US MOVE ON SOVEREIGN FUNDS TARGETS CHINA

The timing couldn’t be clearer. Less than a month after China launched the $200 billion China Investment Corp, the USA has announced that will seek “draconian restrictions” on the activities of sovereign funds at the current G7 meeting.

Having downsized, contracted out, and offshored its industry, turned its workforce into burger flippers, and in the process built up a massive trade deficit, the USA is worried that China might wake up to the idea that it can use its huge foreign exchange reserves to buy America.

You have to laugh.

THE WARMONGER AND THE SHAMELESS OLD FRAUD

While the Dalai Lama seems congenitally incapable of giving a straight answer to a straight question, he certainly knows how to drop a political hint.

He initially lent his support to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but then tried to worm his way out of the controversy, suggesting absurdly that if he stressed his pacifist views too candidly to President Bush, he might be arrested.

Here he is again, standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush, as the lame-duck warrior turns up the temperature on Iran.

The tragedy for Tibet is that when the old political huckster dies, his infant successor will be a captive of his epigones as they jockey for power during a long period of regency – a process from which the Tibetan people will be, of course, completely excluded.

Tibet needs democracy, not theocracy with US military bases.

JIANG ZEMIN ALLY ZENG QINGHONG OUSTED

Few Chinese will regret the sacking of China’s vice-president Zeng Qinghong, the last major ally of former President Jiang Zemin, from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Under Jiang, wildcat capitalism and official corruption turned China into the most unequal country in the world. Reckless growth-at-all-costs destroyed the environment. While the super-exploited workforce slaved to make cheap goods for export, a construction frenzy turned Chinese cities into identikit forests of skyscrapers and peppered the countryside with luxury gated housing – to make way for which countless ordinary people were ruthlessly relocated.

Jiang’s also presided over a judicial reign of terror that permitted China’s ignorant judges, many barely older than schoolchildren, to impose the death penalty for virtually any offence. Thousands were shot, mainly the poor, desperate and excluded.

President Hu Jintao has steered China onto, certainly not a socialist, but a mildly social-democratic path. He has abolished the hated agricultural tax, pumped money into the countryside and has even begun to reign in the beserk judiciary.

It remains to be seen whether Hu’s policy shift will make any real difference. China’s economic juggernaut is firmly on the capitalist road. Yet most Chinese people, while understandably cynical about politics, seem to welcome the leadership’s change of emphasis. Hu is certainly more popular than his predecessor.

MORE CHRISTIANITY

A Chinese Christian film maker recently told me that he fully supported the invasion of Iraq, because as the greatest power in the world, the USA has the right to control global oil resources.

I put it to him that, according to his logic, China, as a great power, should also have the right to use force to control at least some of the world’s resources.

He replied that the world should never let China control any of the world’s resources.

Similar infantile views are all too common among China’s small political opposition, which has yet to learn that by opposing every government policy on principle and placing itself in the American camp it is condemning itself to irrelevance.

SILLY BILLY

Willy Wo-lap Lam, senior fellow at the conservative Jamestown foundation permitted himself this flight of fancy in an article on China’s 5th generation leadership.

“China’s aggressive power projection in faraway areas such as Africa and Latin America is raising alarm bells in capitals ranging from Tokyo to Washington”

It’s hard to know where to begin unpicking this. Presumably “capitals ranging from Tokyo to Washington” means …. Tokyo and Washington.

What does this “aggressive power projection” consist of? Has China stationed troops in Latin America? Are Chinese aircraft carriers laden with nuclear weapons steaming around the Caribbean? Has China invaded any countries recently? How many overseas military bases does China have? The USA has 702 in 130 countries.

Actually China’s “aggression” consists of … official visits and trade agreements.

Of course while tens of thousands of US troops are bogged down in lost causes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s only natural that US conservatives and their supporters gnash their teeth and cast a resentful eye at China’s steady diplomatic progress.

CHINA CENSORS AMERICAN MAOISTS

I recently discovered an internet rarity – an article defending Mao Zedong – but when I tried to read it, China’s net censorship system intervened to block it.

