This lexicon entry consists of the following sub-sections:

• Overview
• Official views
• Contending views within China
• Dissenting views internationally
• Media coverage
• Areas of interest
• References
• Chronology
• Glossary

Overview

The thirty years of rapid carbon-heavy growth that followed the re-launch of China’s reforms in 1992 produced an economic boom that has been hailed both as an economic miracle and as the most successful poverty reduction program in modern human history. But as China attempts a transition to a more sustainable path of development, the accumulated costs of the growth model the country had previously followed are increasingly evident. Every facet of China’s natural and human environment has been compromised.

China’s environmental crisis is also a crisis of governance which has the potential of destabilising development plans and their outcomes. To date, this crisis has undermined trust on the part of citizens in the authorities, affected people’s quality of life at a time of rising expectations and degraded the ecological services needed for society to thrive.

China’s industrial revolution followed the path first taken by Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: one that was later adopted by all industrialised countries. This was a path that required carbon-intensive energy use combined with heavy exploitation of raw materials. The damaging legacy of successive industrial revolutions of this type is now well understood, and most developed countries have not only recognised the environmental damage that accompanied this model of development but are now actively seeking to control and minimise the damage.

It is also well-recognised, however, that the environmental damage sustained is disproportionately worse in the early stages of economic growth. China’s relatively weak starting position – low levels of available natural resources, energy, land and water, combined with a large population, extremely rapid, large-scale industrialisation and uneven distribution of benefits – has brought the country relatively early to an environmental crisis that now threatens to exceed the government’s capacity to manage it or to remedy the effects. If these problems are not successfully dealt with, they will continue to pose a serious threat to human health and future prosperity in China.

The crisis is manifest in air quality, water quality and availability, soil contamination, desertification, food safety and biodiversity and its impacts are seen in growing rates of cancer and respiratory disease. The state of the environment — and anything a sensitised and concerned public might judge to pose a further threat to it — has become an important cause of social unrest. In China’s expanding cities, citizens are increasingly willing to take to the streets to mark their discontent with a deteriorating quality of life.

In the last two years, this public anxiety has been focused, among other things, on air quality in China’s major cities, and has generated a mistrust of official environmental information. The government was unwilling to publish figures for the smallest and most dangerous airborne particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, implicated in 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010 alone, until it was finally forced to do so by public demand, and by the increasing availability of handheld digital air quality monitors. In a particularly severe episode in January 2012, levels of PM2.5 in Beijing reached 291 parts per million; in January 2013, concentrations soared to 900 ppm, 40 times the levels the World Health Organisation regards as safe.

Water might have been an equally important focus of public concern: China suffers from a low per capita allocation of fresh water — just 450 cubic metres per person per year, although severe water stress is usually defined as an annual 1000 cubic metre per capita. China also suffers from an acutely unbalanced distribution of such water as exists: most of northern China — which produces 40 per cent of the country’s GDP and houses half the population— enjoys only one fifth of the available water, while south of the Yangtze River, floods are frequent. Beijing sits in the dry north and is the world’s most water-stressed capital, with just 100 cubic metres of water per person per year. As the city has expanded over the last twenty years, chronic over-extraction has lowered Beijing’s water table by 300 metres. The impacts of these acute shortages are exacerbated by continuing, severe pollution of ground and surface water, which the government has, to date, failed to control.

In June, 2013, the government’s annual assessment of the state of China’s environment confirmed what its citizens already felt they knew. The People’s Daily headline about this assessment read: ‘2012 China Environmental Bulletin shows environmental situation is still grim’ 2012中国环境状况公报: 显示环境形势严峻依旧.

The report made for sobering reading: there had been a ‘marked deterioration in China’s air, water and land quality’; more than fifty-seven percent of the groundwater in 198 cities inspected in 2012 was ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’; more than 30 percent of the country’s major rivers were ‘polluted’ or ‘seriously polluted’; seven of the country’s nine most important coastal bays had bad water quality and twenty-five percent of monitored lakes and reservoirs were suffering from eutrophication.

The air in only twenty-seven out of 113 key cities reached air quality standards in 2012 and at the beginning of 2012, heavy smog blanketed more than 1 million square kilometres for several days, affecting the lives and health of hundreds of millions of people. The report did not detail the figures that now arouse the keenest interest in China’s city dwellers during such episodes: the concentrations of PM2.5.

The report found that it was not just China’s cities that were suffering. Although rural areas attracted less attention, environmental problems in the countryside had become increasingly apparent, with pollution from mining, domestic waste, intensive livestock and fertiliser as the main sources. The 798 pilot villages monitored in the previous year all suffered varying degrees of drinking water and surface water pollution. Of 452 counties monitored, the ecological environment was classified as ‘fragile’ in 101, or more than twenty-two percent. The year had seen 542 national environmental emergencies, five of which were classified as major.

Missing from the report was news of one of China’s most threatening and intractable environmental problems: the accumulated poisoning of agricultural land from industrial pollution, contaminated irrigation water and over-use of chemical fertilisers. Officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection have described the findings of a five year soil pollution study that cost 1 billion yuan (around US$160 million) as a ‘state secret’.

The true extent of China’s soil pollution, therefore, remains unclear though some researchers have claimed that up to 70 percent of China’s agricultural land is affected. It is a particularly sensitive topic in a country repeatedly rocked by food contamination scandals. In April 2013, Zhuang Guotai 庄国泰, head of the ecological department of China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, told a conference in Beijing that the soil survey had exposed the environmental price that the countryside had paid for the doubling of grain production in the previous three decades: remnants of toxic heavy metals, traces of a pesticide banned in the 1980s and residues from the chronic over-use of fertiliser. Soil remediation is a difficult and expensive process and China’s State Council has promised to establish a nationwide system to protect soil from pollution, but not until 2020.

The Chinese government has repeatedly declared that protection of the country’s battered environment is a national priority and the deepening urban air pollution crisis triggered a flurry of policy initiatives in 2013. From mid-June, a series of regulations aimed at controlling air pollution were announced, China’s first carbon market was proclaimed, the prosecution of environmental crimes was to be made easier and local officials were told they were to be more accountable for air­ quality in their areas. At the same time, the government promised US$275 billion of spending on cleaning up air pollution over the next five years, a sum that equates to twice the annual defence budget.[1]

In October, Beijing’s city government unveiled a further round of measures, from restricting the number of cars on the road on any given day to closing schools, to be implemented only in the event of air quality emergencies. A few days later, air pollution triggered by the start of the winter heating season brought Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, to a virtual standstill with closed schools, paralysed public transport and grounded planes.

A new and tougher draft environmental protection law came up for its third reading before the bi-monthly session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in October, but the vote was postponed as legislators called for harsher actions to protect the already heavily polluted environment. The law had not been revised since its passage in 1989, despite China’s deepening environmental crisis and the government’s apparent inability to reverse the trend. The draft amendment reiterated the call for more responsibility and more spending on environmental protection at all levels of government and increases the weighting of environmental protection in governmental performance evaluation. It also included a contentious proposal to limit severely the civil society groups that were entitled to bring environmental lawsuits.

Despite the raft of new measures, improving Beijing’s air quality — a sensitive task for a government that likes to boast of the capital as a world city — will not be easy. Beijing’s smog, for example, is largely fed by emissions from poor quality automobile fuel and from coal fired power stations. Both sources are projected to increase for at least a decade.

In addition, approximately twenty-five percent of Beijing’s pollution comes from the surrounding province of Hebei, where authorities have proved reluctant to close down industrial plants and sacrifice jobs, just to ease life in the capital. Hebei already hosts most of the industrial and power plants that were moved out of Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games. It now seems evident that they were not moved far enough to ensure tolerable air quality in the nation’s first city. The province has demanded a cash transfer of two billion yuan (US$330 million) in compensation for a pledge to close some of its steel and cement plants and to cut its coal usage.

Cleaning up the capital is important for China’s prestige, but as the 2012 report makes clear, China’s environmental problems are nationwide. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that pollution was costing China about 5.8 percent of GDP each year, without factoring in future impacts from climate change, which is already contributing to expanding deserts and spreading drought. Today, as the government attempts to stimulate growth in the still relatively impoverished Western regions, moving heavy manufacturing and mining westwards from coastal areas, environmental damage is spreading to the more fragile ecosystems of Tibet and Xinjiang, and to the richly bio-diverse province of Yunnan. As each year goes by, China’s environmental costs are rising. The question that China’s people are asking is, will the governments measures work, and if so, how soon?

Official Views

In his inaugural address in March 2013, the prime minister, Li Keqiang 李克强, said: ‘It is no good having prosperity and wealth while the environment deteriorates.’ Then, in a neat reflection of the contradictions in China’s approach to environmental protection, he added that it was just as bad to have ‘poverty and backwardness in the midst of clear waters and verdant mountains’. In the long running contest between GDP growth and environmental protection, growth has consistently come out ahead.

The Chinese government can, however, list a long series of environmental protection measures, regulations and laws as evidence of its environmental concerns. Back in 1996, in its White Paper on environmental protection, the government stressed that environmental protection was an important aspect of improving living standards and quality of life. The government aimed, the paper said, to promote coordinated development between the economy, society and the environment and it recognised that prevention and control of pollution and the rational utilisation of natural resources were of vital importance to China’s long term development.

Measures listed in support of this policy included: making environmental protection a basic national policy; formulating the guiding principles of balancing development for economic returns, social effects and environmental benefits; putting prevention first, emphasising polluter responsibility and intensifying environmental management; enacting environmental protection laws and regulations; formulating strict law-enforcement procedures and increasing the intensity of law enforcement so as to ensure effective implementation; incorporating environmental protection into national economic and social development, introducing to it macro regulation and management under state guidance; increasing environmental protection input so as to ensure coordinated development; establishing and improving environmental protection organisations under governments at all levels; bringing into full play the government’s role in environmental supervision and administration; promoting environmental education, environmental science and technology and promoting international cooperation.

China participated in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, at which participants declared that sustainable development should be the strategy for the future. Two months later, the Chinese government advanced ten measures to enhance its environment and development as evidence of the fact that China was, indeed, choosing sustainable development. This was followed in 1994 by the approval of the Agenda 21— White Paper on China’s Population, Environment, and Development in the 21st Century. Again, the document stressed sustainable development and put forward China’s overall strategy, measures and a program of action. Two years later, at the Fourth Session of China’s Eighth National People’s Congress, the Ninth Five Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Outline of the Long-Term Target for the Year 2010 both acknowledged sustainable development as an important strategy for China’s modernisation.

This approach was reaffirmed in the eleventh and particularly in the twelfth Five Year Plan (FYP) adopted in 2011. Environmental targets had been in evidence as far back as the tenth FYP — to increase forest coverage to 18.2 percent, to raise the urban green rate to thirty-five percent and to reduce urban and rural pollutants by ten percent compared to 2000. The eleventh FYP kept growth and development as the primary goal but also reflected some official concern with the environmental costs of China’s development model. It aimed to stimulate the growth of services, increased investment in research and development, and set a number of related targets, including a twenty percent reduction in energy consumption per unit of GDP over the five years of the plan, a thirty percent reduction in water consumption per unit of industrial added value, an increase of the coefficient of effective use of water for irrigation from 0.45 percent to 0.5 percent, a further 1.8 percent increase in forest coverage and a ten percent reduction of major pollutants.

Some of the methods used — the closure, for instance, of small and inefficient coal fired power plants — addressed more than one target. Nevertheless, the eleventh FYP’s energy density and pollution targets suffered from a continuing stress on growth and a lack of effective enforcement.

By the time the draft twelfth FYP was under negotiation, China’s environmental and sustainability crisis demanded a significant change of course. After thirty years of breakneck growth with all its negative environmental consequences, the twelfth FYP signalled a more robust ambition in the leadership to make the difficult transition to a more sustainable model. At a similar stage of development, Japan, Korea and Taiwan had all made the transition to higher value, cleaner, more innovative and more technologically advanced economic models, much as China is trying to do under the twelfth FYP. In China’s case, the urgency was the greater because three decades of damage to water, air, soil and human health had begun to have important consequences for social and political stability.

In November 2012 at the Eighteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the concept of ‘ecological civilisation’ 生态文明 was included in the newly revised Constitution of the Party, and calls were made for accelerated action on environmental improvement. In March 2013 at the National People’s Congress, these points were reiterated. Since then, China’s leadership has regularly highlighted its intention to build a ‘beautiful China’ and an ‘ecological civilisation.’

In many of their speeches, both the former president, Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, and the former prime minister, Wen Jiabao 温家宝, had stressed the importance of environmental protection and the current incumbents, President Xi Jinping 习近平 and Premier Li Keqiang have continued to do the same.

On 24 May 2013, for instance, Xi Jinping led the Politburo’s sixth group study session on the construction of an ‘ecological civilisation[2]‘, emphasising in his speech that the relationship between economic development and protection of the environment must be correctly managed; green, circular and low-carbon development should be more consciously promoted; and the environment must not be sacrificed for temporary economic growth.

He threatened severe punishment for those who failed to protect the environment and public health and stressed that the construction of an ecological civilisation required the strictest implementation of environmental regulations . He warned that officials would be held accountable for projects which had grave negative outcomes, regardless of whether or not the official had moved on.

‘Ecological civilisation’ now figures as one of China’s five most important policy areas, along with social progress, economic progress, political progress and culture.

Contending views within China

In 2006, Pan Yue 潘岳, a Vice Director in what was then the Environmental Protection Bureau (later the Ministry of Environmental Protection), predicted, in an interview of unprecedented frankness with the German magazine Der Spiegel, that China’s environmental crisis would bring China’s economic miracle to an end:

Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water. One third of the urban population is breathing polluted air, and less than twenty percent of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner. Finally, five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China.

…Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between eight and fifteen cent of our gross domestic product, and that does not include the costs for health…

Pan Yue went on to predict that China would need to resettle 186 million residents from twenty-two provinces and cities because of environmental stress and that, despite government efforts at pollution control, advocates of rapid growth continued to dominate Beijing’s policies. It was a mistake, he said, to assume that ‘economic growth will give us the financial resources to cope with the crises surrounding the environment, raw materials, and population growth‘ because

there won’t be enough money, and we are simply running out of time. Developed countries with a per capita gross national product of $8,000 to $10,000 can afford that, but we cannot. Before we reach $4,000 per person, different crises in all shapes and forms will hit us. Economically we won’t be strong enough to overcome them.

It was the last outspoken interview that Pan Yue gave to a foreign publication but his predictions have never seemed more pertinent.

Despite repeated statements of intent by government and a flurry of laws and regulations, China’s environment continues to deteriorate and the gap between regulation and implementation remains wide. According to the 16th Article of the Environmental Protection Law, ‘the local people’s governments at various levels shall be responsible for the environment quality of areas under their jurisdiction and take measures to improve the environment quality.’ In fact, although local governments have the power to allocate resources to environmental protection, conflicts of interest mean that they frequently lack the motivation, local officials are rarely rewarded for investment in environmental protection, and the system fails to punish polluters as it should.

Until recently, neither China’s national or local government officials really prioritised environmental protection and GDP remained the key evaluation criterion for local officials’ performance (Chen et. al. 2005; Li and Zhou 2005). Local officials sought to boost their local economies through attracting dirty industries, but since protecting the environment did little to help their political career (Wu et. al. 2013) they had little incentive to do so.

Rapid economic growth, therefore, has trumped environmental protection in China for more than three decades, a pattern reinforced by the fact that local Environmental Protection Bureaux answer not to the environment, the public, or the state, but to local power holders who may have direct stakes in industrial or commercial developments.

Xie Zhenhua 解振华, the former director of the State Environmental Protection Agency, sought to address this policy problem and the heart of China’s environmental problems by repeatedly proposing the inclusion of four indices of environmental protection in the assessments of cadres’ performance — enforcement of environment law, intensity of pollution, changes in environmental quality and public satisfaction — in order to link bureaucratic promotion with environmental protection and to encourage environmental transparency. But although there is now a nominal linkage, it remains a relatively weak lever: according to a study funded by America’s National Bureau of Economic Research, mayors in China who spent money on environmental projects such as water- treatment plants in 2000-09 were less likely to be promoted than those who invested in infrastructure. There is not yet any widespread prioritisation of environment over economic growth, and environmental protection officials complain that their agencies are weak and under-staffed, or directly under the control of local governments that may themselves be polluters or investors in polluting enterprises.

In addition, a series of factors integral to China’s party-state system hamper the ability of civic agents to mobilise in the interests of establishing a more robust form of environmental protection. These factors include the constraints under which non-governmental organisations are obliged to operate in China; the weakness of the legal and regulatory framework and the restrictions placed on press and media freedom. These constraints have served to deprive the government of potentially important tools and allies in its efforts to protect the environment.

Nevertheless, despite the difficulties they face, the green NGOs that emerged in China in the mid-1990s and proliferated in the 2000s have played an important role in environmental protection.

The first independent environmental NGO to win official recognition was the Society for Protecting Black-Beaked Gulls, which registered in 1991 in Liaoning province, but the one that was to become an important national player in environmental protection was Friends of Nature, founded in 1994. Global Village Beijing followed in 1995 and the Center for Legal Assistance for Pollution Victims in 1998, all now well established and effective organisations, along with thousands of others across the nation.

Many civil society campaigns have focussed on the protection of animals, from the snub-nosed monkey to the Tibetan antelope. Others were forged in resistance to China’s excessive dam building, including the important and, for the time being, successful 2003 campaign to save the Nu River.

Today China’s environmental NGOs are increasingly sophisticated, despite the difficulties under which they operate. Organisations such as Ma Jun’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), which has mapped China’s water and air pollution using public data, the Green Choice Alliance, a consortium of activists who have tried to bring the purchasing power of the public to bear to persuade polluters to clean up, to organisations active in the provinces, such as Green Anhui and Yunnan’s Green Watershed, continue to challenge official narratives and the actions of abusive local power holders.

Some officials recognise the value of civil society action in the struggle to counter the political and economic power of China’s major polluters and they have supported the work of these organisations. Pan Yue was one official who played an important role in encouraging the growth of non-governmental organisations, greater public access to information and greater public participation in planning decisions. In 2005, for instance, in a public demonstration of the importance of both openness and participation, he held a televised public hearing on an environmentally controversial proposal to line the Old Summer Palace lake with an impermeable membrane. It was an unprecedented and highly symbolic occasion, even though it did not lead immediately to greater public participation in the majority of China’s contentious planning decisions.

The lack of opportunity for public participation is a major factor in the striking growth of urban public protest against environmental threats that began in Xiamen, a major city in Fujian province, in 2007. Citizens in the city took to the streets to protest against a planned project to build a PX plant. (PX is the abbreviation for paraxylene, also known as 1,4-dimethylbenzene and para-dimethylbenzene). The protest successfully triggered the intervention of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which mandated a new Environmental Impact Assessment that, in turn, recommended re-siting the plant.

PX is produced without protest around the world, but public mistrust of China’s chemical industry is high and not without justification. The protest in Xiamen was followed by others in Zhangzhou, Dalian, Ningbo, Xianyang, Sichuan, Jiujiang and, most recently in 2014, Kunming. Similar protests have broken out against other projects, including infrastructure projects, waste incineration plants and a nuclear re-processing plant, as China’s urban middle classes have grown increasingly active in defence of their interests.

The government has promised to relax some of the restrictions placed on civil society, but progress is extremely slow and further restrictions in some significant areas are proposed. In the draft amendment to the Environmental Protection Law which was debated in the NPC in October 2013, Wu Xiaoling 吴晓灵, a member of the NPC Standing Committee, complained that the range of subjects of public interest litigation on environmental issues was too narrow, and it was not possible for most non-profit organizations to seek litigation on environmental issues.

Several NGOs complained that the proposed amendment to the environmental law, which will define which groups would be allowed to take pubic interest environmental cases to court, would effectively bar most NGOs in China from litigating against polluting companies on behalf of the public. Under an earlier draft, only the state-aligned All-China Environment Federation would be eligible to pursue such cases. The October draft expanded the criteria but only narrowly. According to Zhang Mingqi 张明其, the vice-chairman of the NPC’s law committee, litigants would be required to be national-level environmental groups legally registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, active for at least the past five years, and possessing a ‘good reputation’. Academic experts have pointed out that this would limit the number of potential plaintiffs to about thirteen groups, all affiliated with government bodies.

Without legal protection, or the possibility of legal action, defending China’s environment can be a hazardous business. China has produced some remarkable individual environmental campaigners in recent years but many have run great personal risks in their efforts to curb pollution.

Wu Lihong 吴立红, for example, was an environmental advocate who lived by the shores of Lake Tai, in Jiangsu Province. Lake Tai was once celebrated for its scenic beauty and was meant to be under special environmental protection as a national level scenic area. Despite this, 2,850 factories and chemical plants that were permitted to site themselves around the lake from the 1990s were also allowed to discharge into its waters, resulting in a severe degradation of the lake and its immediate environment.

Mr Wu organised local residents into Defenders of Tai Lake, a grassroots organisation that monitored the water quality of the lake and its tributaries. He collected samples for 16 years, braving constant harassment by local officials and police, and filing reports to senior government officials. He succeeded in shutting down nearly 200 factories, but in April 2007 he was arrested and subsequently jailed, on charges of extortion. Shortly after his arrest, the lake suffered the worst algae bloom in its history.

Dissenting views internationally

Despite the Chinese government’s reservations about foreign interference in China’s internal affairs, a number of international NGOs (INGOS) have successfully established environmental or conservation programs in China, among them WWF and, more recently, the campaigning organisation Greenpeace. In fact, the period of reform has been marked by a significant growth in the activities of INGOs operating in China. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs’s China Charity and Donation Information Centre, in March 2012, 1,000 US NGOs, for example, were operating in China, mainly working in humanitarian aid, environmental and animal protection, and gender and labour rights. American NGOs, according to the report, have donated nearly twenty billion yuan (US$3.18 billion) to China since 1978, much of it into education and research. In view of the difficulties that Chinese NGOs face in raising money in China, overseas funding has been an important factor in the development of China’s civil society, although the receipt of such funding can expose the recipient to suspicions in the eyes of the Chinese government.

There have been occasions on which international commentary about China’s environment has proved unwelcome. On one notorious occasion in 2007, the Chinese government insisted that statistics on premature deaths caused by pollution be removed from a World Bank report entitled ‘Cost of Pollution in China’. The report had estimated that up to 760,000 people died prematurely each year because of pollution – up to 700,000 from indoor and outdoor air pollution and around 60,000 from water pollution. These figures were reportedly considered too sensitive by the government, which feared they might trigger unrest.

Media coverage

In the Maoist period, enormous damage was done to China’s environment by the economic policies pursued by Mao but none of it was reflected in the then tightly controlled state media. After Mao’s death, however, the more liberal decade of the 1980s brought the rise of outlets in which people could voice their social concerns and by the 1990s the increasing marketisation of media and growing competition encouraged the growth of investigative reporting in China, much of it focused on environmental issues. In the current century, social media have transformed the nature and the flow of environmental information.

For most of the history of the People’s Republic, however, environmental coverage was closely tied to official information. China’s first major appearance in the global environmental arena goes back to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, at a time when China was still immersed in the Cultural Revolution. Although environmental information was completely undeveloped in China, in a path-breaking initiative somewhat reminiscent of Yan Fu’s 严复 translations of Western texts in the late nineteenth century, several Chinese intellectuals and environmentalists translated Barbara Ward’s and Rene Dubos’s Only One Earth and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The following year, China’s first environmental journal, Environmental Protection 环保, was launched, its masthead embellished with calligraphy by the veteran revolutionary and scholar Guo Moruo 郭沫若.

Following the death of Mao and the beginning of China’s economic transition, ecological damage came into sharper public focus. When in 1983 the government identified the rational use of resources and protection of the environment as basic national policies, China’s official media began to report on environmental issues. By 1990, People’s Daily 人民日报, Guangming Daily 光明日报 and China Youth Daily 中国青年报 had all added environmental sections. China Environmental Sciences Press, founded in 1980, began to publish books on the environment and on 31 December 1981, the country’s first environmental television show, Animal World 动物世界, was broadcast on China Central Television (CCTV). In 1983 the first national environmental newspaper, China Environmental News 中国环境报 was launched. That same year the State Environmental Protection Agency and the UN Environment Program jointly launched the publication World Environment 世界环境.

Outside official media, the 1980s saw a vigorous campaign against the proposed Three Gorges Dam, with the well-known journalist and activist Dai Qing 戴晴 in the forefront of the the public discussion. That campaign came to an enforced end on 4 June 1989: Dai Qing was subsequently detained and the dam was built, resulting in many of the negative environmental consequences the dam’s opponents had predicted.

The Rio earth summit in 1992 gave a further boost to environmental coverage in Chinese state-directed media as reporters from Xinhua, People’s Daily, China Environmental News and Science and Technology Daily reported from the conference, stimulating local media to increase their own environmental coverage. The following year, fourteen central government ministries and commissions, including the Environmental and Resources Protection Commission of the National People’s Congress, the Film and Television Bureau and the Propaganda Department of the State Council jointly launched the Chinese Century of Environmental Protection 中国环保世纪行, a top-down information campaign that used newspapers, radio, television, public information posters and the Internet in an attempt to familiarise the public with the principles of environmental protection and sustainable development.

China’s media today are much less controlled than in earlier times, but are still expected to conform to government priorities and official perspectives. Historically, this has meant that media coverage of the environment in state- directed media, especially print media, has reflected the official position both in the framing and selection of issues.

A recently conducted content analysis of environmental coverage in the People’s Daily (Huang He et al) is illustrative of the phenomenon: between 2003 and 2012, the paper published around 200 articles a year on environmental topics, with the exception of the years 2006 and 2007, when coverage was increased to reflect the tenth Five Year Plan for national environmental protection and initial discussions around the eleventh Plan.The perspective of the paper’s coverage closely followed that of the government’s: reports on the current status of environmental protection, environmental protection measures, environmental protection achievements, and positive reports accounted for sixty-two percent of the output, despite China’s steadily deteriorating environmental conditions, increasing public anxiety and growing civil society activism. Neutral coverage accounted for another thirty percent and articles that reported on existing problems or obstacles to environmental protection only made up eight percent. The newspaper, the researchers observed, always reflected a positive view of government, whether in its handling of routine environmental issues or of environmental emergencies. Enterprises tended to appear in a negative light, frequently blamed for pollution and waste. Other sectors barely appeared at all as the newspaper’s main information sources were government departments. China’s rapidly proliferating environmental NGOs, independent activists and the general public were ignored.

As environmental protection became a key government policy, officially endorsed environmental reporting expanded. Today, newspapers, radio stations and television channels regularly air environmental programs, and reports such as CCTV’s Green Space, China Educational TV’s Environmental Focus, Shandong TV’s Homeland, Hebei TV’s Green Homeland, Hubei TV’s Lucky Global Village, Beijing TV’s Green Economics, Jiangsu TV’s Green Report, and Phoenix TV’s Our Shared Planet, all focus on communicating and reinforcing the official message on environmental protection. (S. Dong)

There was, at the same time, an important, parallel trend in environmental reporting that grew out of the particular combination of journalism and activism that was a feature of the late 1990s and early 2000s in China. This phenomenon helped environmental coverage to grow beyond the transmission of official messages to become a vehicle for campaigning and investigative journalism. A key figure in the growth of independent environmental journalism, as in other civil society phenomena, was the journalist-turned-official, the then EPA Vice Minister, Pan Yue (see above). Pan, a prolific writer, used his position to encourage both environmental journalism and the growth of an environmental civil society. His promotion of greater public access to information, open Environmental Impact Assessment processes and public involvement in environmental decision making were all radical ideas in China at the time. It was Pan who pioneered the discussion of ecological civilisation 生态文明, which was subsequently adopted as a central government policy.

The close relationship between journalism and activism in this period was striking: it was a journalist, Liu Detian 刘德天, who founded the Association for the Protection of Black-Backed Gulls in 1991 (see above); another journalist Liao Xiaoyi 廖晓义 who founded Global Village of Beijing. Ma Jun, 马军, the founder of IPE, and Wang Yongchen 汪永晨, whose Green Earth Volunteers is one of China’s biggest and most influential environmental NGOs, were also journalists. Moreover, Liu Jianqiang 刘建强, a journalist who campaigned in the Nu River dam effort, is now Chinadialogue.net’s Beijing editor. In the early to mid 2000s, these journalist-activists were instrumental in raising awareness of important environmental issues in the public mind and challenging official accounts about the benefits of industrial and urban development. They formed their own associations and continued to educate themselves and others on environmental issues. Today they are in the forefront of environmental thinking in China.

With the rise of digital media, especially social media in the last five years, the government has lost its traditional monopoly of news. The most popular micro-blogging site Sina Weibo, launched in 2010, had attracted more than 500 million registered users by 2013, with 100 million messages posted daily. In the new media age, any member of the public with a mobile phone can break a story, and the public has acquired a new power to scrutinise and expose government abuse through postings on micro-blogs that can be forwarded hundreds, thousands or millions of times, accumulating influence as they go. During Beijing’s ‘airpocalypse’ in January 2013, for example, there were 2.5 million posts on the subject of smog.

