistrust and risk of alienation that the CCP engages in endearing itself to the Chinese diaspora, no matter how far removed, to cultivate ties and perhaps even an obligation to the ‘Motherland’. Even in Singapore where by now, generations of Han Chinese have grown up as Singaporean, China has launched study abroad programs, visits to ancestral villages and even ‘roots-seeking camps’ for Singapore youth. For those like me who are Chinese but who have spent our entire lives outside of China, it’s important to keep pushing back on the CCP-endorsed narrative of the ‘Chinese ummah’, that we share in the dreams of the People’s Republic and her perpetuation of a techno-utopian authoritarian surveillance state who has yet to reckon with the moral failings of her past and present. It’s up to us to show that our ideas and views transcend ethnic and national boundaries.Sometimes, the party uses terms like ‘Chinese values’ to appeal to cultural relativism, carving out a rationale for the government to embrace blatant cultural exceptionalism that directly undermines universal aspirations. ‘Chinese’ may be my hardware, but my software is decidedly not Chinese, at least as far as how the CCP defines it. I embrace pluralism, freedom of expression, freedom to fail and not be surveilled, freedom of association, freedom of religion and universal suffrage. And until China has space for differing Chinese identities, then count me out of the Chinese ummah."

China's Looming Class Struggle - "Since 1978 the country’s GINI ratings—a system that measures inequality—have gone from highly egalitarian to more unequal than Mexico, Brazil, and Kenya, as well as the United States and virtually all of Europe. In avowedly socialist China, roughly 1300 individuals constitute roughly 20 percent of the country’s wealth, and top one percent roughly one-third. Initially, China’s progress lifted up all classes, raising as many as 850 million people out of extreme poverty in 40 years, one of the greatest economic accomplishments in history. Yet the boom has been less successful in creating a Western-style mass middle class which analyst Nan Chen estimates at roughly 12 percent of the population. “Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post-World War II America,” she observes, “China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth.” Overall, two-thirds of all Chinese are either migrant laborers, peasants, industrial workers, or agriculture laborers—all groups unlikely to make it into the Chinese middle class... These migrants threaten to swell into a massive, and potentially politically disruptive, urban underclass. As notes Leeds University’s Li Sun has noted, Chinese migrants unable to claim residency in the city generally lack access to education, healthcare, and most forms of insurance. Although they perform many of the most dangerous tasks in society, notably manufacturing and construction, barely one in four has any form of insurance if they get injured. But they are largely excluded from other, less dangerous jobs... This vast class of poor and often powerless migrants, peasants, and factory workers represents a far greater threat to the Chinese regime than isolated intellectuals on the mainland or even the brave protesters in Hong Kong. Chinese history lacks examples of successful rebellions launched by a middle class informed with democratic ideals; no equivalent to the distinctly bourgeois American Revolution, the French Third Estate’s drive to destroy feudalism, or even a reformist movement akin to Japan’s Meiji Restoration.Instead, Chinese history consists largely of an interplay between hierarchical regimes and occasionally rebellious peasants... Rather than rule by proletarians and peasants, the leadership is increasingly dominated by so-called “red princelings,” such as President Xi himself, who trace their roots to generals and top officials of the initial Maoist regime. Even the entrepreneurial class, a force for reform in many cultures, has been subsumed by the Communist Mandarins. Some 90 percent of China’s millionaires, notes Australian political scientist David Goodman, are the offspring of high-ranking officials. This alliance with the Communists extends to the far more populous and well-established professional and managerial classes, which staffs the bureaucracies of the all-powerful party-dominated state. Goodman suggests that, rather than run to the barricades, these fortunate individuals would likely oppose any democratic transition that could allow the less privileged masses to threaten their status... the most serious long-term threat to the Chinese regime stems from the lower classes. Like laborers elsewhere, these workers are faced with a broader global trend of weakened prospects and fewer protections, such as those provided by the Maoist-era “iron rice bowl.” These workers are particularly vulnerable to China’s slowing economic growth rate—in 2018, its growth rate was 6 percent, 50 percent below the 9 percent average since 1989—and stagnant industrial production, now at the lowest level since 2004... most kids left behind in the rural villages are sick or malnourished and up to two-thirds struggle with combinations of anemia, worms, and uncorrected myopia that set them back at school. More than half the toddlers, he predicts, are so cognitively delayed their IQs will never exceed 90—portending a future as the gammas and epsilons of Huxley’s Brave New World... there is evidence of growing labor unrest, particularly among the new generation of migrants... There are now efforts nationwide to harvest biometric data, track smartphones, and install compulsory satellite-tracking systems for vehicles. Brain monitoring devices are becoming increasingly common in Chinese factories, ostensibly to improve productivity but actually to tap into and shape the thoughts of their potentially rebellious workers... Being able to improve the lives of the people was always seen as a critical element assuring the Imperial “mandate of heaven.” Right now, the Communist regime seems more interested in surpassing the West in elite industries and building grandiose urban landscapes"
