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This intriguing, tickling, curiosity about China may well be something I share only with Brian Micklethwait but perhaps he, like me, is forever being goaded into continuing scrutiny by these little streams of fascinating information coming out of the place.
No sooner have the Chinese authorities decided to amend the constitution to provide for private property protection than their Courts start implementing it:
The court in Beijing ruled on December 18, 2003 that Beijing Artic Ice Technology Development must return the virtual goods to the player, Li Hongchen. Hongchen had spent two years and over US$1,200 on ‘pay-as-you-go’ access cards playing the online game “Hongyue” (Red Moon) and had built up an account of virtual money and weapons in his playing account.
In February 2003, Hongchen discovered that his account had been hacked through the game’s central servers. He complained to the company but was told that the virtual goods had no real world value. The company also refused to identify the hacker, saying that it could not reveal private details of players, reported Reuters, an international news agency.
So not only are Chinese Courts going to protect private property, they are even going to protect virtual private property.
A columnist for TechNewsWorld, a U.S. news Web site, said the Chinese court case appeared to be the first in the world.
I am not aware of any similar ruling in either the UK or Europe so maybe the chappie from TechNewsWorld is right and this is a world first. Who would have imagined even a few short years ago that property law precedents would be set in China?!!
All shock and awe aside, I wonder if it is a precedent that will followed elsewhere, especially in the West? It just might. I noticed some time ago that laws relating to technology in general, and the internet in particular, are taking on a very global hue.
If that Court in Beijing manages to start a global ball rolling then I foresee very interesting implications for the future of ‘cyber’ wealth.
Some are real trainspotters, and seek them out in all their literal dullness. I am a virtual skyscraperspotter, and surf the net looking for photos and descriptions. And I have just discovered a new one, the amazing Ryugyong Hotel, in Pyongyang, North Korea. When I say “new”, all I mean is I’ve only just heard about it. The thing has been in existence for well over a decade. I only encountered it because it is on the left here. Good grief, what the upper case top row of my keyboard is that? – I expostulated.
I have my answer. Says Wikipedia:
The Ryugyong Hotel is a towering, 105-story, 1,083 foot empty concrete shell in Pyongyang, North Korea. If the building ever was completed it would be considered the world’s largest hotel, and one of the tallest buildings in the world. Today however, the building remains uninhabited and unfinished.
The North Koreans began constructing the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in 1987, reportedly aiming for 105 stories to beat out a structure the South Koreans were building in Singapore. The building was to contain 3,000 rooms and 7 revolving restaurants. The estimated cost of building it ran upwards of $750 million, which is 2% of North Korea’s GDP. It’s generally assumed construction came to a halt in 1991 because North Korea was suffering from famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding. The basic structure is complete, but no windows, fixtures or fittings have been installed. According to http://www.skyscrapers.com, the concrete used in building the Ryugyong Hotel is of unsuitable quality and therefore is unsafe – it cannot therefore be completed as currently built. With annual tourism numbering less than a hundred, some question the logic of building such a massive hotel. Pyongyang’s few existing hotels remain to this day, virtually empty. The 3.9-million-square-foot concrete structure continues to dominate Pyongyang’s skyline.
In other words, this building is going to supply the world with the second most dramatic demolition video ever (I am afraid it will not be the winner), and nothing else. I love that bit about how “some question the logic” of this ludicrous structure. In general, anti-collectivist propaganda does not come any more damning, and is all the more damning here because it is done so delicately. “Some question the logic …” in a country “suffering” (like it just happened to turn out that way) from “famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding”. Yeah, I had heard about that.
I was going to put that this makes our little Dome look like very small potatoes, public-spending-wise. But actually our Dome seems to have wasted about three times as much as the Ryugyong Hotel. (Hah!! You call that wasting public money?) The difference is that we could afford our Dome without very much mass starvation, and even now our electricity supplies are hardly ever interrupted.
Until just now, as I say, I had no idea about this ridiculous edifice, no idea at all. I guess they are not that eager to advertise it, what with it being made of cheese and having no windows and being unliveable in and liable to collapse at any moment.
The sooner President Bush finds a way of shutting down this evil joke of a country and merging it into the sensible one to the south of it, the better.
