Without saying definitively he would not attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing one month from today, U.S. Senator Barack Obama said as president he would skip the ceremony without hearing from the Dalai Lama that there had been progress on the Tibet issue.

“In the absence of some sense of progress, in the absence of some sense from the Dalai Lama that there was progress, I would not have gone,” Obama said at a news conference, according to the Associated Press.

From a Chinese perspective, the statement that Obama would take cues from the Dalai Lama is quite bold and constitutes a public articulation of which side the candidate has chosen in the Dalai Lama–P.R.C. disputes. While few would be surprised to hear a Democratic candidate support human rights in Tibet, it’s diplomatically significant if enunciated.

The AP article notes that Obama had encouraged President George W. Bush to skip the ceremony, as had Senator John McCain in April.

McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, also issued a hypothetical ultimatum, similarly saying that he would only attend the ceremony if he saw improvements on human rights issues. McCain’s April statement was in some ways stronger than Obama’s most recent one, though he did not allude to taking cues from the exiled Tibetan leader.

“If Chinese policies and practices do not change, I would not attend the opening ceremonies,” said the Arizona senator, who has clinched the GOP nomination for president. “It does no service to the Chinese government, and certainly no service to the people of China, for the United States and other democracies to pretend that the suppression of rights in China does not concern us. It does, will and must concern us.”

These statements, which apparently promise to show symbolic support in exchange for concessions on human rights issues, recall the early Bill Clinton administration principle of conditional engagement: The United States would work with China on trade in exchange for rights improvements. What the candidates haven’t mentioned is that when Clinton tried this tactic, it either failed or was abandoned in favor of, say, less-conditional engagement.

Could the candidates be reacting to George W. Bush’s friendly behavior toward China in the way that Clinton reacted to George H. W. Bush’s? The current president, for one, comes near toeing the Chinese line in his most recent statement, promising to attend the ceremony. Skipping the event would be “an affront to the Chinese people,” he said.

In The New Republic, Jed Perl exercises no economy of words in lambasting art from China and its growing global following. Based on a reading of “Chinese art” that does not apparently leave the island of Manhattan, Perl makes several questionable statements, often abetted by lack of knowledge, and Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well has already taken some of them to task.

I find some solace in Perl’s admission that: “This is not to say that there is nothing of value going on in China today: I do not know all there is to know about art in China. What I do know is that the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious.” Fine, but this comes only after hundreds of words of under-informed negativity and no apparent experience with Chinese art that hasn’t arrived in New York or Venice.

Missing from Perl’s account is the pervasive sense of unease among many in Beijing’s art scene, both Chinese and foreign, as they have watched the transformation of spaces such as the 798 Art District into pedestrian mall commercial centers, and as they have watched some of the artists Perl criticizes grow their bank accounts with manufactured art.

That’s one of the things Angie Baecker and I tried to capture with our article in the current issue (No. 59) of Art Asia Pacific. We examined the plans and sentiments of some major art spaces and figures in Beijing leading up to the Olympics. And we found a mixture of excitement and trepidation, sometimes with both sentiments coming from the same person.

Totally unexamined by Perl, for instance, are the artists whose work rarely if ever engages political and nationalist issues. And others who openly criticize the government and the country’s history, even if with a certain care to avoid publicity that could threaten their livelihood. Then there’s Ai Weiwei, both involved with and vocally opposed to the Olympics. In the classic media formulation, his contributions to the design of the Olympic stadium are tempered by his criticism of the government. (”The Olympics are an opportunity to redefine the country, but the message is always wrong,” Ai says in our article.)

I would not discount the possibility that some of Ai’s repeated statements have been motivated by a desire for publicity. But for those who make their commentaries in private and whose art-with-message works face government scrutiny, the spotlight is neither welcomed nor sought.

Criticizing a country’s art without engaging even well-reported examples that don’t support one’s criticism is an art world example of the basic structure of [insert country]-bashing: Find some well-accepted tropes about the target country that are well-reported but unconfirmed by the critic, and then use them as the basis of an argument that makes no effort to engage the actual thoughts or facts of life of those involved.

Could it be that a critic writing in a derivative way in the milieu of China-bashing is just as guilty as artists who profit from market-friendly, easily digestible political messages?

Anyone living in China and communicating with the Western Hemisphere or Europe knows that even when government controls aren’t slowing down the internet, any disruption of undersea fiber optics in the Pacific can bring traffic to a crawl.

From MIT’s Technology Review, via Japan Probe and Foreign Policy, comes a map of global fiber projects slated and in progress. This is a screenshot of the Pacific, taken from TR’s global interactive map.

