China's Challenges

What do the mainland Chinese members feel about this recent Economist article? Fair...unfair...too Western slanted?

A lot to be angry about

May 1st 2008 | FENSHUI VILLAGE
From The Economist print edition
Polluted, poisonous and immune to popular efforts to enforce a clean-up: Tai Lake is a metaphor for the state of China's politics
AP

THE plain-clothes police are always there, watching Xu Jiehua. When she goes out, two of them follow by motorcycle. Sometimes an unmarked car joins them, tailing her closely on the narrow road winding past the factories and wheat fields around her village.

Ms Xu is used to the attention. Her husband, Wu Lihong, was arrested in April last year and sentenced four months later to three years in prison for fraud and blackmail. For her, the police harassment is proof that the charges were false, and that Mr Wu's only crime was to anger local officials with his tireless campaigning against pollution around nearby Tai Lake, China's third-biggest freshwater body. It is also a warning that she too should keep quiet.

Last year nature appeared to vindicate Mr Wu. Soon after his arrest, the lake was choked by toxic algae fed by the phosphates from the human and industrial waste that had been poured into the water and its tributaries. For more than a week, the stinking growth disrupted the water supply of 2m people living on its shores. It was one of China's biggest environmental scandals since the Communist Party came to power. In Wuxi, the city closest to Mr Wu's home in Fenshui village, residents queued to buy bottled water. The Yangzi River was diverted to flush the algae out.

Amid an internet-fuelled uproar, officials promised to close down polluting factories and clean up an area once legendary for its beauty. But in late March blue-green blooms were again found along the southern shore. Such growths are rare so early in the year. Officials admit that despite their clean-up efforts the water remains at the lowest grade in China's water-quality scale, unfit for human contact, and that another “big bloom” is possible this year.

A repeat of the algae catastrophe on Tai Lake would be a huge embarrassment to both local officials and the central government. As they look nervously at protests around the country fuelled by an upsurge of anti-Western nationalism, the authorities are ever mindful that the anger could readily turn upon them too. Nationalist fervour may be helping to divert public attention away from the party's mishandling of Tibet—a remote problem in the minds of many Chinese. But it will do little to pacify citizens angered by official corruption, incompetence and negligence.

There are many such people. Officials rarely give figures, but they have said that the number of “mass incidents”—an ill-defined term—rose from 10,000 in 1994 to 74,000 in 2004. Suspiciously, the government reported a 22% decrease in the first nine months of 2006, but from a much lower base than previously announced figures had suggested. This may reflect underreporting by officials under pressure to show that their departments are achieving the goal of establishing a “harmonious society”, which the party has vowed to build by 2020.

The same internet and mobile-telephone technology that is helping China's angry young nationalists organise protests and boycotts is also helping other aggrieved citizens to unite. The past year has seen the first large-scale, middle-class protests in China over environmental issues: in the southern coastal city of Xiamen in June over the construction of a chemical factory, and in January this year in Shanghai over plans to extend a magnetic levitation train line.

For all the central government's green talk, a complex web of local interests sometimes linked with powerful figures in Beijing often frustrates efforts to deal with the problems that lead to such unrest. Wu Lihong's campaigning around Tai Lake threatened factories, the governments that depend on them for revenues and the jobs the factories provide. The anger of laid-off workers has long been one of officialdom's biggest worries. A factory where Ms Xu worked was among those Mr Wu helped force to stop production.

In 2002, after peasants blocked a road in protest over pollution in their fields, Mr Wu was jailed for 15 days for allegedly inciting them. He tried to launch an environmental NGO but officials turned down his request to register it (Wuxi already had one, they said, and that was enough). The police summoned him several times to warn him to cease his activities. But Mr Wu, ignoring his wife's remonstrations, persisted. He spent the family's savings on work such as gathering pollution data and lobbying the domestic and foreign press.

The official press—at least organs beyond the control of the local bureaucracy—reported on his efforts glowingly. His living-room is adorned with tributes: an award in 2005 from the central government naming him one of the year's ten “outstanding environmental-protection personalities”; a photograph of him receiving an honour for his environmental work in 2006 from the Ford Motor company.

But local officials were not impressed. One evening in April last year, when Mr Wu and his wife were watching television in their bedroom upstairs, police climbed up a ladder, through a window and took him away. They then smashed into his study and seized papers. Ms Xu still has the pile of cigarette stubs they left on the floor.

Mr Wu, who is 40, was found guilty in August of extorting money from an environmental-equipment manufacturer by threatening to inform the authorities that products supplied to a steel company were substandard. The court also ruled that he had cheated the company by claiming to represent the equipment-maker and seeking payment for the sale. The amount involved was 45,000 yuan ($5,940). Mr Wu denied the charges and told the court that his confession had been extracted by torture. Ms Xu says journalists were barred from the proceedings and no witnesses were produced for cross-examination.

A higher municipal court rejected Mr Wu's appeal last November. Last month Ms Xu submitted an appeal to a court in Nanjing, the capital of their province, Jiangsu. But she says she has no hope of success. The polluting companies her husband campaigned against remain open and the authorities have closed only unprofitable ones, she says. She shows visitors one alleged offender, a new lakeside resort complex. Since last year's disaster, the then Jiangsu party chief, Li Yuanchao, has been promoted to the ruling Politburo.

Ms Xu believes the national media have been quietly ordered to avoid mention of her husband. The police stopped an attempt by relatives to circulate a petition for his release (more than 100 people signed it before the police seized it, she says). Officials have warned Ms Xu not to talk to the press. A senior environmental-protection official said this month that the battle against Tai Lake's algae problem would be a protracted one. So too will efforts to silence whistle-blowers.

