From Reuters:

But even as Hu spoke, about 200 protesters waved signs outside the university gate saying “Free Tibet” and “No Pandas, No Poison Dumplings,” the latter referring to Hu’s offer to lend two pandas to a Tokyo zoo and a row over Chinese-made dumplings laced with pesticide that made several Japanese people ill.

When I was in Japan recently, the contaminated jiaozi/gyoza scandal was one of the first things most Japanese friends asked me about on learning I now live in Beijing. It seems like a bit of progress if anti-China demonstrators (who weren’t particularly numerous) are complaining about human rights and food safety rather than history-related issues. Anti-U.S. slogans were not as substantial when I happened upon a much larger demonstration on Sept. 11, 2004, at Tokyo’s Omotesando.

“I just want to say ‘Free Tibet’. I want to say ‘No’ to China’s oppression of human rights,” said 29-year-old Atsushi Hanazawa, who carried a guitar along with a Tibetan flag.

Again, this makes Japanese protesters in a similar position as many around the world. No comment on who’s well informed.

Some Waseda students were more concerned about getting to class. “I can’t get through the gate. It’s a pain,” said 18-year-old Takuhiro Waki of the protest.

About two dozen right-wing activists yelled anti-Chinese slogans such as “Hu Jintao, Go Back to China.” Earlier, some right-wing Waseda alumni protested against Hu’s speech in a blog.

There’s the nationalism. But two dozen? Pretty weak from people who get crowds twice that size in front of sound trucks on anonymous Tuesdays near busy train stations and somewhat regularly clog the streets near the Chinese embassy.

Nearby around 50 Chinese students held their own rally, yelling “Go, China” in Chinese, “Sino-Japanese Friendship” in Japanese, and “Yes, We Can” in English.

“When I hear the anti-Chinese slogans, I feel that the Chinese people’s character has been maligned,” said 28-year-old Chinese graduate student Cao Shunrui.

There’s a little more nationalism, perhaps, from the other side. I’m not sure what to make of that, but the “Sino-Japanese friendship” message is considerably more helpful than some of the vitriol on both sides in U.S. campuses, from Grace Wang’s experience at Duke to a few dozen other reported rallies.

Hu later shed his suit jacket to play ping-pong at Waseda with popular players from both countries, but Fukuda, 71, declined to pick up a paddle.

“I’m glad I didn’t play ping-pong with him,” Fukuda told reporters. “He’s very strategic. I thought you can’t be too careful.”

I wouldn’t play him either. If he’s playing with popular players, he’d kick my ass. Unless Prime Minister Fukuda has been training, it’s probably wise to save the embarrassment and watch a friendly match.

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.

If a product is consumed in one country, and it is manufactured in another, which country is responsible for the carbon emissions from manufacture? And if one country outsources manufacturing to a country with more lax environmental regulation, who’s responsible for the extra carbon? These will be part of the discussion in Bali when representatives of the world’s countries gather next month to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2006, the idea that outsourcing industry meant outsourcing pollution was already well developed. A think tank report at the time suggested that “when trade between China and its partners exerts an environmental impact, the responsibility should be borne by all parties, including manufacturers, traders and consumers in the product chain,” according to the China Daily.

In The Wall Street Journal, Jane Spencer reports that this concept is back, and may play a role in Bali.

Past accords like Kyoto have looked at emissions on a country-by-country basis, requiring participating nations to reduce greenhouse gases released within their borders. In other words, the manufacturing nation pays for the pollution. But in a twist that could put more pressure on industrialized nations like the U.S., academics, environmentalists and some policy makers argue the next global climate treaty should take into account a nation’s emissions “consumption.” They argue the emissions are embedded in goods that move around the world through trade — so if the U.S. imports iPods from China, Americans should share some responsibility for the pollution produced in making them.

“As China’s emissions rise, everyone is pointing the finger of blame at China,” says Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank and environmental-advocacy organization based in London. “The real responsibility for rising emissions should lie with the final consumers in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.”

The article notes that some in the U.S. dispute this idea, but I find it pretty persuasive. If U.S. or other consumers didn’t buy products, they wouldn’t be made. The essential cause of emissions is the consumer. It doesn’t make sense to blame the venue of the proximate cause: coal burning in China.