The material was on the website of the American journal Monthly Review and from there I found out the author’s contact details and asked him to email me a copy.

The net censoring system, however was ahead of the game, and blocked the email attachment, which I found a little too personal and slightly alarming.

Whatever one thinks of Mao, it is interesting that in China – where banknotes still carry his portrait – the views of his American defenders are no longer welcome.

THE MAN DATE FROM HEAVEN

Overheard in a bar…. you have to imagine a plummy, English officer-class voice that can slur largeginandtonic into one word.

“Most men who come to China looking for girls aren’t able to judge anything about them, because their Chinese is not good enough.”

“But as soon as a girl opens her mouth and talks for five minutes you can find out so many things. For example, if she can’t even speak standard Mandarin, then she may be OK for a short fling, but not for anything long term. You couldn’t take her anywhere. She’d be an embarrassment. These things are important to me.”

What a guy.

CHINA’S BLOODY CODE

China’s courts are the harshest in the world. Every year around 2000 people are executed. Judges can impose the death penalty not just for murder, but for almost any offense, including theft, forgery, smuggling antiques, imparting criminal methods, organizing prostitution, even VAT fraud.

But what are the social and political roots of this savage sentencing policy?

Most commentators assume it is a hangover of hard-line Maoism¹. But this is more or less the opposite of the truth.

A recent study by Chinese legal experts² demonstrates that use of the death penalty became widespread and routine during the period of free market reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping and continued by his successor, Jiang Zemin.

Deng summed up his policy as reform and opening up on the one hand, and law and order on the other. He dismantled socialism and replaced it with a form of managed capitalism. As Maoist egalitarianism gave way to a highly stratified social order, judicial terror replaced the ideological glue and workplace discipline that had bound Chinese society

The 1979 penal code, summing up the position at the end of the Maoist era, reserved capital punishment for serious violent crime and treason.

But from 1982 to 1995 a series of decisions of the National People’s Congress extended the death penalty to an ever greater number of non-violent crimes.

At the same time, the Supreme People’s Court devolved its role in reviewing death sentences to local courts, effectively giving them free reign. Executions were particularly frequent during periodic ‘strike hard’ law and order campaigns. According to legal expert Zhao Bingzhi, during the 1980s and 1990s the courts developed a ‘blind faith in the death penalty’.

Present leader Hu Jintao, thought of as a relative hard-liner by Western commentators, has recently ordered a rethink. As a first step, the right of appeal to the Supreme Court has been restored in death penalty cases.

The closest historical parallel to China’s system is 18th Century England’s Bloody Code. From 1650 to 1815 the number of capital offenses rose from 50 to 288, allowing commercial landowners to enrich themselves through the enclosure of common land and consolidate their grip on power after the chaos of the Civil War.

In China, a new possessing class, enriched by privatization of state assets, but widely resented and yet to feel secure, is in the process of securing its power following the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

England’s Bloody Code was undermined by juries who refused to convict criminals of capital offenses. In China’s case we can only hope that the desire for international respectability will lead the government to curb its bloody assizes.

1 See for example The Debate Over the Death Penalty in Today’s China, Zhang Ning, China Perspectives no 62

2 The Road of the Abolition of the Death Penalty in China Ed. Zhao Bingzhi, Press of People’s Public Security University.

TO GET RICH IS .. UNPOPULAR

It’s interesting that despite years of fawning propaganda in the Chinese media, including bogus rags-to-riches stories that would embarrass Mr Bounderby, a recent survey showed that 70% of Chinese people have a low a opinion of the rich.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about views of ordinary Chinese people. I suspect the results of such a survey in Europe or the USA would be broadly similar.

But don’t expect any letup in the tidal wave of glossy ads for gated housing, Louis Vuitton bags, Rolexes, BMWs etc. etc.

The poor don’t have bucks so they don’t count in China. That’s the way the so-called Communist Party likes it and that’s the way the West likes it.