On China

Author: Henry Kissinger

608 pages, hardcover

£30.00

Published by Allen Lane in the UK on 17 May 2011

HENRY Kissinger’s latest book, On China, an ambitious combination of his memoirs as a professional diplomat and his understanding of Chinese politics, culture and history, attempts to fit Chinese leaders’ strategic intentions and diplomatic approaches into a historical and cultural framework. Opening with a look into the deep past, the book discusses the important influence of Confucianism on Chinese politics, then sweeps through the rise and decline of dynasties, the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, moving on to the Korean War, Taiwan Strait crisis, the China-Indian border war, and the geopolitical challenges China faced after China-Soviet relations deteriorated. It is here, in the ninth chapter, that Henry Kissinger appears on the scene.

President Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in February 1972 changed the tone of the Cold War and surprised both ideological camps. Kissinger, then national security advisor, made advance trips to negotiate the rapprochement. He was the first high-level U.S. official to visit the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and talk with Premier Zhou Enlai face to face, ending over two decades of diplomatic and economic isolation. The story is well known to the world, but Kissinger’s version has the stamp of authority.

He recalls the many events leading up to Nixon’s visit, putting the resumption of China- U.S. diplomatic relations into a clear context. Many regard the visit of the American table tennis team to China in April 1971 as a breakthrough, without which bilateral relations couldn’t have been restored. According to Kissinger’s book however, Chinese and American leaders had established channels for high-level dialogues through third party countries years ago and had already shaped their respective understanding of the strategic cooperation. The “Ping-pong diplomacy” incident was just a catalyst.

As a diplomatic veteran, Kissinger is one of the few high-ranking American officials who have dealt with all four generations of PRC leaders. He shares with us his observations and cultural and historical analysis of the different styles of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Kissinger believes that the diplomatic actions Chinese leaders took were mostly rooted in Confucianism and the ancient military treatise, Sun Tze’s Art of War. He also believes concepts from the board game Go, also known as Chinese chess, can be used to explain the starting point of China’s foreign strategy and even includes an illustration of chess games in the book.

His narration is sketchy in some places and appears over-interpretated in others, but Kissinger gives a sharp reading of China’s diplomatic history and psychology. Calling itself the “Middle Kingdom,” China used to regard itself the center of civilization. Outside “barbarians,” such as the Mongols and Manchus, would bow at the feet of Chinese civilization and become sinified, even if they had conquered the Middle Kingdom. Because of this, China lacked the desire for external expansion, and adopted a superior attitude when dealing with foreign countries, regarding foreign diplomats as pilgrims.

However, in the 19th century, China, under the reign of the Qing Dynasty, found that the West had superior science and technology, and, further more, they did not revere Chinese culture. For the Chinese emperor and his ministers, the confrontation with modern countries was confusing. Diplomacy was an entirely new concept.

Chinese diplomats emerged at the forefront of this situation. They, Li Hongzhang in particular, won some time for China with their analytical ability and diplomatic skills. Unfortunately, the Chinese court didn’t seize the opportunity to enhance national strength through trade, as many in the ruling class were not aware of the changes occurring in the world or China’s new status on the global map. China’s foreign policy often went from one extreme to another, swinging from a proud and stubborn attitude to that of complete surrender. Time was wasted and resources sapped. But the PRC, in an equally bad international situation, took a firm stand during the Korean War and subsequently created some maneuvering room for itself. Its leaders were also able to put aside ideological differences and decide to restore diplomatic relations with the U.S., showing a pragmatism appreciated by Kissinger.

As to the future prospects of China-U.S. relations, Kissinger reviewed the Crowe Memorandum, a secret document written by British diplomat Eyre Crowe in 1907 predicting a military clash between Britain and the rising Germany was inevitable. If “war with China” was seen as inevitable, Kissinger warned, all disputes between China and the U.S. would be seen as harbingers of war, and in the long run China would indeed become a real enemy of the U.S. American policymakers must do whatever they can to avoid this to happen. Readers of this book get the sense that the same warning should be given to China. The two nations must find a way to “co-evolve” – they should cooperate as much as possible in achieving their respective internal missions, and constantly adjust bilateral relations to reduce the risk of a conflict. Henry Kissinger has been an active practitioner of this philosophy from the start.

