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By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW for The New York Times
July 22, 2010

On a day in late March, Zhang Dazhong, one of China's richest men, struggled to speak through tears as he addressed his assembled guests.

"My mother died 40 years ago this year, but I never held a decent memorial for her," Mr. Zhang said. On the stage about him, in the red-carpeted hall of a luxury hotel, were flowers and a large portrait of a woman in a white shirt, her hair in pigtails.

"To this day, I don't know where she is buried," he said, voice cracking. "As her son, this troubles my conscience very much."

With the extraordinary ceremony on March 27, Mr. Zhang, founder of the Dazhong Electronics appliance stores, and his younger sister, Zhang Kexin, did something very few relatives of the nearly two million people killed from 1966 to 1976 during the Cultural Revolution dare to do to this day: publicly honor an ordinary victim of Maoist terror.

Their mother, Wang Peiying, a widow with seven children, was a worker at the Ministry of Railways. The famine precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, which killed perhaps 30 million people by the early 1960s, had horrified her, and as political turmoil began again only a few years later, she publicly called on China's leader, Mao Zedong, to take responsibility for his mistakes and resign.

Ms. Wang was sent to a psychiatric hospital and drugged. Released and paraded around the capital, she refused to recant. Instead, she repeated her accusations. Her jaw was broken to stop her from talking. After a mass trial at the Workers' Stadium on Jan. 27, 1970, she was executed.

"She was a kindhearted woman who was unflinching in the face of evil," said Mr. Zhang, a man of medium height with coal-black hair and a slightly jowly face, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. "Her brave stance, her unvarying faith, were completely correct. She symbolizes truth and justice."

Criticism of Mao flowed freely among speakers at the event. Mao Yushi, a prominent economist, said the violence and subsequent cover-up lingered. "Chinese society is not normal enough," he said.

Also on display was an electrifying new documentary by an independent filmmaker, Hu Jie, called "My Mother Wang Peiying."

Like Mr. Zhang's memorial, the film challenges the government's deliberate forgetting about the era, said Zhou Xun, a historian at Hong Kong University who is finishing a book about the Great Leap Forward famine.

"In the case of China's recent history, we are not talking about the truth, because the public has never been informed about the complexity of the whole period. There is not even any room for discussion and debate," Ms. Zhou said.

Not far from the hotel where Mr. Zhang, 62, conducted his memorial, Wang Jingyao, 89, keeps a shrine to his late wife, Bian Zhongyun, in the study of his modest apartment.

He has also refused to forget.

The day after students at an elite Beijing girls' school beat Ms. Bian to death with nail-studded planks on Aug. 5, 1966, he did something deeply audacious. Grieving but clearheaded, Mr. Wang took a bus to the Xidan shopping district and bought a camera -- a Shanghai brand, model 202.

He returned to the Post Office Hospital, opposite the Beijing Normal University High School, where Ms. Bian had been vice principal, and began photographing her naked and bruised body.

The pictures are unflinching, well- composed, hard to look at. Mr. Wang had worked as a photographer and journalist before the 1949 revolution, for the Americans and the Chinese Communists. "History must be recorded," he said.

For years, Mr. Wang said, he tried to sue the people involved in his wife's killing, but courts rejected the cases. Today, he assembles evidence -- her wristwatch, smashed during the final beating, a bloodstained shirt, documents. "They avoid me," he said of the former Red Guards involved. Some are now wealthy, or in positions of influence.

How has it been, living with this sad truth for 44 years? "Two words," he said, eyes glittering. "Bitter. Struggle."

Wang Youqin was a student at the Beijing Normal University High School when Ms. Bian was killed. Inspired by reading a classified copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel of life in the Soviet gulag, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," she began collecting information about victims in the 1970s, after the violence subsided. She published a book listing 659 names; her "Chinese Holocaust Memorial" Web site details nearly 200 more.

The site is blocked in China. Ms. Wang, who teaches Chinese at the University of Chicago, is writing a new book with more names, from hundreds of interviews across the country.