This shouldn’t let China off the hook, though. China’s manufacturing is indispensible in the world economy, but we could do without the inefficient energy practices. The rub is that, without proper government intervention and assistance, more efficient practices could make products more expensive in the short term.

In the United States, the government has used a variety of means to encourage efficiency. Once efficient practices are mandated, manufacture actually gets cheaper: Factories buy less energy. But the innovation costs money at first. That’s why governments develop rebate programs to offset higher consumer prices or other incentives to offset higher costs of manufacture.

What this question raises, in my view, is whether it’s the exclusive responsibility of the Chinese government to back efficiency in China. If foreigners consume the products, shouldn’t they pay to reform the industries? Imagine China charged a carbon tax on all products and put the money into efficiency programs. Would the WTO allow China to charge a carbon export tax? Maybe Bali will help solve all this.

Ampontan points out that the media’s love for Li Yang’s instructional rallies and methods, called Crazy English, recently included a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos.

I’m pretty happy with myself because with my Mandarin tutor today I finished a textbook. But our meetings at a Beijing cafe are nothing like Crazy English.

One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before.

In Shanghai at a gallery whose name I’ve forgotten on Moganshan Lu, I saw a photographic exhibition composed of massive prints of Li Yang’s instruction. The scenes were astonishing. Student-teacher ratio was actually optimized to be very high. The events in these images and in other reading on the subject emerge as motivational events, and one of Li Yang’s primary methods is to increase confidence in his students.

But there is a nationalist element. The title of this post, “Conquer English to make China stronger,” is Li’s motto, according to the New Yorker. Ampontan points to another article that contains this passage on China and Japan.

During a question and answer session with the crowd, one student told Li that he hated the Japanese for their rape and occupation of the mainland prior to World War II. The student then said he didn’t want to study Japanese because of this hatred.

“If you really hate the Japanese, then you will learn their language,” Li told the student and the crowd. “If you really want revenge against Japan, then master their language.”

Nationalism, I suspect, may be a tool to reach audiences and to keep his massive events (along with the potentially millions of books sold) from running afoul of the government. This, from the first article, may tell you something about his deeper motivations:

On the couch at the hotel, Li turned one of our interviews into a lecture for his employees, who crowded around to listen. (Someone recorded it on a video camera.) “How can we make Crazy English more successful?” he asked me, his voice rising. “We know that people are not going to be persistent, so we give them ten sentences a month, or one article a month, and then, when they master this, we give them a huge award, a big ceremony. Celebrate! Then we have them pay again, and we make money again.”

He turned toward the assembled employees and switched to Chinese: “The secret of success is to have them continuously paying—that’s the conclusion I’ve reached.” Then back to English: “How can we make them pay again and again and again?”

I wonder how much the students learn.

Danwei today posted an excellent set of material on the 1996 book China Can Say No (中国可以说不). The book was influential in Chinese nationalism and follows a 1989 book by Japanese novelist-turned-governor-of-Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, and a top Sony executive, Morita Akio, called The Japan That Can Say No.

The Danwei post includes a recent interview with one of the Chinese book’s writers, Song Qiang. In it, Song says anti-Japanese nationalism is not as warranted as anti-U.S. sentiment.

NH: What were you thinking during the anti-Japanese demonstrations of 2005?
SQ: I think that China’s biggest enemy is America. Japan is relatively harmless, so it’s easy to confuse things if you’re anti-Japan. China is a poor country, but Japan and Korea have done things better than us: each move they’ve made has been carefully considered. A national attitude of prudence and self-protection is something that China lacks. I didn’t take part in the demonstrations but I did sign my name. I said to Tong Zeng [defender of the Diaoyu Islands] that I was afraid that the anti-Japanese demonstrations would slip up and be exploited by the Americans.

China Youth Daily reported that a Japanese exchange student had posted online, saying: The “Chinamen” (支那人) don’t have any warriors; the Yamato people are superior to the Chinese. When I first read that I thought it was fake. There was no source of stimulation inside the country, so why not make up a post by a Japanese exchange student to inflame the passions of the Chinese—then we’d all have something to do. This is taking things far too lightly. A few years later, people said that the post was a fake, something cooked up by a Chinese person. If you’re anti-Japanese to such an extent, I’d say there’s a problem.