According to the article accompanying the map, global international transmissions are about 11.0 terabits per second. As I wrote at Sinobyte, one cable is supported by Google, Japan’s KDDI, and others. Another, the Trans-Pacific Express, recently won approval early this year from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Fidel Castro met with He Guoqiang, a member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee, for more than two hours yesterday, discussing numerous and diverse topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, food prices, the Olympics, and Fidel’s health (He conveyed President Hu Jintao’s wish for Castro’s speedy recovery). Earlier in the week He met with Cuban President Raul Castro.

He’s visit is just one of many recent signs of strengthening Cuba–China relations. Trade between the two nations surged to $2.2 billion last year, up 23 percent from 2006, and nearly 250 percent from 2005; China is Cuba’s second-largest trading partner (after Venezuela). China recently expanded broadcasts in Cuba of Chinese television stations and sold railway engines to the Cuban government for use in the public transport system.

He Guoqiang’s Cuba visit marked the beginning of a four-country tour that will take him to Brazil, Angola, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Our friend Lyle Morris has a well-reported piece at YaleGlobal on China’s new labor law, which went to effect at the beginning of this year.

Under the law, which affects both domestic and foreign companies operating in China, workers will see increased protection from labor unions and significant overhauls in policy ranging from contract formation to severance packages and job training. Arguably the most influential — and controversial — change centers on an open-term clause for long-term employees. The clause states that workers with 10 consecutive years, or having signed two consecutive fixed-term contracts with a company, are entitled to a contract without a fixed end date – essentially giving them lifetime employment. …

Many foreign enterprises voiced discontent with the law. Among them was Serge Janssens de Varebeke, then-president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, who warned in a 2006 letter to the National People’s Congress that the “strict regulations” could raise production costs and “force foreign companies to reconsider new investments or continuing their activities in China.” …

Karen Lin, a senior fund manager at Paradigm Asset Management Co. in Taipei, predicts the law will add roughly 25 percent to the cost of labor in China, which typically accounts for 10 percent of total manufacturing costs. Companies that fail to adjust will start to feel major pressure on their profits within “five to six years,” Lin said.

It strikes me as a little bit duplicitous on the part of some foreigners to have their governments and citizens’ groups insisting on new regulations to improve human rights in China while business groups complain that such regulations cost too much money.

No matter which side of the debate you may stand on, it’s hard not to be a consumer of products created under these regulatory conditions. As Lyle writes, however, better laws on the books doesn’t necessarily mean better work conditions.

In the long run, whether or not the law is successful in curbing worker abuse is another matter. Critics point out that the while the law will add much needed rights for workers, its goal of reducing worker-abuse cases might be difficult.

“The impact it will have on migrant workers’ working conditions will be limited,” says Lauffs. “Simply passing a new law will not guarantee that the local labor bureaus will become more active in enforcing employees’ rights or companies will be more accommodating in coming into compliance.”

A fundamental question is whether Chinese workers will actually make use of their newfound power. “I think many workers will be hesitant to use their full rights under the law” says Zhangjian, secretary at a small electronics manufacturing company in Beijing. “Bringing too much attention to yourself could cost you your job.”

Lest a week go by without new evidence of strengthening ties between China and Venezuela, a massive trade show featuring Chinese companies and products opens tomorrow in Caracas. The fair includes more than seventy Chinese firms from numerous industries, ranging from porcelain to automobiles.

The fair, organized by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, is an especially visible sign of the exponential growth in trade between China and Venezuela, which has surged from about $100 million in 1998 to $6 billion last year, according to the Chinese Embassy in Caracas.

The trade show comes on the heels of the government’s announcement that it has begun to spend some of the resources committed to the “China-Venezuela Investment Fund” earlier this year. Venezuela tagged $2 billion for the fund; China promised $4 billion, “the largest credit China has offered to any one country,” according to Zhang Xiaoqiang, a vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

One of George H. W. Bush’s less discussed jobs, lost among president of the United States, ambassador to the United Nations, and CIA director, was head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing during the Nixon administration. Bush’s China journal has recently been published, and it reveals frustration at being made irrelevant by direct contacts between Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping.

James Mann, author most recently of The China Fantasy, has an article on the book in The New Republic. A couple of choice paragraphs.

When Bush landed in Beijing on October 21, 1974, its wind and dust reminded him of places he had encountered in the oil business. “It reminded me very much of West Texas and also of a trip to Kuwait,” he observed. He soon tried to establish high-level contact with Chinese leaders. He paid a call on Deng Xiaoping, then a vice premier under Mao Zedong. Bush’s initial impression of Deng, eventually the father of China’s economic reforms: “He was a very short man.” (For American one-liners about China, this ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s verdict on the Great Wall: “It really is a great wall.”)