While the Cultural Revolution is not a taboo subject per se, to this day research and writings are strictly controlled. One or two individuals have opened private museums, such as Peng Qian, in the southern city of Shantou, where he was formerly deputy mayor. The content is carefully calibrated. Ms. Wang says the government has identified only senior officials who were killed, plus a few "celebrities," while ordinary people are ignored. She finds that deeply offensive. "It should be all about the victims," she said.

The government has conceded that Mao committed "errors," but his reputation in China is still officially sacred. Wary of challenges to the man whose body lies on display in Tiananmen Square, publishers of writings about the era submit to a three-tier censorship process: at the government's General Administration of Press and Publication, the Party History Research Office and the Party Literature Research Office, according to Ding Dong, a historian.

Since the mid-1990s, "very little has been published about the Cultural Revolution, and even less of any significance," Mr. Ding recently told an audience at Sanwei Bookstore in Beijing.

As time passes, historians increasingly worry about how to preserve the truth, with people dying before they can tell their stories.

"For decades, the truth has been living in the dark, but now it's dying in the dark," Ms. Zhou said. "Then one might ask, what is truth? What is justice? What is history?"

>> Original Source

By Philip Bowring (International Herald Tribune Op-Ed Contributor)  | The New York Times
June 03, 2010

A strike at Honda's plant at Foshan in southern China. Suicides and labor unrest at the giant Foxconn factory not far away in Shenzhen. Everywhere in coastal southern China pressure is growing for wage rises and better working conditions, particularly from the young, mobile workers who have converged on the region in recent years.

At one level this is just a demand for a fairer share of the China cake now mostly being eaten by enterprises, local and foreign, rather than by their workers. In almost no other country are employees' shares of national income as low as it is in "socialist" China.

But behind the surge of worker activism lies not ideology but some dull, fundamental data -- demographics. This year the percentage of China's population of working age people (15 to 64) peaks at 71.9 percent, the culmination of a steady rise over 30 years. Together with the birth bulge which preceded the introduction of the One Child policy in 1980 this increase drove workforce growth of 33 percent in 30 years and helped to fuel the export sweatshops of southern China.

Another important marker is just five years away: The absolute size of the working age population will peak by 2015 and then decline gradually. In practice, the peak of available workers may have already arrived because more people stay in school longer and thus do not enter the workforce until much later than 15. The participation of women in the workforce, at 70 percent, is as high as it is likely to get.

As important as the size of the workforce will be the change in its age composition. For almost two decades very rapid economic growth has been possible partly because of the mass migration of young people from rural areas to the towns driving urbanization and industrialization.

But this spring of youth escaping rural drudgery is drying up. The Honda strikers, like the Foxconn suicides, are mostly in their 20s. There is an instinctive realization among them that there is a diminishing number of youths to follow their migrant footsteps. There are also now more work opportunities in the towns and small cities closer to their rural homes.

For China as a whole there are currently only 106 million workers in the 15-19 age group compared with 122 million in the 20-24 group. China now has 378 million in their 40s and 50s but only 273 million under 20. The decline, which is continuing, in the number of the young and mobile has been greatest in rural areas. So China will have to find other ways of sustaining economic growth and gains in worker productivity.

This is actually good news for almost everyone -- except the control freaks of the Chinese Communist Party, and those who believe that investment is an end in itself, not a means to a better life. The more strikes, the more demands for higher wages, the more chance that China will see the shift toward a better balance between consumption and investment. The more chance too that investment itself will focus on raising labor productivity rather than on mega projects with scant economic return. Improvements in technical education and an innovative spirit in the private sector should keep productivity moving ahead.

Big wage increases will also reduce China's export competitiveness, eliminating a trade surplus that is positively damaging to the global economy as well as to China's low-paid workforce. It is past time that personal incomes that have lagged for so long start to grow faster than national income. More money for households will also mean less for military aggrandizement and prestige projects -- and maybe less to be laundered by corrupt officials through Macau's gambling tables. More consumption will make for greater long term economic stability than today's lop-sided focus on investment regardless of its rate of return.

There will be challenges. One is what will happen to agriculture as rural populations get ever older. Will consolidation of land holdings, now that transfers of agricultural land are allowed, happen on a big enough scale to allow the rapid mechanization of farming? Or will rural de-population and water shortages threaten a food crisis?

But that potential problem is further down the road. The harbingers of the coming demographic decade are the Foshan strikers.