It’s been a while; to any loyal readers, my apologies. Since Monday evening I’ve been in Japan traveling, the first time I’ve left China after moving there last July. Writing now on the train between a visit in southern Kyushu on my way to Hiroshima, I’ll save you my personal reflections. I did see something of interest, however, in today’s Japan Times. The paper carried a Kyodo story on a U.S. professor’s advice to Japan.

In brief, the story reports that Kent Calder, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., urges that Japan be more “proactive” in its post-Bush relations with the United States. He also said that an Obama presidency may be more conducive to changes in Japan policy from the U.S. side than a Hillary Clinton or McCain administration.

The article leads with Calder’s comments on a concept called “Japan passing,” meaning essentially U.S. policy discussions going on without much discussion of this country. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, for example, China and Iraq are among the most talked-about countries in Clinton’s foreign policy, whereas Japan plays a small role. (Perhaps I will have time to compare that work with Obama and McCain.) The story may be using Calder’s statements to imply a general apathy in U.S. policy circles toward Japan, which I think isn’t true. Without knowing more about Calder’s work and statements, I can’t say what he thinks, but I do believe that economic and East Asian security concerns would prevent any U.S. government from ignoring Japan.

Calder said energy efficiency and environmental technology are strengths for Japan and might serve as a good way to increase its international influence. “Japan is the only major nation of the major energy producers whose consumption in the last three years or so has gone down,” Calder said.

Anecdotally, I see positive and negative forces at work in Japan on energy efficiency over the last few days. Mass transit is of course a strength here, and over two days in an area of Kyushu with fewer train options, I was glad to see light-engine automobiles either at parity with or outnumbering larger engines. Meanwhile the lack of good insulation in many regular Japanese residential and public buildings represents a huge opportunity for retrofitting to prevent energy waste as heating or cooling is lost through under-insulated walls. (As I write this, I am passing the most industrial and pollution-spewing vista I have encountered in Japan, off the shinkansen tracks near Tokuyama Station.)

I have taken an unanticipated break on this site because of an uptick in my paid workload: Sinobyte, my blog on Chinese technology and society for the CNET Blog Network, is now in its third month. I have also had work to do on some new consulting before what, barring any unforeseen changes, will be my return to the United States this fall for more academic work on East Asia. I am sure I will have more to say after my stay in Hiroshima, and most likely more to come after my return late this month to Beijing.

For a while now, G. John Ikenberry’s article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs has been on the reading lists of those who watch Chinese–U.S. relations. Its title does not lack for gravity—”The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?”—but its argument is perhaps a bit less uncertain. “The United States’ ‘unipolar moment’ will inevitably end,” he writes. “If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.”

After this pithy formulation, the possibility of the “West” not surviving is not given much space. Ikenberry argues that the international institutions in the era of U.S. dominance are fundamentally different from other orders that have been challenged by rising powers. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the security pacts that enlace the earth, are portrayed as too open to be overthrown. He writes: “[I]f a country wants to be a world power, it has no choice but to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). The road to global power, in effect, runs through the Western order and its multilateral economic institutions.”

And that’s what Ikenberry thinks China is trying to do. For the full argument, give the article a quick read.

There is one interesting passage worth highlighting. As Ikenberry argues that 20th century international institutions were designed to be open, he notes a difference of opinion between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the composition of the U.N. Security Council…

In fact, it was Roosevelt who urged—over the opposition of Winston Churchill—that China be included as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The then Australian ambassador to the United States wrote in his diary after his first meeting with Roosevelt during the war, “He said that he had numerous discussions with Winston about China and that he felt that Winston was 40 years behind the times on China and he continually referred to the Chinese as ‘Chinks’ and ‘Chinamen’ and he felt that this was very dangerous. He wanted to keep China as a friend because in 40 or 50 years’ time China might easily become a very powerful military nation.”

This issue of Foreign Affairs has other China articles worth checking out too. While it’s the current issue, those pieces are here.

