Tag: PRC

Categories
Conflict & disaster Liberty

[2032] Of guarded salutation to Turkey

In times when China is growing ever influential with other governments become increasingly reluctant to criticize the Dragon, it is good to know that someone has the courage to stand up and go against the wave. In response to the situation in Xinjiang where a racial riot between Uighur minority and Han majority that caused death on both sides happened, Turkey accused China of committing genocide against the minority.[1]

Turkey’s accusation of genocide is a tad too dramatic however. Furthermore, given Turkey’s history, Turkey might not have the moral authority to make that accusation, regardless the truth of the allegation.

That however does not negate the fact that Turkey’s criticism of China is appropriate at this juncture. What happened and is happening in Xinjiang cannot be left ignored by the world. Turkey went to keep the issue from dying, as China would want it.

If Turkey had remained silenced, China would remain relatively free from criticism from various governments. That would continue to create a suffocating momentum that gradually but ominously creates an environment where China is free from criticism. Continous unadmonished behavior of China may give it the idea that as long as it is an internal matter, it could do whatever it like. That is clearly false.

A break of that trend is important to demonstrate how that is false. Turkey broke it and that is why I salute Turkey.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — The comment by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that Chinese policy in Xinjiang was ”like a genocide” and that China should ”abandon its policy of assimilation,” will ring in Beijing ears for a long time. However excessive his choice of words, Mr. Erdogan was in effect speaking for all Turkic people from the Mediterranean to central China. [The Echoes of Xinjiang. Philip Bowring. New York Times. July 14 2009]

Categories
Economics

[1984] Of inverse relations between safety net and savings

If you think of the exports as the first link in the causal chain, the resulting pile of Chinese savings is the second. Much of this savings has been by the corporate sector, which is subsidized by the government in all sorts of ways (an undervalued currency, low interest rates, cheap energy). The economic boom brought big profits, and companies held on to much of them. The government has also increased its savings in this decade by collecting more taxes and, until the financial crisis, running a budget surplus. And households increased their own savings in the 1990s, in reaction to the dismantling of many bloated state-run companies and the cradle-to-grave benefits, known as the ”iron rice bowl,” they once provided to their workers. When a Chinese citizen is rushed to the hospital after a car accident today, the first stop for the victim’s family is often the cashier’s window. Many hospitals won’t admit patients until they have paid, and many families have no health insurance. Instead, they insure themselves, by saving. [Will China still bankroll us? David Leonhardt. New York Times. May 13 2009]

Leonhardt’s article suggests that lack of social safety net encourages saving. It makes sense.

The reversed relation is interesting: does availability of safety net discourage savings?

Indirectly, this asks how does that affect consumption? Does it increase consumption?

Implicitly, this may suggest that people may be less judicious with their consumption and more happily go into debt to spend with the presence of safety net. This is so when one contrasts the situations without social safety net in China and the availability of one in the United States as described by Leonhardt; massive savings in the former and large debt in the former on individual level, on average.

I really think I want to explore this when I finally get back to school. Ah, approximately 72 days before school begins. I just cannot wait.

Categories
Humor Liberty

[1944] Of Cao Ni Ma!

Though old, I cannot get the rhythm out of my mind.

Context is of course important:

The Grass Mud Horse — Cao Ni Ma — is a Chinese Internet meme widely used as symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China. It is one of the 10 mythical creatures, and since an article about it was created on Baidu Baike, it has become a cult phenomenon on the internet in China through chat, forums. Videos, cartoons and merchandise of this animal, which apparently resembles the alpaca, and has since received world-wide press attention. [Grass Mud Horse. Wikipedia. Assessed April 6 2009]

Categories
Liberty

[1894] Of the flaw of forced liberation

It is likely for those supportive of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to call the operation an act of liberation. Appearing on NBC’s ”Meet the Press” hosted by Tim Russert, former US Vice-President Dick Cheney confidently postulated that Iraqis would greet the US military as liberators. Not to deny that there were Iraqis who celebrated the fall of Saddam Hussein the dictator, the days, months and years that followed greeted the invading force with bullets and bombs instead of flowers.

He said: ”Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Four days later, the US troops with its Coalition of the Willing began what they would identify as the liberation of Iraq.

The former vice-president and many supportive of the war from the beginning were not alone in tricking themselves into believing that their actions would be appreciated by the invaded. Farther to the east, Tibetan legislators loyal to the central government of the People’s Republic of China just last month declared March 28 as an annual holiday in Tibet. Known as Serfs’ Emancipation Day, it is designed to celebrate the official narrative of the central government of the PRC.

It is an act of pretension equivalent to Cheney’s.

It was 50 years ago on that day that the independent government of Tibet fled the country after a failed rebellion against the occupying PRC force. It was already nine years since the communist PRC first invaded Tibet in 1950 since effective Tibetan independence decades ago.

The invasion was predicated on a pillar: Tibet has always been part of China. To morally support the invasion if the idea of first rationale is unpalatable, the PRC claimed that it was freeing Tibetan serfs from a feudalistic system practiced there.

These two assertions are controversial. Here today in light of the newly announced Serfs’ Emancipation Day, the claim of liberation requires attention.

For a country whose liberty has never been its strong point, the claim of liberation is highly inappropriate. What is the value of such liberation when it led to another kind of occupation? What is the value of forced freedom?