New technology has thus facilitated the rise of citizen journalism, a phenomenon that has also made its mark in environmental reporting. In early 2012, Liu Futang 刘福堂, a retired forestry official, became the first winner of Chinadialogue.net’s citizen journalism award, a new category in the organisation’s annual environmental press awards.

Liu had worked in the provincial forest fire prevention department in Hainan, rising to be director of the forest fire prevention bureau. He had developed an expertise in deforestation in his career and was not afraid to challenge logging companies on their poor environmental practices. With his retirement in 2007, Liu became a citizen activist, continuing to campaign for better environmental monitoring. His efforts became more urgent after 2010, when the central government declared Hainan an ‘international tourism destination,’ and tourist-related development began to threaten the island’s mangroves.

Liu opened a micro-blogging account under the name, ‘Hainan Liu Futang‘ in 2011, painstakingly writing blog entries by hand and posting them using recognition software. His efforts attracted national media attention, but his account was shut down by authorities in May of 2012, and in July, local police removed the 63-year-old Liu from a hospital where he was receiving treatment for diabetes to charge him with ‘crimes related to conducting an illegal business.’ His ‘crime’ was to distribute copies of his self-published book, Hainan Tears 海南泪. He received a hefty fine and three years’ probation, with a strong warning to discontinue his environmental campaigning. While Liu was in detention, the building of a power plant against which he had campaigned resumed. Not all citizen journalists are as successful or as heavily persecuted as Liu Futang, but his example serves as an important counterpoint to official media narratives of ‘ecological civilisation’.

Areas of Interest

China’s pervasive environmental crisis has begun to affect many aspects of social and economic activity in the People’s Republic. Concern for the environment, and the search for policy responses, has also had a positive impact on certain aspects of regulation, notably in the field of access to information.

In January 2007, the Chinese State Council introduced its first Regulations on Open Government Information 中华人民共和国政府信息公开条例, with a view to increasing government transparency. On 1 May 2008, the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s own Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation) 环境信息公开办法（试行）came into effect.

The measures aimed to promote pollution reduction by strengthening public involvement in environmental governance. They sought to empower people to participate in environmental supervision through demanding that enterprises disclose environmental information and violations of discharge standards.

The measures require environment agencies to disclose seventeen different kinds of environmental information including regional environmental quality, amounts of discharge and the records of polluters in various regions. The information required to be disclosed included the lists of enterprises in violation; letters, visits and complaints about pollution caused by enterprises and the results; administrative punishments, reviews, lawsuits and enforcement; enterprises that were causing major pollution accidents and incidents; enterprises that refuse to comply with administrative punishment. In addition, companies in violation were required to publish their discharge data within thirty days in the local media and register the data with the local government agency or face a fine and forced publication of their data. Agencies, in turn, were legally bound to disclose the list of polluters within twenty days. If an environment agency refuses, the public has a right to apply for administrative review.

It was landmark legislation and activists took full advantage of its powers. Many, however, were disappointed with the level of implementation and compliance, a common complaint in China. Powerful local and vested interests continue to obstruct both access to information and efforts to control pollution in China. For many local authorities, polluting enterprises are a double-edged sword: they are a source of pollution but also of jobs and revenues. Thus while local governments may be responsible for environmental protection on paper, in practice they are frequently complicit in pollution.

According to delegates to the 2013 National People’s Congress, for example, there were more than thirty serious incidents of heavy metal pollution in China in the previous three years. Many of them, the delegates pointed out, were caused by ‘regional governments blindly pursuing economic development, as well as law enforcement and supervision not being strong enough’.

One notorious case in 2010 involved one of China’s biggest state-owned companies, Zijin Mining, which had already been reprimanded by the Ministry of Environmental Protection for its failure to observe environmental protection regulations. In 2010, the company was responsible for two major pollution incidents: in the first, 9,100 cubic metres of toxic slurry from its Zijin Mountain gold-copper mine in Shangang County, in Fujian Province, burst through a tailings dam and entered the Ting river, killing four million fish. It took nine days for Zijin to admit that there had been an incident at all. Two months later, another dam burst at a Zijin mine in Guangdong province.

The pollution that resulted from Zijin’s lax standards was serious, but local indignation was tempered by the fact that Zijin Mountain mine provides seventy percent of local revenues, and most of Shangang County’s jobs. So close is the relationship with the local government that the company’s largest shareholder is an arm of Shangang County’s state-owned assets bureau, with several current or former local officials serving on the company’s supervisory board.

These intimate connections between powerful polluters and government are reflected at every level in China. If China is to control pollution, the state must recognise the pernicious effect of these relationships and take a far more robust approach to violations. So far there is little sign of this happening, and despite high level political promises, there is a high risk that China’s environment will continue to deteriorate.

References

1. Chen, Ye, Hongbin Li, and Li-An Zhou, 2005. ‘Relative performance evaluation and
the turnover of provincial leaders in China.’ Economics Letters 88(3): 421-425.

2. Dong, Steven, 2013. Presentation to CCICED 2013 Annual General Meeting, Beijing.

3. Huang, He, et. al., 2013. Presentation to CCICED 2013 Annual General Meeting, Beijing.

4. Li, Hongbin, and Li-An Zhou, 2005. ‘Political turnover and economic performance:
the incentive role of personnel control in China.’ Journal of Public Economics 89(9):
1743-1762.

5. Wu, J., Deng, Y., Huang, J., Morck, R., Yeung, B., 2013. ‘Incentives and outcomes: China’s
environmental policy.’ NBER Working Paper, cited in Zheng, S., et al., ‘Incentives for China’s urban mayors to mitigate pollution externalities: The role of the central government and public environmentalism,’ Reg. Sci. Urban Econ. (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2013.09.003

Chronology

1960s
Mao Zedong boasts that in future, the view from Tiananmen Square would be ‘all chimneys’.

1989
Dai Qing 戴晴 publishes Yangtze! Yangtze! (是否该进行长江三峡水坝的工程), a book that argued against the construction of the Three Gorges dam because of environmental concerns; she is later arrested and sentenced to 10 months imprisonment.

1991
The Society for Protecting Black-Beaked Gulls (黑嘴鸥保护协会), China’s first legal environmental NGO founded in Liaoning province.

1992
The Rio Earth Summit, a United Nations conference attended by 172 governments including China’s, brought environmental topics such as sustainable development into the mainstream.

1995
The Ninth Five Year Plan covering 1996 – 2000 is published on 28 September. Sustainable development is confirmed as a national development strategy.

1996
The number of public protests over environmental issues begins to grow. Frequency of protests subsequently increases by twenty-nine percent each year.

1997
At the Fifteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (12-18 September), the word ‘environment’ (环境) appears for the first time in a national congress report. The ‘huge environmental and resource pressures caused by population growth and economic development‘ was listed as a major difficulty for the nation’s future.

Also in 1997, the National Sustainable Development Report is published.

2001
China joins the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China quickly becomes the world’s biggest manufacturer in many sectors: concrete, iron and steel, textiles and clothing; automobiles, mobile phones and others.

2002
At the Sixteenth Party Congress held 8-15 November, President Jiang Zemin 江泽民 said that in building a xiaokang (小康 – well-off) society, the ‘conflicts between the environment, natural resources and economic and social development are becoming more apparent daily,’ stressing the need for continual strengthening of sustainable development ability, improvement of the environment, clear increases in resource efficiency, the promotion of harmony between humanity and nature and putting society as a whole onto a development path of production, wealth and environmental-friendliness.

2003
The new premier, Wen Jiabao 温家宝, puts forward the ‘scientific view of development,’ along with the new idea of ‘green GDP’. Green GDP does not last long in official rhetoric and disappears shortly thereafter.

2004
The Nu River campaign begins, bringing together scientists, environmental groups and concerned citizens in opposition to dam building in Yunnan province.

2005
At the Fifth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Party Congress 8-11 October, 2005, Wen Jiabao puts forward the ‘two-oriented’ society – one that conserves resources and is environmentally friendly, pointing the direction for local development.

Later that year China initiates circular economy trials, which emphasise sustainable development and reduction of pollution through saving resources, reusing and recycling in ten different provinces.

On 13 November, an explosion at a petrochemical plant in Jilin province releases an 80km long toxic slick into the Songhua river. The cleanup operation takes many months, resulting in media criticism of official handling of the incident that lasts throughout 2006.

2006
The government sets tough targets for energy intensity and emissions of pollutants. As the 2010 deadline approaches, businesses and local governments that had failed to reach their goals face sanctions, leading to a spate of enforced blackouts.

On 13 December, the baiji 白暨豚 or Yangtze river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is declared ‘functionally extinct’, after a 45-day search by leading experts in the field failed to find a single specimen.

2007
In January, regulations on Open Government Information are introduced by the State Council.

At the Seventeenth Party Congress 15-21 October, ‘Building an ecological civilisation (生态文明)’ is confirmed as a goal.

Wu Lihong 吴立红, campaigner against industrial pollution of Lake Tai is arrested in April 2007, tried for alleged extortion of one of the polluters and sentenced to three years in prison.

1 June, a protest against a PX (Paraxylene) plant slated for a neighborhood in Xiamen, Fujian province attracts around 10,000 people and becomes the first notable citizen environmental protest of the digital age. The project was relocated ion in Xiamen.

2008
In March China’s Environmental Protection Agency is upgraded to the Ministry for Environmental Protection.

1 May: measures on Open Environmental Information (for trial implementation) come into effect.

Lake Tai is affected by algae bloom.

8 August Beijing Olympics commence.

2010
Circular Economy Promotion Law is adopted.

2011
4 June, 2011 s serious oil spill occurs in the Bohai gulf.

2011
In August, an estimated 12,000 people protest in Dalian to demand the relocation of a PX plant.

2012
The Eighteenth Party Congress puts environmental issues higher up on the agenda and links them to performance assessments, adding environment to the four ‘platforms’ or basic beliefs announced by Hu Jintao as follows:

Resource consumption, environmental damage and ecological efficiency shall be included in systems for evaluating economic and social development, in order to establish a system of targets, evaluation and rewards and punishments that reflects the requirements of an ecological civilisation.

On 1-3 July there are protests in Shifang, Sichuan province against a copper plant; on 22 October, there are protests on Hainan island against a proposed coal-fired power plant; on 28 October there are protests in Ningbo against a PX plant.

2012
In December, Hainan-based environmental campaigner Liu Futang 刘福堂 is found guilty of ‘illegal business activities’, and punished with a fine and suspended three year jail term.

2013
January airpocalypse: Beijing pollution levels reach new heights, making headlines across the globe.

In May, protest in the Songjiang district of Shanghai against plans for a lithium battery factory leads to project cancellation.

Also in May, protests are held against a proposed PX plant in Kunming.

On 14 June, twenty new anti-pollution laws drafted.

In July, protesters in Guangdong win the promise of the cancellation of a uranium re-processing plant.

In October, the third reading of revisions to the Environmental Protection Law is conducted.

Glossary

Ecological civilisation – Ecological civilisation was proposed by Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in his report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the CPC. It has been described as ‘an important change in the Party’s understanding of development. Rather than emphasising economic construction as the core of development as it did in the past, the Party authorities have come to realise that development, if sustainable, must entail a list of elements including the right relationship between man and nature.’ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2007-10/24/content_6201964.htm

Circular economy – an industrial economy that is restorative, and in which biological nutrients reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, circulate without entering the biosphere.

Green GDP – an index of economic growth that factors the environmental consequences of that growth into conventional GDP. It requires net natural capital consumption, including resource depletion, environmental degradation, and protective and restorative environmental initiatives, to be subtracted from traditional GDP. In 2004, Wen Jiabao, announced that the green GDP index would replace the Chinese GDP index as a performance measure for government. The initiative was dropped in 2007 when the results proved politically unacceptable.

Two-oriented society – a resource-conserving and environmentally-friendly society The term was adopted in the eleventh Five Year Plan, which defined building a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society as a strategic task in the long-term plan for the national economy and for social development.

Environmental issue – any matter of concern to interested stakeholders and people regarding natural or built environment or the social environment.

Environmental event – an observable natural or human induced phenomenon that may be positive or negative or neutral as judged by those observing or measuring it.

Environmental accident – a judgmental term implying an unintended change to environmental conditions, or causing harm to economic, social or ecological situations as a result of some event.

Environmental incident – similar in meaning to an environmental accident but without the value judgement that it was an accident since some incidents are the result of planned activities; often used in safety and health reporting as well as for matters affecting ecosystems.

Environmental disaster – environmental incidents that happen at a significant scale. Sometimes modified to ‘potential disaster’ if the full dimensions are not immediately apparent.

Environmental impacts or consequences – standardised terminology used in relation to EIA and SIA, especially in relation to proposed projects, activities, and sometimes policies, in order to consider positive and negative types of effects and their potential significance and risks.

Environmental harm – legally, an action, intentionally or unintentionally causing significant damage to the environment or people. Often a term that finds its way into legislation and into court cases.

Environmental justice – the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. It recognises the unfair distribution of environmental burdens imposed on poorer and minority communities and ensures opportunities for people from those communities to be heard.

Environmental risk – a perception of, or calculated level of danger or hazard either of causing ecological, human or other damage/harm as the result of an event, project or action taking place.

Public Participation – the public’s right to be involved in every stage of the decision-making process. A technical approach to risk assessment and communication vs a broader ‘cultural experiential’ approach.

Notes

[1] http://english.mep.gov.cn/News_service/infocus/201309/t20130924_260707.htm

[2] See Meng Si. 2012. An Insight into the Green Vocabulary of the Chinese Communist Party. in chinadialogue (https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5339 ) for an explanation of significant environment and development terms including Ecological Civilisation.

The post The Environment 环境 appeared first on The China Story.

By Ivan Franceschini

This lexicon item consists of the following sub-sections:

• Overview
• Perspectives
• Chronology
• Glossary

Overview

When the International Labour Organization (ILO) held its first Conference in Washington in 1919 following the end of the First World War, a discussion arose around the issue of labour conditions in China. The Conference proposed the creation of a social legislation in China, with the aim of protecting workers in more advanced countries against competition from the low-paid labour force in East Asia. It suggested the enforcement of a limit of ten working hours per day and sixty hours per week for adults in factories employing more than one hundred people. In 1923, regulations to this effect were finally issued by the Chinese government, although they were never enforced.

Almost a century later, Chinese labour is still at the centre of the international debate, with the ‘China price’ being blamed for what is perceived as a general decline in labour conditions, wages and labour protection in many developed countries. In the last three decades, after the Chinese government decided to open the economy of the country to the world, stories of low wages, unpaid salaries, labour accidents, mass lay-offs and strikes have been widely and regularly reported by the Chinese and international media, fuelling criticism of the so-called ‘world factory’. This, in turn, has nourished the idea that China, thanks to its artificially repressed labour costs, is literally ‘sucking’ jobs from developed countries. This discourse particularly gained traction after 2001, following China’s accession to the World Trade Organization.

The story of this ‘China price’ dates back over three decades. Before the beginning of the economic reforms in 1978, China had no labour markets for industrial workers and jobs were allocated by the state. Then China’s state-dominated industry had a particular employment model, often described as the ‘iron rice bowl’ (tiefanwan 铁饭碗), a term which designated a lifetime position with low monetary salaries but comprehensive welfare and benefits provided by a state-run ‘work unit’ (danwei 单位). Salaries were kept ‘rationally’ low, while markets were replaced by a rationing system, and the work unit became a redistributive hub in urban areas.

The situation began to change gradually in the 1980s, following three distinct processes:

• first, the development of a private sector in China, boosted by foreign investments in Special Economic Zones;
• secondly, the loosening of controls on internal migrations, accompanied by the appearance of urban markets for food, houses and other goods; and,
• thirdly, the introduction in 1986 of the labour contract system for all new employees in state industries.

The final blow to the ‘iron rice bowl’ employment model then came in the mid 1990s, when the authorities decided to implement the 1989 Bankruptcy Law and allow many State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to go bankrupt, especially small and inefficient ones, while retaining control and reinforcing the largest enterprises and the most strategic industries.

With the progressive demise of ‘work units’ (although many large enterprises continued to provide above-average welfare to their workers) and the emergence of a labour market (in fact a number of fragmented, local labour markets), a new set of social problems emerged: shortage of skilled labour was accompanied by unemployment of the traditionally privileged state workers, labour disputes were ripe and frequent, low and unpaid wages and excessive overtime became common in certain booming industries like construction, all in the virtual absence of a social security net that could replace the role of the work-unit. In this context of legal uncertainty and scarce supervision, sweatshops (xuehan gongchang 血汗工厂) have appeared everywhere, causing recurrent uproar among the public opinion, both in China and abroad.

To deal with this situation, over the past two decades the Chinese authorities have introduced a series of laws which not only regulate labour relations in the workplace, but also aim to enhance labour protection. The 2007 Labour Contract Law, despite on-going problems with implementation, is generally considered a big step forward for Chinese workers’ rights. Other important laws include the Labour Law (1994) that defined the rights of Chinese workers and their basic protection; the Trade Union Law (1992, amended in 2001) that better defined the role of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU, Zhonghua quanguo zonggonghui 中华全国总工会) but maintains its monopoly of labour representation; the Labour Disputes Mediation and Arbitration Law (2007), the Employment Promotion Law (2007) and the Social Security Law (2010). The passing of each of these laws has been accompanied by heated public debate. When the first draft of the Labour Contract Law was published in March 2006, for example, more than 192,000 comments were submitted in a month.

It is often noted that while China has a large number of labour regulations, they are not properly implemented, or they are applied unevenly in different parts of the country or in different industries. One of the reasons given for this situation is the overwhelming importance of economic growth, in particular in the eyes of local governments and local leaders. Dependency on international capital (leading to a reluctance to enforce labour regulations by local governments) is another oft-cited factor. Among the opinions submitted after the publication of the first draft Labour Contract Law, critical documents issued by foreign chambers of commerce suggested that such a law would have had a negative impact on the country’s competitiveness and its appeal as a destination for foreign investment. In the following months, as a result of more discussion and further critiques, new drafts largely expunged the most innovative clauses of the law, ones which, if implemented, would have given Chinese workers and the official union a significant voice in workplace-related matters.

Despite resistance from local state and foreign investors, the context for China’s labour market is undergoing significant change. In 2003, for the first time the Chinese media reported that the flow of migrant workers from the countryside had started to dry up and that many factories in the most developed coastal areas could not fill vacancies. Since then, the so-called ‘migrant labour famine’ (mingong huang 民工荒) has become a significant problem for local authorities and entrepreneurs in the highly industrialized areas on the Chinese littoral. With the passage of time, a new generation of better-skilled migrant workers has become both more aware of opportunities and more demanding. This has resulted in higher costs for factories in labour intensive sectors, while the most advanced regions have changed their economic strategy from export orientation to higher-yielding production for the domestic consumer market. It has been observed that such structural changes will eventually lead to a general increase in wages and an improvement of labour conditions.

Chinese workers have never been silent when confronted with the infringements of their rights. According to a study of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2003 alone about 58,000 ‘mass incidents’ occurred involving more than three million people. Among them, the most relevant social groups were workers and pensioners, with about 1,660,000 participants, 46.9 percent of the total number. Nevertheless, it appears that worker protests in China are mainly driven by economic reasons and rarely end up challenging the official narratives promoted by the state. They attempt instead to manipulate the official discourses in a sort of captatio benevolentiæ intended for the authorities. Furthermore, most of the workers’ protests just aim at addressing the violation of rights that have already been recognized by the state, not at pressing for new rights.

Two major incidents in the spring of 2010 contributed to focusing international interest on Chinese workers campaigns:

• first, the Chinese and international media widely reported a series of suicides at Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, linking them to poor labour conditions and managerial strategies adopted by this Taiwanese company; and,
• then, a few weeks later, a major strike started at a Honda factory in Nanhai, where workers demanded not only higher salaries, but also the right to a more representative union.

Since then, the Chinese and Western discourses about Chinese labour have been shifting. While for many years workers, especially migrant workers, were portrayed as powerless victims under assault from the forces of international capitalism, 2010 witnessed the rise of a new narrative framed in terms of ‘rights awakening’. This new narrative often highlights the importance of a generational transition, as younger workers are seen as being smarter, better educated and therefore more conscious of their rights than their elders.

Perspectives

This sub-section has the following parts:

• The Official Chinese View
• Contending Views
• International Scholarship: An annotated review
• Media Representation

The Official Chinese View

The official narrative regarding labour in China depicts workers, especially state employees, even today as the true masters of the country (zhuren weng 主人翁). This idea is still reproduced, after several revisions of the PRC Constitution, that, in Article 42, states that: ‘Work is the glorious duty of every able-bodied citizen. All working people in state-owned enterprises and in urban and rural economic collectives should perform their tasks with an attitude consonant with their status as masters of the country.’

Despite its recent embrace of other social groups, in particular the admission of entrepreneurs to Party membership, under the aegis of former Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s Theory of Three Represents, the Chinese Communist Party still draws part of its legitimacy from its historic relationship with the working class. The Party Constitution, defines the Communist Party of China as the ‘vanguard both of the Chinese working class and of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation’, while its members are ‘vanguard fighters of the Chinese working class imbued with communist consciousness’.

The contradiction between the language of a working class state and the reality in today’s labour market is evident to both observers and the Chinese Communist Party. This is compounded by the fact that the Chinese working class is today much more complex than it was before, fragmented in a number of different groups with different and at times competing interests. Not only is the position of migrant workers different from that of the xiagang 下岗 workers (laid-off workers from former State Owned Enterprises), but within each group a complex fragmentation based on age, education, and skills is also emerging. In a society where families invest heavily in education, many also see as problematic the ‘ant tribe’ (yizu 蚁族) of under-employed or unemployed university graduates.

In response to the more complex situation, the Chinese authorities have promoted a new narrative of the working class, one which is articulated in legal terms and revolves around the centrality of workers’ rights in the overall ‘rule of law’. At the same time, some concepts coming from the pre-reform era have been retrieved and adapted to contemporary realities.

Harmonious labour relations

The term Harmonious Labour Relations (hexie laodong guanxi 和谐劳动关系) has been coined in recent years to define the official goals of labour policy. According to the official definition, harmonious labour relations have four main features. They should be:

• contractual (hetongxing 合同性)
• based on the rule of law (fazhixing 法治性)
• democratic (minzhuxing 民主性); and,
• aimed both at rescuing the working class and maintain social stability (jiuzhuxing 救助性).

The main components of this discourse can be found in labour contracts, labour supervision and workers’ quality (suzhi 素质).

The legal protection of rights is a fundamental element of the narrative on harmonious labour relations. According to the White Paper on the Socialist Legal System with Chinese Characteristics, by the end of August 2011, the Chinese government had enacted eighteen ‘social laws’, that is regulations to guide labour relations, social security, social welfare and protection of rights and interests of special groups. This official document underlines the fact that: ‘China’s Labour Law deals with labour relations and other relationships closely related to them, such as labour protection, labour safety and hygiene, occupational training, labour disputes and labour supervision, thus establishing China’s basic labour system’.

Besides the 1994 Labour Law – the first comprehensive regulation of labour relations in every company on the Chinese territory irrespective of ownership – in the past twenty years Chinese central authorities have enacted a series of labour related laws which include the Law on Mine Safety; the Law on Prevention and Control of Occupational Diseases; the Production Safety Law; the Labour Contract Law; the Employment Promotion Law; the Law on Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration; the Trade Union Law; and the Social Insurance Law.

Since the early 1990s, the government has also been strongly promoting the legal process among workers, publicly exhorting them to ‘use the weapon of the law’ (yi falü wei wuqi 以法律为武器) to protect their lawful interests and rights. Legal materials and handbooks produced by the government and the official union have been widely distributed and the texts of the new laws have been widely publicized. In particular, the 2007 Labour Contract Law has received an extensive coverage by the Chinese official media, with the Party mouthpiece People’s Daily even calling for a public contest to test the knowledge of the new Law among the readers.

Nevertheless, this strong legal discourse often clashes with the inefficiency and the structural problems of the Chinese legal system. Workers who want to redress their grievances through officially sanctioned channels not only have to face the partiality and inefficiency of state actors as legal aid centres, labour offices, letters and visits bureaus and trade unions, but also the scarce interests in labour disputes by professional lawyers. Under such circumstances, many workers develop an attitude that the scholar Mary Gallagher has defined as ‘informed disenchantment’.

According to Gallagher, Chinese workers who use the Law would rapidly move from high expectations to a very negative evaluation of the effectiveness of the legal process. As a result, the entire system revolving around the administration of justice produces a group of citizens who are perfectly aware of the legal mechanisms but also completely disenchanted (see: Mary Gallagher, ‘Hope for Protection and Hopeless Choices: Labor legal aid in the PRC’, in Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman, eds, Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp.196-227)

A Sense of Mastery

In the Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 Wen Jiabao 温家宝 decade (2003-2012), in an attempt to mitigate the worrying effects of the reforms a greater emphasis was placed on social aspects of development. In this context, the narrative about labour has undergone a notable shift, especially with regards to migrant workers (nongmingong 农民工) and other marginal groups (ruoshi qunti 弱势群体).

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2011 there were 240 million workers working away from their place of residence. Despite changes in the strict household registration system that prevented mobility from rural areas to industrial centres during the Maoist era, these workers still have a different status from that of local residents in the receiving areas, mainly urban or peri-urban. As non-residents, they are entitled to work but not to have access to the welfare provisions available to local residents. Thus, their situation greatly depends on the capacity or willingness of their employers to pay for health, accident and old age insurance schemes.

While an all-out abolition of the household registration system (hukou zhidu 户口制度) still seems unlikely, in the last few years the government has promoted numerous policies specifically aimed at addressing migrant workers’ problems. These have accorded with the principles outlined in a 2006 State Council document entitled ‘Some Opinions on Resolving the Problems Faced by Migrant Workers‘ and in a 2008 State Council document, ‘Notice on Doing Well the Current Work on Migrant Workers‘. Such policies include the provision of free education to migrant children in urban schools and a number of provisions regarding social security.

Also, various local administrations that bear the blunt of managing large numbers of migrants, have experimented directly with the reform of the household registration system in order to better integrate migrant workers and recently urbanized farmers in the urban welfare system. For example, in June 2010 Guangdong province adopted a new ‘point system’ that rewards migrant workers with special characteristics or who perform certain social duties with an urban registration; in April 2011, Chengdu in Sichuan province abolished altogether any remaining distinction between citizens with rural and urban household registration status.

In recent years, China’s official media has also been actively promoting a new narrative about migrant workers which emphasizes their contribution to the Chinese economy and their fundamental role in driving the country’s development. This new ‘spirit of mastery’ (zhurenweng jingshen 主人翁精神) echoes the role of state workers in pre-reform, Maoist-era ideology. Examples of this discourse are now ubiquitous. We offer here an example of migrant workers’ performances broadcasted during the China Central Television (CCTV) annual Spring Festival Gala, a variety show staged annually to celebrate Chinese New Year that attracts the largest viewing audience in China.

The following video is taken from the 2011 Spring Festival broadcast. The song presented herein, ‘We the Workers are Strong!‘, is an old propaganda tune written in 1947 and adapted for the occasion.

Similarly, in the 2008 Spring Festival Gala, dancers impersonating workers sang ‘Yesterday I was a Farmer, Today I am a Worker!’ (The song of the migrant worker).

Finally, in this scene from The Founding of a Party, a film produced in 2011 to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, one of the communist forefathers, Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, harangues the workers, reminding them of their contribution to the well-being of the people.

Socialist Trade Unionism with Chinese Characteristics

Trade unions in China are described as being ‘mass organizations’, and they maintain the monopoly of representation of worker interests. The Chinese party-state promotes what it calls ‘socialist trade unionism with Chinese characteristics’ (juyou Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi gonghui 具有中国特色社会主义工会), as recently reaffirmed during the Sixth Plenum of the Fifth Executive Committee of the official union federation, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

The Trade Union Law permits the establishment of basic-level trade union committees in any enterprise, institution or government department that has a membership of twenty-five or more. The establishment of basic-level trade union organizations, local trade union federations, as well as national or local industrial trade union organizations requires the oversight of the official trade union organization at the next higher level for approval, with the ACFTU as the unified national organization. According to official data, in 2010, the ACFTU had 239,965,000 members, more than 88 million of them migrant workers, organized in 1,976,000 grassroots unions. China’s unionism therefore maintains a corporative structure that makes it illegal for grassroots trade unions to operate independently of the ACFTU.

The ACFTU is itself under the supervision of the Party. It is required to: ‘observe and safeguard the Constitution, take it as the fundamental criterion for their activities, take economic development as the central task, uphold the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, leadership by the Communist Party of China, and Marxist-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, persevere in the policies of reform and opening, and conduct their work independently in accordance with the Constitution of trade unions’ (Article 4). Its basic duties are: ‘to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of workers and staff members. While protecting the overall interests of the entire Chinese people, trade unions shall represent and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of workers and staff members’ (Article 6).

