The British Ambassador to Ireland, Mr David Reddaway, announced today that Bono is being awarded an honorary knighthood.
As Bono is Irish he is not entitled to the 'Sir' title, as a British national would be, and he can receive the award in a ceremony in Dublin. The award is being granted for his services to music and for his activism.
In 2003 Bono was presented with the Legion D'Honneur by President Jacques Chirac on behalf of the French Government, for his contribution to music and his campaigning work. Also in recognition of his work promoting justice and equality, Bono was awarded the Time Person of the Year 2005, along with Bill and Melinda Gates.
British honours are granted by The Queen, on advice from the British Government and previous non-British recipients include Bill Gates, Placido Domingo, Rudolf Giuliani, Steven Spielberg and Simon Wiesenthal.
We understand that Bono is 'very flattered' to be honoured, particularly if the honour - like its French counterpart - opens doors for his long standing campaigning work against extreme poverty in Africa.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Book Review: U2 & Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band
U2 fans will find that the book is riddled with errors about U2's history. While the writers took great care to provide correct information regarding the philosophers they quote from and cite, the same is not true about their information gathering about U2. Some examples of these errors include when the band first formed, when albums were released, and stating that songs like "Acrobat" and "Always" were performed live during the Zooropa tour, which they weren't. There are too many historical errors to list here, but the bottom line is that it makes the reader think that these essayists are not familiar enough with U2's work to make a solid case for their argument.
What is also troubling about this book is that the majority of the authors make sweeping generalizations about U2's fans, the band themselves, and U2's music without offering any support...
This book is not designed for a casual U2 fan. It is also not designed for someone with no background in philosophy. For the U2 fan who has read every book available on the band and found John Waters' Race of Angels a tough read, you are in for a similar experience. You'll be challenged in many ways, but not in the ways a U2 fan would hope to be. I found myself questioning if some of the authors even listened to U2's music, or even if they were fans?
If the book's intention was to show me "how to decipher an atomic band," it left me wondering how on Earth the authors would think that Bono had Descartes, Derrida, Aristotle or Plato in mind whilst writing a lyric. I'm sure Bono's familiar with some of the philosophers, but to actually believe that Bono's writing of "Vertigo" was a direct correlation to the works of Aristotle is a tough pill to swallow.
What is also troubling about this book is that the majority of the authors make sweeping generalizations about U2's fans, the band themselves, and U2's music without offering any support...
This book is not designed for a casual U2 fan. It is also not designed for someone with no background in philosophy. For the U2 fan who has read every book available on the band and found John Waters' Race of Angels a tough read, you are in for a similar experience. You'll be challenged in many ways, but not in the ways a U2 fan would hope to be. I found myself questioning if some of the authors even listened to U2's music, or even if they were fans?
If the book's intention was to show me "how to decipher an atomic band," it left me wondering how on Earth the authors would think that Bono had Descartes, Derrida, Aristotle or Plato in mind whilst writing a lyric. I'm sure Bono's familiar with some of the philosophers, but to actually believe that Bono's writing of "Vertigo" was a direct correlation to the works of Aristotle is a tough pill to swallow.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Letter from China: The sex industry is everywhere but nowhere
SHANGHAI: What's the fastest-growing industry in China? Mobile phones? Computer components? Toys? The last wouldn't be too far off, but not in the sense that the word toys is conventionally understood. Call them playthings.
Anecdotal evidence is the best one can do for a field such as this, but a bet could be placed on the sex industry. Yes, prostitution.
It is scarcely possible to walk for 10 minutes in any big Chinese city without coming across the sex trade in one of its many guises. Prostitutes work in most hotels, and are indeed employed by the hotels, including the state- owned ones. They work the streets, the clubs, and massage and sauna parlors, which range from monstrously gaudy to grimy holes in the wall.
They can be found in barber shops and beauty salons; sometimes they are the only people working in such establishments. And they are present — no, ubiquitous — at every class level of society, down to the poorest neighborhoods of Shanghai and the lowliest villages.
Numbers range all over the board, from the official estimates one sees from time to time of 3 million prostitutes nationwide, to U.S. State Department reports that have placed the figure at 10 million, to a Chinese economist, Yang Fan, who has estimated there are 20 million sex workers in the country, accounting for fully 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
EyePress/AP
Police raid
Coming back to anecdotal impressions, it would not surprise this writer if all of these figures were low. Beyond the numbers, though, it is when one considers that before economic changes were introduced a quarter- century ago, there was essentially no open prostitution in China at all — none — that one is most astounded.
Ordinarily, a phenomenon that had grown so fast and become this vast would be grist for all manner of conversation, from the public health implications of near-universal prostitution, to the social causes of gender inequality, high unemployment and blossoming organized crime, just for a start. From there one might move on to a discussion of profound changes in social values to the need for legal reform.
One of the most basic notions in law is that an unenforceable law is a bad law. The existence of millions of prostitutes makes a mockery of China's legal code, whose formal banning of a deeply entrenched activity forces women into the hands of organized crime and furthers their vulnerability and marginalization.
Perhaps the most striking feature of China's booming prostitution industry, though, is how little ink is expended on it, how seldom its extent is even acknowledged.
In a relaxed moment the other day, a Chinese official made this startling confession: "I read the foreign press to learn about things that are happening in China. The Chinese press doesn't write about bad news."
When I moved to object to categorizing news as "good" or "bad," he waved me off, saying: "Don't worry. When there are problems, I think it is good to focus on them."
Although generally invisible in polite society, two very different kinds of prostitution have managed to work their way into China's national consciousness in the last few weeks, and they speak volumes about a huge and yawning class divide here.
At the end of November, officials in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown, got the bright idea of reviving the Cultural Revolution for the purposes of temporarily cracking down on its prostitutes.
This came to pass as a face-preserving measure after a regional television station broke with decorum by mentioning the existence of this industry in a city famous throughout Asia for its sex trade.
To send the message that Shenzhen was actually a clean and proper place, the police dressed several dozen prostitutes in identical yellow smocks and marched them through the streets of Futian district, to be shamed by a jeering crowd and have their names and hometowns announced to all.
A few weeks earlier, beginning with the still unfolding political corruption scandal in Shanghai, Chinese newspaper readers were treated to stories detailing the sex lives of public officials, including the city's party leader, Chen Liangyu, who is said to have maintained 11 "mistresses."
The quotation marks are warranted because in its apparently most common, high-level Chinese form, such relationships are typically as money- based as an hour with a sauna girl, only more elaborately contractual, sometimes including the frequency of sex, and are, of course, incomparably more lucrative.
Soon, Chinese blogs and Internet forums were competing to reveal the details — albeit rumored details — of public officials and their kept women from one end of the country to the other.
In parts of Africa, another region of the world where such practices are rife, these women are known as "second offices." Journalists who work on that continent learn that one usually reliable gauge of corruption is the flamboyance with which politicians bring new women aboard.
For a long time, the late leader of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, was a dubious champion in such matters, establishing families with both his wife and her identical twin, among many other liaisons.
China's governing class may have something even on Mobutu, though. According to press reports, when he was caught up in a corruption scandal in 2000, the head of the Jiangsu Province Construction Bureau, Xu Qiyao, was found to have had relations with over 100 women, including a mother and her daughter. Lin Longfei, the former Communist Party secretary of Zhouning County, in Fujian Province, reportedly kept 22 mistresses simultaneously and held a banquet for them all in May 2002.