 

For as much as I don't like the tone of the report, I must admit that we do have a tough situation to deal with here - jobs, or better air/water quality? It's not as black-and-white an issue as the west sees it. Just last week, a friend of mine from my hometown asked me to translate a Washington Post article about a supposedly green company there making negative environmental impact. Their perspective is totally different from the reporter's.

Personally, I think it's time that we tackle our environmental problems with all forces. Solving the problem is no easy task and needs creativity and sacrifice. But I have faith in our collective wisdom and resolve to deal with tough challenges.

 

i watched about 10 minutes of that Indian guy talking. i have to say, he is almost 100% correct in his views. some of the western countries have become so closed, conservative. when i first came to US, i was surprised how conservative some people are.

 

Please note that "that Indian guy" is actually not Indian. Professor Kishore Mahbubani is an Indian Singaporean. I watched the whole video the other day and gained some valuable perspective on some of the toughest challenges that China faces today.

I must say that I really liked the program host. Humble and right to the point, unlike most talking heads these days.

 

but i don't see how people like him can "convince" the western countries. it seems like it's heading to the wrong direction.

 

He can't. The truth is in the eyes of the beholder. Let's concentrate on doing the best we can do and let the critics criticize.

Be hopeful for the best, but be ready for the worst. That's my attitude for everything.

 

oh ya, i think most Chinese youth have similar attitude. depend on yourself and those you trust.

 

What China needs most is independent rule of law, more than a couple growth points.

 

^ the PRC certainly needs that but as I've said in the Tibet related threads what the Dalai Lama is asking for for Tibet is what the rest of the PRC should also be asking for. Greater local autonomy to control the local economy, development and culture.

IMO pollution problems in the PRC have been largely driven by central control that has largely ignored local problems. The situation of Tibetans losing out to Hans isn't much different from Tai Lake being polluted by an centralized economy that didn't care much about the local environment. A problem now propagated by a booming capitalist economy that has inherited inefficient and dirty industries and an central government pushing development above all else.

 

Theocracy? Serfdom? Racial segregation? 35-year life expectancy? Excessive taxation on low-class? Sh!tty hygiene and piss poor health care? Illiteracy?

I don't think Chinese - Tibetan Chinese included - want any of those. Sorry.

 

How the heck did you reach that conclusion when the article clearly shows that it's the local government that's protecting the polluting industries?

 

Have you ever even bothered to read the Dalai Lama's position? YOu like to claim others aren't reading the PRC's but clearly you aren't taking your own advice to know what you are talking about.

 

I'm looking at the history of the PRC as a whole were clearly during the Great Leap Forward and almost all of the 5 year plans local interests were subordinated to national ones. I would say that the same things are going on and the local government in that province is more likely following the dictates favoring development rather than responding truly to local concerns.

 

I think it's because it's a Canadian broadcast. It's less a remark on propaganda, but more on the excessive commercialism in American media on what constitutes as entertaining dialogue that's "ratings worthy"....

Kishore Mahbubani seems to LOVE China, but I'm guessing he's trying to provide counterbalance to the ideas being floated around in American media.

Reactionary is a more appropriate word than conservative. Europe is far from conservative. Many people still consider China communist, and those who don't aren't keen to the idea of a Chinese Communist Party dominating the lives of 1.5 billion people.

Plus, it's hard to look at China's growth into a economic power without being afraid of how an authoritarian government will use it, while on the other hand thinking, "if you're so rich, why not democratize?". I don't think the mainstream Western opinion realizes how small (yet sizable) a minority the middle class is proportionate to the population. Then again, the video goes into how there are several thousands of protests going on inside China every day. Clearly, there are Chinese yearning for more. When is enough enough?

The democratization question will always linger in America because it's in our cultural DNA. While it's convenient to point to the jingoism leading up to the Iraq War, it took a catastrophic event for Americans to allow Bush to assume unprecedented executive powers. It took us 9/11 to rename French to Freedom Fries in government cafeterias. Local Chinese protests against French took A LOT less... That cultural DNA goes beyond post-WW2 foreign relations, and it's behind the philosophical underpinnings of the American republic. I don't know if it's sustainable, but I'm pretty sure more than enough Americans won't let it go without a fight.

Anyways, the other rationale behind Western reactionism against China is the economic side of things. India is also enjoying big growths, but it's democratic, their population is English speaking, and for the most part, they're willing to interact with Europe despite its Western colonial history (they had it far worse than China) and in fact, are using that history to strike future partnerships with the West. China's growth is far greater, and the industries it effects worldwide is more readily seen on the manufacturing blue collar level. Despite the West benefiting with China/global trade on several economic levels (cheaper goods and technologies despite inflationary pressures, easier to access credit, higher demand for managerial and financial services), those left behind in the rust belt affect a lot vocal people who are uncertain of their futures. The angles China uses to protect its own industries (they don't want to be colonized again, foreign competition is too developed, our rules our house) are less than genuine. In that sense, charges of unfair economic advantages or wars of attrition become more mainstream.

I haven't read Mahbubani's recent book yet, but I think it's about how the West copes with or accepts China and Asia's cultural DNA with theirs. In this era of uncertainty and presumed future supremacy, I think any views on bridging diverging cultural and philosophical relationships is a good thing. The alternative is that everyone loses.

 

I am pretty impessed with the Indian professor, like he said we will know if China is doing something right twenty years down the line.

 

most protests in china are about social issues these days anyways. it ain't like people are protesting for democracy.