>> Original Source 

From the publishers of Truth About China
on June 04, 2010

Editorial | The New York Times
May 27, 2010

There is only one country with any chance of getting through to North Korea. That is China, the North's major supplier of aid, food and oil. As tensions on the Korean Peninsula continue to spiral -- frighteningly -- upward, China is refusing to get involved.

China has only one concern: avoiding any crisis that might unleash huge refugee flows. If it believes that the status quo is conducive to stability, it is mistaken.

Relations between the Koreas have threatened to explode since last week when the South accused the North of torpedoing a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. It offered compelling forensic evidence of the North's role in the March attack, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

What makes this so especially dangerous is that North Korea's erratic leader, Kim Jong-il, is in a power struggle to ensure that his youngest son succeeds him. (American intelligence officials suspect Mr. Kim may have ordered the attack to prove his willingness to take on South Korea and its Western allies.)

North Korea often blusters, but it has gone much further this time. Over the last few days, it has cut almost all ties and agreements with the South and threatened war if Seoul proceeds with threatened sanctions. On Thursday, it severed a naval hot line that was supposed to prevent clashes in disputed waters.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried hard this week to convince Chinese leaders of North Korea's culpability -- and of the need for Beijing to press the North to accept responsibility. There is no doubt about the North's involvement. An international team investigated the incident, and South Korea has produced a torpedo propeller with North Korean markings.

China needs to stop covering for its client and join in a United Nations Security Council statement that condemns the North's behavior. Privately, Beijing should make clear to North Korea that any future acts of aggression will result in a cut off of aid. The United States, South Korea and Japan, which have taken a strong stand against the North, also must leave some room for Pyongyang to back down.

The two Koreas -- which have never formally ended their war -- need to finally set a demarcation line in the West Sea where the Cheonan was attacked and sank. China could do real good if it worked with the United States to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table.

>> Original Source

By Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press Writer | AP | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
May 26, 2010

Rising tensions over North Korea's alleged sinking of a South Korean warship are providing an unwelcome reality check for Pyongyang's chief ally, China.

Only months ago, Beijing was reaping kudos for sponsoring six-nation talks on dismantling North Korea's nuclear programs. These days, it's looking increasingly isolated for failing to back U.S. and South Korean calls to get tough on Pyongyang in the face of what investigators say is overwhelming evidence the ship was struck by a North Korean torpedo.

The ship sinking and rising tensions put Beijing in an uncomfortable position, forcing it to choose between traditional communist ally North Korea and close trading partner South Korea. Beyond that, the situation is squeezing China between playing the responsible power it says it wants to be, and protecting a loyal buffer state reviled by the world.

For Beijing, none of the options look good.

"China won't pressure North Korea. That could lead to a crisis," said Gong Keyu, deputy director of the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Shanghai's Institute for International Studies. "But if China keeps doing nothing, some countries may come to doubt our influence in the region and question whether Beijing is a responsible international player."

For now, Beijing appears to be buying time in hopes of an outcome that won't require it to take a clear-cut stance that could cripple relations with either Korea, with whom Beijing works to maintain a balance in ties.

On Wednesday, a vice foreign minister said the cause of the March 26 sinking in which 46 South Korean sailors died had yet to be determined, and called for dialogue in place of growing confrontation.

Beijing regards the destruction of the corvette Cheonan as "extremely complicated" and is "carefully and prudently studying and examining the information from all sides," Zhang Zhijun told reporters.

Chinese officials have been no more forthcoming in private, telling diplomats that the result of the international investigation blaming North Korea that was announced last week was inconclusive, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. They say Beijing has also faulted Seoul for rejecting North Korea's demand that it be allowed to send its own investigators to the South.

Yet the pressure on Beijing seems likely to only grow. On Friday, Premier Wen Jiaobao travels to South Korea for a three-way summit with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts, and the incident is expected to feature prominently.

Meanwhile, South Korea's plan to bring the issue before the U.N. Security Council would force Beijing into a hard decision on whether to use its veto power to quash the discussion. Doing so might preserve relations with Pyongyang but could be disastrous for Beijing's hopes of being seen as a rising, responsible regional and world power.

>> Complete Report