China Changes- Part 2

I have been travelling to Asia, since 1985 and China since around 1995. I started my work in Asia about five years after Deng’s creation of Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen and other Chinese provinces. Most of the women’s handbags we bought were still made in China in 1985. By 1987, the changes taking place in China made it a necessity to do business in China. The import company I was working for at the time was slow to adapt to those changes and did not survive.

When I made my first visits to China, Deng’s revitalization of the Chinese economy was already underway for more than a decade. I wished I had seen those first years though many I have spoken to have told me they weren’t that pleasant. I can believe that. Some of the places I have seen-- even in the last six months—are still pretty rough. 

Since my first visit, which looking back I certainly did not comprehend in any historical framework, I have visited China something like 75 times. I spent a few minutes in one of the endless car rides on the last trip to China, which I just concluded, doing a back of the envelop calculation. I estimated that adding up all the trips I have spent more than a year and a half in China. Whatever my life is, whatever good I have done or failures I have endured or created, the ability to witness this change in this wonderful country is one of the most profound adventures of my life. I did not and could not shape history the way others did, I would only wish. But in my life I have been beyond fortunate to be a witness firsthand to so much profoundly historical change and in some odd way to call China, this country of such complexity and scope, such promise and decay, home.  

My most recent trip carried me from Shanghai to Yancheng to Yiwu in the North, then Shenzhen and Dongguan in the south, then back to Ningbo, Linhai City and Wenzhou (sort of in the middle), and finally back to Hong Kong. I tried to look at the places I visited in remember what they might have been like when I started my journey almost two decades earlier. During this most recent trip I travelled by bus, car, plane, and high speed rail. On previous trips I have traversed the country by ferry and regular train  as well, which pretty much rounds out the methods of travel available to a billion Chinese people. Not including the flight from New York I probably covered a couple thousand miles during this last trip. Truth be told I am sick of the travel now, and always, always, always, would prefer to be home with my family. But China has been part of how I earn my living, owing to the need to pay for schools, mortgage and food, God willing, I hope it continues for a few years more.

I am a novelty in many places I go. I have often been the only westerner in some cities I visit. So there is an element of circus act, a 6’2” freak in a nation of 5’8” men and 5’0” women. But on these last trips, when I have needed to so often find my way on trains, planes and automobiles, the Chinese I have approached have been unerringly helpful and kind. In Wenzhou the board at the Hi-Speed rail station said the train left on 4, but actually departed on 2. I would have never been able to get that without the courtesy of the middle-aged man who spoke not a word of English and did not even understand my apparently feeble pronunciation of the Chinese city, Wenzhou. He kindly read my ticket and walked me to the spot on the platform here I needed to stand, then walked me on the train to the car I occupied, which by chance was the same as his.   

Everywhere children smile and approach me. Though the parents are often reserved, the children speak to me, almost always in Mandarin which makes me smile, with enthusiasm and smiling faces of their own which are still etched in my memory. In Shanghai on a subway a few years ago, giggling boys about Ben’s age now, 14, asked me my name. I told them Michael and asked their name. One by one they all repeated the same name: Michael. Chinese with contacts with the West often adopt “English” names for ease of communication. I have met Falcon’s and Skye’s and Jerry’s. These boys understood the ritual but did not have an “English” name themselves, so they repeated the only one they knew: My name, Michael.

Truth be told the personal habits of some are repulsive to me. Others have noted the spitting and hocking which is common in public spaces, even on airplanes and buses. Beyond personal habit, I believe this is something that can be directly attributed to skyrocketing use of tobacco products. A few weeks ago it was reported that the lung cancer rate in Beijing had risen 56% in the last decade. Improved economic circumstances have made many vises considerably more available to Chinese people.

