Folding the umbrellas

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IT WAS the most sustained street campaign for democracy in China since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Yet the protests in Hong Kong ended very differently. Instead of using tanks and machine-guns to clear the streets, police in Hong Kong ended 79 days of sit-ins on busy roads in the city armed with court orders, pepper spray and cutting tools to dismantle barricades. Dozens of people were arrested, but most left the three protest sites (the last and smallest was cleared on December 15th) without attempting to resist. The Hong Kong government, by refusing the protesters’ demands for free elections and largely ignoring them, had worn them down.

Peeling away the symbols

It was not always so orderly. The protests erupted in late September in a fog of tear-gas; the umbrellas students tried to use to protect themselves became the symbol of their movement. But the authorities quickly decided it would be better to wait the protesters out. Public support for them ebbed as the disruption to traffic grew more irksome. Eventually courts accepted complaints by those whose businesses were suffering and ordered bailiffs to move in....Continue reading

Why grumble?

The art is red

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

AS THE people of Xi’an file through the subway and along underpasses, rush past bus stops and buildings, they pass hundreds of posters. Some of these advertise the newest smartphone or fancy car, but many tout less marketable commodities: the importance of thrift, diligence, filial devotion, Chinese civilisation and the virtues of the ruling party. “The Communist Party is good, the people are happy” reads one, over an image of a couple bouncing their single child.

During the party’s rule, propaganda art has always been a feature of the urban landscape. But in recent years it has been relegated to the margins by the onslaught of commercial advertising. President Xi Jinping has been trying to revive it. Propaganda posters are now everywhere: on fences around construction sites, billboards and walls. The party is waging a low-tech, old-fashioned campaign to sell itself. At the same time it is tightening its grip on creative endeavours that do not have the party’s welfare in mind. Art for the sake of politics is back in vogue.

Art has a long political history in China. It was deployed by all sides in the revolutionary campaigns of the...Continue reading

The party’s goal

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ONE of the most dismal days in the history of Chinese national football was June 15th 2013, President Xi Jinping’s 60th birthday. Having lost to Uzbekistan and Holland in friendly matches earlier that month, China were thrashed 5-1 at home by a Thai youth team. Furious Chinese fans swarmed around China’s Spanish coach, José Antonio Camacho and smashed cars. Mr Camacho resigned.

Men’s football in China is a national shame. In FIFA’s world rankings China’s male players rank 88th; below Estonia, a country whose 1.3m people could fit with room to spare inside a Beijing suburb. China qualified for the World Cup once, in 2002, but failed to score. Its domestic league is blackened by tales of match-fixing and bribery. Investment in expensive foreign coaches has not been much help.

Mr Xi wants to change this. He has been a football fan since childhood, when he played for his school team. During his early career he attended weekend matches. He was in the crowd at a Shanghai stadium in 1983 when China lost 5-1 to Watford, a British club. (The People’s Daily, a party-run newspaper, says Mr Xi...Continue reading

Oh what fun

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Jazzing it up

CITIES across China blink with fairy lights, fancy hotels flaunt trees and tinsel, and glossy magazine covers display festive recipes and table settings. “Joy up!” reads a sign (in English) on three illuminated trees by a shopping mall in Beijing. The Chinese are doing just that.

In the first decades of Communist rule in China Christianity was banned, along with other religions. Now there are tens of millions of Christians in China and faiths of all kinds are blossoming. But this has little to do with the country’s fast-growing fascination with Christmas. In the West the holiday is a commercialised legacy of Christian culture; in China it is almost entirely a product of Mammon. Father Christmas is better known to most than Jesus.

Well before Christmas took hold in China’s cities, its factories were churning out Christmas essentials for consumption in the West. Industrially, China is now the Christmas king. According to Xinhua, a state-run news agency, more than 60% of Christmas trinkets worldwide last year came from a single “Christmas village”—Yiwu (in fact, a city), in the eastern...Continue reading

Propaganda 2.0

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IT LOOKS a lot as new media should, with hip click-bait headlines that are ready to be tweeted on microblogs. One headline on the website of a new online publication in Shanghai, the Paper, is about an “evil” former general, defrocked for corruption—“so wicked he looked loyal, so fake he looked real”. Another headline says that three women have withdrawn an accusation that a teacher raped them during the Cultural Revolution. There is also a story about an internet company being called “mean” for attacking the founder of a Chinese dating app ahead of the app firm’s initial public offering.

