Analects
China
Beijing's air pollution
Blackest day
Jan 14th 2013, 4:49 by T.P. | BEIJING
ON January 12th of last year, in an article in the print edition of The Economist, we reported that the public outcry over Beijing’s atrocious air quality was putting pressure on officials to release more data about more kinds of pollutants. We also noted that Chinese authorities had already embarked on a wide range of strategies to improve air quality, and that they probably deserve more credit than either foreign or domestic critics tend to give them. But we concluded with the sad reality that such work takes decades, and that “Beijing residents will need to wait before seeing improvements.”
Talking about press freedom
Warm porridge and bitter tea
Jan 11th 2013, 11:31 by T.P. | BEIJING
IN THIS week’s dramatic tussle over press freedoms, much of the action took place in the Guangzhou newsroom of Southern Weekend, the newspaper at the heart of the dispute, where journalists organised petitions and threatened a strike. There was more action in the streets outside the paper’s headquarters, where supporters of press freedom bickered with supporters of the Communist Party and its old-line, heavy-handed approach to media control.
But China’s growing chorus of new-line, new-media voices have managed to put their own stamp on the controversy too. They have had to be rather creative about it, since the old-line forces still call most of the shots.
Google in China
Mr Kim, tear down that wall; Mr Xi, carry on
Jan 11th 2013, 7:05 by V.V.V.
“AS THE world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world.” So declared Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to a throng of reporters in Beijing. Given that his firm more or less abandoned China’s heavily censored internet search market a few years ago in order not to be “evil”, these sound like fighting words. Mr Schmidt went on: “The government has to do something—they have to make it possible for people to use the internet.”
At first blush, such words would seem timed to throw Google’s considerable heft behind those who are pushing for freer flows of information in China.
Continue reading "Mr Kim, tear down that wall; Mr Xi, carry on" »
China in transition
Echoes of Tiananmen
Jan 10th 2013, 17:32 by Economist.com
IN THE face of increasing discontent over press freedom and the justice system, our correspondents assess the mounting pressure on China's rulers
Press freedom
Street politics
Jan 8th 2013, 16:13 by J.M. | GUANGZHOU
RARELY since the heady days of the Tiananmen Square unrest of 1989 have people in China gathered so openly, and so free of police interference, in support of wide-ranging political freedoms as they have in the past two days in the southern city of Guangzhou. The pretext for the gatherings has been the watering-down of a feisty New Year’s message that a local newspaper, Southern Weekend, was preparing to run in its latest edition. It would have urged the Communist Party to uphold the Chinese constitution and the freedoms it purportedly guarantees. Chinese journalists have accused censors of modifying the message to make it more like praise of the party.
Curbing dissent
Muzzling the media
Jan 4th 2013, 12:29 by J.M. | BEIJING
AS The Economist reported this week in its China section, the Communist Party’s new leaders are facing bold calls for political reform. These are coming from figures close to the establishment, with backing from at least a couple of the country’s more liberal-minded newspapers. Since we published the story, more signs have appeared of the leadership’s anxiety about these appeals for greater freedom and democracy, which began to surface almost as soon as the new leadership was installed in November. Officials could well be worried that unless they move quickly to suppress the appeals, demands for political change might spread to other newspapers and gather support from the public.
Dissent and the demands of literature
Mo on Mo
Jan 3rd 2013, 8:22 by L.M.
MO YAN'S characters are often inspired by real people, if not, in any obvious way, by their politics. His father featured in “Red Sorghum”, Mr Mo’s most famous work. The main character in “Frogs” is his aunt, who was hounded by the press as a result. And his mother was the reason he wrote “Big Breasts and Wide Hips”. Mr Mo’s latest novel, “Pow!” (reviewed in our sister-blog, Prospero), is all about Mo Yan. A ripe opportunity, then, to see for once what the world’s newest Nobel laureate thinks of the Chinese state and the role of the writer within it?
Mr Mo has been criticised for not thinking what people think he should think about China.
China's global role
You can't have it all
Dec 20th 2012, 5:15 by T.P. | BEIJING
The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy. By Edward N. Luttwak. Belknap Press of Harvard Univeristy; 268 pages; £19.95
MANY aspire to it, but few succeed. Any modern parent juggling the demands of a job and a family knows all too well how difficult it can be to "have it all". But what about a certain emerging Asian superpower?
