X marks the spot

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Missing faces

AFTER pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong late last year that blocked several main streets for weeks, neither the territory’s leaders nor their backers in Beijing are in any mood to make concessions. On April 22nd the Hong Kong government revealed how it would like to conduct elections in 2017 for the territory’s chief executive, as the most senior official is known. The proposal faithfully echoed the views of mainland Communist Party officials, whose disdain for a free vote had triggered the recent unrest. For the first time, Hong Kong residents will all be allowed to cast a vote for their leader. But the only candidates will be ones approved by a committee stacked with the party’s supporters.  

Pro-democracy legislators were quick to show their contempt for the government’s plan. Most of them walked out of the Legislative Council (Legco) when the proposals were announced. The politicians left placards with yellow “X” symbols (see picture): yellow being the adoptive colour of last year’s protests and “X” signifying their intention to vote against the proposals when they are...Continue reading

Keep the fires burning

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ONE Saturday last May, thousands of people near the affluent lakeside city of Hangzhou clashed violently with police during a protest over a planned waste incinerator. The demonstrators feared it would pollute the air in their bucolic district outside the city centre. They burned patrol cars and caused enough mayhem to force the government to delay construction. A few days ago, work on the facility quietly began. Police, both in uniform and plainclothes, were posted on the road into town to discourage troublemakers.

Such security in China is often a symptom of the government’s intolerance of dissent. In this case, however, it also may have had a positive effect, by giving the environment a much-needed break. As China urbanises, its cities are producing a lot more rubbish. They are running out of good places for landfills and are turning instead to burning rubbish, generating electricity at “waste-to-energy” plants like...Continue reading

Staunching the flow

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

CHINESE officials have shown no willingness to compromise in the face of demands for free elections for the post of chief executive in Hong Kong, despite weeks of demonstrations late last year by residents demanding them. But on April 13th the country’s state-controlled media announced a concession to those involved in a subsequent series of protests over the problem of “parallel trading”: trips by mainlanders into Hong Kong for the purpose of buying up goods for resale back across the border. Under a new policy, residents of the neighbouring mainland city of Shenzhen will not be allowed to visit Hong Kong as often using the multi-entry visas favoured by such shoppers.

Hong Kong’s current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, whose dogged support for China’s intransigent stance on political reform in the territory has won him few supporters, has sought to boost his popularity by heeding the complaints of those angered by the large numbers of mainland shoppers who, many Hong Kongers complain, strip shelves of daily necessities and clog public transport. Mr Leung once defended the “parallel traders” as doing nothing illegal. In March, however, he visited Beijing where he sought the help of central-government officials in stemming the influx. Now Shenzhen residents will be issued with multi-entry visas that restrict them to one visit a week instead of...Continue reading

The Mao taboo

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

No joke without fire

WHEN a video of Bi Fujian calling Mao Zedong “a son of a bitch” at a private dinner party was posted online earlier this month, it went viral. The popular-television host was suspended from his job and the clip taken down. The authorities reportedly asked local media to cool discussion of the episode, but online chatter continues unabated.

The gaffe has embarrassed the Communist Party because Mr Bi is one of the best-known faces of China Central Television, the state broadcaster. As well as glitzy talent shows, he presents Chinese television’s most-watched event, the tightly scripted Spring Festival gala. The video, apparently filmed secretly, shows him singing his own mocking lyrics to a Mao-era opera while his guests laugh. The snitch has not been unmasked, while several prominent figures have been quick to say that they were not present. Mr Bi has apologised publicly and promised to “exercise strict self-discipline”.

Chinese media present Mr Bi’s comments as just one example of celebrity brashness. On April 8th Xinhua, a state news agency, attacked Wang Sicong, the son of...Continue reading

Bang goes retirement

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

AT SIXTY, Zhang Chaoshou has only distant memories of his young life in the countryside. He has been working in and around the centre of Chongqing, a province-sized municipality in south-western China, for more than 30 years. As he shovels cement under a fierce sun, he says he will keep working as long as he is able. “Can’t retire,” he says. Like millions of others his age, he cannot afford it. His state pension is just 93 yuan ($15) a month.

Most of the low-skilled workers who for three decades have powered China’s economy are people like Mr Zhang who were born in the countryside and moved to urban areas. They are often called mingong, or peasant workers, even though they have little if any experience of farming; or else, less disparagingly but just as misleadingly, “migrant” workers, though older ones like Mr Zhang may have moved to the cities many years ago and younger ones may have been city-born, to migrant parents.

Under China’s household-registration system, known as hukou, rural connections, even if inherited, determine the kind of welfare benefits individuals may receive....Continue reading

Saving fish and baring teeth

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ON TAKING over in February as China’s minister for environmental protection, Chen Jining said the country needed an environmental law that was “not a paper tiger” but rather a “sharp weapon with teeth of steel”. Early indications, among them the cancellation of a series of dam projects on the upper reaches of the Yangzi river, are that the former academic and university administrator intends to follow through on his fighting words.

State media have reported that the builders of the Yangzi’s Xiaonanhai dam—expected to cost 32 billion yuan ($5.1 billion) and to generate two gigawatts of electricity—were denied permission to continue because of the harm it would cause to a nature reserve that is the last remaining habitat for many species of rare fish. Work on its foundations began in 2012, but was halted while the environment ministry assessed the project. Two smaller dams on the same stretch of river were also rejected.

