Determined

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

EVERY year on June 4th, thousands of people gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to commemorate the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The former British colony is the only place in China where large-scale mourning of the bloodshed is tolerated. This year crowds will gather as usual. But a growing number of people now criticise the event, arguing that Hong Kong should fight for its own causes, rather than marking the mainland’s struggles. The splintering of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is a product of growing antipathy towards China. Other protest movements increasingly stress a separate identity in the territory too. The governments of Hong Kong and China are watching with alarm.

When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Chinese officials hoped that a gradual narrowing of the wealth gap between it and the mainland would help to overcome the misgivings of many Hong Kongers. There has been much evidence since then of the mainland’s growing success: millions of rich tourists have been pouring into Hong Kong to shop, China’s brightest students have been flocking to local universities and mainland professionals have...Continue reading

Big plan, a little fuzzy

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

FROM the damming and diverting of mighty rivers to the building of huge new cities from the ground up, China’s government does not shy away from grand schemes. The Communist Party’s highest decision-making body has now signed off on another one: the integration of the capital, Beijing, with the nearby port city of Tianjin and much of the surrounding province of Hebei in a “co-ordinated development programme”.

The idea had been under quiet consideration for years, but after the Politburo announced on April 30th that it would move forward, extravagant claims quickly followed. It could turn the region into a “Chinese version of the Rhine-Ruhr”, one of Germany’s most populous and productive areas, said Xinhua, a state-run news agency. Other reports likened the potential effects to the “powerful boost” enjoyed by Los Angeles when, decades ago, it incorporated nearby counties. An economist at Peking University said it would be “earthshaking” for the region’s population of more than 100m and bring “tremendous economic progress in north-eastern China by 2050”. According to the finance ministry, the project will attract 42 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion) in investment over the next six years alone.

The decision to go ahead was taken at a meeting chaired by Xi Jinping, China’s president and the Communist Party’s leader. Reports in state...Continue reading

And the law won

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IN DECEMBER 2005 Asia Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine in Hong Kong, put 14 Chinese civil-rights advocates on its cover. It hailed them and their brethren in the cause of weiquan, or rights protection, as “men of the year” for their brave efforts to advance the rule of law in China. The cover might as well have been a “most wanted” poster. Since then authorities have turned the lawyers into a gang of “criminals” and fugitives.

All of the activists pictured on the magazine’s cover have since been imprisoned, detained, beaten or threatened, except for one lawyer who had already fled the country into exile in Canada. The most vocal among them were, as their sympathisers like to put it, “disappeared” by party-hired thugs in extralegal abductions.

It has been a long and hard fall that says much about the Communist Party’s chosen path of evolution. Activists seeking to protect the legal rights of ordinary citizens rose to prominence in the early 2000s. At the time the party was trying to professionalise its legal system, to encourage people to seek redress through the courts and...Continue reading

A mighty mission

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE Chinese Communist Party does not go up against America’s mightiest heroes very often. But this month the latest Avengers film starring comic-book superheroes hit Chinese cinemas within days of “Mr Deng goes to Washington”, a documentary on a different kind of superpower alliance—Deng Xiaoping’s nine-day trip to America just after the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1979. The Avengers strive to save humans from extinction, whereas Deng must rescue China from poverty. Yet the biopic has diplomatic ambitions too: it seeks to polish the image of China’s relationship with America ahead of Xi Jinping’s first state visit to Washington as Chinese president in September.

The biopic is part of Mr Xi’s campaign to deploy the image of Deng, who ruled China from 1978-1992, to bolster his own position. Last year, for example, a 48-episode drama about Deng was aired on state television. The government did not directly fund the just-released “Mr Deng”, but its author and director, Fu Hongxing, used to run the state-backed China Film Archive. During the editing some of the wider geopolitics was reportedly stripped out. A reference...Continue reading

Correction: Bitter harvest

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Correction: Our article on farm subsidies (“Bitter harvest”, May 16th) said China was providing food for two-fifths of the world’s population with a tenth of its arable land. In fact it provides for one-fifth of humanity with that area. This has been corrected online.

Deep roots

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

No poem lovelier

IN RECENT years the sight of historic neighbourhoods, their houses often a century or more old, reduced to rubble to make way for grim new structures has been tragically common in Chinese cities. Officials have often appeared to care little about the architecture they destroy and the communities they scatter. Oddly, however, they have just as often made strenuous efforts to preserve one beloved feature of the urban landscape: ancient trees.

The capital, Beijing, the scene of some of the most brutish flattening of traditional housing, boasts that it has the most trees over a century old of any Chinese city: more than 40,000, of which more than 6,000 are at least 300 years old. Many are in the grounds of former imperial palaces, which are well protected, but those in ordinary neighbourhoods are usually looked after lovingly, too. On new roads, traffic sometimes has to weave around them. So sacred are old trees that concessions are made for them even when tarmac is laid.

Officials charged with monitoring the trees’ welfare have long toured courtyards and alleyways with tape-measures and...Continue reading

Burned again

Bitter harvest

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

OVER the past five years, as farm wages soared, sugar-cane growers in southern China looked across the border to Vietnam for help. They hired Vietnamese workers—nearly a quarter cheaper than Chinese ones—to tend their fields, especially during the winter harvest. The immigrants were illegal but local authorities looked the other way. Some 50,000 Vietnamese streamed annually into Chongzuo, China’s “sugar capital” in Guangxi province, where cane stalks sprout from red fields nestled among the karst hills. But given recent political tensions with Vietnam, China has started to turn the migrants away. For sugar-cane growers, the effect is akin to Mexican workers suddenly disappearing from Californian fruit farms.