…

And then there was the question of human rights. “China is very vulnerable on human rights, just as the Soviet Union was,” Bush thought. “Some day sure as can be Congress will turn its attention to these aspects of the Chinese policy. … [T]his euphoric analysis of this society as an open society, as a free society, a soft or gentle society, is simply wrong.” All in all, Bush concluded, China was getting more out of its relationship with the United States than the United States was getting from China. “They need us, actually more than we need them in my judgment,” he decided. “This is the consensus of the international community incidentally.”

The New York Review of Books ran a review June 12 of two books on climate change. It contains the following assessment of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.

Not having read up on the Stern Review, the work of Lord Stern of Brentford for the U.K. government, I don’t know if this description is perfectly accurate, but it is interesting, at least.

The practical consequence of the Stern policy would be to slow down the economic growth of China now in order to reduce damage from climate change a hundred years later. Several generations of Chinese citizens would be impoverished to make their descendants only slightly richer. According to Nordhaus, the slowing-down of growth would in the end be far more costly to China than the climatic damage. About the much-discussed possibility of catastrophic effects before the end of the century from rising sea levels, he says only that “climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for serious damages in the long run.” The Chinese government firmly rejects the Stern philosophy, while the British government enthusiastically embraces it. The Stern Review, according to Nordhaus, “takes the lofty vantage point of the world social planner, perhaps stoking the dying embers of the British Empire.”

Read the full review if you have a chance. It takes on several interesting questions among the two books. It also throws in this insight:

This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming

My personal favorite transpacific investment tie-up is one that made a frustrating and expensive process free, if not easy. Bank of America has an 8.2 percent stake in China Construction Bank (jiàn háng), a major institution that went public in 2005. I don’t claim to understand the implications of this investment between huge banks, but I know one thing: It lets me move USD into RMB with no ATM fees, no exchange rate adjuncts, and generally few headaches.

By way of news, The Financial Times reports that BoA is increasing its stake to more than 10 percent, but I thought it might be useful for readers coming from the United States to China to know about this trick.

Many international travelers are familiar with the pain of double-barrel ATM fees — one from the machine that gives you money, and one from a U.S. bank penalizing you for using someone else’s terminal. Worse yet is the percentage of the withdrawl charged as an “exchange rate adjunct.” Before I discovered the BoA-CCB deal I was losing almost 7 percent on my USD withdrawls in China.

Now, I withdraw money from a BoA checking account with the debit card I received in the United States with no fees whatsoever: It transfers at market rate from USD to RMB and gives me cash.

There was one hurdle, however. Money in my life this year is deposited in Colorado. People in the U.S. needing to pay me send a check to my family, who generously go to the bank to make the deposit. But there are no BoA branches in Colorado.

BoA has one more service that completes my money circuit. Once you associate a U.S. account with a BoA account, incoming transfers from the other bank can be done on a one- or three-day basis with no fees. So if you think I need to be richer in China, I’ll send you the address in Colorado, my family will make a deposit into a locally available bank, I’ll transfer it free to BoA, and CCB ATMs throughout China (and Hong Kong) will allow me to withdraw that money with no charges.

At Foreign Policy, former Amnesty International Executive Director William F. Schultz considers how to “pressure Beijing.” Aside from taking a little too literally Chinese government statements about “the Chinese” and their supposed hurt feelings, Schultz, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (disclosure: my former employer), makes an interesting suggestion:

What is the appropriate tack to take? The most successful human rights engagement with China—such as that of John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong who has intervened on behalf of hundreds of political prisoners—is characterized by what one might call respectful tenaciousness. Trying to crack Chinese Internet censorship or highlighting the cases of those mistreated for seeking to advance the rule of law or exercise free speech, for instance, is always appropriate. But so is applauding China’s attempts to control corruption or experiment with local elections.

Effective human rights work requires two things. First, it requires a tragic sense of history—a recognition that, no matter what we do, we will never be able to save everyone from misery or suffering. Sometimes, for example, despite its immense power and resources, the U. S. government’s own ability to influence human rights is limited, and its willingness to do so in a bold way is compromised by competing interests. We who care about human rights would do well to recognize that and shape our recommendations to the U.S. government accordingly. Otherwise, we risk even greater marginalization than we already experience.

But secondly, good human rights work requires persistence and a long view, the recognition that human rights have become the lingua franca for much of the world and a ticket of admission to widely honored membership in the international community. The United States with its plummeting approval ratings around the globe has learned that the hard way. China too will learn eventually that the best way to avert hurt feelings is to avoid prompting criticism in the first place.

The whole construct of “pressure” feels problematic, but I think what Schultz proposes is a significantly more sensitive tack for advocacy and diplomacy. It’s an open question, though, whether a government that stakes much of its domestic persona on a national sense of pride will really change behaviour for the sake of avoiding criticism.