There is a political cartoon first published at the height of the Bush administration. I feel that the author wanted to paint the usefulness of exporting freedom and democracy to the Middle East. In it, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ran a plebiscite among Arabs. While she proudly witnessed the Arabs finally practicing democracy and free choice, to her great surprise she learned that the Arabs voted to kick the US out of the Middle East and democratically rejected democracy. The cartoon is of course filled with hyperbole but the message is clear.

Societies in the Middle East are undoubtedly unfree. Those societies and especially those holding the levers of powers maintaining the status quo there deserve criticism. Nevertheless before the societies can be free, individuals in those societies have to yearn to be free first. What is the point of forcefully doing away with an unfree societal structure when the majority of individuals in those societies after that waste no time in returning to the old ways of disrespecting individual liberty?

For a society to be truly free, freedom has to be born organically and not introduced exogenously through force. Freedom has to be freely and sincerely embraced before true change towards a freer society can happen. A society forced to be free would become an unsustainable society that would only regress farther away towards a coercive top-down approach, making the arduous journey towards a free society harder than it should be.

Iraq today is not free but occupied. That is why there is opposition in Iraq. The same goes with Tibet. The truth is that the story in Tibet is a story of occupation. Freedom shoved down a person’s throat is no freedom at all. To say otherwise is an attempt at dishonesty.

And surely, the PRC’s claim of serfs’ liberation in Tibet itself is not consistent with its own previous effort at collective farming and people’s communes. Such systems tied individuals to the land: that is unarguably serfdom.

The many inconsistencies are observable. Forced liberation is an oxymoron and the Serfs’ Emancipation Day is a celebration to legitimize illegal occupation of Tibet.

Many Tibetans went out and voiced what they really think of the liberation on March 28, 2008. That day is instructive of how much freedom Tibetans have in a liberated Tibet. Not only has the right to self-determination has always been denied, freedom of expression was brutally suppressed. Those who care would remember that Tibetans peacefully took to the street last year to exercise their inalienable right to freedom of expression to remember the events of 1959. Unfortunately, the desire for freedom of expression on one side and the effort to contain it on the other side ended in a deadly riot.

For many Malaysians, we were lucky to have the courage to exercise our freedom in the face of state power and then coming out on top. For many Tibetans, they do not share this sweet liberty. The suffocating grip on liberty was not loosen but tightened. They have a long way to go, just like Palestinians who wish only to be free.

As the inaugural oxymoron day approaches, already the PRC authority in Tibet is mindful of last year’s event. At this very moment, homes, businesses and other places are being raided in the name of fighting crime. In reality, it is an act of intimidation.

That is the reality of a supposedly liberated Tibet.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

First published in The Malaysian Insider on February 2 2009.

Categories
Environment Liberty Politics & government

[1739] Of Beijingoist myths

The Beijing Olympics is coming up and it is time to break some myths.

Those who have argued for the beneficial effect of the Olympics on China have made three specific claims, none of which holds water. First, Chinese officials themselves said the games would bring human-rights improvements. The opposite is true. China’s people are far freer now than they were 30, 20 or even 10 years ago. The party has extricated itself from big parts of their lives, and relative wealth has broadened horizons. But that is not thanks to the Olympics, which have brought more repression. To build state-of-the-art facilities for the games, untold numbers of people were forced to move. Anxious to prevent protests that might steal headlines from the glories of Chinese modernist architecture or athletic prowess, the authorities have hounded dissidents with more than usual vigour. And there are anyway clear limits to the march of freedom in China; although personal and economic freedoms have multiplied, political freedoms have been disappointingly constrained since Hu Jintao became president in 2003.

Second, these would be the first ”green” Olympics, spurring a badly needed effort to clean up Beijing and other Olympic venues. This was always a ludicrous claim. Heroic efforts to remove toxic algae blooms from the rowing course do not amount to a new environmentalism. The jury is still out on whether Beijing will manage to produce air sufficiently breathable for runners safely to complete a marathon. If it does, it will not have been because of any Olympic-related change of course. Rather it will be the result of desperate measures introduced in recent weeks: production cuts by polluting industries, or simply closing them down; and the banning from the road of half of Beijing’s cars.

The third boast was not one you would ever hear from the lips of Chinese diplomats. A belief in the inviolability of Chinese sovereignty is often not just their cardinal principle, but their only one. Yet some foreigners claimed that the Olympics would make Chinese foreign policy more biddable. Western officials have been quick to talk up China’s alleged helpfulness: in persuading North Korea at least to talk about disarming; in cajoling the generals running Myanmar into letting in the odd envoy from the United Nations; in trying to coax the government of Sudan away from a policy of genocide. But last month China still vetoed United Nations sanctions against Zimbabwe; it wants a UN vote to stop action in the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir.

China’s leaders remain irrevocably wedded to the principle of ”non-interference” in a country’s internal affairs. In so far as China itself is concerned, they seem to have the backing of large numbers of their own people. The Olympics are taking place against the backdrop of the rise of a virulently assertive strain of Chinese nationalism—seen most vividly in the fury at foreign coverage of the riots in Tibet, and at the protests that greeted the Olympic-torch relay in some Western cities.

And all that was before the games themselves begin. Orwell described international sport as ”mimic warfare”. That is of course infinitely preferable to the real thing, and there is nothing wrong in China’s people taking pride in either a diplomatic triumph, if that is how the games turn out, or a sporting one (a better bet). But there is a danger. Having dumped its ideology, the Communist Party now stakes its survival and legitimacy on tight political control, economic advance and nationalist pride. The problem with nationalism is that it thrives on competition—and all too often needs an enemy. [China’s dash for freedom. The Economist. July 31 2008]