With a structure still based on the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, ACFTU’s behaviour is thwarted by its contradictory role as defender of both workers’ rights and the enterprise’s interests. Trade union officials emphasize the search for a ‘win-win’ (shuangying 双赢) for workers and management, and underline the importance of a cooperative approach between social parties.

As Guo Jun 郭军, then head of the Democratic Management Department of the ACFTU, said in an interview with Southern Weekend newspaper in early 2008

Those enterprises [who fear the effects of the new labour legislation] have not noticed a very important issue: the Unions’ idea of rights protection emphasizes cooperation with the enterprises to achieve a common success [hezuo gongying 合作共赢], the quest for the interests of both labour and capital [laozi liangli 劳资两利] and a collaborative development [gongmou fazhan 共谋发展], while in the process protecting employees’ rights and interests.

Contending Views

Despite the political sensitivity of the issue of labour rights, the domestic debate has been intense and dissenting views have circulated in various forms. The ACFTU often takes positions in this debate, although not much of the internal discussion surfaces outside of the organization.

Chinese Academic Debates

The Chinese scholastic community is very vocal in debating labour policies and disputes, and this occasionally features in the mainstream Chinese media. Two issues have been particularly central in this discussion in recent years: the right to strike and the new contract law.

The right to strike (bagongquan 罢工权), is one of the grey areas in the labour legislation ever since it was excluded from the Constitution in the early Eighties, after the emergence of the Solidarność movement in Poland. Many Chinese scholars, as well as ACFTU officials, advocate the amendment of the existing regulations or the adoption of a specific law to officially recognize the right to strike. In June 2010, after the attention given by the Chinese media to the Honda strikes, a leading scholar went as far as to declare that: ‘if the workers do not have the right to strike, they are not respected’. Other observers have argued that implementing a law on strike in China at this time would, paradoxically, restrict workers’ ability to use industrial action to improve their working conditions.

The debate on the 2007 Labour Contract Law polarised around two contending schools of thought: the first, often identified with professor Chang Kai 常凯 of People’s University (an institute traditionally close to the Party bureaucracy), advocated a greater involvement of the state in labour relations in order to balance the unmitigated power of management and market; the second, led by professor Dong Baohua 董保华 of East China University of Political Science and Law, argued instead for a better implementation of the existing laws and a market regulation of labour. In 2006 and 2007, Chang and Dong engaged in a increasingly public debate, with their opinions often appearing on both domestic and international media.

Worker Activists

If strikes are very common in China, activists who try to direct workers’ dissatisfaction in the direction of creating an independent labour movement are often harshly punished by the authorities. Emblematic is the story of Zhao Dongmin 赵东民, a labour activist who was sentenced to three years in jail for ‘gathering a crowd to disrupt social order’ (juzhong naoshi 聚众闹事). Zhao was first arrested in August 2009 after organising 380 workers from about twenty state-owned enterprises in Shaanxi province to form a labour rights group to monitor the restructuring of SOEs and report corruption and abuses of power. The group was officially banned in July 2009.

Domestic Labour NGOs

According to the available evidence, in mainland China there are a few dozens grassroots labour NGOs. Unfortunately, the only data available are based on personal estimates of people who work in the sector. For example, Liu Kaiming 刘开明, founder and director of the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation (Dangdai shehui guancha yanjiusuo 当代社会观察研究所), told the newspaper Nanfang Dushibao in 2007 that about fifty labour NGOs were active in the Pearl River Delta with more than 200 people involved totally. Roughly at the same time, Huang Yan 黄岩 from South China Normal University told the publication Nanfeng Chuang that in the Pearl River Delta there were only about thirty such organizations, each employing two or three activists.

In some cases, these organizations are established by former workers and can only survive thanks to a substantial financial support from international trade unions and other foreign foundations and organizations. The widespread belief is that these labour NGOs are harbinger of independent unionism in China or little short of a ‘Chinese workers self-salvation movement’. The political context they operate in, however, constrains their ability to challenge the official narratives about labour rights and often reproduce mainstream, state-produced discourses. Despite these limitations, Chinese labour NGOs are an invaluable source of information and public awareness about Chinese labour both for international organizations and the media.

International Trade Unions and NGOs

Critical voices are far stronger abroad than they are in China. The Hong Kong labour movement is particularly active. Some of the most influential voices include the China Labour Bulletin, an NGO founded by Han Dongfang 韩东方, a former labour leader who went into exile in the early 1990s for his role in the 1989 Beijing Protest Movement; the Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), an NGO established by scholars from Hong Kong and the mainland, particularly active in denouncing malpractices in global corporations, primarily Foxconn (the Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple products that employs more than a million workers in mainland China); and Globalization Monitor, which produces important surveys on labour conditions in factories on the mainland. Other important actors are the international unions, especially the International Trade Union Confederation, that publishes an annual survey of violations of trade union rights.

International Scholarship: an annotated review

International scholars have produced a consistent body of literature on the history of the Chinese labour movement. Most of these studies focus on a specific period of Chinese modern history, as Jean Chesneaux’s The Chinese Labor Movement (1968), which describe the dawn of the Chinese labour movement in the decade 1919-1927; François Gipoloux’s Les Cent Fleurs a l’Usine (1986), which analyses workers’ role in the Hundred Flowers Campaign; or Elizabeth Perry’s Patrolling the Revolution (2006) on workers’ militias during the Cultural Revolution. Some studies describe the history of the Chinese workers’ movement in a longer temporal arch, as is the case of Jackie Sheehan’s Chinese Workers: A New History (1998) and Elizabeth Perry’s Shanghai on Strike (1993).

Significant attention has been devoted to the issues of Chinese industrial relations. While some of these studies focus on industrial relations in specific periods of Chinese history, as Bill Brugger’s Democracy and Organisation in the Chinese Industrial Enterprise, 1948-1953 (2010), others tackle more general issues related to organisation and power relations inside the work-units in the pre-reform and early reform eras, as Andrew Walder’s Communist Neo-traditionalism (1988); Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth Perry’s edited volume Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1997); Sally Sargeson’s Reworking China’s Proletariat (1999); and Mark Frazier’s The Making of the Chinese Workplace (2002). More general studies deal with the issue of the labour reform, describing the policy-making processes which led to the demise of the work units and the creation of a labour market in China, for example Luigi Tomba’s Paradoxes of Labour Reform (2002).

The issue of migrant workers’ labour conditions in Chinese factories, as well the impact of the global capital on Chinese labour, are topics of great interest for the international scholar community, as well for the media. In this regard, Anita Chan’s collection of accounts translated from the Chinese media in China’s Workers Under Assault (2001) has become a classic. Part of this literature has a strong focus on gender, as is the case with Ching Kwan Lee’s Gender and the South China Miracle (1998), Pun Ngai’s Made in China (2005) and Tamara Jacka’s Rural Women in Urban China (2005). Other studies specifically tackle the role of international capital in the worsening of labour conditions in China, such as Mary Gallagher’s Contagious Capitalism (2005), or focus on specific companies for their case studies, as Anita Chan’s edited volume on Walmart in China (2011).

Much has been written about worker protests and contentious labour politics over the last decade. Probably, the most influential book on the topic is Ching Kwan Lee’s Against the Law (2007), which underlines the different pattern of mobilisation among migrant workers in Shenzhen and laid-off workers in Liaoning. Other studies focus on the dynamics of resistance by specific social groups, especially laid-off workers, as Yongshun Cai’s State and Laid-off Workers in Reform China (2005) and William Hurst’s The Chinese Worker after Socialism (2012), or migrant workers, as Chris Chan’s The Challenge of Labour in China (2010). There is also a growing body of literature focusing on the Chinese official union, from Lee Lai To’s Trade Unions in China, 1949 to the present (1986) to Tim Pringle’s Trade Unions in China (2011).

Other studies focus on legal issues related to Chinese labour laws and regulations, especially labour disputes resolution, but this kind of studies can hardly keep up with the very rapid change in Chinese legal landscape. A more recent field conjugates labour studies with media studies. Worth mentioning in this regard are Sun Wanning’s Maid in China (2009) on the production and consumption of popular media among domestic workers, and Jack Linchuan Qiu’s Working-Class Network Society (2009) on the use of new media among workers. Finally, some recent studies have placed Chinese labour in a comparative perspective, including Dorothy Solinger’s States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses (2009).

Media Representation

Chinese labour issues are widely covered in the international media, especially when major companies are involved in scandals related to labour conditions in their Chinese supplier’s factories. Household brands like Nike, Walmart, MacDonald, Pizza Hut and Apple have all been involved in Chinese labour-related scandals reported by the international media in recent years. Such global media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Economist regularly report on Chinese labour disputes and occasionally produce more in-depth analysis about the changes in the Chinese labour market. In light of this widespread reporting, the ‘China price’ has long been one of the main concerns for the public in many Western countries.

After major events such as the recent Honda strikes and the Foxconn incidents, the international media started promoting a narrative which was mainly framed in terms of an ‘awakening’ of Chinese workers. Such headlines as ‘The Rising Power of the Chinese Worker‘ (The Economist), ‘The Rise of a Chinese Worker’s Movement‘ (Businessweek), ‘An Independent Labor Movement Stirs in China‘ (The New York Times) have become increasingly common, and Time magazine went as far as to designate the common ‘Chinese worker’ as Person of the Year in 2009.

Numerous reporters have also published books on the topic. The most prominent were The China Price (2008), written by Financial Times editor Alexandra Harney, and Factory Girls (2008), authored by The Wall Street Journal’s Leslie Chang. While Harney’s book is more analytical, Chang’s volume focuses on the life of two female migrant workers in Dongguan, Guangdong province, whose lives the author followed for a few years. Both books are based on extensive field research undertaken by the authors and offer the reader two different but equally vivid portraits of workers’ life in the ‘world factory’.

Many other books written by foreign journalists deal with the issue of Chinese labour in some of their chapters or sections. Among them, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (2007) describes a visit of the author to Shenzhen in the late 1990s. Country Driving (2010), by the same author, has an entire section dedicated to the vicissitudes of a small factory and its workers in a city not far from Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow (2009) describes in detail a strike by SOE workers in Liaoyang city, which took place in 2002, and Ian Buruma’s Bad Elements (2003) offers a series of portraits of prominent Chinese labour activists.

International NGOs and labour groups also actively bring Chinese labour issues to the attention of the international media, with organisations China Labour Bulletin (CLB), China Labour Watch (CLW) and Student and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) often quoted by journalists as their sources. Occasionally, the leaders of these organisations contribute to the public debate, writing their own op-eds for prominent newspapers and magazines. The websites of these organisations are precious sources of information for anybody interested in Chinese labour issues.

Migrant workers have been protagonists of various documentary films which have been made in the past few years. Some of them have enjoyed popular and critical success, such as Micha Peled’s China Blue (2005), and Fan Lixin’s Last Train Home (2009). Following are some interviews with Foxconn workers from the 2011 documentary film Dreamwork China, collected in Shenzhen by Tommaso Facchin and Ivan Franceschini.

Dreamwork China from Cineresie on Vimeo.

Chronology

Republic of China, 1912-1949

1914-1918: Early wave of industrialization in China
1919: First conference of the International Labour Organization held in Washington recommends the introduction of labour legislation in China
August 1921: Secretariat for the Organization of Labour established by the Chinese Communist Party
May 1922: First All-China Labour Conference held in Guangzhou
7 February 1923: Striking workers of the Beijing-Hankou railway line are massacred by the forces of warlord Wu Peifu
29 March 1923: First labour legislation adopted in China (‘Temporary Regulations on Factories’)
May 1925: All-China Federation of Trade Unions established in Guangzhou during the second All-China Labour Conference
30 May 1925: May Thirtieth Movement, general strikes launched in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong
11 April 1927: Killings of trade unionists and workers in Shanghai by the local triads
1927-1937: Laws on factories, trade unions and labour disputes passed by the nationalist government with capital in Nanjing
November 1931: Labour legislation passed by the communist government of the Jiangxi Soviet

People’s Republic of China, 1949-

1950: Trade Union Law passed
1951: Li Lisan, Minister of Labour and leader of the All- China Federation of Trade Unions, is purged after supporting greater autonomy for the official union
1953: Establishment of the household registration system
1955-1956: Complete nationalisation of the industry
Spring 1957: The All-China Federation of Trade Unions and workers take part in the Hundred Flowers movement and call for greater autonomy for Chinese unions. Purges ensue
1958-1960: Great Leap Forward
1960-1966: A ‘two-line struggle’ in industry, with the supporters of the ‘Anshan Constitution’ and the ‘Seventy Rules for Industry’ on opposite sides
1966-1978: All-China Federation of Trade Unions shut down, workers allowed to set up their own revolutionary groups in the factories
1975-1985: Reintroduction of flexible salary structures (piece rate and bonuses)
1978: Ninth Congress of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the official union is re-established
1980: Special Economic Zones established in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen and Hainan
1986: Enforcement of the labour contract system for all the new employees in State Owned Enterprises, formal end of life tenure or ‘iron rice bowl’ (tie fanwan 铁饭碗)
May-June 1989: Emergence of short-lived independent unions in various Chinese cities
1992: Deng Xiaoping’s Tour of the South. Amendment to the Trade Union Law
1994: Labour Law passed
1995: Reform of the State Owned Enterprises intensifies, according to the principle of ‘grasping the big and letting the small go’ (zhuada fangxiao 抓大放小)
2001: Amendment to the Trade Union Law
March 2006: Popular consultation on the first draft of the Labour Contract Law, more than 192,000 comments submitted in a month
2007: Labour Contract Law, Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law and Employment Promotion Law passed
May 2010: Strike at the Honda factory in Nanhai widely reported by the Chinese and International media
2010: Social Security Law passed

Glossary

Ant tribe (under-employed or unemployed university graduates) yizu 蚁族
All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) zhonghua quanguo zonggonghui 中华全国总工会
Foxconn (company name – a Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple products) fushikang 富士康
Harmonious labour relations hexie laodong guanxi 和谐劳动关系
Household registration system hukou zhidu 户口制度
Iron rice bowl tiefanwan 铁饭碗
Labour laodong 劳动
Laid-off workers xiagang 下岗
Marginal groups ruoshi qunti 弱势群体
Masters of the country zhuren weng 主人翁
Migrant labour famine mingong huang 民工荒
Migrant worker or labourer nongmingong 农民工
Quality (of a person) suzhi 素质
Socialist trade unionism with Chinese characteristics juyou zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi gonghui 具有中国特色社会主义工会
Sweatshop xuehan gongchang 血汗工厂
The right to strike bagongquan 罢工权
Union gonghui 工会
Use the weapon of the law yi falü wei wuqi 以法律为武器
Win-win shuangying 双赢
Work unit danwei 单位

Back to Lexicon main menu

The post Labour 劳工 appeared first on The China Story.

Susan Trevaskes and Elisa Nesossi
Australian Centre on China in the World

This lexicon entry consists of the following sub-sections:

• Overview
• Perspectives
• Chronology
• Glossary

Overview

When, in 2008, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the post-Mao open door and reform policies, the domestic media praised the country’s realization of the rule of law and the progress made in the protection of human rights. One year later, domestic newspapers applauded the enactment of the first National Human Rights Action Plan (2009-2010) by the State Council; and in 2010, Wang Chen 王晨, then director of the State Council Information Office, opened the Third Beijing Forum on Human Rights claiming that the Chinese government has long pursued modernization and human rights, and that improvements in human rights were ‘obvious’ (see here). In 2004, the protection of human rights was inserted in the 1982 Constitution of the People’s Republic and, more recently, in the 2012 amendment of the Criminal Procedure Law. A new National Human Rights Action Plan (2012-2015) was issued in 2012 to restate China’s domestic commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights.

Voices from Chinese civil society contrast starkly with these official views and their accompanying enthusiasm about the pace of change; they openly contest and denounce abuses by the party-state of its citizens. They claim that party-state discourse does not reflect a genuine commitment to the protection of individual rights in practice, as official discourse on human rights is rigid in its conception of the relationship between the individual and the state, protecting the political and institutional status quo. The official commitment of the PRC to the protection of individual rights is also questioned by the international human rights regime, especially at times when the party-state fails to acknowledge domestic flaws in the administration of justice and perpetrates abuses against domestic human rights activists and other critics who are seen as dissidents or dissenters.

Notwithstanding some significant changes in the Chinese domestic discourse on human rights over the last twenty years, human rights has been and remains a very sensitive political issue. Before the 4 June Incident of 1989 (known variously internationally as ‘4 June’, the ‘Beijing Massacre’ and the ‘Tiananmen Massacre’), which was a turning point in the human rights debate within China, there was little discussion, either public or academic, of human rights questions. Human rights were seen as bourgeois, Western liberal values that, expressed as political and civil rights, were not regarded as relevant to China’s socialist system, which in principle privileged the promotion of economic and social rights. Indeed, according to the 1991 First White Paper on Human Rights, a key goal of human rights development in China was to dramatically improve the subsistence rights of citizens.

The widespread international criticism of the human rights situation in the PRC that followed 4 June 1989 had, among other outcomes, the effect of opening up a domestic debate on human rights. Since then, human rights issues have become an acceptable aspect of domestic political and legal discourse, though the promotion of political and civil rights has remained highly contentious. The official view has always been that in a fast developing economy, economic and social rights should be privileged over other rights.

During the last decade, Chinese public discourse on human rights has widened considerably, as exemplified by the increasing number of academic and official publications on key issues. Overall, the development of a stronger civil society, a burgeoning internet culture of critique and the changes in the media sector such as the rise of progressive newspaper outlets as the Southern Metropolis Daily (Nanfang dushi bao 南方都市报), have contributed to a more pluralistic and diversified domestic discourse on human rights from the grassroots of society.

New approaches in the Chinese discourse on human rights have also been triggered by the dramatic economic changes over the last three decades. Economic growth in China has not, of course, benefited everybody equally. While hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty as a direct result of the economic reforms, many others remain poor and are more vulnerable to the socio-economic fallout of land development and labour policies that encourage rapid growth.

China now has one of the widest economic gaps in the world between the richest and poorest members of society. This inequality has increased social tensions and the threat of instability, challenging at its core the party-state’s earlier assumptions that economic success and prosperity would bring about social stability. Indeed, as the pace of economic development has accelerated, so has the rate and intensity of public protests against forced land acquisitions, job layoffs, low and unpaid wages, environmental degradation, toll charges, forced housing relocations and ethnic tensions.

In the twenty-first century, Party doctrine has sought to deal with this uneasy nexus between rapid economic growth and social stability. While not explicitly cloaked in the discourse of ‘human rights’, official state doctrine in the Hu Jintao 胡锦涛-Wen Jiabao温家宝 era (2002-2012) sought to address – at least rhetorically – the disparity in income and access to wealth, welfare and justice by touting the development goal of an Harmonious Society (hexie shehui 和谐社会).

The goal of ‘building an harmonious society’ by the year 2020 was written into a Party Resolution in 2006 and it included a blueprint for social and political governance goals aimed at more equitable economic development. Since 2007, however, the idea of ‘building an harmonious society’ has been linked increasingly with protecting society from those who dissent, many of whom are those who are most vulnerable to the social and economic fallout of rapid growth and development, along with the more well off who, in various ways, oppose the inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. In this context, official discourse has reemphasized the 1980s’ maxim by Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 that ‘Stability crushes everything else’ (wending yadao yiqie 稳定压倒一切), a slogan that stressed that stability was a prerequisite for the development of rights.

The perceived threat of instability has had a significant impact on the discourse on human rights in China over the last decade, particularly since 2007. That is to say:

• In the first place, it has given more prominence to civil society groups and the weiquan (维权 or ‘rights defence’) movement whose mission is linked to the promotion and protection of the human rights of the most vulnerable in society. Weiquan lawyers, for example, are committed to taking up legal causes with wider social and sometimes political impact to fight social injustices and give voice to the socially marginalised;
• secondly, academic views support the idea that Chinese citizens have progressively become more rights-conscious and tend to challenge their grievances by adopting the language of rights. Social inequality and the various related social problems that cause it are nowadays often interpreted in the social sciences and humanities through the lens of rights violation and protection; and,
• thirdly, and most importantly, perceived threats of instability have had a significant impact on party-state discourse, particularly how it articulates the Party as the protector of society and how it promotes performance-based legitimacy in terms of stability maintenance.

While continuing to promote the rhetoric of human rights protection through the issuing of official statements and the amendment of existing legislation, the party-state has increasingly expressed the need to enforce measures for the maintenance of stability by preventing and containing social unrest. Stability Maintenance has therefore become a central plank of social management policies since 2007. Since then, the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao socio-economic policy model has sought to justify suppression – in the name of Stability Maintenance – of those views that demand economic and social rights beyond what the party-state can supply.

In the face of rising public dissent, the party-state has made stability a key legitimizing principle for justice system practice and for official views on how best to use its authority to govern the nation through this current era of increasing tension between society’s haves and have-nots. But in doing so, and whether self-consciously or not, it has tied the rationale for ‘stability’ to the centre post of socio-economic policies and hence, it cannot ignore the foundational principle of its own human rights agenda – the prioritizing of economic and social rights – as a key part of the debate about how to forge socioeconomic policy in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Perspectives

The Official View

Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, in line with Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought and consistent in approach with other developing countries, China has emphasised the promotion of collective rights such as anti-discrimination, anti-colonialism, self-determination, development and economic and social rights. While in a rhetorical sense not denying the existence of political and civil rights, official views on their promotion over and above economic and social rights has been considered an expression or vestige of Western hegemonic imperialism.

The Chinese official human rights policy has always emphasised that human rights interpretation and implementation is strictly dependent upon local circumstances which vary according to the level of economic development, socio-cultural and historical circumstances. Accordingly, the rationale has been that each country should be afforded a margin of appreciation on rights issues. This rationale has been supported with rhetoric on the principles of non-interference and calls for the international community to respect the domestic jurisdiction of individual countries, even in the field of international human rights law.

Despite this consistent stance of ‘non-interference’, over the last decade human rights discourse has found its way into key instruments of legislation in China. In 2004, the 1982 Constitution was revised to include the formula ‘the state respects and protects human rights’ in Article 33. While the inclusion of this terminology has been acknowledged by international commentators and human rights groups as a step in the right direction, the fundamentals underpinning the concept of human rights in China have not changed and have continued to be tied to the notion of the inseparability of rights and duties. The same Article sets out the principle of mutuality of rights and duties (quanli yiwu xiang yizhi 权利义务相一致), which implies that rights are inseparable from the duties prescribed by the Constitution and other laws.

As clearly stated by Liu Huaqiu in his speech to the Vienna conference on Human Rights in 1993:

The rights and obligations of a citizen are indivisible. While enjoying his legitimate rights and freedoms, a citizen must fulfil his social responsibilities and obligations. There are no absolute individual rights and freedom, except those prescribed by and within the framework of law. Nobody shall place his own rights and interests above those of the state and society, nor should be allowed to impair those of others and the general public. (See: Liu Huaqiu in Tang James Tuck-Hong, ed., Human Rights and International Relations in the Asia and Pacific, London: Pinter, London, 1995, p.215.)

Official documents such as White Papers on Human Rights (the first issued in 1991 and the second in 2009) and the two Human Rights Action Plans (2009 and 2012) demonstrate changes and continuities inherent into the official approach to human rights, both civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights.

Changes and Continuities Since the 1980s

The 1991 White Paper on Human Rights is the first formal expression of post-1949 Chinese view on human rights, offering as it does an insight into the most fundamental theoretical and philosophical concepts underpinning the official discourse on human rights during those years. The document reiterated China’s support of economic and social rights embraced by other Asian and developing countries. However, in contrast to these countries, it put utmost emphasis on the ‘right of subsistence’ (shengcun quan 生存权), as a right superior to other economic and social rights. This meant that the priority of the leadership was to ensure a basic level of subsistence for Chinese citizens, without necessarily guaranteeing all other economic and social rights. Consistent with the internationally-shared gradualist approach toward the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, the Chinese leadership formally acknowledged that such rights could be enjoyed by the Chinese citizens only gradually, in line with the country’s economic development.

More recent official views on human rights can be found in the 2009 White Paper on Human Rights, and, strictly in line with it, in the two National Human Rights Action Plan which, according to Chinese official views, are intended as a manifesto on the dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred in Chinese society since the early 1980s and the benefits that these changes have accrued. Notwithstanding their different aims – while the first one is mainly an account of recent-past achievements in protection of human rights, the second are programmatic documents that set milestones for the future – the three documents are based on very similar theoretical approaches.

As in the case of the 1991 White Paper, these most recent documents continue to stress economic development and the protection of economic and social rights. Nevertheless, in light of China’s economic performance, the emphasis has shifted from the right to subsistence to redistributive rights. Because of the gap between rich and poor that has emerged in Chinese society due to rapid economic development, the government is committed to prioritising the egalitarian provision of economic and social rights in an ‘all-round way’ to all members of society, in particular through the development of a social welfare system. Other economic and social rights newly introduced by the 2009 documents are labour and environmental rights, and provisions related to the right to health (in the form of health care).

In terms of civil and political rights, both the 2009 White Paper and the National Human Rights Action Plans identify a number of rights new to the Chinese discourse on human rights. By associating, the protection of civil and political rights along with the promotion of the rule of law and democracy, the documents list the rights of prisoners and detainees, fair trial rights, the right to be informed, the right to supervision (by the authorised organs of the state) and the right of citizens to orderly political participation. They emphasise transparency and freedom of expression also associated with Internet rights.

According to the official view, whereas civil and political rights should still be considered secondary to economic development, in practice Chinese citizens now enjoy a significantly wider spectrum of rights than a few of decades ago, including freedom of movement, speech, press, publication, association and assembly. The legislation constitutes to be the instrument through which such rights are guaranteed and through which they can be claimed in court and through other official channels.

Human Rights Diplomacy (renquan waijiao 人权外交)

Human rights groups refer to the progressive engagement of developing/non-Western countries in the international human rights community as a process of ‘socialisation’, which is reflected in the country’s willingness to engage with international treaties and conventions. Notwithstanding the persistently strong emphasis on state sovereignty and the right to development, since its access to the UN in 1971, the Chinese government has increasingly engaged with international human rights bodies. In 1992, in a Security Council speech, the then Chinese Premier Li Peng 李鹏 formally acknowledged that China would engage in discussion and co-operate with other states on human rights issues.

The 2009 documents show the full extent of China’s international engagement in the previous twenty years. China has acceded to twenty-five international conventions and, the issuing of the National Human Rights Plan itself was a clear response to the 1993 UN call for the establishment of human rights plan at the nation level. Among other instruments, the PRC signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1997 (aiming at an imminent ratification) and, in 2002, ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

In addition, China has participated in the international human rights regime by submitting reports, participating in the drafting of new instruments, engaging in multilateral, regional and bilateral dialogues on rights issues, and hosting a number of important human rights meetings. It has also allowed international rights monitors to visit the country – including the Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion, the one on the Right to Education and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

In view of this increasing level of involvement, the Chinese authorities see the continuing negative reports by international organizations and Western NGOs simply as an attacks on China that ‘intentionally distort China’s human rights conditions’ and do not take into account the significant improvement in the welfare conditions of the Chinese citizens. The argument here is that countries that criticise China’s human rights record have their own human rights problems, ones that they should try to address before pointing the finger of blame at others (see here, for example).

Social Management Goals

Despite China’s increasing willingness to participate in international human rights law and dialogue, its internal human rights discourse, especially in regard to economic and social rights, is still articulated within the boundaries of socialist discourse such as the Harmonious Society, Stability Maintenance and, more recently, Social Management Innovation (shehui guanli chuangxin 社会管理创新).

Social Management is a catchall expression that includes all areas of social and political policy related to the regulation of various sectors of the population including economically and socially vulnerable people, criminals and dissenters. The aim of social management strategy is to encourage politico-legal institutions such as courts and police to work more closely with community groups to solve social problems such as poverty and crime. Since 2011, party-state discourse has progressively sought to associate human rights goals with social management goals, stating that Social Management is realized through the respect of human rights and rule of law principles.

Social control rhetoric and strategies such as Stability Maintenance, Harmonious Society and Social Management continue to link rights with duties. Theoretically, the authorities can claim that by preserving the rhetoric of mutuality of rights and duties (Article 33 of the 1982 Constitution), those who do not respect their duties in society should not be accorded certain rights by the state. Thus, those whose actions hamper social stability may legitimately be deprived of their rights. In this sense, both individual and collective protests undermine the rights of the collective; they hamper economic development and the realization of the economic and social rights of others.

Despite this recent obsession with ‘stability’, there remains a recognition (albeit limited) in socio-economic policy that social inequality in and of itself has a potential negative impact on social stability. In order to mitigate the problem of social inequality and its negative impact on stability, the government has issued a significant number of laws and regulations protecting the rights of most disadvantaged group in society for the realization of social justice.