At first it reads like bad news:
China not to pursue profit-oriented education: official
BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) — Chinese education minister said here Tuesday that China will not place profit-gaining capability as the primary par for education.
At a press conference organized by the State Council Information Office, Minister Zhou Ji said that education is basically a cause for social benefits.
Governmental encouragement of private investment into education does not mean gaining economic returns is the priority for schools, said Zhou, adding that more private funds could alleviate burdens of the government for financing education.
Meanwhile, China welcomes overseas partners who are able to provide quality education service to the Chinese.
A newly adopted law stipulates that private schools are legally equal to their public counterparts.
Statistics show that by the end of 2002, about 61,200 privately-funded schools enrolled more than 11 million students. A total of 712 programs were jointly carried out by Chinese and overseas educators, nine times that of seven years before.
“Profits pursuit in education might endanger equal rights of education for every Chinese citizen,” Zhou said.
What’s going on here? My take: the Chinese government knows it has to have great gobs of education if it is to race ahead economically like it wants to. But (just like India) it can’t afford to supply this entirely out of its tax revenue. So it is going to encourage private sector, profit-oriented education. But won’t encouraging profit-oriented education encourage profit-orientation? No, says the government. We won’t be encouraging profit-oriented profit-oriented education, only non-profit-oriented profit-oriented education. So there.
And the shorter version of the above reads: never believe anything until it is officially denied. In China, as in so many places, “official” is another word for “not”.
The point here is not the answer, which is contradictory waffle. The point is the question, which is: how about all this private sector education? How about it indeed.
I am increasingly starting to believe – and I seem to recall (quick phone call) our own David Carr hinting here not so long ago at something similar – that the next great challenge to statism and statist economic policies may come not from the likes of us, but from the East.
A question. What exactly is the function of the shop in this photograph?
I will get to this in good time, but first, a little travelogue.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent the weekend in Tokyo. I did this because Tokyo is one of my very favourite cities, and because the 23 hour plane journey from Sydney to London is much more pleasant if you take a break in the middle. On Sunday morning, I went for a walk around Akihabara, famously the section of Tokyo where you go to buy the latest electronic products. This area consists mainly of a group of buildings filled with small shops and market like stalls selling components and generic products near the railway station, and a long wide street. Down both sides of this street are a large number of seven or eight floor shops that sell nothing but electronic equipment, in this case mainly consumer equipment. And, mixed in with the electronics shops, are manga shops. These are seven or eight floor shops selling nothing but comics. The comics sold on the lower floors are fairly innocuous, but get steadily more pornographic as you ascend the building, and those sold on the top level are quite hard core.
As I walked down the street, I was repeatedly approached by young Japanese women in short skirts who would hand me flyers about electronic products, or (usually in broken English) attempt to ask me if I already had DSL. (My answer, which was “Yes”, and “Anyway, I live in London” was not what they were looking for, although one of them thought it would be cool to live in London).
Not too different from what I might find in certain places in the west. But things would get stranger. → Continue reading: Bureaucracy and Political Incorrectness in Tokyo
More news from the Independent concerning the globalisation of education, which is all mixed up with the global mega-success story that is the English language:
A successful Chinese industrialist was boasting proudly that his son was at a British educational institution, one of the best in the country. However, he couldn’t remember which. After racking his brains, he decided to call his wife on the mobile phone. But his wife couldn’t recall the name of the elite establishment either. In desperation, the entrepreneur had only one choice: he fast-dialled his son in the United Kingdom to ask where the boy was being educated.
This is a true story, illustrating not only the Chinese affection for mobile telephones, but also their enthusiasm for a foreign education. In China, to receive your schooling or your degree at an institution in Britain, or Australia, or the United States automatically puts you into the top league. The name of the university or school is not as important as the fact that you have tasted learning outside the People’s Republic. No wonder universities from the United Kingdom are falling over one another to meet this huge demand.
Last year, the number of Chinese students in the UK reached a new record – 25,000. But there are millions of people in China now who aspire to, and receive, a university education and would leap at the chance to get a degree from the UK. In the three years between 1997 and 2000, there was remarkable growth in student numbers within China, according to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Numbers increased from 3.2 million students to a staggering seven million. (The government target is 15 million.)