Medical care has improved dramatically for everyday Chinese during the period of economic opening.  Even though it has a ways to go when compared to what Americans might expect, the government guarantees health insurance for all. That is saying something in a country where more than 100 million still live on less than $1 a day. On World AIDS Day, Dec-01, the new Chinese Leader, Xi Jinping, made a series of appearances at which Chinese AIDS policy was discussed. The stigma attached to the disease in Chinese as elsewhere still lingers, but to a much lesser extent, and most Chinese officials especially at the national level seem to get that it is a requirement of good governance to address the suffering. Although the government provided health Insurance policies do not currently  cover AIDS medications that is something that is under discussion now, the government does provide antiviral medication at low or no cost and this includes to the 70,000 Chinese in prisons, where testing is mandatory.

Despite the AIDS policies which appear to bring the force of government equally to those caught up in the judicial system and those outside it, the Chinese justice system itself has decades to go to reach any sort of equilibrium. The death penalty is handed out with astounding proficiency, even for property crimes. Political activists in particular are treated in the harshest way possible. Stories of people being swept off the streets are common, and even reported in Hong Kong, now under Chinese governance. Recent stories in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post indicated a wave of extra-legal kidnappings of protestors who made their way to Beijing to register complaints regarding local officials. Once there they were followed there by provincial law enforcement, detained and intimidated to relinquish their claims. Local Communist Party officials fearing for their careers because of such complaints are responding with extraordinary and even in China illegal arrests.

Government officials at the national level, and more acutely at the provincial and local level are subject to fervent political activity. The middle class is growing, gaining in strength and political awareness. People are watching, and they have expectations. This affects environmental policy, land use regulations, worker rights and worker safety, and political corruption. A member of Chinese Greenpeace was quoted in the China Daily newspaper regarding the Global worming Conference in Doha. Wiebo, a homegrown social networking site which is sort of hybrid between Facebook and Twitter launched in 2009, has over 350 million users. It is estimated that over 100 million items are posted on the site each day. Weibo, nearly impossible for the government to control, has superseded the highly censored state media as a source of information, particularly for a younger and plugged in professional class.

Government officials are exposed with some regularity through the Weibo site. The continuing scandal of Bo Xilai, the Communist Party secretary of for the Chongqing municipality, has expanded in concentric circles through the site, as those who supported the deposed official and those opposed release scandalous information about their opponents. Sexual indiscretions with young, shockingly so, women have surfaced repeatedly, most recently with actual sex tapes being released. In addition to Bo Xilai who was brought down by sexual indiscretion and scandal, including the murder by his wife of an English businessman, Time Magazine reports that Liu Zhijun, the former Railway Minister, Chen Liangyu, Shanghai Communist Party secretary and Lei Zhengfu, the Communist Party secretary of the Beibei district in Chongqing, Bo’s home were also implicated.

Lei was brought down after a tape of him with what was variously reported as a 16 or 18 year old girl surfaced. The person who released that tape, claims to have additional footage of at least half a dozen other government officials in compromising circumstances. Though Chinese censors are constantly making key-word searches to bring down embarrassing stories, the onslaught of 100 million posts a day is impossible to contain, and even when they do the Chinese public deletes the keyword and repeats the post, so that both the public and the censors are locked in a battle of attrition which the government cannot win. 

When I was in China, both the Washington Post and the NY Times Websites were blocked, but in a sign of the porous nature of things, some stories published by the Huffington Post which conglomerates stories from many media sources, including the NY Times were available there.  The Times in particular has repeatedly run afoul of the Chinese leaders and the 10,000-plus censors that attempt to protect it, by reporting on the accumulated wealth at the highest echelons of the Chinese Government, including the previous Premier Wen Jiabao. Recently the Times reported on the scandal which rocked the Chinese Government in September. Apparently a close advisor to the former Chinese President, Hu Jintao, who himself was a highly placed CP Member, a man named Ling Jihua, tried to cover up the fatal crash of his son in a Ferrari in Beijing in September. As always details, posted on Weibo, sort of snuck out, then were brought down by the censors. In an odd twist in this case, whoever attempted the cover up, posted on the dead young man’s Weibo site, the goal being to dispute the fact of the death.  