Contending Views on Human Rights

There are complex political, social, cultural, historical and economic factors that shape human rights dissent in China. Those who hold contending views on human rights argue that dramatic economic growth has lifted millions out of poverty, but many hundreds of thousands of people have lost or are losing their homes and land, some under the threat of violence and without adequate compensation; hundreds face imprisonment for practicing their faith, others may be tortured into confessing to a capital crime or locked up in a psychiatric institution or in illegal places of detention, that is ‘black jails’ (hei jianyu 黑监狱) for persistent petitioning and filing complaints. Dissenting views on human rights within China come from different sources and their nature and scope have significantly changed over time. With the popularization of the Internet, avenues and modalities for expressing dissent have also been dramatically transformed.

Academics and Intellectuals in China

In pre-1989 China, dissent on human rights issues developed among academics and intellectuals. Particularly in the early reform era of the 1980s, a number of intellectuals showed an open commitment to liberal democratic political reforms and supported the human rights ethos. While most of these intellectuals attempted to promote democratization from within the system, a minority employed more radical means to press for political change and the realization of human rights.

Clear examples were the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-1980 and the student-led demonstrations of late 1986 and spring-summer 1989. The leaders of the latter were severely punished or compelled to flee the country. In the last twenty years, the majority of the Chinese intellectuals have become more aligned with official views and many have come to seek improvements by participating in official decision-making activities. Their mode of dissent has been expressed subtly and in relation to very specific topics – like the amendments of specific laws for example. The few academics who have been seen to be too outspoken on democratization and human rights issues have been marginalized by their peers and moved to the peripheries (see, for example, the case of He Weifang 贺卫方 in 2009). Other intellectuals who have been overtly outspoken promoting principles of democracy and human rights – China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, for example – have been subject to harsh punishments and become international icons of dissent against the Chinese government.

Human Rights Defenders and Activists in China

Chinese human rights defenders and activists openly contend that the official commitment of the Chinese government to the protection of human rights is merely rhetorical and does not have an effect on the daily life of individual citizens. In an attempt to hold the authorities to account, human rights activists and defenders take up social causes and advocate for the resolution of specific social problems and for the redress of abuses perpetrated by the party-state and its officials. They speak for the most disadvantaged in society either through the social media or by working or volunteering for civil society organizations and NGOs. Indeed, since the beginning of the period of reform in late 1978 the latter have become increasingly prominent, even taking up some of the functions originally performed by governmental agencies, particularly in relation to the promotion and protection of economic and social rights – labour and environmental issues – as well as the rights of the most vulnerable groups in society, that is women, children, the diseased and the disabled.

A group of human rights defenders that in recent years has become increasingly prominent and has gained international attention are the weiquan 维权 or ‘rights defence’ lawyers. The community of lawyers who are willing to take on the most difficult cases which touch on fundamental issues – mainly around the use of detention, ill treatment or torture, freedom of religion, association or speech – is still small, but it is growing steadily. Although the chances of winning specific cases may be slim, by taking on such cases, lawyers seek to demonstrate the importance of the law, the right of citizens to legal defence, and the need to seek redress for clients. Their arguments are helping to shape an emerging human rights discourse.

Some lawyers specialize in specific areas of the law such as women’s rights or forced evictions while others may take on a significant number of cases involving deaths in custody or allegations of torture. Some issues such as the practice of Falun Gong 法轮功 or the defence of individual dissidents are considered particularly sensitive and have often resulted in problems for those lawyers involved in these cases. Within this broad community, different strategies have been adopted in fighting cases; some lawyers have tried to engage the Constitution in their legal arguments while others have focused on trying to succeed on behalf of their clients within the constraints of a very imperfect set of laws and institutions. These different approaches sometimes spill over into tensions, with the more radical lawyers criticized by their colleagues for increasing the political sensitivity of the profession as a whole. Yet many lawyers who have taken this route have themselves become victims as their cases touch on so-called ‘sensitive’ issues, challenge local political interests or reveal serious violations of the law.

Among the specific problems experienced by many within the target group are: the frequent use of ‘soft detention’ (ruanjin 软禁) or house arrest (particularly during politically sensitive periods), regular harassment by the police and state security forces, restrictions on freedom of movement and overseas travel, police violence including torture, and the monitoring of personal communications and lack of digital security. Some of the lawyers have lost their licenses to practice, faced the closure of their law firm or have been required to re-register their status as lawyers.

Chinese Activists and Dissidents Abroad

Chinese activists and dissidents overseas contest party-state human rights policies and abuses. Intellectuals and academics who fled China following the events of 1989 often express their dissent through cultural means or the media. Others, who have left China because of their human rights activism or religious affiliation (for example the case of Falun Gong followers) have founded and/or worked for human rights organizations or informal networks which support the work of Chinese domestic groups or help to disseminate information about the human rights situation in China (see, for example, the Laogai Foundation founded by Harry Wu). The majority of these human rights organizations are found in the US.

Popular Dissent

Expressions of popular dissent are clearly visible from collective and individual protests against rights violations and through Internet discussion forums and blogs. There are now reported to be more 100,000 public protests or mass incidents’ (quntixing shijian 群体性事件) every year in China with protestors at rallies or sit ins usually ranging from ten to 10,000 and sometimes even over 50,000.
A significant number of collective protests have been spurred on by unscrupulous misappropriation of land and environmental hazards directly affecting citizens’ right to health and housing. Other en masse unrests are rooted in unemployment and violations of basic labour rights, forced housing relocations and ethnic tensions. Similar issues have also led aggrieved citizens to take their individual cases to the attention of the authorities through the system of individual petitioning (xinfang 信访) whereby disaffected individuals protest at the gates of the relevant local government and court offices to register disputes or plead for redress of the abuses they have been subject to. The Internet has proved a very potent tool in channelling popular dissatisfaction; the various Internet forums and blogs have helped news spreading fairly quickly and offered a platform for netizens to talk about both individual and collective cases of rights’ violations. Though at times banned within the country, Weibo and Twitter are the two most prominent virtual platforms for social networking in China.

International Scholarship

Since the late 1980s, the issue of human rights in China has become the focus of Western scholarship in three diverse disciplinary areas: Politics and International Relations, Chinese/Asian Studies and Law.

Scholars of politics and international relations have mainly focussed their analysis on China’s diplomatic engagement with the UN and other Western countries. The three most representatives scholars in this area are Ann Kent (see her Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights, 1993; and, China, the United Nations and Human Rights: The Limits of Compliance, 1999), Rosemary Foot (see Rights Beyond Borders: the Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China, 2000) and Andrew Nathan (see Human Rights in Contemporary China, with R. Randle Edwards and Louis Henkin, 1986; and, his Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism, co-edited with Lynda S. Bell and Ilan Peleg, 2001).

Scholars of Chinese and Asian Studies have sought to explain the discourse on human rights in China by exploring its historical and philosophical background. The 1997 edited collection by Tu Weiming and Theodore de Bary Confucianism and Human Rights represented a pivotal attempt to examine the possible links between human rights and the Chinese Confucian tradition and their degree of compatibility.

In the early 2000s, Marina Svensson published a comprehensive intellectual history of the Chinese political discourse on human rights since the late Qing dynasty and throughout the twentieth century (see Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History, 2002); Stephen Angle in his Human Rights and Chinese Thought (2002) combines a historical and philosophical investigation into the ways the Chinese rights discourse developed and its possible connection with rights ideas in the West. All these three works may be seen as representative of the intellectual discourse developed during the second half of the 1990s, placing the Chinese discourse on rights within the wider debate on rights universalism versus cultural relativism, and the related discussions on Asian values.

More recently, China scholars have been discussing the practice of human rights as an indicator of the changes in the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens; they mainly focus on phenomena of local activism and protests. In this context, Merle Goldman’s 2005 book From Comrade to Citizens: The struggle for political rights in China examines the effects of the awareness about political rights among the general population and describes the struggles undertaken by groups and individuals to assert them. A more recent volume is Perry Keller’s 2012 edited volume, The Citizen and the Chinese State. Other scholars such as Kevin O’Brien focus on the sociological aspects of the rise of popular protests (see his Popular Protests in China, 2009).

The incipient discourse on Chinese constitutionalism and constitutional rights has developed on similar grounds analyzing as it does the different avenues adopted by the Chinese citizens to claim for their rights. The general discourse asserts that citizens have become more rights-conscious and increasingly keener to assert their rights not only by taking the streets but also in court through formal legal means. This process is described in detail in the recent volume edited by Stephanie Balmé and Michael Dowdle, Building Constitutionalism in China (2009).

A few legal scholars – particularly Eva Pils and Fu Hualing – have been looking at rights consciousness and activism by analyzing the work of weiquan lawyers as part of the wider rights-defence movement. Weiquan lawyers are linked to the human rights discourse in China in two ways: on the one hand, they are part of the wider group of human rights defenders who take up the legal causes of the most disadvantaged and socially vulnerable; on the other hand, they are themselves the victims of overt human rights abuses by the hand of the State officials who want to discourage their action for the sake of social stability.

Apart from the analysis on legal activism, legal scholarship on human rights in China has developed through a quite particularistic approach, analysing Chinese specific legislation compliance/non-compliance with international human rights standards and quite definite areas of legal practice that prove problematic against international standards and the paradigm of the rule of law.

Criminal justice is but one of the areas of significant human rights concerns among legal scholars. Since the early 1980s up to recent years, Western scholarship has been concerned with administrative detention powers in China, the administration of criminal justice especially during strike hard campaigns, criminal proceedings and fair trial rights, the widespread use of torture and the death penalty. These debates have become more intense in the wake of China’s signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1997 and promising to amend its 1996 Criminal Procedure Law accordingly. Adopting a socio-legal approach, in their New Crime in China: Public order and human rights (2006) Ronald Keith and Lin Zhiqiu provide a number of examples of the Chinese ‘anti-rights legislation’. In this work they explain how criminal justice has been used/abused to deal with specific social problems with wider human rights implications – the management of public order, cyber-crime, the Falun Gong movement, domestic violence and organized crime.

Legal scholars have also discussed issues related to religious freedom – in particular in relation to the repression of the Falun Gong, Tibetan and Muslim minorities (see, for example, the entry on Xinjiang in this Lexicon), freedom of expression and association, women and children’s rights (see journal articles by Michael Palmer, online here).

Areas of recent concerns by Western scholarship are land and property rights, environmental protection and labour rights. An analysis on health rights is offered by Pitman Potter who contextualises it in a wider discourse on human rights’ adaptation in the Chinese context. Taking health rights as a case study, Potter tries to elucidate the process through which international human rights principles are selectively chosen and adapted to the local Chinese context to instrumentally serve domestic socio-political needs (see Lesley Jacobs and Pitman B. Potter, ‘Selective Adaptation and Human Rights to Health in China’, Health and Human Rights, vol.9, no.2 (2006): 112-134).

Overall, two main approaches may be identified among Western legal scholars:

• the first is a critical literature emphasising weak governance capacities and human rights abuses in specific areas; and,
• the second approach is what some may class as an ‘apologetic’ literature linking human rights with economic development and emphasising the enormous progress done by the Chinese government in re-building a legal system after the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution and lifting millions out of poverty.

Scholars such as Randall Peerenboom argue that China is subject to a double-standard. He points out, for instance, that the international human rights regime bases its conception of human rights on the presumption of a liberal-democratic framework which emphasises individual autonomy not group interests. Moreover, the international human rights regime constructs the Chinese human rights narrative around individual atrocities that, while horrific, are not representative of the Chinese system as a whole.

These different approaches both acknowledge that economic and social rights and civil and political rights have expanded since the onset of the reforms. They recognise that more citizens can access to justice, NGOs are increasingly tolerated, individuals are freer to express their views through the Internet and more open discussions on human rights are taking place at different levels of society. However, those who pursue more critical approaches point to China’s weak compliance record in relation to international obligations and the overall lack of transparency. These critics focus relatively less on changes and more on continuities with past human rights practices looking at claimed progress – such as the enactment of a new law – with a certain degree of scepticism, or questioning the discrepancies between stated theories and actual practice.

For its part, the contending literature stresses the unique cultural and political context of China and its immense and successful efforts to improve the living conditions of the Chinese population. It also emphasises the increased internationalisation of Chinese thinking in relation to human rights with the adherence to a significant number of international human rights treaties and cooperation activities.

Media Representations

Media representations of human rights in China in ‘the West’ (North America, Europe, Australia, as well as Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan) have rarely been positive and journalists have sometimes depicted China as a ‘rogue’ element in the international human rights arena. Similar to human rights organizations, the Western media generally have tended to focus on particularly horrific stories of abuses and human rights violations. The wide reporting about the Beijing Massacre of 1989 helped to create a simplistic dichotomy of ‘good dissidents’ versus ‘bad authoritarian government’ that has shaped the media discourse until more recent days (for more on this, see ‘Telling Chinese Stories’ on this site).

In the late 1990s, there was not a significant amount of media attention given to China’s human rights record – weak media attention being the result of a relaxation of international pressure on China since 1997 because of its signing of the two major international human rights covenants. Over the last decade, however, media coverage has become more prominent with China’s crucial role in the international economy, its access to the WTO and its hosting of the Olympics in 2008.

In 2008, the media became increasingly attentive to China’s human rights practices in relation to protests and reported on the actions taken to silence activists and protesters immediately prior to and during the Olympics, particularly in relation to domestic unrest and scandals – such as those related to the Sanyuan Company’s 三元集团 contaminated milk powder (see for example: Tania Branigan, ‘Chinese figures show fivefold rise in babies sick from contaminated milk’, The Guardian, 2 December 2008) and the Sichuan earthquake (see for example: Jake Hooker and Jim Yardley, ‘Powerful quake ravages China, killing thousands’, The New York Times, 13 May 2008). In 2008 and 2009, they also widely reported on the repressive actions in Tibet (see for example: ‘Fleeing students bring tales of Tibet repression’, ABC News, 23 November 2008) and Xinjiang (see for example: ‘Is China fraying? Racial killings and heavy-handed policing stir up a repressed and dangerous province’, The Economist, 9 July 2009) and other minority areas.

More recently, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo at the end of 2010 and the reaction by the Chinese government brought increased attention on China’s poor human rights conditions, and presented once again an extremely negative and repressive image of the Chinese government (see for example: Michael Bristow, ‘One year on: Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo still in jail’, BBC News, 6 October 2011). Even though the human rights focus was on reporting about the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011, the Western media dedicated various articles to the repression of the ‘Jasmine Movement’ in China and the imprisonment of a number of weiquan lawyers and activists in connection with such activities (see for example: Michael Moore, ‘China suppresses, arrests, and makes lawyers disappear’, The Telegraph, 01 July 2011). More recently, Western media had paid significant attention to the case Foxconn and the abuses against workers in China (see for example: Charles Duhigg and Steven Greenhouse, ‘Electronic giant vowing reforms in China plants’, The New York Times, 29 March 2012).

Chronology

1971: The People’s Republic of China enters the UN
1982: Issuing of the current Constitution (Chapter 2: Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens)
1989: 4 June Incident (also known as the ‘Beijing Massacre’ and the ‘Tiananmen Massacre’); turning point in the human rights discourse in China
1991: First White Paper on Human Rights
1998: Signature of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
2001: Ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (signed in 1997)
2004: Protection of human rights inserted into Article 33 of the 1982 Constitution and into the CCP Constitution
2009: China’s first National Human Rights Action Plan (2009-2011); second White Paper on Human Rights
2010: Liu Xiaobo awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
2012: China’s second National Human Rights Action Plan (2012-2015)

Glossary

Black jails hei jianyu 黑监狱
Harmonious Society hexie shehui 和谐社会
Human rights renquan 人权
Human rights diplomacy renquan waijiao 人权外交
Mass incidents quntixing shijian 群体性事件
Mutuality of rights and duties quanli yiwu xiang yizhi 权利义务相一致
Petitioning xinfang 信访
Right of subsistence shengcunquan 生存权
Rights Defence (weiquan is short for 维护合法权益 weihu hefa quanyi) weiquan 维权
Social Management Innovation shehui guanli chuangxin 社会管理创新
‘Soft detention’ or house/hotel- arrest ruanjin 软禁
‘Stability crushes everything else’ wending yadao yiqie 稳定压倒一切
Stability Maintenance (weiwen is short for 维护社会稳定 weihu shehui wending) weiwen 维稳

Bibliography

Stephen Angle and Marina Svensson, eds, The Chinese Human Rights Reader: Documents and commentary 1900-2000, Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

Jean-Philippe Béja, Fu Hualing and Eva Pils, eds, Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08 and the Challenges of Political Reform in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012.

Cai Yongshun, ‘Local Governments and the Suppression of Popular Resistance in China’, The China Quarterly, vol.193 (2008): 24-42.

Chen Xi, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Donald C Clarke and James V Feinerman, ‘Antagonistic Contradictions: criminal law and human rights in China’, The China Quarterly, vol.141 (1995): 135-154.

Joseph Fewsmith, ‘Social Management as a Way of Coping With Heightened Social Tensions’, China Leadership Monitor, vol.36, (2012)

Michael C Davis, ‘The Political Economy and Culture of Human Rights in Asia’, in Sarah Joseph and Adam McBeth, eds, Research Handbook on International Human Rights Law, Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2010, pp.414-438.

Guo Sanzhuan, ‘Implementation of Human Rights Treaties by Chinese Courts: problems and prospects’, Chinese Journal of International Law, vol.8, no.1 (2009): 161-179.

Samantha Hoffman, ‘Portents of Change in China’s Social Management’, China Brief, vol.12, no.15 (2012)

Perry Keller, ed., The Citizen and the Chinese State, London: Ashgate, 2012.

Ann Kent, ‘China’s Human Rights in the “Asian Century” ‘, in Thomas W.D. Davis and Brian Galligan, eds, Human Rights in Asia, Cheltenham, UK/Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011, pp.187-211.

He Qinglian, ‘The Relationship between Chinese Peasant’s Right to Subsistence and China’s Social Stability’, China Rights Forum, no.1 (2009)

Li Buyun 李步云, Discussing Human Rights 论人权, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press 社会科学文献出版社, 2010.

Thomas Lum, Human Rights in China and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service, 18 July, 2011

Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Randall Peerenboom, ‘Assessing Human Rights in China: why the double standard’, Cornell International Law Journal, vol.38, no.1 (2005): 72-172.

Marina Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China: a conceptual and political history, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002.

Randall Peerenboom, ‘Economic and Social Rights’, in John Garrick, ed, Law and Policy for China’s Market Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, pp.167-184.

Eva Pils, ‘Asking the Tiger for His Skin: rights activism in China’, Fordham International Law Journal, vol.30, no.4 (2007): 1209-1263.

State Council Information Office 中华人民共和国国务院新闻办公室, Assessment Report on the National Human Rights Action Plan (2009-2010) 国家人权行动计划 （2009－2010年）评估报告, Beijing: People’s Publishing House 人民出版社, 2011.

Yu Jianrong, ‘Social Conflict in Rural China’, China Security, vol. 3 no.2 (2007): 2-17.

Yue Liling 岳礼玲, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Criminal Justice in China 公民权利和政治权利国际公约与中国刑事司法, Beijing: Law Press China 法律出版社, 2007.

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The post Human Rights 人权 appeared first on The China Story.

Jane Golley
The Australian Centre on China in the World

This lexicon entry consists of the following sub-sections:

• Overview
• Perspectives
• Chronology
• Glossary

Overview

Background

Reforms of China’s exchange rate regime have played a fundamental role in facilitating the country’s growing participation in the global economy since 1978.[1] Prior to this time, as part of the government’s strategy of import-substitution industrialisation, the RMB was deliberately overvalued so that the government could provide imported machinery and equipment to priority industries at relatively low cost. This was done via the People’s Bank of China (PBC), which was the only institution allowed to deal in foreign exchange currency. The RMB was therefore inconvertible and subject to extensive exchange rate and capital controls.

In 1981, the State Council introduced an ‘internal settlement rate’ of RMB2.8 to the USD, which applied to all trade transactions conducted via government sanctioned ‘swap centres’ at which exporting firms were allowed to sell their retained foreign earnings. This rate operated alongside an official exchange rate of RMB1.5 to the USD, which still applied to all non-trade transactions (for example, for foreign direct investment). Through to the mid 1990s, the exchange rate regime gradually moved away from this dual exchange rate system towards one in which the currency value was determined by demand and supply in foreign exchange markets. While there was a gradual easing of controls on trade and other current account transactions (i.e., a move towards current account convertibility), extensive controls remained on capital flows during this period, particularly on outflows.

On 1 January 1994, the unification of market and official exchange rates was accompanied by a substantial reduction in exchange controls on the current account and the adoption of a managed float exchange rate regime. In December 1996, the PBC announced full current account convertibility. Between 1994 and 2001, the RMB gradually appreciated, apart from during the East Asian Financial Crisis in 1997-1998, during which time China resisted depreciation in line with the other Asian currencies (receiving much praise at the time for helping to maintain stability in the region).

On 21 July 2005, partly in response to mounting pressure from US President George W. Bush to float the RMB, China officially ended the fixed RMB-dollar peg, switching to a managed float in which the RMB was allowed to float within a narrow range relative to a basket of currencies, including the USD, the Euro, the Japanese yen and the Korean won. Currency appreciation continued against all major currencies through to mid 2008, when the PBC returned to a fixed RMB-dollar peg in response to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

In June 2010, the PBC announced the return to a managed float with basket of currencies and, in April 2012, the currency’s trading band was widened from a daily range of 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent, letting market forces play a bigger role in determining the value of the RMB.

However, this value is far from being freely determined by market forces. Since 2003, the PBC has intervened heavily in foreign exchange markets to maintain the RMB at the desired value. In particular, the PBC has sold bills in the domestic market and increased reserve ratio requirements for commercial (largely state-owned) banks, to soak up the foreign currency (mainly USD) flooding into China in exchange for Chinese exports. This ‘sterilisation’ of currency inflows from abroad has led to the accumulation of more than USD3.3 trillion in foreign reserves by the PBC by the end of 2012 (see Figure 2 in Box 1), which in turn has fuelled accusations that China is deliberately undervaluing its currency.

A string of US Congressional bills since 2003 have labelled the RMB as a ‘manipulated’ or ‘fundamentally misaligned’ currency, calling for retaliatory measures unless substantial appreciation occurs. While the US Treasury Department has followed the IMF in declining to designate China as a currency ‘manipulator’, the value of the Chinese currency has remained a central point of tension in official talks between the United States and China, despite the substantial appreciation of the RMB against the USD since 2005 of over 20 per cent, including a 10 percent rise since the end of the dollar peg in mid 2010 (through to end 2012).

A number of recent policy initiatives indicate that Chinese authorities are actively promoting the international use of the RMB and further (although not complete) liberalisation of the capital account.[2] This process began in April 2009 with the pilot RMB Trade Settlement Scheme (RTSS), which enables enterprises to channel their funds between Mainland China and Hong Kong. This has been accompanied by the growth of Dim Sum Bonds (RMB-denominated bonds issued by residents or non-residents in Hong Kong) and Panda Bonds (RMB-denominated bonds issued by non-residents onshore); the signing of currency-swap agreements with a number of foreign central banks; the extension of the qualified foreign institutional investors (QFII) scheme, which allows designated foreign institutional investors to invest in China’s onshore interbank bond market and to access A-shares on the Chinese stock market (previously only available to domestic investors); and the opening of the Qianhai Bay Special Economic Zone in July 2012, through which Hong Kong banks will be able to lend RMB directly to mainland companies, significantly reducing the severity of China’s capital controls. However, the RMB has a long way to go before it is completed internationalised, with RMB trading about level with current account transactions, compared with highly internationalized currencies like the USD, euro and yen, which turn over close to 100 times their respective current transactions.

Ultimately, the internationalisation of the RMB will depend on whether the rest of the world is receptive to using a currency that is still heavily controlled by a central bank, and therefore on how far the Chinese authorities are prepared to go in relinquishing that control. Thus debates regarding exchange rate reforms quickly escalate into debates about central government control over the economy in general, which in turn link into debates about how to achieve domestic harmony and stability – both socio-political and economic. Nothing is as simple as it seems!

The Key Debates

The first major debate surrounding the RMB is whether it is, or has been, ‘artificially low’, ‘undervalued’, ‘misaligned’ or ‘manipulated’, and if so by how much? While the majority of evidence indicates that the RMB was undervalued during the 2000s, the extent of undervaluation varies enormously, depending on methods, data, time period, exchange rate definitions, and theoretical frameworks: for example, estimates for 2009-10 range from a -41 per cent undervaluation to 36 per cent overvaluation.[3] Many scholars in the United States take RMB manipulation as a given and conduct their analysis in this context. However, according to the IMF’s Article IV definition (see Glossary), the IMF itself has never found China guilty of manipulation. While President Obama has refrained from labeling China a currency ‘manipulator’, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has insisted that he will do so as soon as he wins the election, stating publicly in 2011 that:

China is on almost every dimension cheating. We got to recognize that. They’re manipulating their currency and by doing so they’re holding down the price of Chinese goods and making sure their products are artificially low-priced. It’s predatory pricing. It’s killing jobs in America.[3]

The second debate centres on whether China’s rising current account surplus (and the United States’ rising current account deficit) has resulted primarily from the undervaluation of the RMB or from other factors, including the extraordinarily high saving rates of monopolistic state-owned enterprises and households (arising for a number of reasons, ranging from a repressed and under-reformed financial system to the One-Child Policy and rising gender imbalances)[4]; measurement errors in the balance of payments (because of ‘hot money’ inflows in disguise at export revenues that falsely enlarge the current account surplus); industrial relocation from other East Asian countries into China; the swathe of policies (beyond the exchange rate) that promoted growth and productivity, and thereby boosted China’s exporting capacity; and factor market distortions (which have tended to depress factor prices and production costs at the expense of domestic consumption). Most of these factors are not mutually exclusive, and economists have struggled to reach consensus on cause and effect.[5]

These debates extend into questions such as: Would a sizeable appreciation of the RMB prove effective in substantially reducing its large current account surplus, and hence in improving current account deficits elsewhere, particularly in the United States? What impact would RMB appreciation have on job creation in the United States (with estimates ranging from virtually no impact to millions of jobs) and, more generally, is China to blame for America’s economic woes? What would be the internal costs of RMB appreciation (in terms of reduced export competitiveness and unemployment), and how would these measure up against the benefits (of rebalancing the economy, reducing import prices, and so on)? Would other Asian and emerging-market economies respond by following suit and revaluing their own currencies (also assumed to be undervalued by some), thereby strengthening the extent of global rebalancing? Are the US congressional bills a necessary ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ response to China’s exchange rate management, or are they a kind of ‘currency terrorism’, escalating in the worst-case scenario to a currency war?

The next debate revolves around the pace and sequencing of future reforms to China’s exchange rate system, and the extent of RMB appreciation this would entail. Some argue for the optimality of fixed exchange rate regimes for economic stability[6]; others support the continuation of the gradual approach that has governed much of the reform process to date; and yet others are calling for a more dramatic and rapid move to a fully floating exchange rate, which would require the elimination of capital controls, full capital account convertibility and substantial reforms in the domestic (and largely state-controlled) banking and financial sectors.

Finally, the focus has recently shifted to debates regarding the future of the international monetary system, and the role of the RMB in that system. One issue here is the basket of currencies included in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR), which currently precludes the RMB because it does not satisfy the two key criteria for inclusion – capital account convertibility and exchange rate flexibility. The G20 Cannes Summit in November 2011 reached an agreement to review this basket of currencies to ‘reflect the role of currencies in the global and financial system and be adjusted over time to reflect currencies’ changing role and characteristics’. While there is growing consensus that the RMB should be in the SDR basket at some point, there is less agreement agree on whether this should be conditional on the two criteria currently required for inclusion, or whether adjustments to these criteria are called for.

Figure 1. Various RMB exchange rate indices (2005=100)

Figure 2. China’s foreign exchange reserves (USD trillions)

Figure 3. China’s current account balance (% of GDP)

 
Perspectives

The Official View

As with most of the economic reforms undertaken in China in the last three decades, the path of exchange rate reforms has been cautious and gradual, and the official Chinese view is of course that this path has been the correct one. Since 2004, the Hu-Wen leadership has emphasised the need for China to rebalance its growth, an objective that is firmly embedded in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). While ongoing reforms to the exchange rate regime are an integral part of this rebalancing strategy, these reforms are only considered important insofar as they help to achieve the guiding principle of achieving social and economic development while maintaining stability.

There is little to suggest at this stage that the leadership change in 2012-2013 will bring about any substantive change in this stance. At the Central Economic Work Conference in April 2012, Vice-premier (and soon to be Premier) Li Keqiang gave a lengthy speech on how China would be pushing ahead with the strategy of ‘strengthening domestic demand during the process of reform and opening up’. Yet in this nearly 8,000 word speech (English translation), Li Keqiang only has this to say about the RMB: ‘We need to deepen reforms to make interest rates subject to market forces and improve the RMB exchange rate regime, promote RMB capital account convertibility in a step-by-step manner, and expand the use of RMB in cross-border trade.’ Given their preoccupation with domestic development issues, the official line on the RMB often seems to be a case of ‘the less said the better’.