It’s Iowa caucus day in the U.S. election, so time for a bit of China-election news. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a candidate for the Republican nomination, promises to “level the playing field” with China in a new ad (below). And Sen. Barack Obama, a Democratic candidate, said he would ban all toy imports from China—and then took it back.

Romney’s ad is more recent than Obama’s toy trouble. Bill Powell at Time’s China Blog, noting that the ad appeared on the eve of today’s Iowa caucuses, cranked up the sarcasm for this one:

Never mind that former Governor Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly say how he’ll “level the playing field” with an economy that’s growing “three times faster than ours” (presumably not by getting Americans to work in factories for a dollar an hour). At least the guy devotes 30 seconds of television time to the second most important foreign policy subject out there. Maybe some crack American political reporter will actually ask him about it.

Or, more likely, not…

As for Obama, I was on the road for two weeks in December and failed to comment on this story. Luckily China Law Blog had some coverage of Obama’s pre-Christmas statement that he “would stop the import of all toys from China.” CLB collected blogger reaction, including from China Venture News, which wrote, “The bottom line though is this: China trade is not a simple “us and them” issue. The companies making toys in Shanghai and Shenzhen for export to America send their profits to New York and are parts of joint ventures that have stockholders in the suburbs of Chicago, Boston, and Topeka.”

The Obama campaign later said that the statement had not been rendered by the press with appropriate context. From Reuters via NYT:

“Now, don’t get me wrong: As president, I’ll work with China to keep harmful toys off our shelves,” he said in Greenfield, Iowa, according to a statement from his campaign for the November 2008 election, . [sic]

On Wednesday, Obama had told voters in New Hampshire: “I would stop the import of all toys from China,” which supplies about 80 percent of U.S. toys.

A spokesman for Obama, Josh Earnest, said the candidate had been referring in New Hampshire to banning “toys that contain more than a trace level of lead, coming from China or anywhere else.”

Chinochano notes [es] that most visits by foreign heads of state to China result in the same press release, names changed. In Spanish from the blog, here are the two hypothetical* examples.

The sentence in bold had caught my eye in an English release when Bush and Hu last met. Without looking it up, it says that Hu “expressed his appreciation for United States/Venezuelan support of the ‘one China policy.’” Just thought I’d post this, as it seems to me that the United States, long walking a diplomatic tightrope on the issue, is one of the biggest substantial factors in why Taiwan remains how it is—despite decades of lip service about “one China.” Doesn’t mean you don’t get thanks for lipservice though.

* I had failed to make clear that these aren’t real releases. I’ve been fooled before, but this was just sloppy writing.

My former employer, CampusProgress.org at the Center for American Progress, has published a lengthy piece by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (a senior fellow at CAP) on U.S.-China environmental responsibility.

His central argument is that a leadership vacuum in both countries is a challenge to improving the environment. In the United States, he argues, the federal government lacks vision while many states are making progress on their own. In China, on the other hand, he points out that the central government is working hard on these issues but the challenge comes in spreading compliance to the provinces. The piece is full of good links, but much of the information will not be news to Transpacifica readers.

I’m taking advantage of Campus Progress’s generous republishing policy to include the full text here. The article was originally posted here.

The Greenhouse Heavyweights
Both the United States and China need climate change leadership.

By Tom Daschle
November 30, 2007

The United States and the People’s Republic of China are two of the 21^st Century’s leading superpowers. China’s economic development continues to dramatically outpace other countries. During the first half of this year, China’s GDP reached 11.5%, putting China on track for its 5^th consecutive year of double-digit growth. For its part, America remains the world’s leading engine of innovation, using our free market of ideas and capital to continue forging new solutions in science, medicine, and technology.

Regrettably, however, the United States and China have now ascended to world leadership in another much more threatening way: greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency has estimated that China will become the world leader in emissions by the end of the year. The Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency has reported that China is already there. Not to be outdone, the United States remains the world’s largest emitter on a per-capita basis. For every person in the United States, there are 6 tons of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. The United States and Chinese governments must not ignore these facts, but should instead embrace them as a catalyst for change. Indeed, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) recent 17th National Congress and the upcoming presidential elections in the United States provide a historic opportunity for our two countries to begin a new chapter of global leadership in the fight against climate change.

(more…)