The mistresses of officials don't get dragged through the streets. Indeed, their easy path to wealth is envied by many. Low and high, there is degradation for all women, though, in this commerce, and nowhere so much as in the silence that surrounds it.
E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com
Friday, December 15, 2006
Rumsfeld Honored at Pentagon, Bids Farewell
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
Dictatorships & Double Standards, by Jeane Kirkpatrick
Why the New Right Lost February 1977
U.S. Security & Latin America January 1981
How the PLO Was Legitimized July 1989
LAMAR HUNT: 1932-2006
| Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt dies | |||
 Hunt's Chiefs won Super Bowl IV. (AP) | Kansas City owner Lamar Hunt, who came up with the term "Super Bowl," died Wednesday night from prostate cancer. He was 74. Story  Reaction: Remembered as an innovator Snapshot: The man through the years | ||
Stories
• Pioneering Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt dies at 74
• Clayton: Hunt always had common touch
• Luksa: Humble Hunt never afraid to think big
• Dell'Apa: Hunt a quiet pioneer of U.S. soccer
• Thoughts and reactions on Lamar Hunt
Video
• Lamar Hunt passes away at age 74 
Timeline
• Lamar Hunt through the years
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The Power of the Press
The media is in need of some mending.
BY PETER R. KANN
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
BY PETER R. KANN
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Thomas Jefferson, a better president than we've had in a very long time, penned a line back in 1787: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." By 1807, in his seventh year as president and after seven years of being subjected to severe press criticism, he wrote: "I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them."
You'll be relieved to know that Jefferson did remain true to his primary principle: "The press," he concluded, "is an evil for which there is no remedy. Liberty depends upon freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost." He was right then, and we are right now, to prefer a free press, however flawed, to any controlled alternative. Still, as we watched CNN flashing its pre-election logos each day--"Broken Borders," "Broken Government," "Broken Politics," Broken Everything--I can't help thinking the media, too, is in need of some mending.
At its best news informs and enlightens the citizens of a free society and thereby safeguards and strengthens our democracy. At its worst--dishonest, unfair, irresponsible--the media has potential to erode the public trust on which its own success depends and to corrode the democratic system of which it is so indispensably a part. So, let me touch on 10 current trends in the mass media that ought to disturb us.
The blurring of the lines between journalism and entertainment. Journalism that puts too high a priority on entertaining is almost destined to distort and mislead. Compounding this confusion is a diffusing definition of "journalist." When political operatives moonlight at moderating news shows, when people alternate between being political editors and political consultants, when celebrity newspeople pocket $20,000 fees speaking at corporate conventions while criticizing congressman for conflicts of interest--we jumble public perceptions of newspeople as well as news.
The blurring of lines between news and opinion. Newspapers have a format that helps maintain the distinction. The Internet, TV and most magazines have neither that format nor that tradition. The result is a blending of news and views. The two are not ingredients to mix together for a tastier meal, they are different courses. Part of the problem here lies in fashionable new philosophies that argue there are no basic values of right and wrong, that news is merely a matter of views. It's a dangerous philosophy for our society and a dagger at the heart of genuine journalism.
The blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships. The resulting porridges may be called "advertorials" or "infomercials"; they may be special sections masquerading as news, news pages driven by commercial interests, or Web pages where everything somehow is selling something. Without clear distinctions between news and advertising, readers or viewers lose confidence in the veracity of a news medium. And advertisers lose the business benefit of an environment of trust.
The problems and pitfalls inherent in pack journalism. Individually, most reporters are decent, dedicated, fair-minded people. But the press, en masse, tends to lose its common sense and its sense of fairness and independence and what we see all too often is the spectacle of a pack of hounds in pursuit of a quarry. We frequently see this phenomenon in political reporting, where the faintest whiff of scandal, or even of weakness, can send the pack in pursuit. At its worst, the pack, not finding a real problem, proclaims the "perception" of one and this perception becomes self-fulfilling.
The issue of conflict and context. On most issues most Americans are not on polar extremes. On abortion, for example, most seek a sensible center. Where is that center reflected in media coverage that mainly portrays rabid feminists or irate pro-life activists? Balance is not achieved by the talk show format of two extremists yelling at each other. And how many of us recognize our own communities from their depiction on local TV news shows--a nonstop montage of mayhem, murder, rape, arson, child molestation and more?
The exaggerated tendency toward pessimism. Just look back a few years over much of the media coverage of "American competitiveness." All those news magazine covers on the coming "Japanese Century." And along with it, all the pessimism about the ability of U.S. industry to compete globally. It was nonsense. Similarly, it's one thing--and an appropriate one--for the press to probe particular instances of political corruption. It's quite another thing to jump to the cynical conclusion that our political process, and all politicians, are corrupted--that "they all do it." They don't, and they aren't. Skepticism and criticism are essential to the media's role; reflexive pessimism is not.
The growing media fascination with the bizarre, the perverse and the pathological--John Mark Karr journalism. Such so-called journalism helps instantly legitimize crackpot ideas, deviant behavior, or alleged victimization in our society. My point is not to argue for "good news" vs. "bad news," but to ask whether much of this amounts to news at all?
Social orthodoxy, or political correctness. These are reflected in a media whose job is not to parrot prevailing fashions, but to question, probe and thereby challenge them. Businessmen are not, by definition, greedy, and environmentalists, by definition, saintly. Third World poverty is not, by definition, a result of overpopulation as opposed to inane economic policies. And so on.
The media's short attention span. As the press hops from Baghdad to Beirut, Natalee Holloway to Valerie Plame, Super Bowls to Super Tuesdays, it justifiably can blame some combination of the nature of the news and the short attention span of the public. The public, meanwhile, bombarded and bewildered can blame a fickle and shallow press. There are too many instant celebrities. Too many two-day crises. Too many "defining moments" from people in search of instant history. In a world where everything is considered critical, nothing needs to be taken very seriously.
The matter of power. The press is at least partially responsible for greater public skepticism toward traditional institutions in America. But the truth, not lost on our public, is that the press is a large and powerful institution, too: "60 Minutes" is more powerful than almost all of the subjects it exposes. This newspaper, arguably, has more influence on national economic policy than do most corporations. Networks are owned by giant industrial corporations, magazines by entertainment conglomerates, and most newspapers by national chains. Given these realties, we cannot plausibly pretend to be a David out there smiting Goliaths and expect the public to believe it.
Mr. Kann, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, is chairman of Dow Jones.Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Monday, December 11, 2006
Here's why Davey belongs in Cooperstown
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 | FRANK KIMMEL/Post file photo |
| Dave Concepcion's defense made up for shortcomings of the Big Red Machine. | |
It's past time to put Concepción in Hall, by Marty Brennanman
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 | ENQUIRER FILE |
| Reds icon Dave Concepción tips his hat after being introduced during end-of-game ceremonies after the final Reds game at Cinergy Field on Sept 22, 2002. | |
The US counter-terror nerve centre
| By Frank Gardner Security correspondent, BBC News |
In a Washington suburb, I am on a journey. No address, no postcode.
Just the phone number of a US government official known only as "T".
After months of requests, he has granted us permission to visit one of America's newest and most secret establishments: the National Counterterrorism Center, the NCTC.