But Western news organizations including the South China Morning Post --which is by the way available in many large cities in China’s South such as Shenzhen-- picked up the thread and released details of the story. It is not clear  to what extent the Chinese public is aware of the specifics of all these stories, but any analysis of the circumstances in which the Chinese Government now operates would indicate the government is highly aware of the resentment the people have for corruption at all levels of government. The new Premier, Xi Jinping, a refugee of the Cultural Revolution, has indicated that he wants to run a more responsive, less imperial government. Time will tell if that will take place, and what that will mean for the West.

 While corruption is an endemic problem, and any real system of justice is still a more long term goal the astounding progress the Chinese have made in securing a better future for themselves cannot be underestimated.  Hundreds of millions have been raised from poverty. Though it is clear this has come at the great price of separated families, environmental degradation, and social upheaval, city after city reveals a relentless march towards social uplift and development. Conditions are often very difficult, and even dangerous. That said the characterization of slave labor it seems to me misses the mark quite substantially, ignoring as it does that astounding social progress that has been made.  Simplistic analysis based on the history of labor strife in this America holds very limited relationship to what has happened and is still taking place in China.

The Red Crowned Crane is China’s national bird, but the towering construction crane is far more ubiquitous. This is true in very single city I visited.  To be fair the development is still largely concentrated in the industrial eastern third of the country. But, that said, macro-economic circumstances such as lower labor costs, less provincial regulation, lower costs, and government investments and inducements are driving development slowly inland. The Chinese are investing in infrastructure in ways that American politicians dare not acknowledge. Spending on high-speed trains, green energy, better roads, more ports, schools, and water projects dwarfs what the US is doing. These investments as Obama has pointed out are critical to any country’s ability to compete in the decades ahead.

Despite of or because of the all the tough talk the Chinese currency the RMB has gained a considerable amount of value against the dollar, which should make Chinese Imports more expensive. And yet the growth in the Chinese economy has not been even marginally affected. I have to laugh when I hear politicians on either side of the aisle talk about getting tough on the Chinese.  I do think there is merit in taking trade cases to the WTO and under Obama the US has won a few, but the relentless march of progress in China will not be halted by such gnat bites.

This is not meant to suggest that US ought not to compete, or that it cannot compete with China, or that there are not legitimate grievances. I have seen with my own eyes the rampant desecration of American ideas and creativity. In Yiwu City there are literally a dozen stores with the neon glow of the iconic Apple logo lighting their entranceways. I commented on that to a friend I was travelling with hand was advised that there are only four legal Apple stores in the country, two in Shanghai and two In Beijing, making all of these shops purveyors of illegal copies of Apple Products.

Yet when it comes to trade, and most especially America’s ability to compete, what I do believe is that the simple solutions are no longer adequate. America it seems to me is too willing to complain about the external, sometimes with good reason, granted, and too unwilling to acknowledge our own internal weaknesses. When America accepts poverty in its midst, we lose the great abilities of those people to contribute to our future. This is especially true in education. For all the talk about failing schools, and there are issues across the spectrum, the real failure is the warehousing of or students and the acceptance of their lack of educational achievement. Americas waste the minds of millions of its youth with nary a thought to what it means to the nation. Middle class districts need to emphasize more math and more science, but poor districts need tools to rise above current circumstances in mass, and that as we know is just not happening except in enlightened exceptions.

Beyond education which I believe is the most critical element for our future development, America is falling woefully behind China in particular and I suspect other developing nations, in infrastructure development. America is in odd ways blessed by the utter malaise of more than a decade in Japan, and the economic upheaval in Europe, but is too bogged down in silliness to take advantage of it. When I visit China, travelling for hundreds of miles on their roads, and hundreds more on high speed trains, and then come home to America, I have little doubt which country is most focused on the future. The current argument on taxes for a small slice of the population would be laughable if it weren’t so completely indicative of how lost we are as a nation.