Ironically, given China’s status as a Communist country, many of the new universities that are being set up to deal with this demand are private. There are 1,300 private institutions now in operation, and alliances between Chinese and foreign organisations are burgeoning.
While English educators fret about whether English people are well enough behaved, Chinese educators worry that the Chinese are too well behaved. Too dutiful, obedient, conformist, uninventive, inflexible.
Seriously, one suspects that the real product here is not just Anglosphere education, but Anglosphere education plus a bit of that Anglosphere attitude, hence the indifference concerning exactly which University their children go to. It could be a winning combination. Although I reckon word will soon get around which universities are the best.
It makes you wonder what Mao would have thought about it all. “I ordered you to have a permanent revolution and challenge all authority, but I didn’t mean this!” Attitude!
And quite aside from the impact of all this on China, there is the interesting matter of how it will affect Britain. How long before someone uses the word ‘swamped’ to describe what is happening to higher education? All those foreigners, taking our children’s places. And working too hard.
For those who missed it, Instapundit is having a go at the Chinese authorities and…Walmart. November 7th is the anniversary of arrest of Liu Di by plain-clothes police. No charges have been made and she has not been heard of for the past year. Petitions have been started, in China, with people putting their real names to them and being arrested for that themselves. This is the story:
Until the authorities tracked her down a year ago Friday, she (Liu Di) was one of the most famous Internet web masters in China. A third-year psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Ms. Liu formed an artists club, wrote absurdist essays in the style of dissident Eastern-bloc writers of the 1970s, and ran a popular web-posting site. Admirers cite her originality and humor: In one essay Liu ironically suggests all club members go to the streets to sell Marxist literature and preach Lenin’s theory, like “real Communists.” In another, she suggests everyone tell no lies for 24 hours. In a series of “confessions” she says that China’s repressive national-security laws are not good for the security of the nation.
But since Nov. 7, 2002, when plain-clothes police made a secret arrest, Liu has not been heard from. No charges have been filed; her family and friends may not visit her, sources say; and, in a well-known silencing tactic, authorities warn that it will not go well for her if foreign media are informed of her case.
It is largely the attention of the Western media and public that keeps dissidents afloat and their oppressor in some sort of check. Those who are visible beyond the barrier erected between the oppressed and the outside world tend to fare marginally better. At least they get publicity for their sacrifice and if the campaigning on their behalf is persistent enough, they may even get out of whatever hell-hole communist officials put them in. The thousands (in China probably an order of magnitude larger) ‘small’ human tragedies go unnoticed just as they did in communist Russia and Eastern Europe.
Looking back at the Cold War days it seems incomprehensible that such horrors could be tolerated next door to Western civilisation and capitalist liberal democracies. Marxism and communism – top candidates for the most barbaric and inhuman ideologies – have absolutely no redeeming features, whether in practise or in theory. Not only they create a living hell for ‘ordinary people’ but they bring destruction to those who perpetrate it. Communism, time and again, produces monstrous regimes that like Saturn devour their own offspring.
And for those who believe that letting China ‘evolve’ out of its totalitarianism is the best way forward, this conclusion is not an optimistic one.
…the Chinese security and police are regularly told to crack down. There may be exceptions, as when the daughter or son of a high party member or rich family gets in trouble; or when there are excesses of youth.
But these are exceptions. The rest – labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention – are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm.
Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves.
It is the pressure from the outside that can have the greatest impact on what happens in totalitarian regimes. Glenn Reynolds thinks that challenging Walmart is a way to increase it. Well, that’s good enough for me.
…from an Internet café in Japan to be exact. Michael Jennings is en route to Australia and stopped off at Narita International Airport long enough to blog about some very odd demands made of him before he was allowed to use the Internet.
Check out the article on White Rose.
There may be a sub-text or an agenda here (and it is the Guardian after all) but I am loss to readily identify one. Hence, it is hard to judge just how much credence to give a story like this. In its favour, it is consistent with other news emanating from China:
According to government officials, the amount of economic activity in China soared to RMB7.9 trillion (£570bn) in the first nine months of the year, putting China on course to achieve a growth rate of 8.5% for 2003 – the fastest in more than five years.
If the country can maintain this pace it will overtake Britain and France to become the world’s fourth biggest economy well before the end of 2005.