It is a nondescript building, but inside is the beating heart of America's counter-terrorism nerve centre.
"This is where we maintain a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week operational watch in the counter-terrorism intelligence community and monitor situational awareness in the world of CT [counter-terrorism]," says Vice Admiral Don Loren, one of the watch officers in the Operations Room.
The Operations Room is a large open-plan chamber filled with desks and computer terminals.
But today it is almost empty. Because we are media, all the undercover agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency who would normally sit here have been moved out of sight.
But up on the wall is a giant plasma screen showing every plane approaching the United States.
"Right now, you're looking at the Eastern Seaboard air corridor, and we use that to monitor events of special interest and to keep an eye should there be any reports of what we call no-fly activity," Vice Adm Loren says.
A "no-fly" means a plane with a passenger suspicious enough that the flight can even get turned back over the mid-Atlantic.
In everyone's minds is the thought: "9/11, never again."
Enormous data flow
The NCTC is also intended to remedy the sort of information blockages that led to 9/11.
When it was set up two years ago, they brought in the "imagineers" from Hollywood - experts on sharing information.
The movements of every plane approaching the US are monitored
The data flow here is enormous: more than 6,000 reports come through every day from satellite, electronic and human intelligence sources.
When an incident happens, a "terror line" is created to pass the information to everyone who needs it.
Central to all this is the Briefing Room, where screens rise up like something out of a James Bond film.
This is the nerve centre of the US-led global "war on terror".
It is here in this room, three times a day, every day, that America's specialists in counter-terrorism gather to share information.
Vice Admiral Scott Redd
It brings in 16 agencies like the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security as well as the White House, and has been described as a "stock exchange" for counter-terrorism intelligence.
The man in charge is almost unknown, yet he has one of the most sensitive jobs in the world.
Vice Admiral Scott Redd gives the president America's war plan on fighting terrorism.
"Before 9/11, agencies didn't talk to each other, now all counter terrorism information comes into NCTC," Vice Adm Redd says.
"We take that, we've created an electronic library, we have over six million pieces of CT info that can be accessed by over 6,000 counter-terrorism analysts around the world.
"So bringing that together has been very significant." 
Vice Adm Redd gives the president the war plan on fighting terrorism
But I put it to Vice Adm Redd that although America itself had not been attacked since 9/11, al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism appears to be as active as ever.
Did America's strategy go any deeper than tackling the symptoms?
"Obviously you want to stop an attack, but you don't want to stop an attack just in the nick of time," the NCTC director replied.
"You want to go after, you sort of work your way back, ultimately all the way back to the radicalisation/recruitment phase, proselytisation, with things like travel, the finances which underpin it, training, leadership, planning, typically more travel and then everything up to and including stopping the attacks."
The NCTC has 400,000 names in its database here.
It has five watch teams working 12-hour shifts and a vast electronic library.
But of course, despite all the technology and resources, none of this is guaranteed to stop terrorism.
Senior officials here admitted that this war could last another 40 years or more, and there will be defeats along the way.
Five watch teams work 12-hour shifts from this room
Friday, December 08, 2006
Exit Rumsfeld, Smiling
By Jed Babbin
One day in the next two weeks there will be a departure ceremony at the Pentagon. Flags will fly, bands will play and the liberal media will calumniate. Should the president choose to add the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the other honors rendered, it's entirely possible that some newsrooms will have to bring in trauma therapists. The 527 Media will indulge themselves in one last feeding frenzy over the man they love to hate, Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Rumsfeld's departure will feature a revival of the political fables that have been written about him, and provide a cautionary tale for his successor, Robert Gates.
Mr. Rumsfeld will probably walk out of the Pentagon smiling at the thought of a job well done. His tenure has been colored by an onslaught of media attacks, but Rumsfeld knows that American history is enriched by men who suffered the same treatment at the hands of the press and were later judged to be some of our greatest leaders. Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln endured appalling media attacks throughout the Civil War (Lincoln the incompetent baboon, Grant the drunk, Sherman the crazy man) but historians were better able to judge them.
The criticisms of Rumsfeld, both fair and foul, are overshadowed by a string of lasting accomplishments ranging from bringing ballistic missile defense from theory to reality to transformation of the military from a Cold War garrison force to the flexible forces needed to fight the war we're in. Add to that the rapid overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam regimes, positioning America to deal with the rise of China, subtract Bush's unwillingness to take the battle to the enemy's centers of gravity, and Rumsfeld's record will be seen as imperfect, but one that may prove him to have been our best Secretary of Defense. History will be kinder to Rumsfeld than the daily press, just as it has been to our Civil War leaders, because it will see facts from a greater distance than those who write and broadcast every day can achieve. Some of the facts historians will place in context are these.
After 9-11, the president wanted to hit the Taliban hard, fast and decisively. But Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki insisted that almost the entire army had to be deployed to do it, and that would take several months. Rumsfeld and the other military leaders crafted a plan to take us to war - and to victory -- in weeks. America attacked the Taliban in early October 2001 and the Shinseki army - except for Army Special Forces and helo forces -- stayed home. By December the regime was toppled. Then began the media's contrivance of stories - possibly in collusion with congressional Democrats - about Rumsfeld's supposed failures that have led to everything from Usama bin Laden's escape to the mess in Mesopotamia.
The media suffered a panic attack at the beginning of the Afghan and Iraq wars. When our forces paused in the advance toward Baghdad, the media panicked. Reports said we're pausing, so we must be in trouble, we're running out of ammo, food and even water. There aren't enough troops. The war plan was wrong, and we have to stop, we're in Vietnam, another quagmire. The media were proven so wrong so quickly and so decisively that even they were embarrassed and they've never forgiven Rumsfeld for it. Their revenge is in the contrivance of fables about him.
The first myth was that Rumsfeld refused to put enough troops into the Tora Bora region to capture bin Laden, that we'd "subcontracted" bin Laden's capture to unreliable Afghan tribal leaders, resulting in his escape. Gen. Tommy Franks, CENTCOM commander, debunked that in an op-ed in October 2004, but the media persisted. In a November 2004 interview Marine Lt. Gen. Mike "Rifle" Delong, Gen. Franks's second in command, told me, "Somebody could have made that statement, but it sure as hell wasn't the people who fought the war." But DeLong's and Franks's facts weren't consistent with the media narrative, so the myth is perpetuated. Just like the 527 Media's metaphysical certainty that Rumsfeld didn't get along with the military and disregarded the senior generals' counsel.
"Rifle" DeLong had a few choice words about that as well. "...We had these discussions with [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and we also had them with the Secretary [Rumsfeld] and the Secretary agreed with us." What he described for the Afghanistan operations was the usual process with plans developed in debates - some heated, some not - between professionals. What DeLong told me then I have confirmed over and over in discussions with other senior military leaders. Rumsfeld is a tough guy to work for, but he absorbs - and mostly follows -- the advice of senior military leaders. If anything he's too tolerant of rebellious generals. Eric Shinseki should have been fired (and might have been but for the fact of his family connections to Hawaii Sen. Dan Inouye).