When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It

Author: Jonathan Watts

496 pages, paperback

£8.46

Published by Faber and Faber

THE book’s title comes from a childhood experience of its author in the 1970s. On learning the concept of one billion, he was introduced to the nation with a population of that size, and warned: “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis and kill us all.” After that whenever he prayed for family and friends at night, he would usually sign off with the plea: “Please make sure everyone in China doesn’t jump at the same time.” Thirty years on, the boy who used to worry about the fate of mankind was a journalist on a respected British newspaper and did come to China.

Jonathan Watts was a reporter for the London-based Guardian, and that newspaper’s correspondent in Japan before being sent to China in 2003. The rocket-fueled economy and dramatic transformation in the social environment attracted him to the country – this was where it was all happening. Living in China reminded him of his childhood fear that a billion Chinese are jumping at the same time, but instead of jumping the fear is now of them embracing Western consumerism. A billion Chinese jumping simultaneously might produce a small earthquake, but if they all followed an American lifestyle, the resources consumed and the ensuing environmental damage would lead catastrophic destruction.

Initially his reporting brief from China was not environment-focused. Like many others, he believed the solution to environmental pollution and climate change could be found in smart ideas, strong actions, increased investment and new technology: but he changed his mind after the “biggest news story” of his career.

It was the last large-scale search for Baiji, a freshwater dolphin found only in the Yangtze River. Scientists from all over the world, equipped with the most advanced equipment, made careful searches of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, but not a single one was spotted. The next year, the species was declared functionally extinct. Watts was the accompanying reporter in the expedition, and witnessed the atmosphere on the ship change from optimistic and expectant to depressed and angry. He was no longer convinced by reassurances that humanity would eventually get it right. Sometimes it may be too late to remedy the damage caused by the “get rich first, clean up later” model. How could we assume we are becoming more civilized when a 25-million-year-old species, an animal once worshipped, had been wiped out by neglect, greed and human filth?

Watts subsequently focused on environmental issues and became Asia environment correspondent for the Guardian in 2008. When a Billion Chinese Jump brings together selected reports and investigations from 2003 to 2010 and reports made specifically for this particular book. His eco-travelogue starts in Zhongdian (now renamed Shangri-la) in Southwest Yunnan Province and ends in the north of Inner Mongolia in Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty. His tracks take in export factory zones in eastern and southern China, metropolitan Shanghai, the biodiversity-endangered southwest of China and the polluted industrial cities of the northwest.

Watts serves up worrying illustrations of environmental pollution and climate change, documenting conversations with local residents, officials, environmentalists and scientific workers. Throughout the book, he ponders the dilemma that China and the whole world is facing: It is the right of Chinese to pursue a better life, but adopting a Western standard of living in a country of 1.3 billion people will consume huge resources and produce prodigious waste. Can the planet take it?

The author warns time and again that we cannot count solely on scientific development to improve the environment, nor have blind faith in its ability to manage nature. Recent years have produced many wake-up calls, alerting Chinese society to the fragility of its environment, the rarity of natural resources, and the fact that China’s economy could soon, and in some places already has, hit the “environmental wall” – the point where economic development reaches the limits of what the environment can sustain, and growth begins to hobble. But the Chinese have “jumped” onto the consumerism train, and people in India, Brazil and Africa are looking to jump aboard too. Jonathan Watts, a self-confessed “born worrier,” just hopes China can find a way to balance a robust economy and healthy environment in the 21st century.

It brings to mind Watts’ comment when reporting on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway for The Guardian: “In the 19th century, Britain and Europe taught the world how to produce. In the 20th century, the US taught us how to consume. If China is to lead the world in the 21st century, it must teach us how to sustain.”

What directly led to these riots was that London police shot and killed the young black man, Mark Duggan. On Saturday, the parents of the deceased held a peaceful protest outside the doors of the Tottenham Hale police station, which by evening turned into incidents of smashing and looting. At the same time, police only formed a human blockade on the street to stop people from getting through, incapable of stopping the criminal activity taking place dozens of meters away. A shot of this played on television the entire night, inevitably encouraging others to join in the following day.