It is easy for those who keep gushing about China's success to pretend that those they cannot see do not exist, and that the Chinese they meet who benefit from the system represent all Chinese

When the Lion Wakes: The Global Threat of the Chinese Communist Party - "Chinese citizens have been indoctrinated for decades with the idea that Party is country. The idea was introduced by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping soon after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. He realised that as long as the state and the people were seen as separate entities, then the door would remain open for recognition of the Party’s many historical crimes—and also for recognition of the ongoing subjugation of the people by the Party. He wanted to make sure that citizens would never again rise up as they did in 1989. As China-watcher Clive Hamilton explains: “For many new Chinese arrivals in the West, one of the hardest concepts to understand is the distinction, essential to democracies, between the nation and its government. When they do grasp the difference, they are open to becoming critics of the party-state without feeling they are betraying their homeland.” The problem is that people in the West don’t always understand the distinction themselves, and so they will regularly criticise “China” when referring to the authoritarian policies of the Communist Party. This leads firstly to defensive reactions from patriotic Chinese, and secondly to criticism from Westerners highly attuned to issues of racism. Accusations are flung back and forth, confusion reigns in both East and West, and all the while the Communist Party quietly extends its influence across the globe... Today, the Communist Party stifles criticism and dictates policy far beyond Chinese borders, controlling NGOs and businesses, silencing dissidents, and filling Western university boards with CCP sympathisers... The Party’s thugs have physically assaulted journalists in the US for publishing anti-CCP content... and they have attempted to murder independent journalists in Australia... The Chinese authorities apparently believe that the citizens of all countries come under their jurisdiction. This is more than aggressive nationalism, this is imperialism... Pressure is now being applied to foreign governments to deport Uyghurs to China... Incredibly, the governments of Malaysia, Egypt, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos have all complied, sending their Uyghurs to China for torture and incarceration... He Yafei, deputy director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, told senior Party cadres that “China” (by which he means the Communist Party) will “carve out a bloody path and smash the West’s monopoly and public opinion hegemony.”... The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Project has provided the perfect cover for the Chinese authorities to introduce their own video surveillance system to most of Pakistan’s major cities. In fact, CCP-controlled Hikvision cameras can now be found scattered throughout Stansted and Glasgow airports and the London Underground. The Party has direct access to the data from any one of these camera systems. The same issue has cropped up with regard to China’s telecoms infrastructure—Huawei has been banned in many parts of the world because of fears that “backdoors” in the equipment could allow Beijing to carry out unauthorised surveillance. Tourists to the western Chinese province of Xinjiang must now submit their phones to border guards, who install surveillance apps and download personal information before allowing the tourists to move on... Lee Kuan Yew told Graham Allison that hundreds of Party officials came to him over the years to seek his advice, and they all shared the same nostalgia for “a world in which China was dominant and other states related to them as supplicants to a superior, as vassals came to Beijing bearing tribute.” Graham Allison knows of a Shanghai deputy mayor who says he looks forward to the day when every upper-middle class family in Shanghai has an American houseboy... Successive Western governments have dealt softly with their counterparts in Beijing, hoping for the gradual emergence of a Western-style democratic regime. We convinced ourselves that if you leave lions alone then they will become completely different animals. Now we must deal with the consequences of that mistake. The Communist Party will never change, it will only get worse—and already it begins to threaten the liberty of people all over the world. We need a new approach. Wang Dan, one of the exiled student leaders from Tiananmen Square, has found cause for hope in the recent US-China trade war. “In the 1990s,” he told the New York Times, “when Washington linked the granting of China’s most favourable trading status with human rights, the Chinese government bowed to the pressure by relaxing its political control and releasing me and several other dissidents. But once trade and human rights were delinked, the situation there deteriorated drastically.”... But equally important is the support of the Chinese populace. We must decouple Party from people, making it clear that the former threatens us, not the latter. Language is crucially important here. If ‘the Communist Party’ and ‘China’ are separated in the political discourse, then Chinese citizens will be liberated to criticise the Party themselves, just as Deng Xiaoping feared. Another Tiananmen Square movement will become possible... If we provide continual support and coverage, ignoring the Party’s inevitable barrage of bribery and bullying, then we may be able to avoid the Orwellian future that Xi Jinping has planned for us all."