The greatest fable about Rumsfeld's tenure was the so-called "generals' revolt" contrived by the 527 Media in apparent collusion with the Democrats. The political maneuver -- culminating in the phony "congressional hearing" held by Democrats during the 2006 campaign - is the most fascinating of all the myths. The statements and media appearances of the "rebelling" generals were obviously coordinated. The questions I posed last July about the media's collusion with the Democrats and the generals haven't been answered. Which Democrat "war room" ran this operation? Why did the generals get a free ride, exempted from the tough questions they should have had to answer? And that gives rise to ethical questions about the 527 media that will some day be answered.
In conversations with a retired officer who was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, he told me - and said the other Joint Chiefs would affirm - that none of the "rebel" generals had raised their newly-advertised concerns about Rumsfeld's Iraq plans and operations while they were on active duty. None of the media asked about this dereliction of duty: why didn't these generals raise Cain over their supposedly-heartfelt criticisms through the chain of command while they were in a position to do so? The media didn't seek or tell the truth about the generals. That's the real story behind the story.
Few know that in early 2003 - a month or more before the Iraq invasion - President Bush was presented with two plans for post-war Iraq. The first, written by CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided for a long occupation of Iraq and the nation-building that the president renounced in his 2000 campaign. The second, a Pentagon plan authored by Rumsfeld's team, provided for the establishment of a provisional government before the invasion and American withdrawal within months of Saddam's overthrow. The president, convinced by Powell that "if you break it, you own it", chose the Powell-Tenet plan and ordered Rumsfeld to carry it out.
When Baghdad fell, after the brief tenure of Gen. Jay Garner, the president appointed L. Paul Bremer III to govern Iraq under Rumsfeld's direction. But Bremer proved to be a loose cannon, endlessly circling around from Powell to Rice to the president to get permission to do whatever Rumsfeld didn't agree with. One Pentagon official involved closely told me Bremer's tenure was disastrous because of his continuing reliance on the group surrounding Adnan Pachachi, an old-time Sunni whose persuasion of Bremer to leave Sunni militants alone was one of the principal reasons the Sunni insurgency was able to gain strength. Bremer's decisions to disband the Iraqi army and delay the outlay of reconstruction funds alienated Iraqis almost completely. At about that time, the media began contriving the myths of Rumsfeld and Iraq.
All of those myths combined, in the minds of some defeated Republicans, to blame Mr. Rumsfeld for the election debacle of November. But that overlooks the facts presented by the Zogby poll in late October that showed 49% of Americans wanted the president to retain Rumsfeld, against 42% who wanted him gone. When that poll was taken, the president's job approval numbers were about ten points lower than Rumsfeld's "stay or go" polls.
In his Tuesday confirmation hearing, Dr. Gates said he was surprised at how much transformation of the military had actually been accomplished. He will be more surprised at how the media has transformed itself since he last served in government. He can learn a lot from studying how the media has treated his predecessor. If he studies no other lesson, he should look at the "Rumsfeld refuses to testify" story that the AP manufactured last summer. (There's another story in that incident, too. Rahm Emanuel used to issue press releases calling for people's resignations. Whose idea was the AP string of stories, centered around Hillary Clinton, culminating in her call for Rumsfeld's resignation? Did AP reporters - or editors - collude with Democrats to write and time the stories?)
Gates will have a very short media honeymoon. If he doesn't bring the Iraq war to a quick close - which he, the Pentagon and the White House agree can't be done without surrendering it to the enemy - he'll soon enough be the subject of the same kind of contrived news stories. Welcome to the world of the 527 Media, Dr. Gates. If you don't toe the Baker-Hamilton line, you'll soon be subject to the same treatment your predecessor received. You may even so enrage NYT columnist Maureen Dowd that she will write a poem excoriating you, as she did about Rumsfeld two Decembers ago. It's a badge of honor you may yet earn.
Dr. Gates will realize, as Mr. Rumsfeld undoubtedly has, that the daily media-bashing comes from the ankle-biters, the politically-active media that history will ignore. And that's why Rumsfeld will be smiling when he takes his leave.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Commentary Magazine: China in Revolt
Thirty years ago this past September, Mao Zedong, hero to the Chinese nation, died in the Communist-party compound in the center of Beijing. During his tumultuous life he played many roles, but today the Chinese people are asked to remember him as a patriotic poet. Of all the memorable lines he left behind, they recall the one he used just before proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949: “We the 475 million Chinese people have now stood up, and the future of our nation is infinitely bright.”
Because Mao, the Great Helmsman, is now a symbol of national assertion, the Chinese people are not officially permitted to remember that he essentially enslaved them. China’s Communist party has also forgiven him for some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century—crimes that led to the deaths of anywhere between 30 and 70 million people, virtually all of them Chinese.
Most of those deaths resulted from Mao’s attempts to remake Chinese society as he saw fit. After coming to power, he embraced the concept of “permanent revolution,” which soon evolved into “continuous revolution.” Beginning in 1957, he launched in quick succession the Hundred Flowers movement, the Anti-Rightist upheaval, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which ended shortly after his death in 1976.
Since then, Mao’s heirs have institutionalized themselves and transformed his revolutionary party into a ruling regime. Although, in theory, authoritarian systems are inherently fragile and eventually fall apart, the People’s Republic of China is now widely considered to be both resilient and durable. In the view of leading China specialists like Andrew Nathan, new mechanisms of governance developed by the Communist party since 1989 have given Chinese leaders the means to ensure the continuance of their rule despite rising popular discontent. Beijing’s autocrats themselves go so far as to credit these new institutions for creating some of the fastest economic growth in history.
This development has certainly given rise to profound geopolitical consequences. Asia’s small states now defer to the rulers in Beijing. Russia and India are learning to accommodate them. The United States hopes they will use their strength wisely. Although the 21st century has barely begun, many analysts have already decreed that it belongs to China, which the military historian Eliot Cohen has dubbed “the most important power in the world.”
China, the nation, will always be with us. But is the modern Chinese state, the Communist regime anchored in Beijing, similarly permanent? In fact, it is bedeviled today by a raft of problems: corrupt institutions, debt-ridden regional governments, a degraded environment, insolvent state banks, unprofitable enterprises, bankrupt pension funds, failed schools, and overburdened hospitals, just to name the most prominent. But the most serious challenge to the one-party regime is the Chinese people, who, almost independently of their government, are taking hold of their future. They also represent the greatest hope for the Chinese nation.
The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People’s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worker and peasant protests, such as the wave of labor riots in Shanghai in 1957, were of no lasting significance. So strong was Mao’s grip that there were virtually no disturbances even during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when his industrial and agricultural policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. Nor were there anti-state protests of consequence in the later 60’s or the 70’s.
After Mao’s death, however, and especially in the second half of the 1980’s, the Chinese people began to express discontent at almost every opportunity. In April 1985, hundreds traveled to Beijing without permission; there they staged a sit-in outside party headquarters to protest their continued exile dating to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the subsequent months and years, demonstrations—many of them directed against party rule—spread throughout the country. By January 1987 students were rallying in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China.
Deng Xiaoping, the country’s paramount leader at the time, declined to respond to this general mood of discontent, itself fueled largely by economic dislocation. Fortunately for him and the other veteran cadres, the Chinese people were not ready to demand revolutionary change. During the exhilarating days of the Beijing Spring in 1989, more than a million students, workers, and their allies would congregate in Tiananmen Square—but they came there to talk to their leaders, not to remove them. For me, the most powerfully suggestive image of the time was not of the euphoric crowds in Tiananmen Square, or the lone man in front of the tanks, but the three motionless students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People. This solitary trio had come to supplicate their leaders, who refused to see them.
