Studies / Reports: October 2006 Archives
By Reuters | washingtonpost.com
31 October 2006
Despite its rising power and wealth, China may not be willing or ready to play a responsible role in an international system aimed at encouraging peace and stability, a commission set up by Congress said in a report released yesterday.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission accused China of failing "to meet the threshold test of international responsibility in the area of non-proliferation" by aiding Iran's nuclear, missile and chemical programs and refusing to effectively use its leverage to bring North Korea back into nuclear arms negotiations.
It said China in recent years has allowed the transfer of weapons and technology across its territory from North Korea to Iran and even if Beijing wanted to control such transfers, this would be very difficult.
Beijing's adherence to World Trade Organization obligations remains "spotty and halting" five years after it attained membership, while its hunt for oil and gas holdings overseas could "substantially affect U.S. energy security," the report added.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
October 22, 2006
THE corruption scandal in Shanghai that had already taken down one of China’s most powerful officials claimed two smaller scalps last week: the chief of the national statistics bureau was fired, and an official with the Formula One racing circuit was hauled in for questioning. The contrast between the statistician and the racing executive may have been incidental, but it underscored the perception, fair or not, that official corruption is everywhere in China.
To some extent, the ruling Communist Party does not disagree.
In an economic boom gilded with excess and profiteering, official corruption is so widespread, and increasingly so brazen, that it is almost taken for granted. The latest World Bank governance survey found that China had seriously backslid in the category of “containing corruption” when much of the rest of the world, if not improving, was basically unchanged on the issue.
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have warned that corruption threatens the credibility and legitimacy of Communist Party rule and have vowed to stamp it out. But many experts say that truly stamping out corruption would involve the type of broad political reform and a full embrace of the rule of law that the party has long resisted. The current corruption sweep authorized by Mr. Hu in Shanghai and other cities is widely viewed as more of a purge of allies linked to his predecessor, President Jiang Zemin, than an unfettered crackdown.
“The problem with China today is that if you want to pursue corruption, so many people are tainted,” said Minxin Pei, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. As a result, Mr. Pei noted, Mr. Hu could never investigate corruption solely on its merits because it would topple so many of his own political allies.
By RADIO FREE ASIA
October 18, 2006
HONG KONG—Two people are critically ill and dozens of others are injured following clashes between villagers and police in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, local residents said.
Around 900 residents of Xingtan township arrived in the provincial capital of Guangdong at about 10:30 a.m. Sunday by the busload to stage a protest outside the offices of the provincial government.
They planned to spend the night in adjacent streets and stage a sit-in at provincial government headquarters Monday in protest against alleged corruption surrounding the sale of their land by local officials.
The same evening, the authorities mobilized around 2,000 police officers and riot police with orders to force the villagers back onto their buses and back to their hometown.
“That evening, the police beat up anyone staging a protest, whether they were male or female, young or old,” a villager surnamed Leung told RFA's Cantonese service Tuesday.
By JUDITH SHAPIRO | The New York Times
October 08, 2006
CHINA's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, caused an estimated one million unnatural deaths. It is widely viewed as one of history’s most horrific political cataclysms. Yet there is a peculiar amnesia at play in China, where the regime, whose legitimacy depends on protecting the record of the Communist Party and its founder Mao Zedong, suppresses discussion of the past. Ordinary Chinese, influenced by Confucian traditions that emphasize social harmony, are complicit in the silence, preferring to withhold blame for the violence and to avoid reflecting on personal responsibility. Indeed, in the context of today’s rapidly changing China, the nightmare of denunciations by Red Guards, widespread torture, Mao worship, book burnings and government-orchestrated mass relocations seems a distant memory. Yet until China comes to terms with the root causes of the Cultural Revolution, it is unlikely that a genuinely open polity and legal system will emerge to support the economic freedoms that have dramatically transformed Chinese lives.
Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s book, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” the first major history of the elite politics of the period, may generate a wave of Cultural Revolution scholarship within China and encourage healthy debate over state manipulation of historical memory. It is not, however, a book for those lacking some knowledge of recent Chinese history. Its cast of characters includes relatively well-known figures like Mao Zedong, his wife, Jiang Qing, and the other members of the ultraleftist Gang of Four, as well as the top military leader Lin Biao, the beloved Premier Zhou Enlai and the Cultural Revolution’s top-ranking victims, President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. But it also features numerous others who are unknown in the West except among specialists. With little hand-holding from the authors, readers are likely to confuse similar-sounding Chinese names, purges and counterpurges, and unfamiliar events whose significance is unclear.
Yet the book is an important first effort to establish the facts.
By Joseph Kahn *The New York Times*
Otober 04, 2006
When Shanghai’s party boss was detained in an anticorruption probe last week, Chinese were rattled by news of the first purge of a high-ranking Communist Party leader since 1995. But the investigation’s scope and its ultimate goals are wider, as the party’s two most powerful officials aim to shake up the leadership and wipe out resistance to their policy agenda, party officials and analysts say.
The investigation, the largest of its kind since China first pursued market-style changes to its economy more than a quarter-century ago, was planned and supervised by Zeng Qinghong, China’s vice president and the day-to-day manager of Communist Party affairs, people informed about the operation said.
They said Mr. Zeng had used the investigation to force provincial leaders to heed Beijing’s economic directives, sideline officials loyal to the former top leader, Jiang Zemin, and strengthen Mr. Zeng’s own hand as well as that of his current master, President Hu Jintao.
Aside from frightening officials who have grown accustomed to increasingly conspicuous corruption in recent years, the crackdown could give Mr. Hu greater leeway to carry out his agenda for broader welfare benefits and stronger pollution controls, which may prove popular in China today.
Some critics fear that it may also consolidate greater power in the hands of a leader who has consistently sought to restrict the news media, censor the Web and punish peaceful political dissent.
By Friedrich Wu (reporting from Singapore)| The Japan Times
October 02, 2006
China's rulers rarely wash their dirty linen in public. So the arrest of Politburo member and Shanghai Communist Party boss Chen Liangyu on corruption charges has sent shock waves across the country. Some speculate that the arrest is really part of a power struggle, with President Hu Jingtao demonstrating his authority against a local power broker who had thwarted national policy.
Whatever the truth behind Chen's fall, and despite the widening corruption probe of other senior government officials, data and evidence recently released by the government and multilateral institutions suggest that the authorities are fighting a rear-guard battle against a rising tide of graft.
Consider the grim statistics recently released by the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP). More than 42,000 government officials on average were investigated for corruption every year from 2002 to 2005, with more than 30,000 per year facing criminal charges.
These startling figures do not include economic crimes outside the public sector. For example, in 2005 alone, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) unearthed irregularities involving misused funds of 767.1 billion renminbi (RMB), or $ 97 billion. The CBRC uncovered 1,272 criminal cases and disciplined 6,826 bank employees (including 325 senior managers).
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