links for 2007-05-30
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A Pentagon report given to Congress says Beijing is spending far more on its military budget than admitted and calls for greater transparency.
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A sharply worded commentary in The People’s Daily, the main daily newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, attacked the U.S. Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military
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By Zhang Tuosheng (China Daily)
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Representatives of China and Japan failed to resolve problems over East China Sea gas exploration rights Friday, a report said.
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Tang urged Washington to “support China’s efforts to improve and develop cross-Strait relations, and adopt substantive and effective measures to halt Chen Shui-bian’s various Taiwan independence provocations and dangerous ventures.”
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Japan on Friday called for an inclusion of the United States, China, India and other major greenhouse gas emitters into an international framework to fight global warming beyond the 2012 time frame set under the Kyoto Protocol.
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The Hoover Institution, one of the top think-tanks in the United States, has been devoting more resources to studying China.
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200705262244Army1 Here is the pdf link of the US Department of Defense’s report on Chinese military power, released today. This is their annual report to the US Congress, about 50 pages long:
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via China Law Blog, a good collection of resources.
Zoellick on China: The Washington Consensus?
President George W. Bush is expected to appoint his former deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick as head of the World Bank, replacing his former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz. Zoellick, who says has lived in Hong Kong, in previous speeches has regarded China the way the government has. In two speeches Zoellick pushed the “responsible stakeholder” rhetoric about China.
In a 2005 speech at a roundtable on China–U.S. relations, Zoellick remarked on the privilege of knowing Zheng Bijian, the international face behind the Chinese “peaceful rise” rhetoric. He used that contact as an introduction to a speech about China as a “responsible stakeholder.” He said:
China has been more open than many developing countries, but there are increasing signs of mercantilism, with policies that seek to direct markets rather than opening them. The United States will not be able to sustain an open international economic system—or domestic U.S. support for such a system—without greater cooperation from China, as a stakeholder that shares responsibility on international economic issues.
This served as an introduction to his criticism of China on points ranging from intellectual property to China’s “partnerships with regimes that hurt China’s reputation and lead others to question its intentions.”
But what is a “responsible stakeholder” to the folks at the U.S. State Department? In this speech, it seems as if the definition is accession to a variety of international laws and norms and considerable help in enforcing them. “[Responsible stakeholders] recognize that the international system sustains their peaceful prosperity,” Zoellick said. “So they work to sustain that system.”
The key here is not the words “responsible stakeholder,” but the words that come with it. Zoellick as U.S. deputy secretary of state said China should be a “responsible stakeholder in the international system,” (emphasis mine) and a “member” of that system. That system is often regarded, especially in economic commentary, as a manifestation of “the Washington consensus“—an ideology to which the World Bank is closely tied.
The unfortunate truth is that we can’t know how much of Zoellick’s speech reflected his own thinking and how much was State Department talking-points. Luckily we have another speech from when he was out of government and [probably paid handsomely to be a] vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. That one’s from nearly a month ago on May 2.
Paying tribute to the 2005 speech discussed above, Zoellick sought in this month’s speech to outline five topics that he believes make the United States and China “shared stakeholders.” The idea of being a “shared stakeholder” with the United States ought to be significantly different from being a “stakeholder in the international community,” but the topics vary little. He said the topics uniting the United States and China are: “economic policy; Korea; Iran; Sudan; and energy security.” (Korea, economic policy, Iran, and Sudan were in the 2005 speech, too.)
Sparing you the details, it emerges from this month’s speech that Zoellick as Goldman staffer was in agreement with his State Department self. He also made mention of his four trips to Darfur, Sudan, in a period of 12 months from 2005 to 2006. (Both speeches also reference the difference between U.S.–China relations in 1972 and now, the second specifically referencing Nixon and Mao.)
Zoellick is no shoddy politician, and no doubt this is part of the reason that he has been found fit to be nominated as head of the World Bank. What’s important now is whether his perspective as head of an “international” institution can jettison the U.S.-centric chops he’s been paid for for a long time and represent the interests of the citizens of the bank’s member states. If not, charges of a U.S.-dominated international economic system will only be strengthened.
[Speeches h/t Chinese Law and Politics Blog via China Law Blog.]
Hiatus
I’ll be away from the computers until May 28. Until then, read a book!
links for 2007-05-25
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“He impresses me more every time I see him. . . . I can’t believe he’s 65. I had him pegged for 45,” Reagan wrote.
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TOKYO (AFP) – Japan said Thursday it is trying to arrange a meeting between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit in Germany next month.
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BEIJING (AFP) – NATO wants to finally end tensions arising from its deadly 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and establish ties with China, a general with the alliance said in comments published here Thursday.
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Rupert Murdoch, News Corp’s chief executive, on Wednesday defended himself against accusations that he had allowed political pressure from the Chinese government to influence his business decisions.
“Article 9 is the ‘God of Peace’ that Saves Humanity”
That’s the title of a new entry into the Article 9 discussion from Japanese blogger Amaki Naoto.