This approach is echoed in official dealings with the United States. For example, at a press conference with President Obama and President Hu Jintao in January 2011, Obama welcomed China’s moves to increase the flexibility of its currency, but also ‘had to say that the RMB remains undervalued, that there needs to be further adjustment in the exchange rate, and that this can be a powerful tool for China boosting domestic demand and lessening the inflationary pressures in their economy’. There was no direct mention of the RMB from Hu Jintao in response to this other than to note that: ‘We discussed some disagreements in the economic and trade area, and we will continue to appropriately resolve these according to the principle of mutual respect and consultation on an equal footing.’

This does not mean complete silence on the issues. In September 2010, Wen Jiabao said that China’s exchange rate was not the problem, and indicated that China would continue to resist pressure from Washington to appreciate the RMB. He said:

There is no basis for a drastic appreciation of the Renminbi. You don’t know how many Chinese companies would go bankrupt. There would be major disturbances. Only the Chinese premier has such pressure on his shoulders. This is the reality.

In March 2012, Wen reiterated that reforms would be undertaken slowly to keep the economic stable, and that the RMB was very close to a ‘balanced level’ (i.e., neither over- nor undervalued). By May 2012, top Chinese central bank officials concurred that the value of its currency was close to equilibrium after more than six years of gradual appreciation, indicating that efforts to further appreciate the currency are unlikely.

Officials were particularly vocal in their criticisms of the US Congressional Senate bill in September 2011 (which didn’t make it past the House), with one Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman stating that the bill is: ‘doing good to nobody, and it will bring nothing but harm. The passing of the act, under the pretext of so-called ‘currency imbalance’, is a protectionist measure in nature, which severely violates the WTO rules. Not only will it fail to solve the economic and employment problems in the US, but it will severely obstruct China-US economic relations and trade.’ This quote attests to the official line on many of the debates mentioned above.

Officials from the People’s Bank of China have been among the most outspoken advocates for a more flexible and market-oriented exchange rate since the mid-2000s, including then deputy governors Guo Shuqing and Li Ruogu. The Governor of the PBC, Zhou Xiaochuan, given his ministerial ranking, is less likely to say anything that contradicts the current policy stance, but did declare in a widely published speech at Tsinghua University in September 2011 that China’s foreign reserves ‘have exceeded a reasonable level’. This indirectly implies a need for less intervention in the foreign exchange markets, and hence less government control over the value of the RMB.[7]

Governor Zhou also released an influential article in 2009 titled ‘Reform the International Monetary System’[8], in which he explored what kind of international reserve currency is needed to secure global financial stability and facilitate world economic growth, calling for the IMF’s SDR to serve ‘as the light in the tunnel for the reform of the international monetary system’, and putting the internationalisation of the RMB firmly on the official agenda. In September 2011, this was followed by Chinese officials hinting that the RMB might be fully convertible on the capital account by 2015, paving the way for the Chinese currency to be included in the SDR. It was also followed by a surge of academic discussion on the topic.

Views Within China

In general, scholarship within China is sympathetic to the official line, although there is still a willingness to point out problems with the current system, and to call for more rapid or deeper reforms.

It is therefore not surprising that there may be little, if any, research disseminating from China that concludes that the RMB has been ‘manipulated’, although most scholars agree that it has been undervalued. Some would argue that problems of measurement and definition make it impossible to conclude anything decisively regarding the extent of undervaluation. Jiang Yong, director of CICIR Centre for Economic Security, has put this more emphatically, mocking mathematical models that claim to demonstrate undervaluation and arguing that ‘American national interest is the mathematical model here’![9]

Most Chinese scholars support the notion of gradual reform, not one-step adjustment, to appreciate the currency. They also argue that RMB appreciation alone would not be enough to solve the problem of global imbalances. They are, not surprisingly, more likely than their international counterparts to focus on the internal costs of appreciation. For example, Fan Gang, Director of the National Economic Research Institute in Beijing, in response to calls for a larger and more rapid appreciation of the RMB, points out that Chinese leaders need to be sensitive to the employment prospects of some 300 million underemployed rural workers (each who earn about US$500 per year). And they recognise the wide range of domestic reforms that need to accompany exchange rate reforms, including the reduction of factor market distortions, the privatisation and deregulation large SOEs to reduce corporate savings, and efforts to build a social safety net and stimulate consumption.[10]

Yu Yongding, a former member of the PBC monetary policy committee and long-serving Director of the Institute of World Politics and Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has persistently called for more rapid exchange rate appreciation since 2005, arguing in 2011 that a persistent current account surplus is not in China’s best interests and that lending to the world’s richest country for decades via the accumulation of dollar reserves “is not reasonable”. In an article published in the Financial Times in 2011, Yu went as far as saying that: ‘The People’s Bank of China must stop buying US dollars and allow the renminbi exchange rate to be decided by market forces as soon as possible. China should have done so a long time ago. There should be no more hesitating and dithering.’[11]

In light of the Sino-US tensions surrounding the RMB, Chinese scholars have participated actively in trying to dispel common misperceptions about the RMB, in English blogs and newspapers. Huang Yiping of Peking University, for example, in response to Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s widely read criticisms of the Chinese currency regime (see below) wrote an article entitled ‘Krugman’s Chinese Renminbi Fallacy’, in which he pointed out that just because the RMB is undervalued, that doesn’t mean it’s manipulated; that the RMB is not the only factor determining China’s current account surplus, or US job growth; and also what might go wrong if the Obama administration were to follow Krugman’s advice, including slowing down, rather than speeding up reform as China’s leaders would not want to be seen as capitulating to American pressure. He also raised the possibility of a trade war between the two largest economies as the worst-case scenario, and a ‘non-trivial event for the world economy’.

Many Chinese experts have misgivings about, and criticisms of, the current international monetary order, although they are careful to stress that what China wants is ‘reform, not revolution’.[12] The internationalisation of the RMB is seen by some as a way of escaping accusations of currency manipulation from the US, and by others as a strategic option ‘as important as New China’s becoming a nuclear power’. While some scholars are advocating for a gradual de facto internationalization – first strengthening the use of the currency for trade, and only later for investment, loans and reserves – others continue to argue that China must maintain controls over capital and restrictions on foreign currency holdings by Chinese enterprises.

In a 2010 article titled ‘Peaches and Plums Have no Need to Speak, the World Comes to Them by Itself’ 桃子无言自成蹊, Lin Limin (a researcher at CICIR and chief editor of its journal) argues that RMB internationalisation must ‘follow its own path, flowing separately’ 曲径通幽, indicating the notion of a Chinese model to which the rest of the world will need to adapt. As with other aspects of China’s currency reform, the internationalization of the currency is viewed within the broad context of China’s reform process, with scholars recognising the need for internal reforms to pave the way for external liberalization, for example, clearer and deeper financial liberalization and regulation, and an increasing role for Chinese private savers to invest their funds abroad, rather than having China’s vast currency reserves controlled by the bureaucracy.

International Scholarship

International scholarship on the RMB, stemming predominantly from the United States, is striking for the differences (in general) in emphasis, findings, and prescriptions compared with Chinese points of view.

For example, considerable attention has been directed towards determining whether, and to what extent, the RMB has been, and remains, undervalued. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a Washington DC-based think tank, has been particularly vocal in asserting that evidence of undervaluation is ‘increasingly robust and, by now, simply overwhelming.’[13] The Institute’s views on each of the debates outlined above fall clearly on one side: the exchange rate has been seriously undervalued as a result of China’s failure to live up to its IMF obligations regarding currency manipulation, exchange rate reform is essential for China to rebalance economic growth and correct global payment imbalances; the internal costs of such appreciation would be minimal (in contrast with Fan Gang’s point above) and so on. In 2007, they urged China to adopt a relatively rapid approach to exchange rate reform that would culminate in a freely floating exchange rate (with no sterilization or intervention) within four to six years – something that seems highly unlikely to occur by 2013.

However, recent trends in the RMB are likely to bring an end to this focus on the extent of RMB undervaluation. By mid-2012, a PIIE policy brief acknowledged that China has ‘improved its record on currency manipulation’, with attention now shifting to the millions of job losses in American and Europe caused by widespread currency manipulation in other developing and newly industrialised economies.

Another focus has been on the cost to America of China’s exchange rate policy, with the manipulation of the RMB often being taken as a given, not a point of contention. For example, in 2011 Robert E. Scott of The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington wrote pieces entitled ‘Why Revaluing RMB would Boost American Economy’, and ‘China’s Currency Manipulation Reached Record Level’. The EPI has estimated that at least 2.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost between 2001 and 2008 because of China taking over the production of manufactured goods, amounting to 67 per cent of all jobs displaced in that seven-year period. Similarly, articles published in The New York Times in early 2010 by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman attracted much attention (see here and here). In these, Krugman argued that the US Treasury should accuse China of currency manipulation in order to affect Chinese policy, after some ‘back-of-the-envelope’ calculations revealed a loss of around 1.4 million US jobs because of China’s exchange rate policy. He also claimed that it was in China’s interests to appreciate the RMB, and urged ‘China’s government to reconsider its stubbornness’.

Another cost, according to Nicholas Lardy, appears to be that China has turned the United States into a country of addicts:

The United States is the addict. We are addicted to China … China is the dealer. They’re supplying the credit [through their accumulation of foreign exchange reserves because of their undervalued currency] that makes it possible for us to overconsume.

Lardy has written extensively on the need for more comprehensive exchange rate and financial reforms in China to address both China’s internal imbalances and global imbalances as well, concluding in his 2012 book on the topic that:

If China does not accelerate the pace of reforms that would support rebalancing the sources of its economic growth, the economic challenge for the United States and, in turn, the global economy, becomes much greater.[14]

Not all of the Western analysis has been one-sided. For example, in response to the US senate bill in 2011, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis released a report on ‘Why ‘Fixing China’s Currency is No Quick Fix’, in which they asked whether such a China-currency bill would really create hundreds of thousands of US jobs, to which they replied ‘probably not to any meaningful degree.’ They went further to point out that the bill was largely symbolic, since the president would be able to waive the penalties if he chose to, concluding: ‘Why risk costly Chinese retaliation for the sake of a measure whose practical impact could be so easily nullified anyway?’ Similarly, UBS Investment Research examined whether multinational firms scaling back their China outsourcing operations would bring the return of jobs to the US economy, to which they responded ‘Really? You must be kidding’.

Media Representation

It is difficult to keep up with the global media coverage of the RMB, with the focal issues shifting rapidly over time and place. This section provides links to some of the world’s major newspapers and their latest coverage of the RMB.[15]

The state-controlled Chinese media not surprisingly supports the Party line on RMB-related issues. In 2012, RMB internationalisation has dominated the coverage, with headlines such as ‘First bonds to African banks’, ‘Hong Kong relaxes yuan restrictions’, and ‘Yuan bonds provide funding opportunity for struggling Italian companies to raise funds by issuing (RMB-denominated) dim-sum bonds’. Numerous articles have also pointed out that the internationalisation of the RMB is an ‘inexorable trend, not to be hurried’, reflecting the official line of gradualism. For some recent examples see:

• The China Daily article in July 2012 on ‘Journey may matter more than destination RMB’, which presents numerous reasons why it will be a long time before the RMB is truly an international currency.

• Caijing Magazine (the Chinese equivalent of The Economist) articles in Chinese and (online) in English, from both Western and Chinese scholars, including ones in April by American economist Stephen Roach on ‘America’s renminbi fixation’, 美国如果丢掉中国机会很丢脸 calling for a shift in focus in the US towards more important matters; and in May by Robert Skidelsky, member of the British House of Lords, in Chinese and English on ‘Why China Won’t Rule’ 如何中国无法称霸; and Yu Yongding on ‘Greece-proofing China’ 中国怎样抵抗希腊风险 and why the timing could not be worse to consider speeding up capital-account liberalization. (English and Chinese)

In general, US media appears to becoming more sophisticated in dealing with RMB-related issues, and does not necessarily follow the ‘China is guilty’ stance of many US politicians. For examples, see ‘Romney’s China Blunder’, published by The Wall Street Journal in September 2011; and ‘Trade trauma’ published by The Washington Post in October 2011.

The Renminbi (yuan) is one of The New York Times’ ‘Times Topics’, with reports covering a wide range of issues written by both Western and Chinese analysts and scholars. For examples of some of the latest news see:

• ‘Times Topics’ on the Renminbi
• ‘China promises flexibility on RMB’, March 2013
• ‘Better ways to deal with China’, October 2012

The Financial Times also provides extensive coverage on a wide range of RMB issues. See ‘RMB: Global Challenge’ for a link to videos and written articles on issue ranging from RMB undervaluation/manipulation to the US Senate bill and ‘China bashing’, to implications of RMB internationalisation for the Eurozone.

Chronology

1948: The Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Bank of China begins issuing a unified currency in Communist-controlled areas of China, denominated in yuan元 and referred to by a variety of names, including ‘new currency’ 新币 and People’s Bank of China notes 中国人民银行券.

June 1949: The term Renminbi 人民币 (RMB), literally ‘People’s Currency’ used to denote Chinese currency for the first time.

1949-1978: Under a fixed exchange rate system, the value of the RMB is held at a very high level (RMB2.46 to the US dollar, or USD, between 1951 and 1971, and even higher at RMB1.68 to the USD by 1978) to limit exports and facilitate an import-substitution model of industrialisation.

1980-1994: Dual exchange rate system (of an official exchange rate and an internal settlement/swap market) in place. Successive devaluations of the RMB occur as currency becomes increasingly market oriented, with the exchange rate reaching RMB3.72 to the USD by 1986. Separate currency, or foreign exchange certificates (waihuiquan 外汇券), exist alongside RMB, for use by foreigners in China.

1 January 1994: A unified exchange rate replaces the dual exchange rate system, with the adoption of a ‘managed floating regime’. In practice, the RMB remains closely pegged to the USD.

1996: Full current account convertibility achieved, tight capital controls (on outflows) remain in place.

1994-2001: The RMB appreciates gradually through to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, at which point China resists depreciation. It then fluctuates within a narrow band around RMB8.28 to the dollar.

2003: First US Senate bill labelling China a currency ‘manipulator’ and calling for a 27.5 percent tariff on all Chinese goods unless currency revaluation occurs within six months.

21 July 2005: China officially ends the fixed RMB-dollar peg, switching to a managed float relative to a basket of currencies, including the USD, the Euro, the Japanese yen and the Korean won. Currency appreciation continues against all major currencies.

Mid 2008-June 2010: People’s Bank of China returns to fixed RMB-dollar peg in response to the Global Financial Crisis. Accusations of currency undervaluation and manipulation build in the United States. US President Barak Obama repeatedly raises Chinese currency undervaluation with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Internationalisation of the RMB becomes a policy priority in China.

June 2010: Managed float resumes.

2011: Steady appreciation of the RMB continues. RMB internationalisation gathers pace.

September 2011: US Senate adopts bill to address ‘fundamentally misaligned’ currencies, with China the main target.

April 2012: People’s Bank of China doubles size of daily trading band, as further step in liberalizing exchange rate.

July 2012: Establishment of Qianhai Bay Special Economic Zone, through which Hong Kong banks will be able to lend RMB directly to mainland companies, significantly reducing the severity of China’s capital controls.

Glossary

Appreciation/Revaluation: Decrease in the exchange rate (i.e., fewer RMB required to buy one USD), generally used when discussing floating/fixed exchange rates.

Bilateral nominal exchange rate: RMB (or CNY) per unit of a single currency.

Capital account: Reflects the net change in a country’s ownership of assets, with a surplus indicating a net inflow of money into the country.

Capital account convertibility: Ability to buy and sell RMB for purchase/sale of assets at home or abroad.

Current account: The sum of the trade balance (net export earnings minus import payments), plus factor income (earnings on foreign investments minus payments to foreign investors and cash transfers). In surplus when net payments are positive (generally, but not always, when exports exceed imports).

Current account convertibility: Ability to buy or sell RMB for all transactions on the current account (i.e. exports, imports, transfers)

Depreciation/Devaluation: Increase in the exchange rate (e.g. number of RMB required to purchase one USD), generally used when discussing floating/fixed exchange rates.

Exchange rate ‘manipulation’: According to Article IV, Section 1 of the IMF’s Charter, member countries are required to “….avoid manipulating exchange rates or the international monetary system in order to avoid effective balance of payments adjustment or to gain unfair competitive advantage over other member countries”.

Managed floating exchange rate: System of floating (i.e. market-determined) exchange rate where central bank intervenes to reduce currency fluctuations.

Nominal effective exchange rate (NEER): RMB per weighted average of currencies of major trading partners.

Real effective exchange rate (REER): NEER adjusted by relative prices in China and major trading partners.

RMB Internationalisation: the use of RMB by non-residents to invoice trade, make payments and denominate assets and liabilities.

Sterilisation: Activities undertaken by a central bank to offset monetary inflows in order to prevent inflation and/or to maintain a fixed exchange rate.

Special drawing rights (SDR): Foreign exchange reserve assets defined and maintained by the IMF, and set at a value determined by a basket of currencies (currently Euros, Japanese yen, sterling and USD). Representing a claim to currency held by IMF member countries, which can be exchanged for any of basket currencies.

Notes

[1] For a useful overview, see Morris Goldstein and Nicholas Lardy, ‘The evolution of China’s exchange rate regime in the reform era’, Chapter 1 in Morris Goldstein and Nicholas Lardy, eds, The Future of China’s Exchange Rate Policy, Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009, preview available at http://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/4167/01iie4167.pdf

[2] For further details on the internationalisation of the RMB, see Cheung, Ma and McCauley, ‘Why Does China Attempt to Internationalise the Renminbi?’, at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ch043.pdf

[3] For the brave, see Yin Wong Cheung, Menzie Chinn and Eiji Fujii, ‘Measuring RMB Misalignment, Where Do We Stand?’, 2010, at: http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Bundesbank/Research_Centre/conferences/2010/2010_12_03_eltville_01_cheung_chinn_fujii_paper.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

[4] For a simple explanation of the link between current account surpluses and gender ratios, see Jane Golley, ‘Uncertain Numbers, Uncertain Outcomes’, in Geremie R. Barmé, ed., China Story Yearbook 2012. For the more technical version, see Qingyuan Du and Shang-jin Wei, ‘A Sexually Unbalanced Model of Current Account Imbalances’, NBER Working Paper 16000, 2010, at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16000.pdf?new_window=1

[5] For a clear exposition, see Huang Yiping and Tao Kunyu, ‘Causes and Remedies of China’s External Imbalances’, 2012, at: http://en.ccer.edu.cn/download/6802-1.pdf

[6] See Stanford Professor Ronald McKinnon on why RMB stability, not appreciation, is optimal for China at: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2010/03/20/analysing-the-debate-over-chinas-exchange-rate-and-the-trade-balance )

[7] See Nicholas Lardy, Sustaining China’s Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis, p.146-7, Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2012, 181 pages.

[8] The English version of this speech can be downloaded from the People’s Bank of China official website at: http://www.pbc.gov.cn/publish/english/956/2009/20091229104425550619706/20091229104425550619706_.html The Chinese version of the same speech is no longer available on this site, but see http://www.pbc.gov.cn/publish/main/527/index.html for the latest list of speeches by PBC officials in Chinese.

[9] Jiang Yong, cited in ‘Redbacks For the Greenbacks, the Internationalisation of the RMB’, see full details in Note [12].

[10] See Huang Yiping (Peking University), ‘Misperceptions About the RMB and Chinese Exchange Rate Policy’, at: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/author/yipinghuang/
(http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2010/04/11/misperceptions-about-the-rmb-and-chinese-exchange-rate-policy/) ; Xiao Geng (Brookings Institution, Tsinghua University), ‘US-China Economic Imbalances: Alternatives to Appreciating the Chinese yuan; and, Fan Gang’s chapter in Goldstein and Lardy’s The Future of China’s Exchange Rate Policy, Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009.

[11] Yu Yongding, ‘China’s Moment to Break Free of the Dollar Trap‘.

[12] For more details on the discussion here, see ‘Redbacks for the Greenbacks: the Internationalisation of the RMB’, at: http://ecfr.eu/uploads/files/china_analysis_redbacks_for_greenbacks_the_internationalisation_of_the_renmimbi_november2010.pdf. This is a China Analysis issue in 2010 of the European Council on Foreign Relations (http://ecfr.eu), based mainly on Contemporary International Relations 现代国际关系, no.6, 2010: 1-19, online at: http://www.cicir.ac.cn/chinese/ArticleList.aspx?cid=399. See also Huang Yiping, ‘What Does China Want in International Economic Reforms’ at:
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/09/25/what-does-china-want-in-international-economic-reforms/

[13] This quote is taken from ‘The Future of China’s Exchange Rate Policy’, p.17, the first chapter in Goldstein and Lardy’s, Debating China’s Exchange Rate Policy, Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009. This introductory chapter provides a comprehensive summary of one side of each of the debates described here, and a far less comprehensive but still useful summary of the other.

[14] See Nicolas Lardy, Sustaining China’s Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis, full details at Note [7].

[15] This section will be updated every six months.

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Australian Centre on China in the World

• Overview
• Perspectives
• Chronology
• Glossary

Overview

Although not as well known outside China as the question of Tibet, the conflict over Xinjiang appears to be equally as intractable, and similarly grounded in conflicting accounts of both the past and the present.

Xinjiang is an autonomous region within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its immediate precursor was a product of the expansion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) during the eighteenth century. Xinjiang was transformed from being a dependency into an imperial province in the 1880s. It reverted to semi-independent warlord control for much of the Republican period (1912-49), and was incorporated into the PRC by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950. At that time it was home to a large Uyghur majority, with smaller communities of other Central Asian peoples (e.g., Kazakh, Kirghiz, Mongols, Tajik), as well as Han and Hui migrants from Chinese provinces to its east. Recent immigration has seen a rapid rise in the Han Chinese population; factoring in the floating population of migrant workers, this population is now believed to exceed that of the Uyghurs.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) dates from 1955. It comprises roughly one sixth of China’s total landmass, borders on eight neighbouring countries, and contains the largest remaining reserves of oil and gas thought to exist on Chinese soil.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ by the United States in 2001, Uyghur opposition has been cast by China as one wing of an international terrorist conspiracy. This manner of framing issues related to Xinjiang has helped China win endorsement for its definition of the internecine struggle in some circles. The presence of Uyghur militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan cannot be denied, however their numbers, level of organization, and their efficacy inside Xinjiang are all disputed both by Chinese and by foreign observers.

The mainstream leadership of the Uyghur diaspora has adapted to changing international conditions, eschewing talk of armed struggle and independence in favour of a human rights-based strategy. It now seeks support from governments and NGOs in Europe and the US. Recently, the emergence of Rebiya Kadeer (b.1948) has given greater unity to the fractious exile movement. Well known among Uyghurs inside and outside China, Rebiya was formerly a successful businesswoman in Xinjiang, before her detention as a political prisoner from 1999 to 2005.

On 5 July 2009, Uyghur protests in Ürümchi calling for an investigation into the beating death of Uyghur employees in a Guangzhou factory descended into bloody riots, resulting in the death of many Han Chinese, and leading to revenge attacks against Uyghurs (for more on this, see ‘Anxieties in Tibet and Xinjiang‘, China Story Yearbook 2012).

Under the rubric of a ‘New Silk Road’, the PRC now projects a prosperous future for Xinjiang as a major transport hub and the dominant economic actor in Central Asia. From this official perspective, the ‘Xinjiang problem’ is a product of the main local ethnic group, the Uyghurs, claiming Xinjiang as an exclusive homeland, some advocating an independent Eastern Turkistan. Many Uyghurs feel deprived of genuine autonomy as well as being demographically threatened by Han migration from the interior; they are concerned about who will benefit in reality from increased investment in the region. Chinese official and broad-based social unease with the ‘Xinjiang problem’ is a result of a sense that despite the Beijing’s best efforts to encourage inter-ethnic harmony and development, local disquiet and rebellion continues.

Perspectives

• The Official Chinese View
• Contending Views
• International Scholarship
• Media Representation

The Official Chinese View

China’s constitution prescribes equality for all before the law, provides effective checks against ethnic discrimination, and guarantees religious freedom for all faiths. To quote from a recent statement on ethnic policy, the cornerstones of China’s approach to Xinjiang are ‘equality, unity, regional ethnic autonomy, and common prosperity for all ethnic groups.’ Thus, Chinese officials deny any link between local discontent and prevailing ethnic and religious policies.

In the wake of the July 2009 riots, the body charged with such matters, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, stated that: ‘[t]he riots were not because of ethnic policies and they were not related to any religion either’ (Global Times). Instead, such opposition is attributed to outside agitation stirred up by groups and governments that seek to exploit gullible Uyghurs with the aim of destabilizing China and frustrating the nation’s global rise.

Despite superficial differences, Islamic terrorism and Western human rights discourse are in fact two sides of the same coin. Western expressions of concern for the ‘oppressed’ Uyghurs amount to sympathy for violent acts of terrorism. They are a cover for a concerted long-term strategy that would see China enfeebled. [Watching America] [Global Times]

History

China bases its claim to Xinjiang on history and an argument that says the territory has been an inalienable part of China from early dynastic times. Today, in the PRC it is required that works on Xinjiang’s history, official documents and media reports reiterate the point that Xinjiang is an integral part of China. The Chinese party-state regards an ‘objective’ or ‘correct’ understanding of Xinjiang’s history, that is the official viewpoint on all matters to do with the past and present state of the region, to be essential to the region’s harmonious development.

One of the most visible responses to the 2009 Ürümchi riots is the 2010-2011 ‘Three Histories’ education campaign. This region wide re-education movement saw lectures given on:

1. the history of Xinjiang (Xinjiang shi 新疆史);
2. the history of the development of ethnic minorities (minzu fazhan shi 民族发展史); and,
3. the history of the evolution of religions (zongjiao yanbian shi 宗教演变史 ).

A summary of the official view of Xinjiang’s history can be found in the White Paper on the History and Development of Xinjiang, released in 2003. In that document it is claimed that ’since the Han Dynasty established the Western Regions Frontier Command in Xinjiang in 60BCE, the Chinese central governments of all historical periods exercised military and administrative jurisdiction over Xinjiang.’

Nowhere in its justifications for ruling Xinjiang does the Chinese state refer to an act of conquest. The Qing dynasty’s incorporation of the territory in the eighteenth century is described in present Chinese works as a ‘re-unification’ (tongyi 统一), or as a ‘recovery’ (shoufu 收复) of a temporarily alienated territory. The Qing rulers were less committed to the notion of a primordial state of Chinese unity; they called the territory ‘New Frontier’ or ‘New Borderlands’ (Xinjiang 新疆) – a designation that reflects its recent incorporation. The Qing referred to its enemies as ‘bandits’, and its own actions as being that of ‘subduing and pacifying’.

Contemporary Chinese official discourse now elaborates on this terminology to describe Qing victories as being the suppression of Mongol or Muslim ‘rebellions’, and it anachronistically applies terms such as ‘separatist’ to describe the motivations of independent Mongol chiefs in centuries past. Conversely, acts of submission to the Qing are regarded as evidence of patriotic sentiment towards China.

While recognising the errors of Nationalist (KMT; Guomindang) assimilationist policies during the Chinese Republic, aspirations that emerged at this time for an independent Eastern Turkistan (Dongtu 东突) are primarily seen as being the product of colonialist manipulation. The first Eastern Turkistan Republic (1933) is dismissed as illegitimate (wei 伪). The second Eastern Turkistan Republic (1944-1949), however, was described by Mao Zedong as an important contribution to Xinjiang’s liberation from the Guomindang. Therefore today it is grudgingly endorsed, although the name ‘Eastern Turkistan Republic’ is avoided in favour of the more modest ‘Three Districts Revolution’ (Sanqu geming 三区革命).

The incorporation of Xinjiang into the PRC in 1950 came in the form of ‘peaceful liberation’ (heping jiefang 和平解放 ). This does not mean that there was no violence – the People’s Liberation Army fought campaigns against local ‘bandits’ – but that the Communist forces did not have to fight the Nationalists for control. Xinjiang was initially ruled by a military command. In 1954, drawing on a long history of military colonization in China’s west, the PLA founded the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps, a network of industrial and agricultural outposts that still occupies an important position in Xinjiang’s economy.

Ethnicity

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was founded in 1955. Levels of autonomy are enjoyed by all the ethnic groups of the region through a system of ‘nested autonomy’. Usually, local government bodies are headed by a non-Han, but with a Han party chief by his/her side. The system of autonomy was only codified in 1984 with the passing of The Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law [See also here]. Coming on the heels of the then Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s call for the ‘ethnicization’ (minzuhua 民族化) of minority regions, this legislation protects minority language and culture, and provides for a minimum level of self government (although these provisions were weakened in 2001). The law contains few concrete prescriptions and certain policies originally designed to safeguard minority languages and cultures are now seen as being barriers to integration. Uyghur-language schooling, for example, is being replaced by ‘bilingual education’, which envisages the introduction of Standard Chinese from the pre-school level.

