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With temperatures reaching the mid-30s, it's the hottest time of Hong Kong's sticky summer. That, in addition to the recession, is making life even harder for the city's growing number of cage dwellers--the city's poorest inhabitants who pay roughly $170 per month to live in 18-square-foot wire cages. Read Lisa Thomas' full story here.
Various reports yesterday (here's the Financial Times) noted that the U.S. and China ended discussions aimed at solving the problem of confrontation betweem Chinese ships and the U.S. Navy in what China's is evidently aiming to make a 200 mile exclusive maritime zone off its coast. I say evidently as the talks clearly didin't go well. As this graf indicates, the Chinese side is taking its usual extreme bargaining position:
“The way to resolve China-US maritime incidents is for the US to change its surveillance and survey operations policies against China, decrease and eventually stop such operations,” Xinhua, the official news agency, quoted the Ministry of National Defence as saying.
Actually, I am not sure how much this is a bargaining position and how much it really represents a conscious foreign policy decision by Beijing to carve out an exclusion zone into which other navies--and most obviously the U.S. Navy-- may not enter. Policy making in China is a complex and often opaque business. And when it involves the military it becomes particularly tricky. As we've written in the past, the Chinese Admirals have been the ones making the most noise on this issue in the past. the question is, are they driving this policy and how far exactly are they willing to go? It seems highly unlikely Washington would cede on this. apart from anything else, every other country in the world would claim the same exclusion rights, which could be problematical, to put it mildly. A definite danger area in U.S.-China relations.
Just back from summer holiday and the ever reliable Global Times scores immediately with a piece on a supposed online controversy (as is their common practice backed up with the results of an online poll, which are surely meaningless and easily manipulated even by the loose standards of statistics) revolving around the CCTV Towers, about which we have written often. Apparently the nickname most commonly in use "Big Underpants" doesn't reflect what Chinese netizens think is the main resemblance of the buildings, which the story says are supposed to represent the male and female genitalia (the story has an accompanying picture for those who need guidance; the male building, by the way, which was to house the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, is the one that went up in flames, though I don't think that was part of the symbolism).
Anyway, here are the money grafs, quotes from the firm of architects who designed the towers:
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas published a statement on oma.nl, the website of his company, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), saying, “The glorious CCTV building stands as the shining symbol for the ever-changing world order, and that's the exact intent of our design.”
(Is it just me or is this a piece of meaningless pseudery?)
The statement also denies that pictures portraying the tower as human genitalia were produced by OMA, indicating that the pictures were circulated on the Internet in 2005 and are not connected to the company.
Pretty priceless stuff. Rather akin to asking a politician "when did you stop beating your wife?" to elicit a denial and then publishing a big headline saying, "Politician Denies Beating Wife."
This weekend authorities released Xu Zhiyong, the lawyer who was arrested last month in an investigation into the taxes of the legal research group he heads. Zhuang Lu, an assistant, was also let out of jail, as was a Uighur economist who was arrested after deadly rioting in western Xinjiang region, AP reported.
Xu's group, the Open Constitution Initiative (or Gongmeng in Chinese), is known for representing clients like the families of children sickened by tainted milk powder, or a woman who was accused of killing a government official in apparent self defense. He represents a moderate line of political reformers in China whose goal is not to overthrow the system but to make it live up to its promise of rule of law.
While Xu and Zhuang may still face charges in the tax case, their release on bail signals a slight relaxation of the pressure against the group. Gongmeng had had difficulties contesting or repaying the $200,000 in tax penalties it was said to owe because Xu was unable to sign documents or appear at hearings for much of his detention.
In Beijing yesterday Tony Blair praised the progress China has made on green initiatives, which are outlined in a new report by the Climate Group. "Chinese businesses are now today among the top producers of electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and energy efficient appliances," he said. "In an incredibly short space of time, China has taken the lead in the race to develop and commercialize a range of low-carbon technologies."
On the same morning as Blair was making his announcement, Chinese media were reporting on the country's latest environmental disaster. Nearly 100 children in central Hunan province were found to be suffering from lead poisoning due to unchecked emissions from a factory near their homes. A few days earlier protesting villagers forced the closure of another polluting factory in Shaanxi province. And three weeks before that, there were demonstrations over yet another toxin spewing plant, this one also in Hunan.
Journalist Christina Larson recently wrote about the "Great Paradox of China," of green tech and gray skies:
The experience of daily life in Beijing hardly gives the impression that the last year has been a watershed for the environment in China. Being in the capital, one can't help but feel a little quizzical glancing at recent headlines from newspapers in Washington, New York, and London announcing China's green-tech revolution. (This is what an eco-friendly revolution feels like?)
It Thursday is any indication, this paradox will only sharpen.
Hong Kong has made the startling discovery that some of its young people are taking drugs instead of being the well-behaved ping-pong playing, academic over-achievers that they are supposed to be. Each day, it seems, the papers gloat over some new tale of teens and chemical depravity. Oddly, much of it occurs in the last place you would want to be while monging: school itself. We read of the private school boy caught in a corridor with three E's in his pocket; or of girls poleaxed by lunchtime lines of ketamine; or the youngsters wheeled out of classrooms, supine, after being found face down in their textbooks. Oh, the wickedness of it all.