This would be one of the last such moments. Six weeks later, Deng decided to use force to put down the protests. Beijing’s residents, armed with rocks and little else, fought back against the well-equipped soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. By the time the tanks had pushed their way to the students gathered in Tiananmen Square, both soldiers and citizens had already died. The conflict was not inevitable—many senior party leaders and generals had urged conciliation—but Deng saw the need to reassert convincingly the supremacy of the party.
As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People’s Republic. By the end of the 1990’s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them—one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang—may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China’s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.
Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such “mass incidents”; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.
Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests—no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.
“China is facing enormous problems,” notes the scholar Steven Jackson, but “this characterization has been true for the past 150 years.” David Shambaugh writes similarly of China’s “curiously ambivalent state of ‘stable unrest.’” Because demonstrators have yet to link up across the country, and do not clearly exhibit the signs of a truly destabilizing movement—generalized anger, solidarity among the aggrieved, an ability to resist official action, strong leadership, a broad coalition, and the like—China’s citizens are still not seen as posing any particular danger to the People’s Republic.
What we see today may indeed be nothing new: kings and emperors have suppressed countless protests over the millennia of Chinese history. Nonetheless, from time to time, the common folk—the laobaixing—have also changed their rulers by means of violence. More importantly, in the last century they have staged two tumultuous revolutions in quick succession—Sun Yat-sen’s in 1911 and Mao’s less than forty years later.
Every society changes from one day to the next. But the economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling. Mao regimented the Chinese people, oppressed them, clothed them in totalitarian garb, and denied them their individuality. Today, they may not be free, but they are assertive, dynamic, and sassy. A mall-shopping, Internet-connected, trend-crazy people, they are remaking their country at breakneck speed. Deprived for decades, they do not only want more, they want everything.
Change of this sort is inherently destabilizing, especially in a one-party state. Social unrest, writes Samuel Huntington, becomes especially dangerous when political institutions fail to keep up with the forces unleashed by economic change. That is the dilemma of the Chinese Communist party, which, even as it has sponsored uninterrupted economic progress, has itself changed remarkably little from Mao’s days, and still stands in the way of meaningful political reformation.
As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.” In pre-revolutionary France, discontent was highest in those areas that had seen the greatest improvement; the Revolution itself followed a period of unprecedented economic advance. In the late 20th century, the same trends played out in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan.
In China today, it is middle-class citizens, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of economic reform, who are once again confirming the pattern. In Shanghai, homeowners recently fought a state-owned developer who had reneged on his agreement to keep an area of open land in the middle of a multi-building project; one group of residents tore down a fence to stop construction, and when the developer put up another, an even larger group demolished it. In Dongzhou in prosperous Guangdong province, riot police ended up killing perhaps as many as twenty people who were protesting the government’s arbitrary seizure of their land for a power project and denying them the use of a nearby lake.
This is not like Tiananmen. In 1989, Chinese protesters were peaceful until attacked. Those in Dongzhou, however, used pipe bombs as an initial tactic, to break up police formations. In present-day China, the well-to-do act like hooligans, and will even resort to deadly force, if that is what it takes to defend their rights.
Deng Xiaoping’s strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. It was successful, but only for a decade. Change begat the demand for more change. Grievances that were once tolerable began to appear intolerable when people realized they could be remedied. Since the end of the 1990’s, the laobaixing are no longer, to borrow one of Mao’s favorite phrases, “poor and blank.”
Paradoxically, it was Mao himself, the great enslaver, who in his own way taught the Chinese people to think and act for themselves. In the Cultural Revolution, he urged tens of millions of radical youths, who were then forming themselves into roving bands known as Red Guards, to go to every corner of the country to tear down ancient temples, destroy cultural relics, and denounce their elders, including not only mothers and fathers but also government officials and Communist-party members. The young radicals seized these “reactionary elements” and paraded them in the streets, barred local officials from their desks, tortured and killed millions. Urban residents were “sent down” to work in the countryside. In some places, Red Guard factions fought pitched battles with one another.
The Cultural Revolution may have been Mao’s idea of ruining his enemies, but it became a frenzy that destroyed the fabric of society. As government broke down, its functions taken over by revolutionary committees and “people’s communes,” the strict restraints and repressive mechanisms of the state dissolved. People no longer had to wait for someone to instruct them what to do—Mao had told them they had “the right to rebel.” For the radical young, this was a time of essentially unrestrained passion. In one magnificent stroke, the Great Helmsman had delegitimized almost all forms of authority.
The latter years of this wildly abnormal period were marked by a gradual return to lockstep Maoism, even though Mao himself was not always in control. His successor, Hua Guofeng, reasserted the primacy of state and party. But this proved to be more apparent than real, as would emerge soon after Deng Xiaoping pushed Hua aside in December 1978.
We now know Deng as a reformer, and we credit him and the Communist party for debating, then planning, and finally executing the startling transformation of Chinese society. Yet the truth is that reform progressed more by disobedience than by design. Deng began his tenure in adherence to orthodox Communist economics, by trying to implement a ten-year plan. But his early failure to meet the plan’s goals forced him to back away and permit individual initiative, at first under strict rules. Peasants on large collective farms, for example, were allowed to form “work groups” to tend designated plots, but it was specifically prohibited for just one family to make up a “work group.” The prohibition did not last: in clear violation of central rules, families started to till their own plots, and local officials looked the other way.
Subterfuge on the farm was followed by subterfuge in towns and cities. Although private industry was strictly forbidden, entrepreneurs flourished by running their businesses as “red hat” collectives: private companies operating under the guise of state ownership. Such defiance would once have been unthinkable. By Deng’s time, frustrated bureaucrats and countless individuals, including some of the poorest and most desperate citizens in China, were ready to take the next step—ignoring central-government decrees and building large private businesses that now account for at least 40 percent of the Chinese economy. This became China’s “economic miracle,” brought to fruition even as government officials remained holed up in their offices in Beijing, preparing meticulously detailed five-year plans.
Today, China’s mighty rulers are still struggling to come to grips with the demands and the passions of those they rule. In the fall and winter of 2002, Beijing tried to cover up an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) before it became too late to stop its spread around the world. By spring 2003, President Hu Jintao had to reverse course after Chinese doctors and nurses, at considerable personal risk, talked to the foreign media and the World Health Organization, and 10 percent of Beijing’s population, roughly a million people, simply took to the roads. “The previous model of social governance by an all-powerful government is already hard put to cover a society which is flowing at high speed,” a Chinese newspaper editorialized during the crisis.
It would be difficult to underestimate the role played by wireless communications and the Internet in this phenomenon. Societies change—or reach a “tipping point,” to use the contemporary term—when enough people begin to think simultaneously in a new way. These days, Chinese thoughts and emotions travel through optical fiber at the speed of light—there are 123 million “netizens” in China, and 34 million of them are bloggers—and the Chinese are holding nationwide conversations for the first time in their history. Ideas—like, for instance, the idea of representative government—start out small and spread rapidly via countless chatrooms and online forums.