Today: the ‘Three Inimical Forces’

Threats to Xinjiang’s stability continue to arise from the ‘Three Forces’ (sangu shili 三股势力), namely separatism, religious extremism, and international terrorism. Sometimes rendered in English as the ‘Three Evils’, this formulation was introduced in 2000 during meetings of the Shanghai Five, a group that evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 11 September 2001 attacks and the US ‘War on Terror’ let China present itself as being a victim of Islamic terrorism; subsequently, Uyghur organisations based in Afghanistan and Pakistan were listed as terrorist groups. Despite this, Chinese law stipulated no definition of terrorism until 2011, when a draft was put forward by the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament.

The best response to these threats is to increase the pace of development. High-level Party meetings held in 2010 unveiled a ‘roadmap’ to prosperity for Xinjiang, aiming to transform it into a ‘moderately prosperous society’ (xiaokang shehui 小康社会) by 2020. Measures towards this objective include large construction projects, such as gas and oil pipelines to the east, and a new resource tax designed to boost local government revenues. Other recent policy innovations include a program twinning Xinjiang towns with richer cities of the coast, and another to send Uyghurs villagers to relatively high-wage factories in south China. The improvement of road and rail connections with Xinjiang’s neighbours heralds an increase in trade along a ‘new Silk Road’, and a reconstructed Kashgar now stands at the centre of a special economic zone touted as ‘the Shenzhen of the west.’

Contending Views

Dissenting views on Xinjiang policy circulate in a variety of forms.

Academics in China: First, there are critiques of official policy that are allowed to be aired widely. These can at times reflect a process of policy deliberation and rethinking inside the Party. Most prominent of these has been the open discussion of aspects of China’s ethnicity (minzu 民族) paradigm which is blamed for the country’s inability to secure lasting peace both in Xinjiang and in Tibet. Leading Chinese scholars have criticised the creation of the XUAR for linking ethnicity to specific political institutions, which they refer to as the ‘politicisation’ of ethnicity. They have called for this link to be severed, and ethnicity to be divorced from politics, thereby limiting the state’s obligations towards the Uyghurs as a group. Some go even further and argue that recognition of the Uyghurs as a separate ethnicity was itself an error, that the people in question lacked the requisite ethnic consciousness to be granted this status. The thrust of all of these criticisms is that China erred in borrowing from Soviet policy on the national question in the 1950s, and should draw on its own resources to enhance ethnic minorities’ identification with Chinese (Zhonghua 中华) civilization.

Popular Discontent: Alongside these critiques exists a more thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with the current policy, a set of views most commonly encountered in Internet discussion forums and blogs. According to this view, the Uyghurs are ungrateful recipients of generous preferential policies (youhui zhengce 优惠政策), which place them in a privileged position vis-à-vis the Han. Concern is therefore expressed for the rights of the Han in ethnic minority regions. It is not uncommon to hear Han Chinese complain that they, and not the Uyghurs, are the oppressed minority in Xinjiang. The view that Party officials were failing in their duty to protect the Han boiled over after the 5 July 2009 riots, resulting in angry Han demonstrations which were motivated as much by frustration with Xinjiang’s officialdom as by a desire for revenge against the Uyghurs. ‘We want Wang Zhen 王震, we don’t want Wang Lequan 王乐泉’ was a popular slogan, one that invoked the legendary figure behind the often violent Han opening-up of Xinjiang in the 1950s. Partly in response to this pressure, the Party Secretary Wang Lequan was removed from his post in April 2010.

Dissenting Hans: Prominent Han voices raised in public sympathy to the Uyghur point of view are relatively rare. One exception is the novelist and journalist Wang Lixiong 王力雄, a man briefly imprisoned during his 1999 trip to Xinjiang. In 2007, Wang published a meditation on Xinjiang in the form of a cell conversation with a Uyghur entitled My Western Region, Your Eastern Turkistan (Wode Xiyu, nide Dongtu 我的西域你的东土). In it he expresses the hope that competing Uyghur and Han historical claims to Xinjiang can be reconciled without upsetting the nation’s territorial unity.[Review by Sebastian Veg]

Uyghur Viewpoints: Inside China Uyghur voices that seek to contribute to debate within China find few platforms. After speaking out on economic policies implemented in Xinjiang the university professor and Communist Party member Ilham Tohti found himself under increasing pressure to keep silent. Following the 2009 Ürümchi riots, Uyghur Online, a website he had founded, was shut down. His fellow editor Gheyret Niyaz was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on charges of ‘endangering state security’.

Uyghur Viewpoints: Outside China In its global search for sponsorship and support, the Uyghur exile movement has framed its struggle in a variety of terms. Until it was shut down in 1992, pro-GMD Uyghurs in Taiwan ran what they claimed to be the legitimate administration of Xinjiang (Xinjiang shengzhengfu banshichu 新疆省政府辦事處). Meanwhile, from the 1950s onwards, a rival set of Uyghur leaders based in Turkey carried on a campaign on an anti-Communist, pro-Turkic nationalist basis; these identified with the tradition of the first Eastern Turkistan Republic. While still a large community, Uyghurs in Turkey have now lost the level of political support they once enjoyed. A third wing of the movement in the Soviet Union (and independent Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan) positioned themselves as partisans of a third-world national liberation movement. As China’s relations with its Central Asian neighbours have improved over recent years, these too have lost support.

Today the most active communities of Uyghurs are in Germany (where the World Uyghur Congress is based), the US (home to Radio Free Asia and the Uyghur American Association), Australia and Canada. Debates among exile leaders mirror those among Tibetan exiles, most importantly regarding the question of whether they should seek independence or ‘high-level autonomy’ for their homelands. Led by the one-time entrepreneur Rebiya Kadeer, the present World Uyghur Congress leadership are noncommittal regarding independence. Instead they call for self-determination and the protection of human rights. They support the training of young activists who can lobby effectively in various international forums. These activities are in part funded by grants from the US National Endowment for Democracy.

The mood in the broader exile community is on the whole strongly anti-Chinese; collaboration with Chinese dissidents is not seen as a priority or necessarily relevant. An exception to this is Wuer Kaixi (Örkesh Dölet 吾尔开希), who has played a leading role in the Chinese democracy movement from a base in his adopted Taiwan, while maintaining a strong interest in his native Xinjiang.

Other Ethnicities: Caught in the middle of the Chinese-Uyghur tensions are the other ethnic minorities of Xinjiang, the largest of which are the Kazakhs, Hui, Kirghiz and Mongols. These groups have their own history of conflicts and negotiations with the Chinese state, and they do not necessarily take the Uyghur side on every issue; indeed, in some cases, relations among these groups are strained. Some would argue that China effectively pursues a ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy in Xinjiang; that by dividing up territory and resources between minorities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a sense of competition among local elites. It could also be the case that by pursuing a narrow nationalist claim to Xinjiang, Uyghurs have themselves alienated these other communities. While Uyghur-Han conflict will continue to dominate the headlines, relations among non-Han groups will be an important factor in any reconfiguring of ethnic policy in Xinjiang itself.

International Scholarship

Given its cultural complexities, Xinjiang attracts scholars from fields as diverse as Turkic linguistics and Islamic Studies, as well as those with a background in the humanistic or social scientific study of China. ‘Xinjiang Studies’ is now an international field of scholastic pursuit. Pioneered by European and Russian explorers, the most active centres of Xinjiang Studies are presently in Japan and the USA.

Scholarship on twentieth century Xinjiang has reflected a tension between seeing the dynamics of Xinjiang’s history in its own terms, or as being driven by outside influences. The historian Owen Lattimore (1900-1989) spent decades studying the long-term interactions between China and its ‘barbarian’ neighbours. His work on Xinjiang culminated in the monograph Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian frontiers of China and Russia (1950). Lattimore saw Xinjiang as an ‘outer frontier’ of China, standing in relation to the ‘inner frontier’ of Gansu and the Chinese-speaking Hui Muslims. In periods of strength, China had been able to draw on the resources of such inner frontiers to control its outer frontiers. During the Qing, Lattimore felt that this dynamic had given way to a policy of Han colonialism that was not in China’s long-term interests. Lattimore’s idea of the peoples of the north and northwest as a regenerative force in a polity that otherwise tended towards stagnation were echoed by some Chinese scholars in the 1930s. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛, for example, challenged the scholarly consensus by according China’s Muslims an important role in the anticipated revival of China.

Criticising such views as romantic, others have seen great power rivalries as the key to understanding Xinjiang’s past and present. This line of thinking includes both Sinocentric narratives of long-term Chinese control, such as Zeng Wenwu’s History of China’s Administration of the Western Regions (Zhongguo jingying xiyu shi 中国经营西域史, 1936), as well as ‘Great Game’ narratives, which position Russia/Soviet Union and Great Britain as major actors. Allen Whiting and Sheng Shicai offered an implicit critique of Lattimore in Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? (1958), which emphasised the extent of Soviet penetration of the region (i.e. Xinjiang as pawn). More recent work has shown a similar dichotomy: Linda Benson’s The Ili Rebellion (1990) recognised the Soviet role in the Second ETR without denigrating the genuine local militants who fought for it as pawns. In contrast, David Wang’s Under the Soviet Shadow: The Yining Incident (1999) described the whole thing as a Soviet plot.

As a historic crossroads, Xinjiang is thought of variously as part of Inner Asia, Central Asia, or Central Eurasia, though such terminology is rejected by scholars in China, who prefer scholarly boundaries to coincide with political boundaries. In China the study of Xinjiang belongs to ‘Frontier Studies’ (bianjiangxue 边疆学), which emerged as a distinct field in the Republican period, although it is one that drew on traditions of geographic and political thinking that developed during the Qing era.

With a few exceptions, most scholars outside China approach the ongoing conflict in Xinjiang from a position of sympathy with the Uyghurs. The failings of Chinese policy are seen by some as directly to blame for discontent (an ‘internal colonialism’ model); others regard it as being the unintended by-product of the system of autonomy and China’s radical developmentalist priorities. More recently, the focus has turned to issues of language and education policy. Much work on Xinjiang touches on the origins, strength, and prospects of Uyghur national identity. This interest in explaining the reasons for Uyghur discontent in terms other than outside manipulation or religious fanaticism has not been well received in China. With the publication of the edited volume Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland in 2004, a series of bureaucratic twists and turns led to the banning from China of all contributing scholars, who became known as the ‘Xinjiang Thirteen.’ The blacklisting has now been lifted for most contributors to that volume, although for many entry to China remains subject to constraints. The episode has had a negative impact on the free-flowing dialogue and exchange between Chinese and Western scholars [see here]. Research inside Xinjiang remains difficult for outsiders, with archives generally off limits and field researchers closely monitored. Despite this, the possibilities for working in what is still a sparsely populated discipline continue to attract researchers to Xinjiang, and the field is growing.

Media Representation

Xinjiang is no longer the remote and obscure place that it was during the early years of the PRC; major publications such as The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Wall Street Journal regularly run stories on events there. Despite this, direct reporting from Xinjiang remains highly restricted, and most newsworthy events take place far from the eyes of foreign journalists.

The 2009 Riots and Beyond: After the 2009 riots in Ürümchi, Beijing was confident enough of its own position to invite reporters to tour the scene of the violence. For the first time, tweets told of spontaneous protests breaking out on Ürümchi’s streets, and photographers recorded scenes of Uyghurs braving the riot police to present their case to the world. At the same time, the flow of news in and out of Xinjiang was curtailed by the cutting of Internet and telephone communications. Journalists were strongly discouraged from travelling south to Kashgar, and some were detained. Whether or not China will adopt a similar policy towards future outbreaks of violence, or revert to outright bans on reporting (as has been the case in Tibet), remains to be seen.

In the meantime, a steady stream of accounts of a low-intensity conflict is reported internationally on the basis of Chinese accounts, which often make assertions about terrorist activities that cannot be independently verified. Certain Chinese claims about groups such as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) are accepted at face value, others are treated with greater scepticism. For the most part, countries that have their own stake in the ‘terrorist threat’ story, such as India or Russia, tend to be more credulous. In response to such Chinese reports, often the only available alternative views are press releases from Uyghur organizations such as the World Uyghur Congress, or information sourced by Radio Free Asia (RFA), which has a Uyghur-language service. RFA Uyghur in particular is a focal point for the dispersed Uyghur communities living around the globe, and it regularly broadcasts interviews and news from within Xinjiang, all with a strongly anti-Chinese bias. RFA is funded by American congressional grants, and not surprisingly China regards it as a propaganda tool of the US imperium. China tries, with limited success, to jam its broadcasts into Xinjiang.

Resorting to partisan Uyghurs for commentary fuels perceptions in China that Western, as well as non-mainland Chinese and Japanese, media condones, or even tacitly encourages, anti-Chinese violence by Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Within China, Rebiya Kadeer and her colleagues are demonized to no lesser degree than Osama bin Laden was in the West. To understand Chinese attitudes, therefore, we might perhaps imagine a situation in which acts of violence in New York or London were followed by sympathetic interviews with al-Qaeda leaders on Chinese TV. In 2009, ‘angry youth’ websites such as Anti-CNN caught out the Western press in at least one embarrassing error, when Rebiya Kadeer was allowed to present a photo from a riot elsewhere in China as a scene of confrontation in Ürümchi [China Daily]. (Uyghurs countered that the photo was deliberately circulated by Chinese to induce this mix-up). News sites such as the Global Times which are overtly sympathetic to the official position now act as the mouthpiece for Chinese complaints against the Western press. A Global Times spin-off site called True Xinjiang serves a repository for much reporting on Xinjiang.

Western indulgence of Rebiya Kadeer was confirmed for many in China by the release of the documentary Ten Conditions of Love, a biopic told largely in Rebiya Kadeer’s own words. The film depicts in a highly romanticized fashion Kadeer’s struggle against the Chinese. Produced by Australia filmmakers, the documentary first screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2009. This provoked a storm of protest and led to a clumsy intervention by Chinese diplomats who sought the withdrawal of the film from the festival and who requested that the Australian government deny the ‘terrorist’ Kadeer a visa to enter the country. Such action only raised the profile of the film, and of Rebiya herself, and it led to subsequent screenings in festivals around the world – accompanied by similar PRC expressions of dismay and official expression of ‘hurt feelings’. Since this episode, China seems to have thought better of attacking Rebiya so publicly, but the documentary remains a source of controversy. Recently questions were raised in the Australian press as to why the national broadcaster (ABC), who had acquired the rights to the documentary, nevertheless had decided not to screen it on its international station, the Australia Network. Responding to this pressure, the ABC later announced that it intends to show the film.

Chronology

The Qing dynasty

1750s: Qing conquest of Jungharia and Tarim Basin, origins of Xinjiang

1864-1874: Loss of Xinjiang to Yaqub Beg

1871-1881: Russian occupation of Ili, the ‘Ili Crisis’

1880-1885: Reconquest, Xinjiang converted into a province

December 1911: Republican uprising in Ili

Republic of China (1912-1949)

1912-1933: Semi-independent warlord colony

1933: First Eastern Turkistan Republic (ETR) in Kashgar

1933-1942: Pro-Soviet regime of Sheng Shicai

1942: Sheng Shicai turns to Nationalist Party (Guomindang), beginning of Nationalist control in Xinjiang

1944-1949: Second Eastern Turkistan Republic (the ‘three districts revolution’)

People’s Republic of China (1949-)

1950: Incorporation into the People’s Republic of China through ‘peaceful liberation’ led by general Wang Zhen

1954: Founding of the Production and Construction Corps

1955: Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region founded

1956: Wang Zhen removed for pursuing ‘leftist’ policies

May 1962: Ili-Tarbaghatay incident, mass flight to Soviet Union

1984: ‘The Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law’ passed

2000: ‘Three Forces’ (separatism, religious extremism and international terrorism) first discussed. Appearance of the New Silk Road

5 July 2009: Violent riots in Ürümchi triggered by the death on 26 June of two Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory in Guangdong

30, 31 July 2011: Knife and bomb attacks in Kashgar

February 2012: Twelve people reportedly die in riots in Kashgar

Glossary

Chinese; Chineseness zhonghua 中华
Construction and Production Corps jianshe shengchan bingtian 建设生产兵团
Eastern Turkestan dongtu 东突
Ethnicisation minzuhua 民族化
Ethnicity; ethnic minority minzu 民族
Frontier Studies bianjiangxue 边疆学
Moderately prosperous society xiaokang shehui 小康社会
New China xinhua 新华
Peaceful Liberation heping jiefang 和平解放
Preferential policies youhui zhengce 优惠政策
Recovery shoufu 收复
Re-unification tongyi 统一
Splittist fenlie fenzi 分裂分子
Three Districts Revolution sanqu geming 三区革命
Three Forces sangu shili 三股势力
Three Histories sanshi 三史
Western Region xiyu 西域
Xinjiang independence jiangdu 疆独

Back to Lexicon main menu

The post Xinjiang 新疆 appeared first on The China Story.

Jeremy Goldkorn
Danwei Media and the Australian Centre on China in the World

This lexicon entry consists of the following sub-sections:

• Overview
• China Internet Timeline
• Internet Glossary

Overview

This section reviews the development of email and the Internet in China. From the 1980s, China’s connectivity proceeded in gradual steps, beginning with the first email sent from the Mainland in 1986 (or was it 1987? See below) and the systematic development of a nationwide network, to the ubiquitous presence of microblogs and sophisticated Internet censorship today. The timeline below attempts to recap the most significant general events related to the development of the Chinese Internet.

China’s First Email

There is still somewhat of a controversy on when exactly the first email was sent from China. There are two conflicting claims, one from 1986 and the other from 1987.

The first states that China’s first email was sent on 25 August 1986 by researcher Wu Weimin from a computer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of High Energy Physics, to Jack Steinberger, a scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland.

The second claims that China’s first email was sent on 20 September 1987 by a joint Chinese and German team at the Chinese Institute of Computer Applications (ICA) in Beijing to the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The project was led by Werner Zorn, the head of the Computing Center IRA (Informatik Rechnerabteilung) and professor of Computer Science at Karlsruhe University, who was in Beijing in September 1987 to work with Chinese and German scientists to establish the connection to Germany. The Sino-German team composed a message for the first email which read in both German and English:

Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.

This is the first ELECTRONIC MAIL supposed to be sent from China into the international scientific networks via computer interconnection between Beijing and Karlsruhe, West Germany (using CSNET/PMDF BS2000 Version).

In 1990, the ICA registered the .CN country code domain for China, again with the assistance of Zorn and Karslruhe University. Eventually on 17 May 1994, a full TCP/IP connection was established between China and the US, which meant that data packets could take independent paths and the costs of email would be much reduced. In 1995 China Telecom began to construct a network to facilitate public Internet access in China; eventually on June 20 1996, the Chinese network was officially opened to commercial operations for the wider public.

China Internet Timeline

Foundations: 1986-1995

• August 1986: Wu Weimin, as scientist at China Academy of Sciences Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, allegedly sends China’s first email to Jack Steinberger, another scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), via satellite link
• September 1987: A scientific research group at the Chinese Institute of Computer Applications (ICA) in Beijing successfully send an email (supposedly the first from China) to Germany with the title ‘Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner of the world’
• November 1990: Registration of China’s country code domain, .CN, completed
• December 1992: Tsinghua University Network (TUNET) established at Tsinghua University. This is the first college network in China using the TCP/IP structure
• March 1993: Deputy Premier Zhu Rongji oversees the establishment of the National Public Economic Information Network in China (i.e., the Golden Bridge Project)
• May 1994: The High Energy Physics Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences sets up China’s first web server and establishes the first set of web pages
• May 1994: China’s top domain (.CN) servers are fully installed locally using TCP/IP, ending the period of location abroad
• May 1994: National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems opens China’s first BBS, called Dawn BBS
• May 1994: The national English language newspaper China Daily launches a website. Despite the newspaper’s turgid official style, the newspaper and its website publish Reuters and other foreign news wires’ articles which are often much racier than anything in the rest of the state-owned Chinese-language press
• March 1995: The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) completes a long-distance connection to four branch institutions in Shanghai, Hefei, Wuhan and Nanjing respectively in the first step to spread the Internet across the whole of China
• May 1995: China Telecom begins to build a national Internet network in China
• July 1995: China’s first 128k leased line connecting to the US is opened
• August 1995: The primary phase of the Golden Bridge Project is accomplished, connecting 24 provinces via satellite
• September 1995: China’s first commercial website, a directory of companies, goes online at Chinapages.com. The site was started by Jack Ma who later grew it into Alibaba.com, one of the most successful Internet companies in China

Indiginisation: 1996-2002

• 1996: Sina.com and Sohu.com, two privately-run Internet companies, obtain funding and open for business. As the dot com boom takes off, the Internet grows as rapidly in China as it does elsewhere. Suddenly there is a whole new medium that is not subject to any existing government regulations. Within a few years, ordinary Chinese people have access to all the information available on the Internet, with very few restrictions
• May 1996: First Internet café in China opened in Shanghai
• September 1996: China Golden Bridge Network announces beginning of provision of Internet access services, mainly for institutional users through dedicated lines and individual users through telephone lines
• September 1996: First domestic City Area Network (CAN) opened in Shanghai as part of the Shanghai Public Information Network
• July 1999: The first lawsuit involving Internet plagiarism hits the Chinese courts. Six novelists, including former culture minister Wang Meng, sue an IT company for publishing their work without permission. The writers win the case and the court orders the firm to pay compensation
• 2000: Internet services that allow users to go online anonymously without any kind of registration become widespread. Chinese Internet users rapidly get used to being anonymous online. The dot.com bubble bursts, but the massive increase in both Internet accessibility and Chinese online content cannot be reversed. However, the government uses increasingly sophisticated technologies to block and filter certain foreign websites, and starts regulating Chinese websites more strictly as Internet use grows
• 2002: Google.cn, still a US-based search engine, controls an estimated 25 percent of the Chinese search market
• November 2002: Chinese activist Jiang Lijun is arrested following an investigation that used information supplied by Yahoo

Rise of the Netizen: 2003-2009

• June 2003: A young journalist with the online name ‘Mu Zimei’ (木子美, also written as muzimei and Muzi Mei) starts a blog in which she records her sexual experiences. After publishing a rather negative ‘review’ of her experiences with a well-known rock musician, her diary becomes an overnight Internet hit, read by millions of Chinese youngsters. The print media publish reports about her, and blogging becomes a household word
• January 2004: A young computer gamer named Li Hongchen wins the country’s first virtual properties dispute case: the Beijing Chaoyang District People’s Court orders Arctic Ice Technology Development Company, the maker of the game ‘Hongyue’ (Red Moon), to return game winnings, including virtual biochemical weapons, to Li, who protested after the items were stolen by a hacker. In the same month, the state-owned news agency reports that a new online game is introduced every ten days in China
• April 2005: Real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi starts a blog, becoming the first of many celebrities to start blogs in 2005 and early 2006
• 2006: A Chinese rival to Google, Baidu.com, begins to grow, reaching 63.7 percent market share. Google’s market share drops from 25 percent in 2002 to 19.2 percent in 2006. Google was slower and less effective than other search sites because it was hosted outside of China
• March 2006: Some government officials begin personal blogs drawing comments from the public that would never make it into traditional media. Among the bloggers are both People’s Representatives and members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference or CPPCC
• July 2006: A Chinese policeman starts what the People’s Daily calls the country’s first ‘police blog’. The police blog is an overnight hit, claiming more than one million visitors in its first two months
• November 2006: The first part of the Great Firewall of China, also known as the Golden Shield Project, goes into service
• December 2006: Time magazine names ‘You’ as person of the year for 2006. They explain: ‘Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.’ The article includes profiles of fifteen citizens – including a French rapper, a relentless reviewer and a real life lonely girl – of the new digital democracy. One of the citizen’s profiled is Wang Xiaofeng, a Chinese blogger, who is used to highlighting how citizen bloggers are changing the way information can be controlled in China
• April 2007: A Chinese version of MySpace launches, but lacks discussion forums devoted to politics and religion. It also has a filtering system that stops the posting of content about Taiwan’s independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama and other ‘inappropriate’ topics
• April 2007: In the wake of the Virginia Tech Shootings, the largest incident of mass murder in the history of the US, rumors that the killer is Chinese cause wide spread anxiety that the incident might spark anti-Chinese sentiment. Two threads on Netease, a popular web forum in China, garner over 10,000 comments apiece within the first 24 hours
• May 2007: A Shanghainese man sues his Internet connection provider China Telecom because his US-hosted website was blocked, and China Telecom will not or cannot explain to him why. He does not win the case in court, but his website is unblocked
• January 2008: The catch-phrase ‘Very pornographic, very violent’ 很黄很暴力 circulates throughout the web and is dubbed the first online meme in China of 2008. The meme originated in a CCTV broadcast featuring an interview with a middle-school student about the dangers of online pornography; she said she went online to look for information and found a website that was ‘very pornographic, very violent’. The phrase draws ridicule and becomes the subject of spoofs targeted at CCTV and the national anti-pornography campaign
• March 2008: Angry Chinese citizens condemn what they perceive as biased western media coverage of the Tibet riots, beginning ‘anti-CNN’ campaigns and websites, and proposing boycotts
• June 2008: A possible connection between the suicide of a young girl and local police sparks a riot in Weng’an including over 30,000 people; cars are burned, police attacked, government buildings sacked. The government promptly holds a press conference, mainstream Chinese media reports the riots, and fairly open discussion is allowed to remain on government run news sites like Xinhua. On the other hand, discussion of the riots on popular public forums is tightly censored. This censorship angers many netizens and they begin to refer to ‘push-ups’ to indicate the Weng’an riots (one of the suicidal girl’s friends was doing push-ups when she jumped off a bridge.) When the word ‘push-up’ begins to draw online censorship, whole websites are set up devoted to push-ups, and netizens fill forums with references to push-ups in protest
• July 2008: On 1 July, Yang Jia, a twenty-eight-year old Beijing resident, charged into a local police station in Zhabei, Shanghai and murdered six police officers. Speculations and rumors about the murderer’s motive abound on the Internet after the grisly and bizarre murder spree. As dust settled, it turned out that Yang was a victim of police brutality who sought revenge after being denied justice. The public generally have a degree of sympathy for Yang and some even see him as a hero. On 26 November, Yang is executed
• August 2008: MSN and Yahoo sign a ‘self-disciplinary pledge’ that will limit what users can say on their blogging sites, yet both decline to implement the collection of real names of users

The Rage of Microblogs: 2009~

• 2009: By the second half of the year, web portals such as Sina.com, Tencent and Netease have all initiated microblogging platforms. Microblogging starts to attract public figures and institutions and private Internet users increasingly sign up, making it one of the hottest Internet topics of the year
• June 2009: China introduces Green Dam Net Filtering Software that will be fitted to every new PC sold in the country from July 2009. The software was created to stop people looking at ‘offensive’ content such as pornography and violent imagery. In the face of online protest, the policy is never fully implemented
• January 2010: Google announces that it might pull out of China following a cyber attack on e-mail accounts of human rights activists. In March, Google announces that its Mainland search engine will be redirected through Hong Kong
• March 2010: The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issues the first batch of web TV licenses
• October 2010: When Li Yifan, son of a local Public Security Bureau deputy director Li Gang, kills a female student and injures another on Hebei University campus with his car and shouts: ‘Sue me if you dare, my dad is Li Gang!’, the phrase soon becomes an Internet meme in China after the incident causes an uproar in China’s online community. Following the uproar Li Yifan is tried and jailed, although the phrase ‘My dad is Li Gang!’ becomes a ubiquitous phrase associated with corruption and some of China’s elites attempts to sidestepped the normal procedure of the law.
• November 2010: An Internet war erupts between Qihoo’s 360 anti-virus security suite and Tencent’s QQ, used for IM and social gaming, when Tencent releases its QQ Doctor (later revamped to the QQ Computer Manager) app as a free supplement to its IM app. Amid claims that the QQ app has the ability to scan and possibly transmit all files stored on a computer, in response 360 released its own app which claimed to thwart the Tencent app. The spat escalated to become national news, yet when the authorities intervened the brouhaha died down quickly. For a few weeks, China’s Internet users found themselves in the middle of two Internet giants, with pop-ups denouncing the opposing company. Eventually in September 2011, a Beijing court ruled that three companies related to Qihoo 360 had to apologize to Tencent and pay it compensation of RMB 400,000 for slander and unfair competition
• June 2011: A microblog by a user named ‘Guo Meimei Baby’ is discovered on Weibo in which the user flaunts her wealth while claiming to be ‘general manager of the Red Cross society.’ Guo Meimei’s posts are forwarded multiple times and spread rapidly, and netizens start to question her wealth and job status. Netizens discover that Meimei had suddenly become very rich, and suspicions of corruption – especially related to the Red Cross – infuriates netizens. Fiercely attacked online, Meimei soon apologizes via Weibo, disavowing any relations with the Red Cross Society
• July 2011: The importance of microblogs is underscored when the first SOS message from the scene of the Wenzhou train crash is posted to a microblog; shortly afterwards the news spreads rapidly, and in the weeks that follow and large debate occurs on Weibo and other SNS platforms on not only what really happened and how, but on more broader issues like corruption, governance and compensation. The Wenzhou train crash and the ensuing microblogging debate is seen by some as a turning point for China’s Internet culture in which debate on a wide range of issues inexorably moves online
• October 2011: A van hits two-year-old Xiao Yueyue in Foshan, Guangdong; while the little girl lies prostrate on the ground, seventeen passers-by ignore her before another van runs over her. Finally someone came to her aid, but little Yueyue later dies in hospital. When surveillance footage of the entire episode is uploaded to the Internet, it induces a controversial debate on China’s moral character
• October 2011: Beijing residents start to complain online about pollution and dispute statistics on the number of blue-sky days provided by the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). Pan Shiyi, the real estate tycoon who started his blog way back in 2005 (see above), vent his anger on his blog and request the government to release data for PM2.5 readings, i.e. a form of fine particulate matter that is considered to be the most dangerous to human health. In January 2012, in a rare victory for online people power, the official Xinhua News Agency reported that Beijing would start providing PM2.5 data
• As of January 2012, there are around 513 million Internet users in China, increasing from around 9 million in 2000, and around 300 million people use their mobile phones to go online. At the end of 2011, Sina Weibo claims to have 250 million active users

Internet Glossary

• Computer network diannao wangluo 电脑网络
• ‘Interconnection network’ (probably the most common phrase to describe the Internet in China) hulianwang 互联网
• International ‘Interconnection network’ Guoji hulianwang 国际互联网
• Intewang (transliteration of Internet into Chinese, not commonly used) 因特网
• Network wangluo 网络
• Netizen, Internet user, someone who posts to websites and participates in online communities wangmin 网民

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The post The Internet 互联网 appeared first on The China Story.