Personally, the thought of being “on one” during a lecture on photosynthesis, linear equations or Tang Dynasty poetry makes me wince. But never mind. The government's endearingly inept response is to institute a program of voluntary drug testing in schools. Young pillheads will be asked to provide urine samples and if they refuse—well, nothing will happen. It appears that by law, under-18s are not deemed to have the necessary faculties to consent to such tests (even if the crafty scamps have the wits to score drugs amid the bleak concourses of suburban housing estates, under the noses of police and parents, at any time of day or night). Neither educators nor family members can compel them.
Despite this gross impediment to its overall effectiveness, the plan has provoked plenty of opposition. The silent majority sees it for the piece of tokenism that it is because, let's face it, the generally sober, orderly and decent people of Hong Kong really aren't living in a drug hell, whatever the gutter press may tell you. But social activists and panicky foreigners are in revolt, imagining voluntary drug testing to be the harbinger of some terrible Orwellian future of curtailed liberties and government snooping. Today, it's a student agreeing to provide a urine sample, the argument goes. Tomorrow, it'll be dawn raids on the homes of poets and professors.
Lol. And let us note that the colonial government was far more draconian. I remember drug enforcement as a secondary school student in Kowloon, where, believe me, there were no social workers politely coughing and asking for your signature on a consent form. Staff would raid student lockers and take them apart with grim sureness, even the packed lunches, which would be left in a soggy, inedible heap of squashed bread, cling wrap and sandwich filling. I once saw a teacher hold a lettuce leaf up to the light, just in case in proved to be anything smokable. If a fanatic like that really wanted your urine in a jar, he'd have beaten it out of you.
In the late 1990s and early years of this decade China's industrial regions were hit by extensive protests as workers resisted the privatization of large state-owned enterprises. Now there are signs of that labor unrest returning. For the second time in a month steelworkers have protested the sale of a mill to private buyers. In late July a manager was killed by rioting steelworkers in northeastern Jilin province. That violence helped block a proposed takeover. Over the weekend another proposed privatization of a steel mill in central Henan province was also thwarted by worker protests.
The unrest at the two steel mills does not seem, paradoxically, to be directly linked to the global economic downturn. China's steel mills have been booming in recent months in response to the country's $586 billion stimulus package, which has focused on steel-heavy infrastructure projects. As state-owned mills have turned profitable, they've attracted investors who invision further gains by cutting huge payrolls. Labor rights advocates say workers have too little say in how the deals are worked out, leaving them with little avenue but to protest. Now that two privatization plans have been blocked in quick successsion, steelworkers in other mills will surely be emboldened. As China's steel sector booms, more unrest seems inevitable.
Typhoon Morakot has killed 126 people in Taiwan, but another 3-400 are still missing, likely buried when a mudslide claimed the southern village of Xsiao Lin (or Siaolin). Our reporter Natalie Tso reports on the aftermath in Cishan, Taiwan: A Week After Typhoon, Taiwan Rescues Continue. And here's Austin's story on how billions of dollars in donations have been handled since the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan: Sichuan Quake Donations Now Under State Control.
Artist Ai Weiwei, who has led a campaign to document student deaths from last year's Sichuan earthquake, was detained with several other activists last night in Chengdu. The group was there to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, another activist who has investigated the quake's aftermath and is charged with subversion. According to the Associated Press:
Ai said the court had refused to allow him to testify at Tan's trial so he decided to try to go to the court to show support for Tan, but four police officers carrying guns and batons barged into his hotel room at 3 a.m. Wednesday to take him away.
One of them struck him on his right cheek when he questioned them, he said, while another supporter was also roughed up.
"They said, 'If we need, we can beat you to death'," Ai said in a phone interview from the hotel that police took him and the other supporters to, not far from the court. About 20 officers guarded them, but did not give a reason for their detention, Ai said.
Chinese blogger Wen Yunchao has posted a photo apparently snapped by Ai in an elevator as he was taken away by officers this morning. It's impressively composed, given the circumstances.
China is reconsidering restrictions on street merchants, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The story has significance beyond whether residents of Chinese cities can find a good kabob stand. In recent years conflicts between peddlers and the police forces responsible for monitoring them have frequently spiraled out of control, with officers and vendors both resorting to violence. City management officers, or chengguan in Chinese, have developed a reputation for thuggery. With the economic slowdown there have been calls to ease the restrictions on street vendors in order to not shut off one avenue for employment open to jobless migrant workers. The Journal's story indicates that there is official recognition that something needs to be done. One question not raised is that of money. In some cities vendors can register already, but it is expensive and time consuming. If the system is to change in a meaningful way, then it has to be something low-income peddlers can afford.
Given the institutional inertia built into the city management system, major changes could prove difficult. Likewise, Chinese cities in recent years have been obsessive with reducing the jumble of city streets, sometimes at the loss of urban flavor. Will they reverse that for the sake of street vendors?
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