“Ignore government propaganda and live freely,” wrote Liu Di, a college student better known online as the “stainless steel mouse.” The state detained her in 2002, but thousands signed online petitions in her behalf and one man even called a press conference to campaign for her release. Beijing, fearing the consequences of a trial, eventually let the frail Liu Di go. The mouse had roared, and the all-powerful state retreated—a dangerous precedent for a government that relies on fear, and on citizen self-restraint, to maintain control.
It is true that, so far, China has been more successful than any other country in regulating its Internet community; but this is a battle in which it will never be able to claim final victory. “One site has been shut down 30 times,” notes Liu Xiaobo, a dissident who has been jailed on various occasions, “but after a month or two they open up again. You can’t shut them down completely.” Political dissent, online and over the phones, not only gives impetus to new ideas but also supplies fuel to acts of dissidence. Mao built the People’s Republic on the concept of isolation—separating China from the rest of the world and the Chinese people from one another. Three decades after his death, technology has put them back in touch. In China, a cell-phone subscriber—and no country in the world has more of them—can send a text message that may be read by 100 million citizens within an hour, and acted upon by tens of thousands.
Today, the regime survives because no single cause has united the Chinese people and impelled them to march en masse to Tiananmen Square. The government, moreover, still has the ability to fend off unorganized challengers and isolated protesters. Already the leadership is busy chasing down secret societies, political parties, and private armies dedicated to bringing down the Communist party. In late 2002, Open Magazine, a Chinese-
language publication in Hong Kong, reported that the Ministry of State Security believed there were more than 60 such revolutionary organizations in existence; today there could be over 100. For every one that is uncovered and destroyed, at least another is ready to take its place.
The risk for the regime is that one of these groups will launch a genuine insurrection—some mass incidents have already risen to that level—that will merge with unrelated protests as if by spontaneous combustion to become a nationwide rebellion. As Mao memorably noted, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”
How else has the regime tried to cope with the restiveness it has unleashed? One way has been to permit limited participation in the political system, thereby simultaneously deflecting anger away from it and strengthening its otherwise failing legitimacy. For instance, Beijing has sponsored village elections, institutionalized a means of petitioning officials, and authorized judicial challenges of local government action.
By doing so, however, the party has not so much turned anger aside as it has stirred the demand for still more change. Even some local officials, acting on their own, now promote further political liberalization, as by conducting unauthorized elections in defiance of edicts handed down from the capital. Efforts to buy off peasants and workers with targeted economic benefits have likewise failed to stop or even slow the tide of unrest.
Beijing’s autocrats have fallen back on another tactic as well, and one that entails real danger. The country’s two most recent leaders, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have attempted to channel the increasing agitation of Chinese society by whipping up extreme nationalist feelings, directed particularly at the Japanese. With almost daily rants against Tokyo in the party’s media, the regime has indeed succeeded in making Japan a public issue. But, though this could not have been its intention, it has also given the Chinese people a volatile role in shaping Beijing’s foreign posture, if not its foreign policy.
Last year, 44 million Chinese signed an Internet petition to stop Tokyo from securing a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In April, violent nationwide protests, triggered partly by new Japanese textbooks allegedly whitewashing Japan’s aggressive history, were organized largely by e-mail, text and instant messages, and Internet bulletin boards. “Net bugs” planned boat trips to raise the Chinese flag on the Diaoyu Islands, claimed by Beijing but under the control of Tokyo for more than three decades (the Japanese call them the Senkakus).
A few anti-Japan activists, such as Lu Yunfei, have built nationwide followings online. Beijing sometimes censors and restrains these voices, as when it quietly closed down Lu’s website for opposing the purchase of Japanese high-speed trains. But, just as often, central leaders give in to the strident fringe. They are indeed in something of a bind. Having defined Chinese identity as anti-Japanese, they have made it politically unacceptable to settle for anything short of Tokyo’s complete humiliation.
All this is putting at risk the stability of Asia and of the international system as a whole. As the Japanese observe Beijing’s menacing behavior and read the rabid sentiments in China’s chatrooms, many of them are beginning to think that, in the words of one leading Japanese analyst, “China is a threat because it is China.” This view is off the mark—China is dangerous not because it is China but because it is Communist—but it is also understandable. And it has implications for relations between China and the United States as well.
Because of the formal military ties between Tokyo and Washington, any conflict between China and Japan will risk entangling Washington. More important, the nationalism so recklessly stirred up by the Chinese leadership for purposes of self-preservation has spilled over into other channels, including anti-Americanism. Recent incidents include the mass protests against America’s accidental bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the enraged public outcry after the April 2001 collision of a Chinese fighter jet with an American reconnaissance plane off Hainan Island. In both cases, Beijing was held captive by public hysteria for days until it could come to an understanding with Washington, in the latter case only by demanding and receiving an American apology that should never have been given.
As Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged this past September, “We need peace, we need friends, and we need time.” Unfortunately, at the very moment when the Chinese state depends critically on the good will of others around the globe—especially in the form of foreign markets, capital, and expertise—it has lost the confidence of its own most responsible citizens and placed itself at the mercy of some of its least responsible. The intensified internal repression of the last four years is a sign that the Communist party must increasingly rely on force to maintain its power, thus creating even more internal enemies and further delegitimizing itself in the process.
Leaving China a half-decade ago, an American banker remarked: “There’s a billion people here who don’t like following instructions.” If anything, Chinese society since then has become even more willful. It may not always be defiant, but it is frequently disobedient. For better and also for worse, we have entered a period marked by the emergence of a great people from millennia of autocratic rule. For better—because a nation that can barely govern itself will not be capable of dominating the other 200 countries on the planet. For worse—because so turbulent and fretful a society is unlikely to rise peacefully, or to accept its role as a great power in orderly fashion. Thirty years after the death of Mao, the Chinese people have unfinished business to conduct, and their transition into the future is unlikely to be smooth.
Because Mao, the Great Helmsman, is now a symbol of national assertion, the Chinese people are not officially permitted to remember that he essentially enslaved them. China’s Communist party has also forgiven him for some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century—crimes that led to the deaths of anywhere between 30 and 70 million people, virtually all of them Chinese.
Most of those deaths resulted from Mao’s attempts to remake Chinese society as he saw fit. After coming to power, he embraced the concept of “permanent revolution,” which soon evolved into “continuous revolution.” Beginning in 1957, he launched in quick succession the Hundred Flowers movement, the Anti-Rightist upheaval, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which ended shortly after his death in 1976.
Since then, Mao’s heirs have institutionalized themselves and transformed his revolutionary party into a ruling regime. Although, in theory, authoritarian systems are inherently fragile and eventually fall apart, the People’s Republic of China is now widely considered to be both resilient and durable. In the view of leading China specialists like Andrew Nathan, new mechanisms of governance developed by the Communist party since 1989 have given Chinese leaders the means to ensure the continuance of their rule despite rising popular discontent. Beijing’s autocrats themselves go so far as to credit these new institutions for creating some of the fastest economic growth in history.
This development has certainly given rise to profound geopolitical consequences. Asia’s small states now defer to the rulers in Beijing. Russia and India are learning to accommodate them. The United States hopes they will use their strength wisely. Although the 21st century has barely begun, many analysts have already decreed that it belongs to China, which the military historian Eliot Cohen has dubbed “the most important power in the world.”