Even without this blow, Chongzuo’s farmers should have been in deep financial trouble because of competition from cheap imports. But they were just about making ends meet, thanks to efforts by the central government to prop up the country’s sugar industry. It has slowed approvals of imported sugar and bought the more expensive local product for bulging state reserves. To encourage loss-making farmers to go on planting sugar cane,...Continue reading

Bidding masters

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE art world shook on May 11th when a painting by Pablo Picasso was sold for $179m at a Christie’s sale in New York to an unidentified bidder—the highest sum ever paid for an artwork at auction. But a Sotheby’s auction on May 5th, also in New York, caused a bigger tremor. At that sale, bidders from mainland China agreed to pay a combined total of $116m for works by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and another by Picasso. It was striking evidence of China emerging as a new source of demand for the European masters, and of its buyers’ willingness to bid handsomely.

The art of the deal: A history of record prices for art sold at public auction

Two of the successful bidders at Sotheby’s were movie moguls: Wang Zhongjun, the chairman of Huayi Brothers Media, one of China’s largest film companies, who took Picasso’s “Femme au Chignon dans un Fauteuil” for $29.9m; and Wang Jianlin, the chairman of Dalian Wanda, a property conglomerate, who bought...Continue reading

The wrong direction

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE total value of support given by the Chinese government to farmers exceeds that of any other country. In 2012, the most recent year for which comparative data exist, China paid out $165 billion in direct and indirect agricultural subsidies. The next highest totals were those of Japan at $65 billion and America at just over $30 billion, according to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

On a relative basis, however, China’s support is more in line with global norms. Subsidies as a share of farm income are about 17%, rapidly catching up with the average for the OECD, a group of wealthier countries. The most lavish spenders include Japan, South Korea and Switzerland, where subsidies account for more than half of farm income.

More troubling is the trajectory (see chart). Among major emerging markets tracked by the OECD, China is second only to Indonesia in the rate of its subsidy growth. China’s farm support rose from 1.4% of GDP in 1995-97 to 2.3% in 2010-12. It is moving in the opposite direction from developed countries, which are gradually reducing such support. Average spending...Continue reading

Mosh no more

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Strawberry fields, forever?

CRACKDOWNS in China often unfold without explanation, carried out by officials acting on directives that never see the light of day. A veteran journalist, Gao Yu, was jailed last month for seven years for revealing the existence of a campaign against the discussion of Western political ideas. The Communist Party document that ordered it was a state secret, the court ruled. Rock musicians, at least those of a more rebellious stripe, therefore have had cause to worry of late. Even at the best of times their concerts are prone to cancellation by officials for unclear reasons. In recent weeks, however, this has been happening more often than usual. Many suspect the party of losing patience with rock music’s more rebellious fringe.

The 330 Metal Festival had been held without a hitch since 2002. This year the daylong bash was, as usual, to have featured heavy-metal bands whose very names sound calculated to annoy the party’s prudes: Crack, Massacre of Mothman and Suffocated (330 refers to the birthday on March 30th of the festival’s organiser, a guitarist with Suffocated). But a few hours after the...Continue reading

An uneasy friendship

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE celebrations in Moscow on May 9th to commemorate the capitulation of Nazi Germany 70 years ago will speak volumes about today’s geopolitics. While Western leaders are staying away in protest against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine (and the first annexation of sovereign territory in Europe since the second world war), China’s president, Xi Jinping, will be the guest of honour of his friend, Vladimir Putin. Western sanctions over Ukraine, and what looks set to be a long-term chilling of relations with America and Europe, has given Russia no option other than to embrace China as tightly as it can.

Next week, in a further symbol of the growing strategic partnership between the two countries, three or four Chinese and six Russian naval vessels will meet up to conduct live-fire drills in the eastern Mediterranean. The exercise, which follows several similar ones in the Pacific since 2013, aims to send a clear message to America and its allies. For Russia the manoeuvres signal that it has a powerful friend and a military relationship with a growing geographic reach. For China even a small-scale exercise of this kind (its ships are coming from anti-piracy...Continue reading

Not so far away

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

“THE mountains are high; the emperor is far away,” goes a Chinese saying that has always given comfort to bureaucrats who play fast and loose with the law in remote parts of the country. But often, these days, distance is not enough. Those who hanker after the added protection of a foreign jurisdiction are often called “naked officials”. The term describes people who have moved families and assets abroad in readiness for escape themselves. Now, however, anti-graft officers are trying to extend their reach beyond China’s borders.

Since late last year, as part of the most intense and sustained anti-corruption drive in the history of Communist-ruled China, officials have been stepping up efforts to persuade foreign countries to send back those who have fled with their ill-gotten gains. On April 22nd they released a wanted list, together with mugshots, of 100 such people, as part of a new operation called Sky Net. The list was compiled by a Communist Party body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), whose agents often hold suspects in secret detention and torture them. “We will apprehend them no matter where they flee to,” Fu...Continue reading

Making waves

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

IN NOVEMBER, after months of frantic land reclamation in the South China Sea aimed at boosting its vast territorial claim there, China tried a subtler approach. It opened a think-tank in Arlington, Virginia—an outpost of its National Institute for South China Sea Studies on Hainan, a tropical (and indisputably Chinese) island on the sea’s northern shore. One role for the new think-tank is to make an academic case for China’s vaguely backed assertion that most of the strategically vital waters are within its domain—despite rival claims by South-East Asian countries.   

On April 16th the Institute for China-America Studies, as the Virginia-based centre is called, held a conference at a hotel in Washington. Its Chinese-government connections clearly had pull. Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state whom Chinese leaders much revere, spoke in a pre-recorded video about the importance of ties between Beijing and Washington. Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to America, attended in person. Mr Cui told participants that his country would act with “restraint” in the South China Sea, although he also said it would vigorously defend...Continue reading