This is not the standard packaging of Communist Party propaganda. The party is still getting its message across, but in the style of America’s Huffington Post, a news and opinion site. The Paper aims to be accessible to a generation of Chinese that uses smartphones and social media. The Shanghai Observer, another new-media publication that is part of the same state-owned group as the Paper, made a splash in October by publishing a...Continue reading

Tiger in the net

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

HE HAS always looked a rather nasty piece of work, and China’s press now tells us just how nasty. Zhou Yongkang is a thief, a bully, a philanderer and a traitor who disclosed state secrets. The spider at the centre of a web of corrupt patronage, he enriched himself, his family, his many mistresses and his cronies at vast cost to the government. Many Chinese reading the reports of his arrest released early on December 6th must have felt delighted that at last his comeuppance had arrived. But many must also have asked themselves how such a thoroughly bad egg came so close to the pinnacle of political power in China. And some may have wondered why, in its 93-year history, the Chinese Communist Party had promoted so many villains to its upper ranks.

Mr Zhou was for five years the party’s most senior official responsible for the pervasive internal-security apparatus. He is the most senior Chinese politician to face criminal charges since the “Gang of Four” of Chairman Mao’s close associates was arrested in 1976. Since then serving or retired members of the party’s highest body, the Politburo’s Standing Committee, have been immune from the most...Continue reading

Are you being served?

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ZHU Xinli has gone from prey to predator. The firm he runs, China Huiyuan, is the country’s largest privately owned juice firm. In 2008 Coca Cola, the largest drinks firm in the world, tried to buy his company but was prevented from doing so by Chinese regulators. Today, Mr Zhu is on the prowl for big acquisitions of his own—down under.

China’s juice king joined nearly two dozen of China's leading private businessmen on a recent visit to Australia. The group, which calls itself the China Entrepreneurs Club, wanted to investigate new opportunities created by an ambitious free trade agreement (FTA) that was agreed in principle by President Xi Jinping of China and Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, on the sidelines of a recent G20 summit in Brisbane. Such is the importance Australia attaches to this deal that on December 1st Mr Abbott himself met the visiting fat cats.

One important aspect of the FTA, which is to be formalised in a few months, is that it makes life easier for private Chinese firms. In the past state-owned firms looking for big energy or mining deals dominated southerly investment flows—and, in the process, provoked wails of a takeover by China of Australia's crown jewels (Australia's natural resources are in huge demand in China: see chart).

Continue reading

The world is Xi’s oyster

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

XI JINPING, China’s president, has lately had little choice other than to ponder foreign policy. Last month his country played host to the leaders of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum; he then flew to Brisbane for a G20 summit, going on to visit other parts of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. In between, his prime minister, Li Keqiang, was in Myanmar for yet another summit, the 18-nation East Asian one. This welter of diplomacy seems to have inspired Mr Xi—the most powerful leader in a generation of a country more powerful than for centuries—to spell out his foreign-policy vision. He did so in a speech at the end of November apparently intended in part to reassure China’s neighbours that a strong and rising China need not be feared. It was a good attempt, but not entirely successful.

Reassurance is needed. Hopes that China’s spectacular climb to superpower status might be completed without conflict have been dented in recent years. Its assertive approach to old but until recently largely quiescent territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and India has jangled nerves. In Asia, defence spending has risen...Continue reading

Losing hearts and minds

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE Communist Party’s strategy for bringing the self-governing people of Taiwan into its fold has long been tricky seduction. Ply them with money and favours (and tourists from the mainland) if they play along, and with threats of cutting them off if they don’t. Let them see how happy and prosperous the people of nearby Hong Kong are under Chinese rule.

That strategy is faltering. China is not winning hearts and minds in either Taiwan or Hong Kong. On November 29th voters in regional and municipal elections in Taiwan delivered a drubbing to the ruling Kuomintang party (KMT), which under President Ma Ying-jeou has forged closer economic links with Communist leaders in Beijing but has failed to soothe widespread dissatisfaction with the economy. More than 60% of the 23m people of Taiwan will now be governed by mayors who belong to or are supported by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which opposes union with China. Mr Ma is now an unpopular lame duck serving his second (and final) four-year term, and the DPP has the early advantage in the presidential election due to be held in early 2016.

The electoral rout of the KMT is even more...Continue reading

Home truths

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE most recent occasion when Ms Fan’s husband beat her until her eyes were black and blue was a row over 100 yuan ($16). Ms Fan, who did not want to reveal her full name, is a 37-year-old cleaner. She helped her husband deliver gas canisters on the outskirts of Shanghai but hid some of the proceeds lest he fritter them away on gambling and booze. When he noticed the missing money, her lies did not convince him. “He hit me in the mouth until my lips split against my teeth,” she says.

For more than a decade women’s rights advocates in China have lobbied for a law to afford women better protection. On November 25th an office of the State Council, or cabinet, released a draft of China’s first anti-domestic violence law. At last, the government seems serious about confronting an endemic problem.

Many Chinese families suffer violence. According to a report by the All-China Women’s Federation, a state-controlled NGO, nearly 40% of women who are married or have a boyfriend have experienced physical or sexual violence. And it found that about 53% of boys and 34% of girls are physically abused by their parents. Only 7% of those...Continue reading