Police were not active in stopping the criminal activity; on one hand, police forces were weak, and on the other, indecisive. London’s police force currently has no-one leading it. Both the chief of police and the deputy chief for anti-terrorism resigned recently in the cellphone voicemail eavesdropping scandal, and the rest of the leadership are on summer vacation. At the same time, London’s mayor, the minister for home affairs, the deputy prime minister and the prime minister himself were also all overseas on summer holiday. There was no preparedness for a sudden incident such as this, and once it did break out, nobody unfortunately moved to deal with it quickly, instead people just hoped that the rioters would disperse by themselves.

The opposite happened, and riots began to spread by the second day. Police were caught off guard and fumbled around, leaving them even more incapable of dealing with the rioters, contributing to even more people taking part in the looting, and then the situation fell apart.

Given the nature of England’s political climate, riots such as this ought to be the strong suit of a conservative government, but the riots instead caught the current coalition government by surprise, and Cameron was a day late in returning to the country, something which has greatly affected his reputation. If he can’t put the riots down and quickly, I’m afraid Cameron won’t remain prime minister for much longer.

The attention was quickly moved on to the rescue mission. The crash site is in a reasonably populated area, only about 4 kilometres outside the Wenzhou South train station. Besides rescue workers, local residents (many joined the initial rescue) and journalists reached the site fairly quickly. The fiasco of the rescue operation was on full view, live to many eyewitnesses and many many more Weibo users sitting in front of the screen waiting for latest update.

Many questions have been raised, in particular to the rushed end of the rescue operation, the total number of people killed and the decision of burying locomotive and carriages of the crashed train right away. These, along with the compassionless and arrogant demeanour of the spoke person from railway ministry, fuelled suspicion and anger, propagated quickly among re-posting Weibo users. Even the arrival of China’s premier Wen Jiabao at the crash site and an on the spot press conference couldn’t calm all the emotions.

What the press conference did was to give journalists an anchor to launch attack on the railway ministry, who is not only responsible for the safety of the railway, but also in charge of the rescue mission. For a week, Chinese journalists had almost free run on the story, producing many in-depth analyses and human interest stories, along with bold criticism towards railway officials while questioning China’s high speed rail strategy.

The authority, inevitably, responded in the way they knew best. On Friday evening, many journalists posted on Weibo the news that they had received a directive ordering them to strictly minimize coverage of the crash and remove any criticism towards the railway ministry. Many out-of-line mini-posts on Weibo had been deleted at the same time. A lot of journalists reacted by posting the images of the ‘killed-off pages’ of next day’s newspapers.

While most of newspapers seem to toe the line, there are exceptions. Some weekly newspapers and magazines were in better position to defend themselves because the next issue had already been sent to printers while the directive arrived. Among them, a weekly business newpaper, Economic Observer (a publication I write for) devoted 8 pages for the train crash and its aftermath. On the front page the headline says ‘There is no miracle of Wenzhou’, clearly referring to a callous remark made by the railway ministry spoke person. Being a business newspaper, it also raised the issue of railway ministry being too powerful, although the suggestion of ‘splitting the railway ministry’ doesn’t sound very realistic.

It’s been rumoured in the last few days that the railway ministry’s priority was resuming normal service instead of saving lives, which was denied by an unnamed official. Indeed the normal service did resume within 48 hours of the crash. However after allowing the press to run free in the last seven days, the censors may find it’s little bit more difficult to resume the normal service.

Suddenly the crash became the most discussed subject, and weibo.com added a special section for the discussion of this accident. It does not escape censorship though. Many tweets have since been deleted ‘by the original poster’, so the site claims. But it helps that this happened in a Saturday evening when perhaps the censor’s response wasn’t fast enough. According to China Digital Times, a directive was indeed sent to various news organisations later, stopping them from reporting anything out of the official line. But it was too late to stop this accident became the hottest discussion on weibo.com.

It’s interesting to see how witness accounts and reportage were propagated through weibo.com. Without any news from official channel, users of weibo.com were first alerted by tweets sent by residents living near the accident site. The accident that a high speed train hit from behind a stationary train previously stricken by lightning, happened in the outskirt of the city of Wenzhou, a well-off and highly populated area. Many witnesses were equipped with digital cameras, mobile phones and internet connections. Photos and videos of the accident flooded in, then being re-tweeted by many others.