Chinese government officials? The Guardian? Oooh, my ‘Source-Warning’ indicator is blinking furiously. Still, it would not and should not be surprising that a country which has ditched socialism should outperform two countries that are still wedded to it.
Yesterday, there was an article in the tabloid section of The Times (which Samizdata does not link to, although the author of the article has also written this book on the subject), on the treatment of the Uighur people in the Xinjiang province in far western China, the point of which was that this (Muslim) ethnic minority have for a long time been treated appallingly badly by the Chinese authorities, that the world largely doesn’t know about this, and that this is bad.
This is all entirely true, and the Chinese authorities are indeed a nasty bunch of thugs, but the point I am getting to is something else. For three quarters of the way through the article I find the following statement
Behind every protest at this treatment, Chinese officials see only the sinister hand of Muslim fanatics, backed by foreigners, plotting to split the motherland. And the screw has tightened since President Bush’s declaration of a war on terror after September 11.
Is it me, or is there something deeply odd about the way this has phrased? Rather than a crackdown occurring as a consequence of September 11 itself, a dreadful atrocity caused by Muslim fundamentalist fanatics, it is somehow the consequence of the fact that President Bush and America has responded to this. (America is maybe guilty of neglect in this case, but somehow implying that it is in any way George Bush’s fault is surely stretching things somewhat). And the fact is the same organisations rooted in Saudi Arabia that funded and spread the fanaticism that led to September 11 are also doing their best to spread that same fanaticism to every Muslim in the world, and very legitimate grievances such as this one are a tremendous source of recruits. Regardless of how badly they have treated their ethnic minorities (and in this case the answer is “extremely badly”) I do understand why the Chinese are worried.
The article goes on
History shows the Uighurs to be pacific, and lax in their religious observance. No doubt there are today some religious fundamentalists inside Xinjiang. No doubt inflammatory literature, not to mention weapons, is being smggled in. Certainly there are militants (especially amongs the young urban unemployed) both inside and outside who would like to overthrow Chinese rule.
But Islam should be seen as the vehicle, not the cause, of Uighur grievances, and separatism as a mark of despair at the lack of citizens’ rights or a share in their own future
This is all largely true as well. The trouble is that it is also true about the forms of Islam traditionally practiced throughout large portions of (non Middle-Eastern) Asia. Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillippines and various other places is traditionally relatively moderate and often mixed with pre-Muslim practices. However, the flow of oil-money from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world has led to a spread of fundamentalism and terrorism to many of these places, and has made it very difficult for the opponents of such fundamentalism to speak out. Wherever there is a grievance, this money and this influence has largely had an influence akin to pouring petrol on a fire. A war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which was fighting another very legitimate grievance, somehow evolved into the Taliban.
To be truthful, the situation of the Uighurs is sufficiently wretched that not much will make their situation better short of the complete collapse of the People’s Republic of China. The developed world’s neglect of this particular situation is certainly less than admirable. But a further spread of Islamic fundamentalism to that part of the world may well make it worse, and certainly won’t make it better. And a great many things we can do to minimise that spread are, in my opinion, worth it. And given that the fundamentalism has spread and is spreading mostly from Saudi Arabia, anything that can be done to reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabia and anything that can be done to isolate Saudi Arabia is likely worth it, including the invasion of and occupation of Iraq.
Communist leaders plan to amend China’s constitution to formally enshrine the ideology of Jiang Zemin, the recently retired leader who invited capitalists to join the Communist Party. Despite sweeping economic and social changes, the political status of China’s entrepreneurs is still ambiguous.
There have been no details of the possible changes although foreign analysts say they include the communist era’s first guarantee of property rights. Certain amendments are still needed to promote economic and social development, said the party newspaper People’s Daily. It said the changes were meant to cope with accelerating globalization and advances in science and technology.
Jiang’s theory, the awkwardly named “Three Represents,” calls for the 67 million-member party to embrace capitalists, updating its traditional role as a “vanguard of the working class” and for the constitution to formally uphold property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs.
As someone who has more than passing acquaintance with communism, I see this is as a big change indeed. Even under most dire oppression you cannot entirely stop people exchanging goods and services. And so it was in the countries of the former Communist bloc, although the private sector was not officially recognised, there were shades of grey in the ‘socialist worker economy’. Former Yugoslavia, for example, ventured furthest in its recognition of private enterprise and some semblance of property rights and in return relatively prospered. Also in practice, Poland and Hungary were kinder to their small landowners and tradesmen than the communist ideologues allowed.