China, the nation, will always be with us. But is the modern Chinese state, the Communist regime anchored in Beijing, similarly permanent? In fact, it is bedeviled today by a raft of problems: corrupt institutions, debt-ridden regional governments, a degraded environment, insolvent state banks, unprofitable enterprises, bankrupt pension funds, failed schools, and overburdened hospitals, just to name the most prominent. But the most serious challenge to the one-party regime is the Chinese people, who, almost independently of their government, are taking hold of their future. They also represent the greatest hope for the Chinese nation.
The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People’s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worker and peasant protests, such as the wave of labor riots in Shanghai in 1957, were of no lasting significance. So strong was Mao’s grip that there were virtually no disturbances even during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when his industrial and agricultural policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. Nor were there anti-state protests of consequence in the later 60’s or the 70’s.
After Mao’s death, however, and especially in the second half of the 1980’s, the Chinese people began to express discontent at almost every opportunity. In April 1985, hundreds traveled to Beijing without permission; there they staged a sit-in outside party headquarters to protest their continued exile dating to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the subsequent months and years, demonstrations—many of them directed against party rule—spread throughout the country. By January 1987 students were rallying in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China.
Deng Xiaoping, the country’s paramount leader at the time, declined to respond to this general mood of discontent, itself fueled largely by economic dislocation. Fortunately for him and the other veteran cadres, the Chinese people were not ready to demand revolutionary change. During the exhilarating days of the Beijing Spring in 1989, more than a million students, workers, and their allies would congregate in Tiananmen Square—but they came there to talk to their leaders, not to remove them. For me, the most powerfully suggestive image of the time was not of the euphoric crowds in Tiananmen Square, or the lone man in front of the tanks, but the three motionless students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People. This solitary trio had come to supplicate their leaders, who refused to see them.
This would be one of the last such moments. Six weeks later, Deng decided to use force to put down the protests. Beijing’s residents, armed with rocks and little else, fought back against the well-equipped soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. By the time the tanks had pushed their way to the students gathered in Tiananmen Square, both soldiers and citizens had already died. The conflict was not inevitable—many senior party leaders and generals had urged conciliation—but Deng saw the need to reassert convincingly the supremacy of the party.
As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People’s Republic. By the end of the 1990’s, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them—one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang—may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China’s southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.
Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such “mass incidents”; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.
Virtually every segment in society (except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs) is participating in these public demonstrations. Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres. Yet most observers still do not attach real significance to these protests—no doubt because, apart from a general desire for fair treatment, no common complaint or cause appears to bind them together.
“China is facing enormous problems,” notes the scholar Steven Jackson, but “this characterization has been true for the past 150 years.” David Shambaugh writes similarly of China’s “curiously ambivalent state of ‘stable unrest.’” Because demonstrators have yet to link up across the country, and do not clearly exhibit the signs of a truly destabilizing movement—generalized anger, solidarity among the aggrieved, an ability to resist official action, strong leadership, a broad coalition, and the like—China’s citizens are still not seen as posing any particular danger to the People’s Republic.
What we see today may indeed be nothing new: kings and emperors have suppressed countless protests over the millennia of Chinese history. Nonetheless, from time to time, the common folk—the laobaixing—have also changed their rulers by means of violence. More importantly, in the last century they have staged two tumultuous revolutions in quick succession—Sun Yat-sen’s in 1911 and Mao’s less than forty years later.
Every society changes from one day to the next. But the economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling. Mao regimented the Chinese people, oppressed them, clothed them in totalitarian garb, and denied them their individuality. Today, they may not be free, but they are assertive, dynamic, and sassy. A mall-shopping, Internet-connected, trend-crazy people, they are remaking their country at breakneck speed. Deprived for decades, they do not only want more, they want everything.
Change of this sort is inherently destabilizing, especially in a one-party state. Social unrest, writes Samuel Huntington, becomes especially dangerous when political institutions fail to keep up with the forces unleashed by economic change. That is the dilemma of the Chinese Communist party, which, even as it has sponsored uninterrupted economic progress, has itself changed remarkably little from Mao’s days, and still stands in the way of meaningful political reformation.
As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.” In pre-revolutionary France, discontent was highest in those areas that had seen the greatest improvement; the Revolution itself followed a period of unprecedented economic advance. In the late 20th century, the same trends played out in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan.
In China today, it is middle-class citizens, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of economic reform, who are once again confirming the pattern. In Shanghai, homeowners recently fought a state-owned developer who had reneged on his agreement to keep an area of open land in the middle of a multi-building project; one group of residents tore down a fence to stop construction, and when the developer put up another, an even larger group demolished it. In Dongzhou in prosperous Guangdong province, riot police ended up killing perhaps as many as twenty people who were protesting the government’s arbitrary seizure of their land for a power project and denying them the use of a nearby lake.
This is not like Tiananmen. In 1989, Chinese protesters were peaceful until attacked. Those in Dongzhou, however, used pipe bombs as an initial tactic, to break up police formations. In present-day China, the well-to-do act like hooligans, and will even resort to deadly force, if that is what it takes to defend their rights.
Deng Xiaoping’s strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. It was successful, but only for a decade. Change begat the demand for more change. Grievances that were once tolerable began to appear intolerable when people realized they could be remedied. Since the end of the 1990’s, the laobaixing are no longer, to borrow one of Mao’s favorite phrases, “poor and blank.”
Paradoxically, it was Mao himself, the great enslaver, who in his own way taught the Chinese people to think and act for themselves. In the Cultural Revolution, he urged tens of millions of radical youths, who were then forming themselves into roving bands known as Red Guards, to go to every corner of the country to tear down ancient temples, destroy cultural relics, and denounce their elders, including not only mothers and fathers but also government officials and Communist-party members. The young radicals seized these “reactionary elements” and paraded them in the streets, barred local officials from their desks, tortured and killed millions. Urban residents were “sent down” to work in the countryside. In some places, Red Guard factions fought pitched battles with one another.
The Cultural Revolution may have been Mao’s idea of ruining his enemies, but it became a frenzy that destroyed the fabric of society. As government broke down, its functions taken over by revolutionary committees and “people’s communes,” the strict restraints and repressive mechanisms of the state dissolved. People no longer had to wait for someone to instruct them what to do—Mao had told them they had “the right to rebel.” For the radical young, this was a time of essentially unrestrained passion. In one magnificent stroke, the Great Helmsman had delegitimized almost all forms of authority.
The latter years of this wildly abnormal period were marked by a gradual return to lockstep Maoism, even though Mao himself was not always in control. His successor, Hua Guofeng, reasserted the primacy of state and party. But this proved to be more apparent than real, as would emerge soon after Deng Xiaoping pushed Hua aside in December 1978.
We now know Deng as a reformer, and we credit him and the Communist party for debating, then planning, and finally executing the startling transformation of Chinese society. Yet the truth is that reform progressed more by disobedience than by design. Deng began his tenure in adherence to orthodox Communist economics, by trying to implement a ten-year plan. But his early failure to meet the plan’s goals forced him to back away and permit individual initiative, at first under strict rules. Peasants on large collective farms, for example, were allowed to form “work groups” to tend designated plots, but it was specifically prohibited for just one family to make up a “work group.” The prohibition did not last: in clear violation of central rules, families started to till their own plots, and local officials looked the other way.