Among those who were doing the re-tweeting are some Chinese journalists. Unlike their western counterparts, many Chinese journalists operate on weibo.com in a semi-official way. Those that appear to be the official account of a publication or a news organisation do not strictly follow the editorial line. By merely re-tweeting the witness accounts, they lend their influence and credibility without getting their organisations into too much trouble.

When journalists arrived the scene, some of them immediately started to tweet whatever they had seen, most of what they tweeted were not likely to appear on their publication/broadcasting. There was an angry scene in a press conference where journalists fiercely pursued (‘beaten’ was used metaphorically on weibo.com) an official from the Railway Ministry. Local TV station actually broadcasted the press conference live. Some of the footages have since appeared on Chinese video-sharing website. How long will they survive is anyone’s guess.

The ‘human interest’ stories which you often read after the initial reportage of accident now are on your screen immediately. Soon after the accident, some tweets sent a few minutes before the crash by passengers on the train were discovered and re-tweeted while no news about their survival. There was also a moving scene of local people queuing up to donate blood (resulting in a traffic jam), recorded by weibo.com users. It’s chaotic, unfiltered and sometimes rumour-ridden.

Weibo has beaten the censorship, at least for a while.

UKIP: I hate Europe!
BNP: I hate foreigners!
SNP: It’s English’s fault!
Cameron: No more Brown!
Clegg: Look at me!
Brown: I agree with Nick

Well, you are right. Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar, which means the date of new year’s day in relation to western calendar always changes. And this year it falls on Valentine’s Day, when the Chinese 庚寅 (geng1 yin2) year starts.

However, a common mistake is to think the Year of Tiger starts on the Chinese New Year Day. Indeed, a press release from the Great London Authority confidently states, “The Year of the Tiger begins on 14 February”.

It’s easy to think Chinese only use lunar calendar. Actually, the Chinese zodiac, the 12 animals that represent each year in cycle, is associated with the Chinese agricultural calendar, which is a solar calendar. A year begins at the day of Spring Commences (立春), the first of the 24 solar segments of a Chinese solar calendar year. Since the Gregorian calendar is also a solar calendar. The date of Spring Commences doesn’t change a lot each year, always being 3 Feb or 4 Feb, unlike the Chinese New Year’s Day which changes widely, for example from last year’s 26 Jan to this year’s 14 Feb.

There is an online calendar that will show you the Chinese calendar along side the Gregorian calendar, plus common eastern and western holidays.

OK, for those of you wondering what’s the fuss about, here are the vidoes of Mary-Jess Leaverland, who is on the front page of today’s Guardian. Her victory in a “Chinese X Factor” competition is reported by several papers (Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Sun).

The TV singing competition is called Min Ge Chang Fan Tian (民歌唱翻天, literally means “stars from ordinary people singing over the heaven”), organised by a TV channel in Jiangsu Province.

The vidoes show the final round. At the begining the first video, three competitors were presented, then the second runner-up was out, followed by the duel between the last two who each sang the final song, before the phone-in results were announced (in the second video). Mary-Jess Leaverland was called by her Chinese name Li Meijie (李美洁) throughout.

This video shows the round before that, begining with the “grand entry” of the last three competitors. Mary-Jess Leaverland spoke Mandarin in her intro video (at 6’30”), but it looks when it came to singing, she still preferred English songs.

The sad truth is that those who have made the effort of climbing over the GFW in order to access Twitter and like are belong to the 30%. In the same survey, over half the participants said their online activity won’t be affected by Google’s leave. This figure looks to increase if nothing happens.

Shanghaiist’s has a good summary of the Google v. China standoff. On the Guardian website, Tania Branigan has canvassed the opinions of some bloggers and media insiders. Whether Google decided to end its self-censorship purely out of moral reasons I’m not sure. I agree with some of Evgeny Morozov’s analysis. I guess it’s more likely they are fed up with the restraint and criticism while not seeing much gains in Chinese market.

Anyway, what Google has done is to blow it into the open, burn the bridge, making the stakes incredibly high. Now Google.cn is not censored, will the servers be forced to shut down, or moved out of China? And then what? Will Chinese government have to block Google.com as well?

Among the multinationals in China, Google is the one who has the power, influence and resources to make a clear stand on censorship. And now it has the will too. For that it should be praised.