He gives a harsh assessment of U.S. failures in the Middle East, saying that after the Cold War “the Middle East became the epicenter of world conflict.” He also blames problems in the Middle East on the influence of Jews in the United States. Here he quotes a discredited supposed statement by Benjamin Franklin calling for the expulsion of Jews from the United States. But he makes it worse than even the falsely rumored English statement by using a harsher word than “expulsion.”
“The United States must destroy (滅ぼされる) the Jews,” he claims Franklin said. And he agrees. After the somewhat shocking anti-semitism comes another kind of religious fervor. He exalts a personified (or really deified) Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution as a humanity-saving god of peace.
Article 9 has remained silent all these years, he writes, but pretty soon its silence will be broken. He writes:*
怒りだす時が来る。憲法９条という「平和の神」がその意志を示し始めのだ。その時、誰もがその前にひざまづく事になる。その神が声を発したら、それに逆らう事は誰にも出来ない。そうだ。怒れ！憲法９条よ。愚かな人間を目覚めさせて欲しい。声を上げて欲しい。
The time when it gets angry is coming. The ‘god of peace’ called Article 9 will begin to reveal its will. At that time, everyone will kneel before it. Once that god’s voice is heard, no one will be able to go against it. Yes, indeed. Get angry! Article 9! I want you to wake these foolish people. I want you to give us your voice!
As the only people to have been hit by a nuclear bomb, he writes, the Japanese people’s awakening will move the god of peace and rescue the world.
*Comments or corrections welcome on all translations.
links for 2007-05-24
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The central government is considering a proposal from the Ministry of Public Security to scrap the two-tiered “hukou” registration system and allow freer migration between cities and the countryside, China Business News reported Wednesday.
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Japan passed a law Wednesday to fund the reorganization of U.S. forces in Japan and help move thousands of American marines from the country’s south to the U.S. territory of Guam.
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The flow is a trickle right now, but thousands of Japanese engineers and other industry professionals have gone to Taiwan, South Korea and China
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The visit by the US Change to Win Federation, which represents seven unions with six million members, represents a victory for the state-sanctioned All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
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The United States and China reached a new aviation services agreement on Wednesday that would more than double the number of passenger flights between the two countries by 2012, U.S. transportation officials said.
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Henry Paulson said on Wednesday the United States and China agreed it was necessary for China to rebalance its economy to encourage more domestic spending and less reliance on exports.
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Bush will be meet China Vice Premier Wu Yi in Washington on Thursday for an update on her talks this week with U.S. finance and trade officials, the White House said on Wednesday.
Jay Leno the Nationalist
Marxy has an old ad for Doritos that strikes U.S. nationalist notes, apparently from when the threat of Japanese high tech industries was a much-touted “problem” in the United States. The last line? “You won’t find a chip like this comin’ out of Japan!”
links for 2007-05-23
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China has put aside proposals to force internet users to use their real names when signing up for blogging services – and will now merely encourage them to do so.
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China hopes that the Darfur issue can be solved soon in order to achieve comprehensive, lasting peace in the troubled western Sudanese region, Chinese special envoy Liu Guijin said on Tuesday.
Sloppiness in James Mann’s ‘China Fantasy’
I’m half done reading journalist James Mann’s The China Fantasy: How our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, and it’s an interesting, if controversial, read. One thing stands out so far: Mann’s relationship with evidence is strained, and he sometimes fails in logic.
In his defense, Mann notes in the first lines, “This is not a book about China itself. This is a book about the China I have encountered outside of China.” That might be fine, if it were true. But writing about the way U.S. media and politicians talk about China, in Mann’s book, entails trying to make points about how China actually is or might someday be.
Mann has clear opponents. He brings up writings by David Lampton, who later took him to task in a debate on ForeignPolicy.com. What’s most bothersome so far is the rhetorical excess Mann displays in opposing some other commentators. In one case, he criticizes “logical problems” in another argument one sentence after screwing up the logic in his own argument. He writes on page 37:
But this seemingly punchy aphorism, “If we treat China as a threat, it will become a threat,” bears further scrutiny. The suggestion is that the reverse is also true—if we don’t treat China as a threat, it won’t become a threat. But there are all sorts of logical problems with this notion, because one can imagine other possibilities.
Let’s take “treat China as a threat” and call it A. And “China will become a threat” will be B. The argument Mann seeks to refute is then:
If A then B.
His rhetoric turns to deriding a completely different position:
If not A then not B.
In fact this is not implied at all by the statement he’s opposing. He may be thinking of the contrapositive, through which in this case:
“If A then B.” would imply “If not B then not A.”
Anyway, there are indeed “all sorts of logical problems with this notion,” but I don’t suppose Mann was referring to his own logic.
UPDATE: In a later entry, I come around to appreciating Mann’s book despite misgivings about the rhetoric he uses to criticize others’ rhetoric.