Nevertheless, there was no question of formally acknowledging property rights and any form of private enterprise by governments whose grasp of economics was based entirely on Marxism. It was one thing to tolerate existence of non-state markets and even benefit from them, but changing their opposition to individual’s property rights, so firmly embedded in political systems that were barely surviving, would have been a political, ideological and social suicide. (As a matter of fact, not changing it amounted to the same, just by other means: No, no, no, comrade, let’s not play with this (freedom of the press, speech, travel, association, trade, property rights etc) it has sharp edges and will cut your wrists, let’s just circle round the drain together, holding hands and singing the Internationale…)
China’s development has been very different to that of Eastern Europe, politically and economically, although both were waving the Red Flag. The proposed change to the China’s constitution may amount to a symbolic amendment given that China’s entrepreneurs have driven its two-decade-old economic boom. But then, symbols can be very powerful.
China is becoming an increasingly interesting country as far as I am concerned. That is not because I know anything about it. On the contrary, it is because I know so little about it beyond the conventional impressions of it being big, populous and mysterious.
But I keep running across snippets of news that provide some tantalising insights into the way that country appears to be going. This from the Economist:
WITH an increasingly sophisticated and wealthy customer base, Chinese consumer-goods makers are starting to pay attention to brand-building. The smartest are moving beyond simple product ads to marketing an entire lifestyle. In an echo of Nike’s famous “Just do it” campaign, Li-Ning, the largest producer in China’s sportswear market, has just launched an advertising blitz under the mottos “Goodbye” and “Anything is possible”. Costing 15m yuan ($1.8m), eight times the company’s usual ad spend, it taps into the Chinese belief that they can safely wave goodbye to their hard lives of the past, and that the future is filled with unlimited opportunities.
See, I find reports like this fascinating not least because all this entrepreneurial dash is happening in a country which is supposed to be communist. Well, clearly it is not communist. In fact, if the British Labour Party were in charge of China they would probably be looking into ways of trying to put a stop to this kind of thing.
I wonder if the implication in the article is really true? Is China awash with people who believe that ‘the future is filled with unlimited opportunities’? If so then that bodes well for China despite their being saddled with a repressive and ferociously authoritarian government. Who knows if the post-communist hacks that still run the place will be able to maintain their vice-like grip in the hurricane of anarchic forces that all this capitalism and prosperity will eventually unleash.
For reasons I cannot articulate to any satisfactory degree, I believe that China will impact upon the rest of the world in a major way and, possibly, quite soon. Whether this impact will be for good or for ill I cannot say but I do regard the emergence of all this ‘can-do’ spirit to be rather encouraging. After all, political regimes come and go and none of them last forever. The people who are most likely to dictate the shape of the future are the ones who believe that the future is filled with unlimited opportunities.
I wonder if there could be more to this civil unrest in Hong Kong than at first meets the eye? I only say that because what started out as a ‘people power’ mass protest at proposed anti-subversion laws has caused not just the Hong Kong government to backpeddle furiously but it also appears to be tightening a few sphincters on the Chinese mainland as well:
In a sign of China’s deep concern about the situation, pro-Beijing politicians said a team of middle-ranking mainland officials had arrived in the territory to assess developments.
A BBC correspondent says the officials are reported to have been present at Wednesday night’s protest, which saw tens of thousands of people gather outside the territory’s legislative council.
No great leaps of imagination are required to here. The nabobs are going to be reporting back to the poobahs on just how deep this river of discontent runs and the poobahs are going to lose a few nights sleep worrying whether all this uppityness could spread to the mainland. Well, you never know.
On the face of it, it seems unlikely that this show of bolshiness in Hong Kong could threaten the regime in China itself if only because, to outsiders, the old commie apparatchicks appear to have the country in such an iron grip. But the truth is that all authoritarian regimes are shot through with insecurity. They know only too well that their power rests solely on their monopoly of and willingness to use lethal force. But if that force ever fails, even once, then the whole house of cards comes down. → Continue reading: A little trouble in big China
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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