Edward Luttwak, an American military strategist, argues in his new book that China’s simultaneous pursuit of three strategic goals is untenable. In his view, it must soon choose between them if it is to avert catastrophe.
Anniversary of the Nanjing massacre
Ebbs and flows of history
Dec 13th 2012, 6:27 by T.P. | BEIJING
THERE are two times of year when crowds swell at the sombre and imposing memorial to victims of the violence carried out here in 1937 by Japanese troops. One is during April’s grave-sweeping holiday, when Chinese families honour deceased ancestors. The other is the period surrounding the December 13th anniversary of the start of the six-week rampage that killed an estimated 300,000 Chinese and is known to history as the Nanjing Massacre.
China is never shy about putting its history to political use when it seems expedient, and this year’s anniversary, the 75th, coming at an especially sensitive juncture in China’s ever tense relationship with Japan, is one of those times.
Public appearances
Fancy dress
Dec 11th 2012, 4:11 by J.J. | BEIJING
CHINESE author Mo Yan travelled last week to Sweden to collect the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. The decision to give the award to Mr Mo (whose real name is Guan Moye; his pen name means “Does not Speak”) has not been without controversy. After the announcement of his triumph, Mr Mo came in for a round of criticism from fellow writers and intellectuals, including many who feel that he is too cosy with the Chinese government.
Self-immolation in Tibet
The burning issue
Dec 9th 2012, 3:18 by Banyan | SINGAPORE
YET again Tibetans have burnt themselves to death in protest at Chinese rule. According to a website produced by Tibetan exiles, Kunchok Phelgye, a 24-year-old monk, set himself on fire on December 8th, near Kirti monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan. In a separate incident on the same day and in the same region, where this form of protest began in February 2009, Pema Dorjee, a 23-year-old, also lost his life. Since the first self-immolation, more than 90 Tibetans have followed suit. Most have done so to protest against Chinese rule, and to call for the return to Tibet of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader.
The desperate protests are not petering out.
Microblogging and the world
Intweetable
Dec 2nd 2012, 14:06 by T.P. | BEIJING
OF THE 264 Twitter accounts belonging to governments and world leaders, and the 350,289 tweets that have been sent from those accounts to their 51,990,656 followers, not a single one was sent by a Chinese leader.
This information comes courtesy of a new report called Twiplomacy, which describes the ways in which governments use Twitter to brand their countries and to interact with important constituencies both at home and abroad. Issued by Burson-Marsteller, a big public-relations firm, the study reveals fascinating trends about the patterns of usage and inter-connections between heads of state around the world.
Literature of officialdom
The civil servant's novel
Dec 2nd 2012, 12:02 by C.S.M. | BEIJING
REGISTRATIONS for the civil-service exams reached a record high this year of about 1.4m, 20 times what they were a decade ago. The perquisites of life in the civil service make it look like a “golden rice bowl” to many. But in fact Chinese officialdom is something more like a poisoned chalice—or so says one of the country’s bestselling authors. His fiction exposes the self-serving corruption, greed and ferocious politicking that passes for life among China’s politicians and bureaucrats.
Wang Xiaofang is no stranger to Chinese politics. In the late 1990s, he served as private secretary to Ma Xiangdong, then the deputy mayor of Shenyang, a metropolis in the north-east.
Bogus media
Too sexy by far
Nov 28th 2012, 7:33 by G.E. | BEIJING
SOMETIMES China flexes its soft power without really having any idea it has done so. That appears to be what happened on November 27th when the People’s Daily Online, a website of the Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece, reported on an article by the Onion, a satirical version of an American newspaper, declaring North Korea’s Kim Jong Un the “Sexiest Man Alive”. The report, complete with a gallery of 55 photographs of the North Korean dictator at work and play, quickly became an internet sensation.
Some wondered immediately whether a Chinese editor might have been in on the joke.
Parallel history
Times of intrigue and promise
Nov 15th 2012, 8:35 by J.J. | BEIJING
IN THE crisp autumn air of a November day in Beijing, a meeting of notables convened to anoint a new ruler. The previous administration had overseen a decade of reform including new policies that pushed economic and industrial development to unprecedented levels. Sweeping changes in education and growing prosperity, especially in the cities along China’s coastline, transformed society but had also unleashed new social forces that the government struggled to contain.
Insights into China's politics, business, society and culture. An allusion to Confucius, the name means “things gathered up” or “literary fragments”
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