Justice, China-style: The British businessman drugged, caged and forced into a televised confession - "Drugged, handcuffed, and locked in an iron chair inside a steel cage – this is how Briton Peter Humphrey says he was forced to confess to crimes in China... Appropriate responses included expressing repentance and apologising to China’s ruling Communist Party. “He would say things like, if you say this, it will help you get lenient treatment.” Cameras captured Mr Humphrey’s slurred, sedated words; soon, a heavily edited version made to look like an ‘interview’ with a bombshell ‘confession’ was broadcast around the world by Chinese state media... This is China’s legal and judicial system from the inside, and it’s these abusive practices that many in Hong Kong fear being exposed to, bringing an estimated one million people to the streets in recent days to protest plans by city leaders to allow extraditions to the mainland... One-third of Chinese lawyers are Communist Party members; the rest are required to swear loyalty to the country. Most law firms now also have Party cells... Not a single witness was called to the stand by the prosecution that day. Instead, written statements were presented as evidence. The defence, however, wasn’t allowed to produce witnesses or sworn statements... State-controlled bar associations even require lawyers to report when they plan a not-guilty defence in some cases. In practice, “the vast majority of Chinese defence lawyers stay away from risky cases,” he said. “Even in routine cases, they often are not willing to mount a rigorous defence against the prosecution.”“You have to be very savvy about how you present your defence in a way that is not fundamentally challenging the system,” said Ms Lewis. “You can advocate for your client within bounds, and those bounds restrain you from directly taking on the state.” The United Nations Committee Against Torture has expressed “grave concern” over provisions in China’s criminal procedure laws.In some situations, it is legal for individuals to be detained for up to six months without access to a lawyer; there are also no requirements for family to be told why, and where that person is being held.All this “may amount to incommunicado detention in secret places, putting detainees at a high risk of torture or ill-treatment,” found a 2016 UN report, the most recent one to date on the issue... “I was simply given a piece of paper with answers and questions, told to memorise it, and later the same day brought into a room near my cell to record it,” he said. A dozen of state security officers were in the room as the lead interrogator directed him, “instructing retakes, telling me to change my phrasing, tone, posture…it went on for hours”."

Chinese propaganda app doubles as new spying tool for authorities, report says - The Washington Post - "The Chinese Communist Party appears to have “superuser” access to the entire data on more than 100 million Android-based cellphones through a back door in a propaganda app that the government has been promoting aggressively... Use of the app in China is not exactly voluntary. The Communist Party has issued directives to its members to download the app, as have many workplaces.Organizations from the Beijing Chaoyang Lawyers’ Association and Peking University to the Hunan Vocational College of Science & Technology and a bus company in Jinan province have ordered their members to use the app. Starting this month, about 10,000 reporters and editors in Beijing will take part in a pilot test that is expected to extend nationwide, in which they will be tested on their knowledge of Xi Jinping Thought through the app.The Propaganda Department’s media oversight office made it clear that only those who passed would get new press cards, which are required to work as a journalist in China... some entrepreneurial types have started services where they will log app hours on a customer’s behalf. “Sometimes even when I’m very tired and have put my baby to sleep, I still have to complete my Study the Great Nation, otherwise my pay will be cut,” one disgruntled app user wrote on Weibo, the Chinese answer to Twitter. Another complained about having to write a 2,000-word self-criticism because that person didn’t earn enough points on the app.l