Activists in China welcomed the decision, saying it showed a new determination to enforce environmental rules. According to Ma Jin of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a...Continue reading

Zombies in the cloud

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

EVER since the dawn of the internet age, China’s government has fretted over dangers that may lurk in the chaotic and unruly realm of cyberspace. It has worked hard to monitor citizens’ internet doings, and block or filter content it does not like. Now authorities are trying to rein in internet chaos they themselves have wrought.

Officials at all levels, from central ministries to local government sub-departments, have invested billions of dollars since the 1990s in their own websites. But users seeking the latest official data or the current party line are often frustrated. Many pages have not been updated in years. Some agencies that were long ago disbanded or merged into others have left their old web pages floating around the internet like space junk. Some sites work only with certain web browsers, some do not work at all and some contain malware.

In March the central government announced plans to set things right. The first step is a review, lasting until December, of the functioning and accuracy of official websites at all levels. Dormant “zombie websites” will be shut, officials promise. State media have called for the punishment of those responsible for having failed to delete them earlier.

Some of the chaos is caused by websites that masquerade as government ones in order to steal personal information, promote property scams or even...Continue reading

Where all Silk Roads lead

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

NOT content with both purifying the Chinese Communist Party which he heads and with reforming his country, China’s president, Xi Jinping, also wants to reshape the economic and political order in Asia. With the flair that Chinese leaders share for pithy but rather bewildering encapsulations, his vision for the continent is summed up in official jargon as “One Belt, One Road”. As Mr Xi describes it, most recently last month at the Boao Forum, China’s tropical-beach imitation of Davos’s ski slopes, the belt-road concept will “answer the call of our time for regional and global co-operation”. Not everybody is convinced. Some see it as no more than an empty slogan; others as a thinly disguised Chinese plot to supplant America as Asia’s predominant power. Both criticisms seem misplaced. Mr Xi is serious about the idea. And it is less a “plot” than a public manifesto.

Mr Xi first floated the idea in 2013, in Kazakhstan. He mooted a “a Silk Road economic belt” of improved infrastructure along the main strands of what, centuries ago, was the network of overland routes used by silk traders and others to carry merchandise to and from China...Continue reading

Great walls of fire

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

ON MARCH 26th GitHub, an American-based website for programmers, began to suffer what it says is its biggest ever denial-of-service attack. The means and apparent motive were just as noteworthy: the Great Firewall, China’s web-filtering infrastructure, was used. The assault seems to have been intended to persuade GitHub to drop content the Chinese authorities object to, including the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times. The attackers’ identities will probably never be confirmed. But the rules of online engagement with China have taken a nasty turn.

As its nickname suggests, the Great Firewall is a defensive barricade against foreign web content which officials see as undesirable. Until now internet users outside China have been little affected. That changed on March 17th, security analysts say, when the firewall began to be used by unidentified hackers to hijack traffic and redirect it to sites set up by Greatfire.org, an activist outfit that helps users in China to access content that is normally blocked (including the Chinese-language New York Times). The assault on GitHub was similar. Both...Continue reading

Relics of plunder

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

BEFORE it was removed from display earlier this month, a Buddha statue formed the centrepiece of an exhibition at Budapest’s Natural History Museum. Encased in layers of clay, enamel and gold paint was a monk, mummified 1,000 years ago. The origins of this Chinese relic, just one of millions scattered across the globe, many of them plundered, were misty until a village in south-east China claimed it—and demanded it back.

On March 6th Lin Yongtuan of Yangchun chanced on a photo of the statue while browsing online. He thought it looked like the statue of Zhanggong Zushi, a revered monk, stolen from the village temple in 1995. After reviewing the archives and faded photographs, the authorities agreed. They have pledged to secure its return. This will not be simple. It belongs to a private collector who acquired it in 1995 from another who bought it from a “sincere Chinese Hong Kong art friend”. But where there is a will, there may be a way.

In 2009 Christie’s, an auction house, sold two bronze heads despite Beijing’s open disapproval. The winning $38m bid came from an adviser to China’s national treasures fund—who refused to...Continue reading

Just a little bit richer

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE villagers of Dingjiayan subsist on corn, potatoes, sunflowers and the few vegetables they grow. They sell the surplus and buy meat and a few other necessities in the nearby county town of Tianzhen. Its mud-and-brick buildings, and its setting among dusty hills in the north-eastern corner of Shanxi province, offer little to the occasional visitor to distinguish it from countless other parts of China where hard work brings but a meagre living. Yet Tianzhen county, of which Dingjiayan is a part, is one of just 592 areas that the central government designates as “impoverished”.

China’s official threshold for rural poverty is an annual income of 2,300 yuan ($370) per person. But the criteria for classifying a village or county are complex and often revised. They include comparisons of poverty rates and average incomes with those of the province, adjustments for inflation, quotas on the number of villages that may count as poor and a ban on including villages that own collective enterprises, whatever their income level. Though dozens of places have been listed and delisted every few years since the 1990s, the total has remained curiously fixed—at...Continue reading