I visited Shenzhen about a week ago, and in the down town area I was in, the modernization which has taken place was mesmerizing. The city of 9 million is a wonder of technology and development. I was given a security pass in the high-rise building in which I had to meet a client. When I entered the elevator I was taken aback for a moment by the lack of buttons to the floors before I realized the pass I was given selected the floor for me, thus preventing me form wandering into an area that I was not authorized to be in.

In the plaza around the building coming and going were young Wall Street types, in small groups, no doubt trying to take into action what they recently learned at their team-building retreat. “Get Outside; Work together in leaderless groups; Bla, bla, bla…” They were all so earnest and young and vibrant, men and women alike clad in their conservative black or blue suits, all there to manage the billions of dollars available for investment generated by an economy now ranked second in the world. The parking garage contained a sea of luxury brands from BMW to Land Rover, to Mercedes, to Ferrari and Lamborghini.

Chinese influence extends well beyond their own borders wherein Africa, for example, they are the number one trading partner to dozens of countries. While Americans pat themselves on the back for their charitable largesse, the Chinese invest, and build. They even have their own version of the Peace Corp, sending young people across the continent to work and teach-- Mandarin. 

For anyone with eyes to see, it is so clear that global economic predominance will be won or lost on the field of ideas and education and shared national commitment. For all the corruption I really do believe that throughout the Chinese Government structure there are people and institutions committed to progressively providing for the needs of all of the people. As with the US there are pockets of deeply entrenched reactionary conservatism. At the moment the Chinese are blessed with much newly found and unspent wealth. Time will tell how they will deploy their resources, but America would do well to recognize the reality of the challenge they represent.

If Shenzhen is a finance town now, albeit one with a lot of manufacturing, in dozens of other cities I visited manufacturing in small businesses, 300 person or less facilities, is still what everyone is engaged in. Longguan township, part of the city of Ningbo, in the Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, is one of those places. I always think of Rod Stewart’s song, Dirty Old Town, when I see these places. Where the big cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing though not really bilingual are really rather easy for westerners to navigate, factory towns like Longguan are much more difficult. There is no western food, and what there is a health concern. There are dusty, often dirty places, with piles of rubble, including decaying food, everywhere. Whatever waterways one sees call to mind the ubiquitous PSA with the crying American Indian looking over the despoiled countryside. I walked around Longguan on Sunday a week ago, made a loop of maybe 20 blocks. Even on a Sunday there was bustle everywhere. If the color of money in the US is green, in China blue trucks of all sizes from Moped driven minis to 20’ containers, represent the real color of wealth. Here storefronts are open air regardless of summer heat or winter cold. They would be sad little places, except of course they are the outposts of progress in the Chinese economy. There is relentless bustle, honking horns and traffic seemingly coming from all directions, encumbered by any rules of the road. I have ridden literally thousands of miles by auto  over the past year and it is truly amazing the circumstances under which a Chinese driver will cross a double yellow line.

On TV in towns like this there is no Western media, save the odd example of a channel called Fashion TV. There is no CNN or BBC, but there is this vapid channel which displays an endless loop of runway shoes and which advertises a brand of water called “Fashion”, and which says it is for “models and billionaires”. This I think is what the West offers in comparison to the industry and sacrifice of the Chinese. F***, it’s depressing. Besides me, locked in a prison of a hotel room with no English speaking person to talk or listen to, who watches this shit?  I had to laugh as I ironed my freshly sink-washed underwear in an effort to speed the drying process. Elsewhere across the dial I could have chosen soaps or dramas in Chinese which work off of one of the following themes: Chinese Yuppies, the time of the emperors, the great war which may be actually the war before the revolution. All are populated with impossibly earnest yet beautiful, always made up, Chinese women, even the war melodramas, which also sort of makes me laugh.

Young urban professionals live in large towns and small. Their uniform of choice is black from head to toe. I often laugh about Joe Strummers line…

“You start wearing blue and brown and you’re working for the clampdown..”