Geremie R. Barmé
Director, Australian Centre on China in the World

This lexicon entry consists of the following sub-sections:

• Introduction
• New China 新华
• New Writing 新文体 and Popular Language 大众语
• Party & Other Eight-legged Essays 党八股
• Parody & its Enemies 反讽，恶搞，原味
• The Spring & Autumn Style 春秋笔法
• New China Newspeak 一言以兴邦，一言以丧邦
• Faithfulness, Expressiveness & Elegance 信达雅

Introduction
文體五百歲一變，書體五百歲一變
——龔自珍《秦漢石刻文錄序》

This essay is a preliminary attempt to describe what, since the 1980s, some Chinese writers have identified as ‘New China Newspeak’. This style of language is also known as Maospeak 毛语 or Mao-style prose 毛文体, although I would contend that these latter terms offer too narrow a purview of a complex array of language practices that pre-date High Maoism (c.1964-1978). This essay is an exercise in what I think of as New Sinology 后汉学.

New China Newspeak is an accumulation of written and spoken styles of Chinese, it reflects both an impoverishment as well as an elaboration of Chinese as a communicative tool; it overlaps but is not quite the same as the ‘formalized language of Chinese politics’ so aptly discussed elsewhere.[1] The expression covers a wide range of prose and spoken forms of modern Chinese that have evolved and been consciously developed as the result of profound linguistic changes and experiments that date back to the late-Qing period, all of which are intimately connected with politics, ideas and the projection of power. Some of these styles reflect the militarization of Chinese in modern times (during the Republic, in Manchukuo, and under both the Nationalist and the Communist parties). Added to this is the stilted diction of bureaucratese (developed on the basis of traditional bureaucratic language), as well as scientific and academic jargon, to which have been added various forms of political and commercial exaggeration, euphemisms and neologisms. It mixes argot and the vernacular with the wooden language of Communist Party discourse. In recent decades this body of language practices has been ‘enriched’ by the verbiage of neoliberal economics and revived Cultural Revolution-era vituperation. New China Newspeak provides the linguistic architecture to The China Story and, therefore, to understand better that story, it is important to be mindful of the provenance and proliferation of New China Newspeak.

New China Newspeak also incorporates a language of moral evaluation or judgement based both on traditional Chinese linguistic practices and those developed in the Soviet era of Chinese politics (Nationalist and Communist). It is a form of language that grew to maturity in the 1940s and one that became the mainstream official language of China after 1949. In its essence, New China Newspeak was and is used by the Party, its propaganda organs, the media and educators to shape (and circumscribe) the way people express themselves in the public (and eventually private) sphere. It has enabled the party-state to inculcate its ideology by means of relentless verbal/written imposition and repetition. In this it shares much in common with Soviet-style Russian (also known as la langue de bois), and the form of German famously termed LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) by the philologist Victor Klemperer.[2]

New China Newspeak is not merely used for internal communicative purposes, for it is also commonly employed in creating what I call ‘translated China’, that is the English-language Party langue that has evolved over many decades to present China to the outside world. For decades this mode of expression was the near-exclusive preserve of such non-Chinese language propaganda publications as China Reconstructs 中国建设 (founded in 1952 at the behest of Zhou Enlai by Soong Ch’ing-ling and Israel Epstein, renamed China Today 今日中国 in 1990) and Peking Review 北京周报 (which first appeared in 1958, later renamed Beijing Review and now part of the China International Publishing Group, or CIPG). It now also features prominently in the reporting and commentaries published by such internationally high-profile outlets as Xinhua News Agency, China Daily and The Global Times. The role of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau 中共中央编译局 (founded in 1953) has also been crucial in shaping the linguistic terrain of New China. The various Party mechanisms created for the formal generation and dissemination of New China Newspeak has been well described in other work on China’s ‘propaganda state’.[3]

In attempting to discuss the rather nebulous world of New China Newspeak, I am mindful that politicization and militarization are hardly unique to China; both have been a prominent feature of modern English. George Orwell may have created the formulation Newspeak to describe the dystopian world of Ingsoc in Oceania (see below), but he was also the author in 1946 of an important essay on the subject of politics and the English language. My argument is not that the body of languages covered by the term New China Newspeak is unique, but rather that, given the fact that the Communist Party still dominates formal discourse and mass media communications in the People’s Republic today, its linguistic behaviour demands closer scrutiny. So, the present essay is just that, an essay: an attempt to describe in cultural and historical terms a complex form of linguistic and rhetorical practices that relate to political authority and power in China. I would hope that specialists in the history of Chinese, rhetoric, syntax, and linguistic change will shed more expert light on some of the issues raised herein. A future entry in the Lexicon will offer examples of some of the peculiarities of New China Newspeak, including KMT-era ‘open skylights’ 开天窗, the practices of bowdlerisation 篡改 and censorship 删改 during and after China’s socialist phase, as well as the Hu-Wen era favourite: ‘to harmonise’ 和谐, that is to delete, elide, disappear or otherwise censor content on the Internet, disputes in reality and even people.

New China 新华

The expression ‘New China’ (Xinhua 新华), although most readily associated with the Communists since the 1940s, in fact has its origins in the early twentieth century. What is now the Sea Palaces (Zhongnan Hai 中南海) party-state leadership compound in central Beijing, for example, was renamed New China Palace 新华宫 in the early 1910s by the Republican President and would-be emperor Yuan Shikai 袁世凯. As the self-styled Hongxian 洪宪 Emperor (‘vast mandate’), Yuan prepared to ascend the dragon throne formally at the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the former imperial palace in 1916, two years after having been inaugurated there as the first president of the Republic of China. The former Qing capital of Beijing would now become the capital of the Great Chinese Empire 大中华帝国. Local opposition and rebellion in the provinces, however, cut short Yuan’s reign; the new empire lasted a mere eighty-three days. All that remains of that imperial venture is the formal entryway constructed for the new palace: New China Gate or Xinhua Men 新华门, the main entrance to the Sea Palaces on Chang’an Avenue. New China Gate is flanked by two slogans (‘Long Live Ever-Victorious Mao Zedong Thought!’ 战无不胜的毛泽东思想万岁！ and ‘Long Live the Communist Party of China!’ 中国共产党万岁！), as well as the words ‘Serve the People’ 为人民服务 in the hand of Mao Zedong on the spirit wall that blocks a view of the compound from the street. The words ‘Serve the People’ are similarly festooned on signboards and entrances to government and Party offices throughout China. Most people know all too well that, for all intents and purposes, the slogan actually means ‘Keep Out!’

Prior to the series of events surrounding Yuan Shikai’s failed attempt to restore the monarchy, from the late-Qing period the word hua 华／華 had gained renewed currency in the compound expression Zhonghua 中华. It was popularized in particular by the noted thinker Liang Qichao 梁启超 who promoted the concept of the ‘Chinese race’ or Zhonghua minzu 中华民族.[4] Thereafter, hua would frequently be used to represent ‘Chineseness’ in various modern formulations; while today Zhonghuaxing 中华性, ‘the ineffable nature of that which is Sinitic’ has been used to denote a kind of Chinese cultural essentialism, with overtones of ‘racial’ uniqueness. In the name of the new state itself ‘China’ was represented as ‘Zhonghua minguo‘ 中华民国, just as Yuan Shikai’s abortive Great Chinese Empire was the ‘Great Zhonghua Empire’ 大中华帝国. From the Republican era onwards, various products have been sold under the Chung Hwa brand name, most notably books, pencils and cigarettes.

The concept of the ‘new’ 新 as opposed to the ‘old’ 旧 was central to cultural and political discussions and debates in the Republican era. Xinhua or New China Newsagency 新华社 was so named at the Communist base at Yan’an in April 1937, having previously been known as the Red China Newsagency 红色中华通讯社 (红中社 for short), the Party’s propaganda arm founded along with the Chinese Soviet Republic in Ruijin, Jiangxi 江西瑞金 in November 1931. A related propaganda organisation, New China Books 新华书店, was also established at Yan’an, in September 1939. Xinhua now enjoys a global reach, and its Internet presence is dubbed Xinhuanet.

The authoritative dictionary of People’s Republic-style Chinese is the Xinhua Dictionary 新华字典 (an online version is available here). That dictionary was produced as part of the general linguistic reform program launched by the government of New China in the 1950s. It built on Republican-era attempts to standardize written and spoken Chinese (in particular by reducing orthographic and pronunciation variations in subsequent editions). Such efforts were also influenced by 1920s-30s’ debates on language in the Soviet Union.[5] First produced by the Beijing Commercial Press in 1957, the Xinhua Dictionary not only provided guidance on matters of mainland Chinese definitions and usage, but is also the main vehicle for the promotion of the officially approved (and evolving) orthography of the Chinese language. In recent years it has been a tool in Ministry of Education policy to reduce further the variety and complexity of Chinese pronunciation and writing, this includes a long-term policy of simplification and standardization derided by some for amounting to performing ‘cosmetic surgery on Chinese characters’ 汉字整容.[6] It is claimed that the Xinhua Dictionary, which has gone through some ten editions and over two hundred reprints, is the most widely reproduced lexicon in the world.

New Writing 新文体 and Popular Language 大众语

‘New China Newspeak’, Xinhua Wenti 新华文体, is an expression that gained currency in the 1980s among a small group of writers who used it to describe the Communist-inflected Chinese that had evolved from the 1920s, and especially during the ideological struggles of the 1930s and thereafter. It was a form of mainstream media Chinese against which these writers—journalists and fiction writers—constantly struggled in their attempts to find an individual voice after decades of living under the influence of Party discourse. It is a term that recalls the creation in the last decade of the nineteenth century of a form of Chinese prose that straddled the divide between the literary 文言文 and vernacular 白话文, itself a version of what was previously known as kuanhua 官话.[7] The style of exposition that featured in the press from the late-nineteenth century was popularized, in particular, by Liang Qichao. It was known as ‘new writing’ 新文体. Because it most frequently appeared in the pages of new periodicals that introduced concepts and ideas that challenged the status quo it was also variously known as 报章体 、时务体 or 新民体.[8]

The new style of writing was liberating for writers in the late-Qing and it laid the foundation for what would become the May Fourth-period cultural movement (c.1915-1927). Central to that movement was the push for clarity of expression and the modern vernacular championed, among others, by Hu Shi 胡适. Hu was famous for his interdictions against clichéd, tired and obfuscating prose (summarized in his famous list of ‘Eight Nots’ 八不主义). Hu Shi’s ‘Eight Don’ts’ or guidelines for modern Chinese were: 1. Don’t write unless you have something to say; 2. Don’t imitate the ancients; 3. Don’t ignore syntax; 4. Don’t moan and groan without reason; 5. Don’t use old clichés or set expressions; 6. Don’t resort to classical allusions; 7. Don’t use couplets or parallelism; and, 8. Don’t avoid popular expressions or popular forms of characters. In 1918, he simplified these principles in the following way: 1. Speak [that is, speak or write] only when you have something to say; 2. Speak what you want to say and say it in the way you want to say it; 3. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else; and 4. Speak in the language of the time in which you live.[9] Despite these cautions the May Fourth era was a transitional stage in the development of various modern styles of Chinese prose. While this more demotic form of Chinese featured a new diction and imported vocabulary, over time it was most frequently used to preach new ideologies. The formulations of these were often stark and uncompromising, something that reflected an unexamined preference for old-style quasi-axiomatic expressions and linguistic habits against which Hu Shi had spoken. Similarly, the highly judgmental language of vituperation displayed during the Taiping Rebellion attacks on the Qing court in the mid nineteenth century (which in particular featured racist taunts and highly inflammatory expressions), found a new lease of life, as well a new political new causes. Just as the literary language had accumulated various registers and styles, so the evolving ‘new writing’ would be complex, nuanced and layered.

When post-Cultural Revolution writers spoke of New China Newspeak, they identified it as being invidious to clear and honest expression. In some ways, their resistance mirrors somewhat the critiques of the old literary language of the previous century: that it was dated, obfuscating and a kind of dead-letter language. I think, in particular, of the investigative journalist Dai Qing 戴晴, who paid special attention in her own writing to challenging the norms of expression that constitute Party prose.[10] To writers like Dai, New China Newspeak is a kind of writing that remains heavily influenced by May Fourth-era translationese, a style that melded European-style diction 欧化文体 with an evolving modern Chinese written language. Language reform – whether the reform or abolition of the Chinese character in favour of romanisation, or grammatical style and syntax – was a topic debated over many years. It became a focus of contention when in the 1930s, conservatives in the then Nationalist government proposed reintroducing literary Chinese as the main vehicle for written expression in schools. In 1934, the study of Confucian texts was also promoted as part of this return to ‘tradition’. The opposition to these moves, led by linguists and writers such as Chen Wangdao 陈望道 countered with a ‘popular language movement’ 大众语运动. The ensuing debate between the two rival camps was featured in the pages of the Shanghai publication Free Speech 自由谈. The proponents noted that all too often the written language remained an admix of the literary and the vernacular 半文半白. In the realm of public usage the vernacular was favoured in literary and popular works that had evolved during the New Culture Movement. Meanwhile, in the legal, political and social realms, literary Chinese continued to be favoured. The ‘popular language’ advocates triumphed in the debate, facilitating the growing authority and prevalence of the vernacular baihua wen over literary Chinese. These developments also critically informed the subsequent language reforms of the Chinese Communist government in the 1950s.

Well may have Chen Wangdao favoured a language that, in his words ‘can be spoken, understood when heard, written down and understood when read’ 说得出，听得懂，写得来，看得下. Despite the debate, the various styles of vernacular Chinese that were being hailed as ‘popular language’ were largely inaccessible to the masses. This was, in essence, a written language burdened with complex syntax and a plethora of political slogans, to which Soviet-style propaganda, including translations of Marxist as well as Leninist and Stalinist prose (infamously known as ‘la langue de bois‘, or wooden parole [11]), were further added. The prominence of this ‘party-fied Chinese’ grew in tandem with the political rise and growing reach of the Communist Party (although in its use of language it was mirrored by its ideological competitor, the Nationalist Party). The New China Newspeak that gradually developed also continued to draw heavily on the bureaucratese and imagery of literary Chinese. The result was a linguistic concoction that was by turns dry and dull, lively and vociferous. It became the official language of post-1949 China.

Mao Zedong was the master of this kind of flexible (and pedantic) prose (the 1960s selection of Mao quotes was a decoction of his uses of Chinese and see also his barbed essay ‘Farewell, Leighton Stuart’ 别了，司徒雷登, dated 8 August 1948.[12]). Some have called New China Newspeak simply Maospeak 毛语,[13] although I would argue here that such a simplification quite wrongly limits our understanding of this kind of writing to a specific era, and to a specific author. From the 1940s, Mao’s secretaries and ghost-writers also contributed significantly to the evolution of New China Newspeak. Notable among these were Zhou Yang (周扬, 1908-1989), Chen Boda (陈伯达, 1904-1989) and Hu Qiaomu (胡乔木,1912-1992), the latter two were political secretaries for Mao after 1949, while because of his persuasive (and autocratic) influence Zhou Yang would be known as New China’s ‘Cultural Tsar’ 文化沙皇. Chen was famous for the carefully honed vitriol of his 1940s writings (his ‘Enemy of the People: Chiang Kai-shek’ 人民公敌蒋介石 is an anti-KMT Party classic, while his work excoriating the nepotism and corruption of the KMT was often recalled as the Communist Party’s own red nobility emerged in recent decades) and, during the High-Maoist years, he was notorious for the rhetorical violence that characterized his writing, something that was particularly evident in the essays and editorials that he wrote in the early months of the Cultural Revolution. For his part, Hu Qiaomu was a master of carefully honed Party discourse. As propaganda chief, head of People’s Daily and as the ‘Party’s leading wordsmith’, as Deng Xiaoping called him, Hu played a foundational role in the creation of the New China Newsagency style, one that remains the dominant discursive style of China’s party-state today.[14]

It is noteworthy that versions of New China Newspeak/Xinhua Wenti, a language that can mix bureaucratese with the literary and the vernacular, are still frequently employed by political hacks, petitioners and others when making submissions to the authorities, be it the Party or the government. There is a feeling among those who favour this style that such prose ‘avoirdupois‘, that it resonates with readers of all backgrounds as it is freighted with literary effects, orotund terms and poetic flourishes. As they vie to articulate snappy Party slogans and formulations or tifa 提法[15] think tanks and advisers 纵横家 of various shades often favour this expository style. When reading such prose, we are reminded of Zhang Taiyan’s 章太炎 remark that: ‘the vernacular lacks a sufficiency of significance, so at times it is necessary to use the classical’ 白话意义不全, 有时仍不得不用文言文也.[16]

Party & Other Eight-legged Essays 党八股

As we have argued, New China Newspeak evolved long before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. It developed both in China proper and ‘outside the pass’ 关外, in the realm of Manchukuo militarized Chinese (itself much influenced by imperial militant Japanese). That particular form of Chinese is known as ‘Concordia Chinese’ (xiehe yu 协和语, or きょうわご in Japanese), and elements of its syntax and usage, not to mention vocabulary (for instance, the word for the staple grain eaten at a meal, zhushi 主食, is a Concordia Chinese term), penetrated mainstream Chinese during the 1930s and 40s.[17]

As early as 1942, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong would famously deride what he called ‘stereotyped Party writing’ (or ‘Party Eight-legged Essays’ 党八股). Using the very kind of numeration that is a favoured device of such prose, he listed eight indictments against it:

The first indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it fills endless pages with empty verbiage. Some of our comrades love to write long articles with no substance, very much like the ‘foot-bindings of a slattern, long as well as smelly’. Why must they write such long and empty articles? There can be only one explanation; they are determined the masses shall not read them. Because the articles are long and empty, the masses shake their heads at the very sight of them. How can they be expected to read them? Such writings are good for nothing except to bluff the naive, among whom they spread bad influences and foster bad habits. …The same applies to speechmaking; we must put an end to all empty, long-winded speeches.

The second indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it strikes a pose in order to intimidate people. Some stereotyped Party writing is not only long and empty, but also pretentious with the deliberate intention of intimidating people; it carries the worst kind of poison. Writing long-winded and empty articles may be set down to immaturity, but striking a pose to overawe people is not merely immature but downright knavish….

The third indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it shoots at random, without considering the audience….

The fourth indictment against stereotyped Party writing is its drab language that reminds one of a biesan 瘪三. Like our stereotyped Party writing, the creatures known in Shanghai as ‘little biesan’ are wizened and ugly. If an article or a speech merely rings the changes on a few terms in a classroom tone without a shred of vigour or spirit, is it not rather like a biesan, drab of speech and repulsive in appearance? If someone enters primary school at seven, goes to middle school in his teens, graduates from college in his twenties and never has contact with the masses of the people, he is not to blame if his language is poor and monotonous. But we are revolutionaries working for the masses, and if we do not learn the language of the masses, we cannot work well. At present many of our comrades doing propaganda work make no study of language. Their propaganda is very dull, and few people care to read their articles or listen to their talk.

The fifth indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it arranges items under a complicated set of headings, as if starting a Chinese pharmacy. Go and take a look at any Chinese pharmacy, and you will see cabinets with numerous drawers, each bearing the name of a drug—toncal, foxglove, rhubarb, saltpetre…indeed, everything that should be there. This method has been picked up by our comrades. In their articles and speeches, their books and reports, they use first the big Chinese numerals, second the small Chinese numerals, third the characters for the ten celestial stems, fourth the characters for the twelve earthly branches, and then capital A, B, C, D, then small a, b, c, d, followed by the Arabic numerals, and what not! How fortunate that the ancients and the foreigners created all these symbols for us so that we can start a Chinese pharmacy without the slightest effort. For all its verbiage, an article that bristles with such symbols, that does not pose, analyse or solve problems and that does not take a stand for or against anything is devoid of real content and nothing but a Chinese pharmacy. …

The sixth indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it is irresponsible and harms people wherever it appears. …Many people write articles and make speeches without prior study or preparation, and after writing an article, they do not bother to go over it several times in the same way as they would examine their faces in the mirror after washing, but instead offhandedly send it to be published. Often the result is ‘A thousand words from the pen in a stream, but ten thousand li away from the theme’ 下笔千言，离题万里. Talented though these writers may appear, they actually harm people. This bad habit, this weak sense of responsibility, must be corrected.

The seventh indictment against stereotyped Party writing is that it poisons the whole Party and jeopardizes the revolution.

The eighth indictment is that its spread would wreck the country and ruin the people.

These two indictments are self-evident and require no elaboration. In other words, if stereotyped Party writing is not transformed but is allowed to develop unchecked, the consequences will be very serious indeed. The poison of subjectivism and sectarianism is hidden in stereotyped Party writing, and if this poison spreads it will endanger both the Party and the country.

The aforesaid eight counts are our call to arms against stereotyped Party writing.[18]

Mao certainly ‘talked the talk’, but when it came to defeating a strain of odious, long-winded and obscurantist prose that he among others (including Lu Xun 鲁迅) identified as having evolved during the May Fourth movement, Mao proved ineffectual. Indeed, in the Sinofied Soviet system that he and his colleagues championed from the 1950s the blight of ‘Party eight-legged essays’ became the norm. Despite this, Mao himself was adept at combining Party palaver with scientific socialist jargon, demotic vulgarisms and classical allusions. The early Red Guards imitated and built on his complex linguistic style,[19] but generally speaking all that remains of la langue de Mao today is the hyperventilated bombast of post-Maoists and online ‘patriotic thugs’ 爱国贼, although fans of The Global Times’ line in mock outrage can also detect shades of Mao therein. Of course, that is not to say that parodies of Party language and demeanour are uncommon.

Parody & its Enemies 反讽，恶搞，原味

The Taiwan-born writer Chen Jo-hsi 陈若曦 was the first notable novelist to depict Cultural Revolution-era China and its language (Chen had moved to Nanjing from the US with her husband in 1966 following an acclaimed literary debut in Taiwan; she relocated to Hong Kong in 1973). Her stories, the most famous of which is ‘The Execution of Mayor Yin’ 尹县长, were published in Taiwan in 1976, and in English in 1978. In 1980, Li Jian’s 李剑 story ‘Drunk in the Rapeseed Patch’ 醉入花丛 was one of the first mainland-published works of fiction to deride Mao-era slogans via a comic description of Red Guard sex. Later in the decade the Beijing novelist Wang Shuo 王朔 proved himself to be the master of droll spoofs of Party language and behaviour, a style popularised in the mass media by the 1992 TV series The Editors 编辑部的故事. Han Shaogong’s 韩少功 1996 comic novel A Dictionary of Maqiao 马桥词典 concentrates on the Cultural Revolution era, and Yan Lianke’s 阎连科 2005 psycho-sexual political comedy Serve the People 为人民服务 continues in a vein first mined by Li Jian. Of course, Chinese art (and in particular the 1991 ‘cultural T-shirts’ of Kong Yongqian 孔永谦) has long been voicelessly riffing on Party speak, but in recent years it has been Internet spoofers, novelists and essayists who have pursued New China Newspeak with celebrated energy. There was Hu Ge’s 胡戈 online parody ‘Murder by Mantou‘ 一个馒头引发的血案 in 2006 and the 2008 novel by the Beijing-based Hong Kong writer Chan Koon-chung 陳冠中 In an Age of Prosperity: China 2013 盛世：中國、2013年 (published in English as The Fat Years). Perhaps the best-known writers who take Party language to task are the Shanghai essayist Han Han 韩寒 and the Beijing art-dissenter Ai Weiwei 艾未未; both are masters at producing parodies of the Party. Yu Hua’s 余华 2010 series of essays, China in Ten Words 十个词汇里的中国 offers another approach to how writers reflect on and tussle with New China Newspeak. The US-based Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon launched in December 2010 by China Digital Times meanwhile provides a ledger of the ongoing uses and abuses of Chinese on the Internet.[20]

Well may Mao have claimed: ‘Those who are badly infected by stereotyped Party writing do not take pains to study what is useful in the language of the people, in foreign languages, or in classical Chinese, so the masses do not welcome their dry and dull propaganda, and we too have no need for such poor and incompetent propagandists.’ Such poor and incompetent propagandists now reign in the cyber-realm as well. Paradoxically, despite its often mind-numbing effect, the logorrhoea of Chinese Party language enjoys a longevity that feeds off the very neo-liberalised economic successes of the Reform era. Indeed, as Victor Klemperer noted in his study of the evolution of the language of the Third Reich, the hyperbole of American advertising culture proved linguistically very attractive; and the euphemisms and technical jargon beloved of global managerial culture have given practitioners of New China Newspeak a rich new vocabulary. (In Australia, the local version of neoliberal balderdash is called the language of ‘weasel words’. This verbal thicket chokes all aspects of public discourse. Universities, for instance, celebrate ‘research excellence’ while evacuating it both of substance and of meaning; and risible euphemisms such as ‘fiscal realignment’ are employed to signal the shutting down of non-income generating teaching programs and purges of staff. For more on weasel words, see the work of Don Watson and the related site.)

Today, New China Newspeak remains not only a powerful rhetorical weapon in the linguistic arsenal of China’s party-state. It is also employed by writers and self-promoters located at various points along the Chinese political spectrum. Neo-Maoists, including individuals and groups dubbed from the early 1990s ‘red fundamentalists’ (原红旨主义者 or 原红教旨主义者) – the latest being the writers posting on such sites as Utopia 乌有之乡 who were particularly outspoken from 2003-2012 – preferred as their default version of New China Newspeak the ‘big-character-poster’ 大字报 style of radical vituperation and denunciation of the High-Maoist era. Even right-leaning anti-Party activists, be they adherents of Falun Gong or post-1989 ‘democrats’ often consciously or unconsciously employ New China Newspeak. A personal favourite dates from the mid 1990s.