Subterfuge on the farm was followed by subterfuge in towns and cities. Although private industry was strictly forbidden, entrepreneurs flourished by running their businesses as “red hat” collectives: private companies operating under the guise of state ownership. Such defiance would once have been unthinkable. By Deng’s time, frustrated bureaucrats and countless individuals, including some of the poorest and most desperate citizens in China, were ready to take the next step—ignoring central-government decrees and building large private businesses that now account for at least 40 percent of the Chinese economy. This became China’s “economic miracle,” brought to fruition even as government officials remained holed up in their offices in Beijing, preparing meticulously detailed five-year plans.
Today, China’s mighty rulers are still struggling to come to grips with the demands and the passions of those they rule. In the fall and winter of 2002, Beijing tried to cover up an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) before it became too late to stop its spread around the world. By spring 2003, President Hu Jintao had to reverse course after Chinese doctors and nurses, at considerable personal risk, talked to the foreign media and the World Health Organization, and 10 percent of Beijing’s population, roughly a million people, simply took to the roads. “The previous model of social governance by an all-powerful government is already hard put to cover a society which is flowing at high speed,” a Chinese newspaper editorialized during the crisis.
It would be difficult to underestimate the role played by wireless communications and the Internet in this phenomenon. Societies change—or reach a “tipping point,” to use the contemporary term—when enough people begin to think simultaneously in a new way. These days, Chinese thoughts and emotions travel through optical fiber at the speed of light—there are 123 million “netizens” in China, and 34 million of them are bloggers—and the Chinese are holding nationwide conversations for the first time in their history. Ideas—like, for instance, the idea of representative government—start out small and spread rapidly via countless chatrooms and online forums.
“Ignore government propaganda and live freely,” wrote Liu Di, a college student better known online as the “stainless steel mouse.” The state detained her in 2002, but thousands signed online petitions in her behalf and one man even called a press conference to campaign for her release. Beijing, fearing the consequences of a trial, eventually let the frail Liu Di go. The mouse had roared, and the all-powerful state retreated—a dangerous precedent for a government that relies on fear, and on citizen self-restraint, to maintain control.
It is true that, so far, China has been more successful than any other country in regulating its Internet community; but this is a battle in which it will never be able to claim final victory. “One site has been shut down 30 times,” notes Liu Xiaobo, a dissident who has been jailed on various occasions, “but after a month or two they open up again. You can’t shut them down completely.” Political dissent, online and over the phones, not only gives impetus to new ideas but also supplies fuel to acts of dissidence. Mao built the People’s Republic on the concept of isolation—separating China from the rest of the world and the Chinese people from one another. Three decades after his death, technology has put them back in touch. In China, a cell-phone subscriber—and no country in the world has more of them—can send a text message that may be read by 100 million citizens within an hour, and acted upon by tens of thousands.
Today, the regime survives because no single cause has united the Chinese people and impelled them to march en masse to Tiananmen Square. The government, moreover, still has the ability to fend off unorganized challengers and isolated protesters. Already the leadership is busy chasing down secret societies, political parties, and private armies dedicated to bringing down the Communist party. In late 2002, Open Magazine, a Chinese-
language publication in Hong Kong, reported that the Ministry of State Security believed there were more than 60 such revolutionary organizations in existence; today there could be over 100. For every one that is uncovered and destroyed, at least another is ready to take its place.
The risk for the regime is that one of these groups will launch a genuine insurrection—some mass incidents have already risen to that level—that will merge with unrelated protests as if by spontaneous combustion to become a nationwide rebellion. As Mao memorably noted, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”
How else has the regime tried to cope with the restiveness it has unleashed? One way has been to permit limited participation in the political system, thereby simultaneously deflecting anger away from it and strengthening its otherwise failing legitimacy. For instance, Beijing has sponsored village elections, institutionalized a means of petitioning officials, and authorized judicial challenges of local government action.
By doing so, however, the party has not so much turned anger aside as it has stirred the demand for still more change. Even some local officials, acting on their own, now promote further political liberalization, as by conducting unauthorized elections in defiance of edicts handed down from the capital. Efforts to buy off peasants and workers with targeted economic benefits have likewise failed to stop or even slow the tide of unrest.
Beijing’s autocrats have fallen back on another tactic as well, and one that entails real danger. The country’s two most recent leaders, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have attempted to channel the increasing agitation of Chinese society by whipping up extreme nationalist feelings, directed particularly at the Japanese. With almost daily rants against Tokyo in the party’s media, the regime has indeed succeeded in making Japan a public issue. But, though this could not have been its intention, it has also given the Chinese people a volatile role in shaping Beijing’s foreign posture, if not its foreign policy.
Last year, 44 million Chinese signed an Internet petition to stop Tokyo from securing a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In April, violent nationwide protests, triggered partly by new Japanese textbooks allegedly whitewashing Japan’s aggressive history, were organized largely by e-mail, text and instant messages, and Internet bulletin boards. “Net bugs” planned boat trips to raise the Chinese flag on the Diaoyu Islands, claimed by Beijing but under the control of Tokyo for more than three decades (the Japanese call them the Senkakus).
A few anti-Japan activists, such as Lu Yunfei, have built nationwide followings online. Beijing sometimes censors and restrains these voices, as when it quietly closed down Lu’s website for opposing the purchase of Japanese high-speed trains. But, just as often, central leaders give in to the strident fringe. They are indeed in something of a bind. Having defined Chinese identity as anti-Japanese, they have made it politically unacceptable to settle for anything short of Tokyo’s complete humiliation.
All this is putting at risk the stability of Asia and of the international system as a whole. As the Japanese observe Beijing’s menacing behavior and read the rabid sentiments in China’s chatrooms, many of them are beginning to think that, in the words of one leading Japanese analyst, “China is a threat because it is China.” This view is off the mark—China is dangerous not because it is China but because it is Communist—but it is also understandable. And it has implications for relations between China and the United States as well.
Because of the formal military ties between Tokyo and Washington, any conflict between China and Japan will risk entangling Washington. More important, the nationalism so recklessly stirred up by the Chinese leadership for purposes of self-preservation has spilled over into other channels, including anti-Americanism. Recent incidents include the mass protests against America’s accidental bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the enraged public outcry after the April 2001 collision of a Chinese fighter jet with an American reconnaissance plane off Hainan Island. In both cases, Beijing was held captive by public hysteria for days until it could come to an understanding with Washington, in the latter case only by demanding and receiving an American apology that should never have been given.
As Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged this past September, “We need peace, we need friends, and we need time.” Unfortunately, at the very moment when the Chinese state depends critically on the good will of others around the globe—especially in the form of foreign markets, capital, and expertise—it has lost the confidence of its own most responsible citizens and placed itself at the mercy of some of its least responsible. The intensified internal repression of the last four years is a sign that the Communist party must increasingly rely on force to maintain its power, thus creating even more internal enemies and further delegitimizing itself in the process.
Leaving China a half-decade ago, an American banker remarked: “There’s a billion people here who don’t like following instructions.” If anything, Chinese society since then has become even more willful. It may not always be defiant, but it is frequently disobedient. For better and also for worse, we have entered a period marked by the emergence of a great people from millennia of autocratic rule. For better—because a nation that can barely govern itself will not be capable of dominating the other 200 countries on the planet. For worse—because so turbulent and fretful a society is unlikely to rise peacefully, or to accept its role as a great power in orderly fashion. Thirty years after the death of Mao, the Chinese people have unfinished business to conduct, and their transition into the future is unlikely to be smooth.
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