Strummer’s song was a challenge not to surrender to business, and bourgeois values. It resonated with the children of the middle class like me who had in many ways, ironically, already surrendered. Black was Strummer’s color of choice. I wonder what he would think about the endless file of women, aged 15 to 50, dressed in black sweaters, skirts, patterned hose, and boots. They present quite a fashionable appearance even in smaller less cosmopolitan cities, all mixed textures and form fitting, but there is a sameness about it that is dulling, which is what Strummer was getting at. Men are no different, though  fashionable would not be a word I would use to describe their apparel in most cases.  Here too black is the color of the realm, but often there are unfortunate choices of satin jeans or short silk socks. It is all like the women have figured out something that the men have only had a glimpse of. In the train from Ningbo to Wenzhou a young man sat across from me dressed head to toe in Johnny Cash black with a Link Wray haircut, pointy shoes, short nylon socks, and purple tinged spectacles. What a hoot…

A generation ago most of the factory owners in these towns set free by Deng were just steps literally removed from their peasant lives. The fathers build what they could with their peasant hands and rough personas.  They neither knew or cared about labor law or environmental degradation. They lived through both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and built the new China. Often times I suspected their children had no knowledge or respect of the past.  I remember meeting so many of them. I always can recall the image of what I referred to in this past as “Grandpa with two hot rod sons”. The boys neither cared about the business or the struggle to create it. I remember one meeting in particular as they fiddled with cell phones, their toys, while the father, hopelessly aged beyond his years-- bad teeth and scraggly beard on deeply channeled skin-- and I conducted business. It is that middle generation which is the heart of the corruption in China today.

Across China now there is a whole new generation of Chinese business leaders and politicians on the rise. For the most part these are college educated people in their 30’s and early forties. Their children are raised by their grandparents. Childcare except for those of extreme wealth is out of reach for most. It is in fact a nation of one child families. The psychology of single child families is so unique it will be interesting to consider the consequences of that development. Nonetheless, the government recognizing that the population is aging rapidly and actually shrinking in some urban centers is considering relaxing the infamous one child policy. 

The new generation of business and political leaders understand environmental regulation and the laws regarding worker rights. At their factories they have built water treatment plants to treat factory waste, and air conditioned worker dorms. Workers punch time clocks and overtimes rules are not abused. In the best of them worker dorms accommodate children, which is band-aid to a crippling societal problem, children of migrant factory workers left behind when their parents seek work in the cities. When I was there five such boys climbed into a dumpster and after starting a fire for warmth died of asphyxiation.

In one factory I visited the factory owner selected the best and the brightest of the factory workers and is providing extended education up to and including college with a mind towards retaining their best workers and building a long term shared  commitment to the factory’s success. As I walked the leafy factory grounds, and walked the factory l floor I was by chance approached by a reporter for China Radio International and was asked to give my thoughts. I told the reporter that I thought the factory was the future of China. And they are.

A couple years ago when I visited Beijing, I took a photo of a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read “Art=Resistance” while strolling the grounds of the Temple of Heaven and extraordinary relic of China’s Imperial Past. The image lingers with me now. This women and I were both tourists, though she was Chinese and I am not. She has aspirations for our country that I cannot begin to comprehend. I honor her commitment just as I do that factory owner with that magnificent facility on Yiwu. Ultimately there battle is not my battle, though I believe we share similar hopes and dreams for our children. As time goes on now and the weeks of travel extends to months and ultimately years, I feel the tug towards some distant future of which we may all take part.  This is a future where nationally affiliation perhaps matters a notch or too less, and being a citizen of the world carries more weight. I am of course, first and always an American, but I have spent so much time in China now, and have seen so much progress there, I find I have feelings for its people that are not dissimilar to those I feel for my own country. Just as I have looked in the eyes of my own children and the kids on 62^nd Street and made my prayers for their future, I also now have the faces on the children on the subway in Shanghai and the hotel in Wenzhou to consider. The hopes, I think, are much the same.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.” Ted Kennedy, 1980

January 8, 2013

Faceoff in Chinese City Over Censorship of Newspaper

By JONAH KESSEL and CHRIS BUCKLEY

GUANGZHOU, China – Protests over censorship at one of China’s most liberal newspapers descended into ideological confrontation on Tuesday, pitting advocates of free speech against supporters of Communist Party control who wielded red flags and portraits of Mao Zedong.