The US-exiled democracy activist Chai Ling gave voice to her outrage over the film ‘The Gate of Heavenly Peace’ (for which I was the principal writer) and denounced its makers at length (and later, unsuccessfully, through US courts). Party-style language came easily to the Harvard Business School graduate when she attacked the film in Chinese:

…certain individuals have for the sake of the gaining approval of the authorities racked their brains for ways and means to come up with policies for them. And there is another person with a pro-Communist history who has been hawking [her] documentary film for crude commercial gain by taking things out of context and trying to reveal something new, unreasonably turning history on its head and calling black white…
个别的人为了利欲讨好当政者，挖空心思地为当政者出谋划策；另一个有亲共历史的人为了谋取商业暴利推销自己的纪录片，断章取义企图要标新立异，硬要把历史的黑白颠倒过来… [21]

Equally, if not more noteworthy, was the fact that the left-leaning thinker Wang Hui 汪晖 would also resort to a certain Maoist diction when defending himself against accusations of a conflict of interest in 2000:

Some individuals [有些人] have [deliberately] distorted the facts [歪曲事实], and have concocted things out of thin air [无中生有]; furthermore, not only have they attacked and libeled without due cause [无端的], they have directed their attacks [矛头指向] at Tsinghua University and the other recipients of awards. [We are] startled [让人震撼] at the extremely calculating fashion [用心之深] in which certain individuals [有些人] have exploited [利用] divisions in the intellectual sphere to confound the issues [混淆视听]… Some websites and particular [个别] newspapers have acted as the source for such rumour-mongering [… ].
有些人歪曲事实，无中生有，不仅对我本人无端地进行攻击和诽谤，而且也将矛头指向清华大学和其他知识界人士。在这次的议论中，有些人利用知识界的思想分歧，混淆视听，攻击异己，用心之深，让人震撼。有些网站和个别报纸成为谣言的渊薮…[22]

However, among the oppositionist individuals and groups who employ New China Newspeak with some of its original panache, those featured on the Utopia site remained the most colourful. Their retro-version of Maospeak reached something of a contemporary apogee around the time of the crash-and-burn fall of Bo Xilai in March-April 2012.[23]

Although it can often generate risible formulations, when in full flight and soaring on the wings of high dudgeon, even official New China Newspeak remains an unparalleled form of global statist Chinese. Its power derives partly from its evolution over nearly a century and the fact that its authors can draw on a vast legacy of written Chinese and a formidable repertory of memorable, and memorized, formulations that allows users to cut and paste as readily from pre-Qin philosophy and ancient historical texts as well as from poetry and prose from any point in the country’s long recorded history. To this is added a corpus formed from the Maoist canon, Deng-era gray bureaucratese, Jiang Zemin-Hu Jintao engineer-inspired pseudo-science discourse and, since the 1990s, statements bearing a neoliberal diction. In the Internet era, New China Newspeak also features the hyperbole of modern advertising copy and the glib shorthand of text messaging.

The Spring & Autumn Style 春秋笔法

One of the main features of New China Newspeak is its ‘moral-evaluative’ dimension. In this it builds on patters of moral judgment used by writers in pre-modern times, be they historical, cultural or artistic judgments. For those who would use the past as a mirror to guide present actions, evaluations and moral judgments were crucial.

It is the concern of many students of things Chinese (be they in or outside China) that the yawning gap between reality and rhetoric should, in the long run, make things untenable, or lead to some massive revision or collapse of the vestigial ideological power of the party-state. Taking a sideways glance at the parallels between Soviet and Chinese socialism, however, and if we remain mindful of the lessons that have been learnt from the Soviet collapse, one could say that party-state rule in China has created a range of appealing and abiding ideological simulacra. To date these have incorporated cultural alternatives and opponents in a ‘postmodern pastiche’ of the kind originally described in the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein’s work on the former Soviet ideological landscape.[24] This kind of pastiche has also been commented on (and denounced) by China’s own New Left and retro-Maoists.

In his work on relativistic patterns in totalitarian thinking, Epstein analysed totalitarianism as ‘a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism.’ He argued that the use of what he called ‘descriptive-evaluative’ words, that is terms that combine both descriptive and evaluative meanings or connotations – ‘ideologemes’ employed universally in Soviet speech – communicate not only information but also a specific ideological message, or concealed judgments that take the form of words. Epstein’s view of how ideologemes functioned in Soviet public discourse finds striking parallels in reformist-era China (1978-). In short, Epstein noted that a key to the function of ideologemes is that they can encompass both leftist and rightist concepts, embracing the spectrum of utilitarian shifts made within a totalitarian or rather a totalising system, that is a system that can incorporate and reconcile logical inconsistencies and opposing ideas.

A simple example of this can be found in the expression ‘socialist market economy’. It is a term created to convey the extreme contradictions within contemporary economic realities; it is an expression that allows for an ideological underpinning to what, superficially at least, appears to have been an example of the party’s retreat from its avowed state-centred Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary ideals. According to Epstein, this kind of linguistic formulation is not the result of a desperate pragmatism; rather it is the reflection of the core philosophy of a politics which ‘uses leftist slogans to defeat the right, rightist slogans to defeat the left’, a politics that strives throughout to maintain its own primacy. This is a primacy that is not merely about temporal power, but one that is also about dominion in the realms of ideas and emotions.

Totalitarian speech is marked by its ability to employ ideologically laden words to weaken opposing sides while taking advantage of the resulting confusion. I would note that the Chinese language – and what is under discussion here, New China Newspeak – has a rich and venerable lexicon of words that have been converted under party-state rule to act as ‘ideologemes’. It is a lexicon that, according to tradition, was first formulated by Confucius when he purportedly edited the history of the State of Lu 鲁国, the Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋, judiciously selecting expressions to depict political actions in moral terms. Classical scholars claimed that the Sage thereby created a ‘Spring-and-Autumn writing style’ 春秋笔法 which relied on a vocabulary of baobian ci 褒贬词, or judgmental words, to praise bao 褒 or censure bian 贬 every political act and event recorded in the annals of Lu.

In modern usage, all activities beneficial to the party-state are represented by words with positive connotations 褒义词, while those that are deleterious in nature are condemned with negative verbs, nouns and adjectives 贬义词. The growth or maturation of socialist society has led to a linguistic accretion, one that incorporates Maoist doublethink of the first three decades of the People’s Republic with the patriotic parole of Reform. The general party line exists in a state of constant tension with both right and left deviations, maintaining a rhetorical and practical balance between the two. This was notably evident in the populist, and popular, ‘Sing Red Crush Black’ 唱红打黑 campaign launched in Chongqing as part of an effort to clamp down on local mafias (as well as business and bureaucratic enemies) while extolling a nationalistic-Maoism through mass choral performances. One could postulate, as Epstein does for Soviet Marxism, that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ – the theoretical formula that underwrites contemporary China – is an enigmatic and hybrid phenomenon that, ‘like postmodern pastiche… combines within itself very different ideological doctrines’.[25]

New China Newspeak 一言以兴邦，一言以丧邦

My argument then is that in China the ruling ideology has gone through a transmogrification rather than a collapse, absorbing both leftist and neo-liberal ideas. In this context ‘ideology’, as Epstein puts it, ‘becomes simply a habit of thinking, a manner of expression, the prism through which all views and expressions are refracted without depending on specific views and ideas – a sort of universal network that may be compared to the advertising networks of Western nations.’ As goods are exchanged for money in a capitalist environment, so facts can be exchanged for ideas in the totalising realm. As a form of currency, ideas accrue their own ‘ideological capital’. Their value lies in their ability to shore up the ‘correctness’ of the ideology of their proponents, and it is this correctness that compensates people for their sacrifices to the cause, and recoups the cost of policy errors.

Such ideological capital has outgrown the limitations of individual personalities and systems of ideas to ‘become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea’. In China this linguistic practice is New China Newspeak. It produces a skein of idea-laden language that is underpinned by a kind of doublethink that George Orwell described well in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.[26]

Some may object to the use of Orwellian when describing either the reality or the linguistic world of China today. Writers like Ai Weiwei would probably disagree. Linguistic convolutions offer insights into real-time power play, and they have been fodder for creative writers and artists since the early post-Cultural Revolution days. The ideological dialect behind the logorrhea of the party-state – a barrage of verbiage that is easily derided and often overlooked – is not coincidental to a system that articulates itself on the basis of a complex marriage between the territory of dynastic habit, authoritarian politics (related to the Republican period) and high-socialist doublethink.

One example must suffice here as an illustration. On 11 February 2010, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu 马朝旭 declared that: ‘There are no dissidents in China.’ This was, as Agence France-Presse reported it, ‘just hours after a Beijing court upheld an 11-year jail term for one of the country’s top pro-democracy voices.’ The report went on to say that: ‘Ma made the comment in answer to a question about leading mainland dissident Liu Xiaobo, whose appeal of his conviction on subversion charges was denied early on Thursday. When asked to elaborate, Ma said: “In China, you can judge yourself whether such a group exists. But I believe this term is questionable in China.”‘[27]

Shortly thereafter, the artist and cultural blogger Ai Weiwei observed of this risible statement via his Twitter feed that:

Foreign Affairs Ma’s statement contains a number of layers of meaning:
1. Dissidents are criminals
2. Only criminals have dissenting views
3. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether they have dissenting views
4. If you think China has dissidents, you are a criminal
5. The reason [China] has no dissidents is because they are [in fact already] criminals
6. Does anyone have a dissenting view regarding my statement?

外交马说的几层意思.
1、异见者就是罪犯
2、只有罪犯才有异见
3、罪犯与非罪犯之区别在于有无异见
4、如果认为中国有异见分子，你就是罪犯
5、没有异见分子是因为所有异见者都已成为罪犯
6、对我这句话有谁还有异见吗。[28]

Faithfulness, Expressiveness & Elegance 信达雅

Since 1976 there has been a relative demilitarization (or ‘de-Maoification’) of language in China, but there has been only every been limited disarmament, and nonproliferation is still not on the books. Overall, Chinese rhetoric has maintained a war footing, and the ‘military-poetic complex’ which binds revolutionary firepower to poetic fancy is well-funded and widely supported in China today. While international incidents leading to Chinese ‘hurt feelings’, grievance or outrage, generally result in a colourful display of this style of rhetoric, the militarized version of New China Newspeak is most often evident following domestic natural disasters or when the party-state deals with homegrown social or political issues. Modes of criticism, debate and public declamation, as well as Internet-based contention, still reflect to a large extent the habits of mind and language inculcated by decades of one-party rule, education and mass media propaganda. The Party structure also makes it possible, indeed necessary, to enforce ‘unified thinking’ 统一思想 regarding key ideas and current affairs issues. The structure, power and punitive nature of this system, as described by Anne-Marie Brady, allows for a form of verbal ‘unified calibre’ 统一口径 and the wherewithal for the party-state to require appartchiks to stay ‘on message’ regardless of what they might think, or say in private.

One of the more recent examples of New China Newspeak doublethink (some might simply call it sophistry by another name) can be found in the verbal contortions of the official spokesman Zhao Qizheng 赵启正 during the media conference held at the opening of the 2012 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress in Beijing on 2 March 2012.[29] One could argue that with the economic boom since the 1990s and the swagger of the party-state on the global stage in the second decade of the new millennium, the totalizing habits of language and thought in China have enjoyed a new lease on life. Even in an environment of guided media openness that is tolerant of certain forms of public contention, morally laden and totalizing rhetoric, along with its internally structured resistance to critical self-reflection, remains dominant. Of course, legitimating what can be said, or allowed to be said (if not being able to control or guide what can be thought) is part of a process that delegitimizes unacceptable formulations, words and expressions. As Mao Zedong himself remarked ‘one single [correct] formulation, and the whole nation will flourish; one single [incorrect] formulation, and the whole nation will decline’.[30] Over half a century earlier, the translator Yan Fu 严复 had observed that ‘there are three difficulties in translation: faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance’ 译事三难：信达雅; none of these challenges are merely limited to translation.

It is perhaps ironic that the complex body of linguistic and rhetorical practices that continue to enliven and obfuscate in turns both written and spoken Chinese have allowed that language to maintain a stylistic and expressive richness that would have been impossible if the zealous advocates of romanisation and radical vernacular usage had held sway during the Maoist heyday.[31] It is also vitally important to appreciate that the registers of New China Newspeak also provide languages of resistance and opposition to those who consciously oppose the Party’s sway over the mind.

Today, to ignore or make no attempt to understand the underpinnings and contours of New China Newspeak is, I believe, to misconstrue The China Story.[32] To do so limits our ability to take seriously a linguistic realm that generates its own empire of signs.

Notes:

* My thanks to Gloria Davies for her comments on the first draft of this essay, and to Linda Jaivin, Richard Rigby and Sang Ye for their suggestions, as well as to Jeremy Goldkorn and Joel Martinsen for further examples of New China Newspeak. An earlier version of the lexicon entry was published as a China Heritage Glossary entry in the March 2012 issue of China Heritage Quarterly. My own initial encounter with the English-language version of New China Newspeak came as a high-school student, when I was introduced to the stentorian prose of Peking Review in 1967. It was not until early 1974 that my teachers at ANU introduced me to the full-blown version, in the form of the People’s Daily attack on Michelangelo Antonioni’s documentary film ‘Chung Kuo, Cina’. See People’s Daily Commentator, ‘A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks—A Criticism of M. Antonioni’s Anti-China Film China, 恶毒的用心,卑劣的手法——批判安东尼奥尼拍摄的题为《中国》的反华影片, Renmin Ribao 30 January 1974, online at: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1506408.html.

[1] See Michael Schoenhals’ 1992 series of essays published as Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies, China Research Monograph, Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992.

[2] See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady, London: Continuum, 2002. In his meticulous (and extraordinary) diaries of Germany’s Nazi era, Klemperer kept a running account of features of what he called LTI. The notes in these diaries (published in English translation in three volumes) which were marked simply LTI are scattered throughout the pages of the diaries. See, for example, Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, trans. Martin Chalmers, New York: Random House, 1999, pp.33, 35, 45, etc.

[3] See Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China, Boulder, Co.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

[4] In this context, see James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; and, Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds, Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. In his chapter in Critical Han Studies, Leibold notes Liang’s coining of the term Zhonghua minzu in 1902. Leibold also refers to Liang Qichao’s ‘An Introductory Essay on Chinese History’ 中国史绪论, collected in Liang’s Yinbingshi wenji 饮冰室文集, Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua Shuju, vol.6, p.3.

[5] See the chapter ‘Promethean Linguistics’ in Katerina Clark’s Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp.201-23.

[6] See ‘国家语委官员称44汉字微调不会影响生活’ online at: http://news.cctv.com/china/20090820/100544.shtml. For the official account, see ‘2009年中国语言生活状况报告’, online at: http://www.china-language.gov.cn/33/2010_11_25/1_33_4750_0_1290675551886.html. For a list of spoof terms and expressions inspired by the reform, see ‘为四十四个中文词汇整容’, 22 August 2009, at: http://bbs1.people.com.cn/postDetail.do?boardId=2&treeView=1&view=2&id=93887377. An example of the simplification of the pronunciation of words as given in the Xinhua Dictionary is that the 禧 in the Empress Dowager’s honorific title Cixi 慈禧, formerly pronounced as xi1 is now only allowed as xi3; thus, Ci2xi1 has become Ci2xi3. My thanks to Richard Rigby for reminding me of this Communist act of lèse majesté. For an essay on the fate of the dictionary during the early 1970s at the time of the Maoist ‘literary inquisition’ 文字狱, see Fan Chenggang, 范承剛, ‘The Xinhua Dictionary Tamed’ 被馴化的 《新華字典》, in iSunAffairs 陽光時務, 6 December 2011, online at: http://www.isunaffairs.com/?p=1952. . See also Michael Churchman, ‘Confucius Institutes and Controlling Chinese Languages‘.

[7] For an important study of this, see Theodore Huters in his ‘Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression: Rethinking the Transformation of Modern Chinese Prose’, Modern Chinese Literature in Chinese, 10.2 (December 2011): 80-104.

[8] Liang said of this new style of writing that when he wrote for the new press he felt freed of the constraints of the old-style (which he called 古文):

自解放，务为平易畅达，时杂以俚语、韵语及外国语法，纵笔所至不检束，学者竞效之，号’新文体’。老辈则痛恨，诋为野狐。然其文条理明晰，笔锋常带情感，对于读者，别有一种魔力焉。（参见《清代学术概论》二十五）
For details and this quotation, see the section on Liang and Xin wenti in Yuan Xinpei 袁行霈, ed., A History of Chinese Literature 中国文学史, Beijing: Gaodeng Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1999, vol.4, pp.481-82.

[9] See Hu Shi, ‘Preliminary Suggestions for the Reform of Literature’ 文学改良刍议, La Jeunesse 新青年, no.5 vol.2 (1 January 1917), online at: http://baike.baidu.com/view/79542.htm. Writing nearly three decades later, George Orwell would suggest six rules for the writing of clear prose: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do; 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active; 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. From ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), online at: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit.

[10] Dai Qing says that her own prose style developed beyond the immediate thrall of New China Newspeak because as a child she had access to the party-army leader Ye Jianying’s 叶剑英 extensive private library. See my ‘Using the Past to save the Present: Dai Qing’s Historiographical Dissent’, East Asian History, no.1 (June 1991).

[11] See Françoise Thom, La Langue de bois, Paris, Julliard, 1987; and, Christian Delporte, Une histoire de la langue de bois: de Lénine à Sarkozy, Paris: Flammarion, 2009. See also Alain Besançon and George Urban, ‘Language and Power in Soviet Society (I)’, Encounter, May 1987: 3-13. For a late-1980s parody of Chinese Party language by the novelist Wang Shuo, see ‘Voices from the Bamboo Grove: The Humanity of Chinese Humour‘ in the China Heritage Quarterly.

[12] Online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_67.htm. When leaders suddenly depart from scripted wooden language and break into colloquial language to make a point, we witness not only the operation of the Chinese vernacular, but a certain aspect of New China Newspeak, one that enables the user to cut through the verbosity of Party parole by employing direct address. It is not accidental, but part of the very rhetorical style that has built up within the corpus of New China Newspeak over the years. Mao was expert at this. Deng Xiaoping had a few shining moments, such as the time in 1984 when there was media speculation about possible plans by Beijing to station PLA units in a post-handover Hong Kong. The senior leader Geng Biao, who had denied that the Chinese army would be stationed in the former British colony, was famously and publicly rebuked by Deng for ‘talking absolute rubbish’ 胡说八道. (For a recent recounting of this incident, see Li Yigen 李意根, ‘Deng Xiaoping Fury Over “PLA Stationing in Hong Kong”: a female reporter was so startled that she couldn’t lift her microphone’ 邓小平为”香港驻军事件”大发雷霆：女记者吓得举不起话筒, Jinwan Bao 今晚报, 14 April 2012, online at: http://history.people.com.cn/GB/205396/17664526.html). The emergent Party leader Xi Jinping himself demonstrated a mild talent for directness in February 2009 when, during an official visit to Mexico, he blurted out that: ‘There are some well fed foreigners who have nothing better to do than point fingers at our affairs.’ After all, he said: ‘China does not, first, export revolution; second, export poverty and hunger; third, cause troubles for you. What else can you say?’ 有些吃饱了没事干的外国人，对我们的事情指手划脚。中国一不输出革命，二不输出饥饿和贫困，三不去折腾你们，还有什么好说的. Party General Secretary Hu Jintao whose personality was as wooden as his language was less convincing when, in December 2008, he used the expression zheteng 折腾 as he called for his comrades to pursue the ‘Three Don’ts’ – ‘don’t waver, don’t slacken, don’t get sidetracked’ 不动摇, 不懈怠, 不折腾. See the entry on zheteng in the China Heritage Glossary.

[13] See the chapter MaoSpeak in my Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, pp.224-227, where I also use the expression New China Newspeak. See also pp.33 & 113. In a series of unpublished talks and interviews with Chinese intellectuals in 1985-86, undertaken with the film scholar Karima Fumitoshi 刈間文俊 in Beijing, I discussed what I carelessly dubbed ‘Maospeak’ 毛语 (it can also be called ‘Mao-style prose’ 毛文体) and the conundrums it presented to those engaged with China. At the time, we found little serious interest in the subject. Subsequently, writers like Li Jie commented eloquently on the abiding influence of what in 1989 he dubbed the ‘Mao phenomenon’. See my Shades of Mao, pp.140-46. More recently, Li Tuo 李陀 published a fascinating piece on the subject. See Li Tuo, ‘Wang Zengqi and Modern Chinese Writing – and a discussion of “Mao-style prose”‘ 汪曾祺与现代汉语写作 – 兼谈毛文体, 18 September 2009, online at: http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8051808/.

[14] See Hu’s collected writings, 《胡乔木文集》, Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1994, 3 vols. See also Michael Schoenhals, ‘Direction of the Press: Hu Qiaomu’s 1955 Breakfast Chats’, in his Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies 1992, pp.79-102. Anne-Marie Brady suggests that tifa is the Chinese equivalent of George Orwell’s Newspeak. See her Marketing Dictatorship, pp.100-101.

[15] On the significance of ‘formulations’ , see Schoenhals, pp.3, 6ff.

[16] Zhang Taiyan 章太炎, ‘The relationship between the Vernacular and the Classical’ 白话与文言之关系, in Ma Yong 马勇, ed., 《章太炎讲演集》, Shijiazhuang: Hebei Renmin Chubanshe, 2004, p.220. Translated by Theodore Huters in his ‘Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression: Rethinking the Transformation of Modern Chinese Prose’.

[17] My thanks to Sang Ye for pointing out the influence of Concordia Chinese on New China Newspeak. As Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman note in their Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History: 1920-Present, Boulder, Co.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, vol.2, p.164:

The Manchurian Youth League developed the idea of kyowa (xiehe in Chinese) or cooperation between races or nationalities and the rejection of colonialist attitudes. This idea was incarnated in a fascistic mass organization in Manchukuo known as Kyowakai or Xiehehui and translated into English as the Concordia Society. The association was built on a rhetoric or eternal peace embedded in East Asian ideas and a framework of mutual cooperation among different peoples. It advocated anti-imperialism and even conceived of a new type of anticolonial state that would replace all imperialist powers—including the Japanese. Increasingly after 1937, however, the Kyowakai became a propaganda machine for the Japanese army’s expansion into mainland China and Asia.
Although there has been some work on the influence of Japanese on Chinese in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the area of national language policy in Japan and how that influenced political Chinese is a topic worthy of further exploration.

[18] Mao Zedong, ‘Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing’, 8 February 1942, online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_07.htm. Although ‘eight-legged essays’ were much derided by careless critics of the literary tradition, more moderate opinion found in this exacting prose form both intellectual rigour and stylistic elegance. The former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd identified a familiar iteration of New China Newspeak – waijiao bagu 外交八股 – in his 2010 Morrison Lecture when he said:

In the past, the great Chinese writer Lu Xun satirised those writers who tried to sound elevated and self-important by using fashionable foreign expressions, which simply resulted in pretentious and tortured prose. He called it ‘foreign eight-legged essays’ (yang bagu) – referring to the formulaic essays demanded of the imperial examiners in the past, the bagu wen.

In 1942, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, warned his colleagues against creating a new dang bagu, or ‘Party eight-legged essay’ – a form of writing that struck a pose merely to intimidate and obfuscate. Perhaps we too often are caught up in what I would call ‘the eight-legged essays of international relations’, waijiao bagu: that is, stereotypical responses to complex realities, simplistic knee-jerk reactions to situations that require a more layered response. In the great Australian tradition, it’s time that we all got over it.

See ‘Australia and China in the World’, The Seventieth George E. Morrison Lecture on Ethnology, 23 April 2010, available at: http://chinainstitute.anu.edu.au/morrison/titles.php

[19] For a preliminary study of this style of rhetoric, see Lowell Dittmer and Chen Ruoxi (Chen Jo-hsi), Ethics and Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981.

[20] An English-language version of Chen Jo-hsi’s stories was published in 1978 under the title The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, translated by Nancy Ing and Howard Goldblatt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. See also her The Old Man and Other Stories, trans. Diane Cornell and others, Hong Kong: Research Center for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1986. For an excerpt from Li Jian’s ‘Drunk in the Rapeseed Patch’, see my Shades of Mao, pp.221-223. On Wang Shuo, see my In the Red, on contemporary Chinese culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp.71-79; on The Editors, see In the Red, pp.142-143; on Kong Yongqian’s T-shirts, see In the Red, pp.145ff; on post-1976 art and the Chinese language, see my ‘History Writ Large: The dazibao, The art of words, Red logorrhea’ (forthcoming); for Hu Ge’s ‘Murder by Mantou‘, see my ‘Eating Chinese – the History Banquet’, presented on 21 April 2007 at ‘The Future of U.S.-China Relations’ at the University of Southern California, available in downloadable PDF format at: http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=61); and, Chris G. Rea, ‘Spoofing (e’gao) Culture on the Chinese Internet’ (forthcoming Hong Kong University Press, 2012). For Chan Koon-chung’s 2008 novel, see Linda Jaivin, ‘Yawning Heights: Chan Koon-chung’s Harmonious China’, in China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 22 (June 2010), at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=022_golden.inc&issue=022. For Ai Weiwei, see Lee Ambrozy, ed., Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2011, and for a relevant essay by Han Han see ‘A Derailed Country’, translated by Matt Schrader and reprinted at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=027, and included in China Story Yearbook 2012: Red Rising, Red Eclipse, Chapter 9. For the ‘Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon’, see: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon.

[21] Quoted in ‘Totalitarian Nostalgia’, in In the Red, p.331, online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=018_1989nostalgia.inc&issue=018.

[22] Quoted in Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies, ‘Have We Been Noticed Yet? – Intellectual Contestation and the Chinese Web’, in Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds, Chinese Intellectuals Between State and Market, London/NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp.75-108.

[23] See, for example, Zhang Hongliang’s 张宏良 speech ‘Unite to Struggle for the Revival of Socialism – a speech at a meeting to commemorate the 118th anniversary of the birth of Chairman Mao’ 团结起来，为复兴社会主义而努力奋斗！ – 在纪念毛主席诞辰118周年大会上的讲话, 1 January 2012, online at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_9b12a6df01013isn.html. My thanks to Chris Buckley for alerting me to the full text of this speech, previously published on the now-defunct Utopia website. For some early critiques of ‘red fundamentalists’ in the early 1990s, see my In the Red, pp.289, 347 & 353.

[24] This material draws on ‘Totalitarian Nostalgia’, in In the Red, online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=018_1989nostalgia.inc&issue=018.

[25] Zhang Hongliang (see n.23 above) was particularly scathing in his description of the ‘socialist market economy’. In regard to the Chongqing ‘red-and-black’ campaign, see Wang Lixiong 王力雄, ‘Bo Xilai and the “Mechanization” of the Chinese Communist Party’ 薄熙來與中共「機器化」, in iSunAffairs 陽光時務, No.18 (3 May 2012), reprinted online at: http://www.canyu.org/n48186c10.aspx.

[26] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1st World Library Literary Society reprint, 2004, p.47.

[27] ‘There are no dissidents in China’, Agence France-Presse, 11 February 2010.

[28] See: http://twitter.com/aiww/statuses/8962515702.

[29] See, for instance, Zhao on the issue of illness-causing air-borne particulate matter (PM2.5) at: http://news.sina.com.cn/w/2012-03-02/151924048594.shtml. Here he cynically conflates the issue of industrial and motor-vehicle particulate matter, a serious topic in Beijing during 2011, with passive smoking and the smoke plumes produced by New Year’s fireworks.

[30] 一言以兴邦，一言以丧邦. See Mao, ‘Zai Hangzhou huishishangde disanci jianghua zhailu, 11 May 1963’, in Zhongguo Renmin Daxue San Hong, ed., Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui 毛泽东思想万岁！, 13 vols., Beijing, 1967, final supplement, p.120, translated in Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics, p.3. The online publication China Digital Times follows the undulations in Chinese political lexicon via its frequently updated ‘Directives from the Ministry of Truth’. See: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/ministry-of-truth/.

[31] Writing about an earlier era in the development of modern Chinese, Ted Huters remarks:

In terms of the issues facing modern China, perhaps the most important implications residing in the questions about linguistic register in discursive expression ultimately must return to the realm of the writer rather than to the reader, and do not so much center on the issue of the broadness of the audience, but ultimately on the question of intellectual complexity and authorial initiative—who is to be able to exercise the authority to experiment with language in order to engage in the experiments that will ultimate result in original ideas? Would the ‘right’ to take intellectual initiative be restricted to intellectuals writing in complicated registers in Europe and Japan, or could Chinese writers have equal creative access to experiment with ideas, both old and new via a rich and multi-faceted language? Well aware though they were of the desperate situation of the Chinese nation, Zhang Taiyan and Yan Fu should be seen as going against the grain to maintain this initiative over discourse rather than as inflexible reactionaries hamstrung by the legacy of the past. That the ‘hard-boned’ Lu Xun in the next generation shared a number of their discontents with reducing the complexity of language offers impressive support to this view.
See his ‘Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression: Rethinking the Transformation of Modern Chinese Prose’, ibid.

[32] In this context, see Ran Yunfei’s remarks in Ian Johnson’s blog entry ‘Learning How to Argue’ for The New York Review of Books, 2 March 2012, online at: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/02/learning-how-argue-interview-ran-yunfei/. Among other things Ran says:

The good news is that blogging and the Internet have damaged the CCP’s monopoly on information. So change is happening slowly, from the grassroots. But the damage of years of living under this system is profound. You, as a foreigner, can live here and learn to use chopsticks and learn Chinese perfectly but you might not know how Chinese people think, especially in sensitive areas. If you ask ordinary people about a sensitive thing, how they react is different than how you’ll react. It’s hard for you to imagine their sense of fear. You might be expelled but it’s not like being here. The system of language has to be analyzed. The CCP created a parallel language system (of untruth) that is on an equal basis with the language of truth. You have to analyze what it’s like to grow up in this kind of an unfree country. This is the only way to really know this country.

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