The face-off between liberals and leftists at the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China came after disgruntled editors and reporters at Southern Weekend last week decried what they alleged was crude meddling by the head of party propaganda in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.

The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend have called for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong province. They blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist, for making a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that had originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead praised Communist Party policies.

A former editor with the Southern Daily group of newspapers, which includes Southern Weekend, said negotiations continued on Tuesday between representatives of the disgruntled journalists and newspaper managers and provincial propaganda officials.

The former editor, who asked that his name not be used for fear it could jeopardize his new job, said the talks focused on the protesting journalists’ demands that the paper’s managers rescind a statement that denied that Mr. Tuo was responsible for the New Year editorial and for an inquiry into the incident.

“They want that statement to be removed, and they also want assurances about relaxing controls on journalists -- not removing party oversight, but making it more reasonable, allowing reporters to challenge officials,” he said. “The other main demand is for an impartial explanation of what happened, an accounting so it won’t happen again.”

The former editor said a continued standoff into Wednesday could jeopardize the newspaper’s usual publication on Thursday. “In effect, it’s a strike,” he said. “It looks unclear whether it can come out on Thursday.”

Senior Chinese officials have so far not commented publicly on the censorship dispute at the newspaper, which has tested how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, will extend his vows of economic reform into a degree of political relaxation. But self-proclaimed defenders of Communist orthodoxy who turned up at the newspaper headquarters said on Tuesday that they were there to make the party’s case.

“We support the Communist Party, shut down the traitor newspaper,” said one of the cardboard signs held up by one of 10 or so protesters who came to defend the government.

“Southern Weekend is having an American dream,” said another of the signs. “We don’t want the American dream, we want the Chinese dream.”

Some of the group held up portraits of Mao, the late revolutionary leader who remains a symbol of communist zeal, while others waved the red flags of China and of the Communist Party. Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. They said they came on their own initiative, and not at the behest of officials.

The dueling protests outside the newspaper’s headquarters in this provincial capital reflected the political passions and tensions churned up by the quarrel over censorship, which has erupted while Mr. Xi is trying to win public favor and consolidate his authority.

Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on mobile phones as the leftists shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out between the demonstrators.

At one point, leftists were showered with 50-cent renminbi currency notes. The “Fifty Cent Party” has become a popular term for disparaging pro-party leftists, who are alleged by critics to be willing to take 50 cents in payment for each pro-party message they send onto the Internet.

“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Liang Taiping, 28, a poet from the southern city of Changsha who said he took the train to Guangzhou to show his support for Southern Weekend, which is widely read nationwide.

“What’s the point of living while you can’t even speak freely?” he said.

About 70 police officers and security guards stood nearby. They did not try to break up the protests, but officers recorded them with video cameras and occasionally stepped in to stop shoving and fisticuffs. Later, the rival protesters broke into separate camps concentrated on different sides of the gate to the newspaper headquarters.

The protests at Southern Weekend broke out while Mr. Xi, the party’s general secretary appointed in November, has been sending mixed signals about his intentions. He has repeatedly said he supports faster and bolder reform, but on Saturday he gave a speech defending the party’s history and Mao’s standing in it.

The Central Propaganda Department, which administers the censorship apparatus, issued instructions telling news media that the dispute at Southern Weekend was “due to the meddling of hostile outside forces,” according to China Digital Times, a group based in Berkeley, California, that monitors media and censorship issues.

Both supporters and critics of Southern Weekend journalists have claimed that Mr. Xi would back their cause.

“I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Chen Min, a prominent former opinion writer for Southern Weekend who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011.

“The Southern Weekend journalists have said that they accept party control, but the question is what kind of control and how far should it go unchallenged,” Mr. Chen added.

Jonah Kessel reported from Guangzhou, China, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Mia Li contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Patrick Zuo from Beijing.