Oh, to be a fly on the wall to hear what Chinese officials want in return for saving the euro.
Yes, President Nicolas Sarkozy, we will take France’s Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre as collateral. The Mona Lisa will look grand hanging in Beijing. Toss in the Champs-Elysees and Louis Vuitton’s flagship store and we’ll consider swapping more of our $3.2 trillion of reserves for your bonds.
Hi, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Aside from invitations to your bunga-bunga parties, we would be happy with Italy’s Roman Forum, Venice and those Tuscan vineyards of which our nouveau riche are so fond. Keep the leaning Tower of Pisa — we’re leaning toward the Eiffel Tower. At least it’s straight.
Greece’s Acropolis, Ireland’s Ring of Kerry, Spanish cities like Bilbao, a Portuguese castle or two, Finland’s Nokia Oyj and Germany’s Mercedes-Benz brand could end up in China’s shopping cart. Or Beijing could resist instant European gratification and focus on the real prize: acceptance of China as a market economy long before it’s deserved.
It’s a bigger payoff than meets the eye. By bailing out the euro zone, China would silence some critics on the yuan, trade practices, human rights, climate change, territorial disputes, intellectual-property rights and its support of dodgy regimes from Sudan to Burma. Talk about money well spent as China gears up for a major leadership shift in 2012 amid increasingly unsettling global trends.
Buying Europe’s vote won’t cost China very much, but the price may be much greater for the future of the world financial system. It’s no wonder Sarkozy is under fire from opposition leaders for so publicly seeking China’s help.
“It’s shocking,” Martine Aubry, general secretary of the Socialist Party, told Journal du Dimanche. “The Europeans, by turning to the Chinese, are showing their weakness. How will Europe be able to ask China to stop undervaluing its currency or to accept reciprocal commercial accords?”
Consider what Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in September: “We have on many occasions expressed our readiness to extend a helping hand, and our readiness to increase our investment in Europe.” At the same time, Wen said, “they should recognize China’s full market-economy status” before the 2016 deadline set by the World Trade Organization. “To show one’s sincerity on this issue a few years ahead of that time is the way a friend treats another friend.”
Playing the friend card has gotten China further than many officials in Washington realize. While the United States was invading Iraq, squandering resources and alienating allies in the 2000s, China was spreading its largesse everywhere. From Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia, there has rarely been a road, bridge, port, dam or pipeline project that China won’t finance.
China has quietly reduced the list of governments that recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. It won significant concessions from nations like the Philippines, which boycotted the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Last month, South Africa made it impossible for the Dalai Lama to attend Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday celebration. It wouldn’t be because South Africa was deferring to the wishes of its benefactors in Beijing, would it?
China’s ability to go its own way will only increase if one of the world’s three main currencies is beholden to it. That’s exactly where we’re heading as Europe so actively seeks Chinese lifelines. Get ready for Russian overtures, too. This week, the Kremlin’s top economic adviser said Russia would make a “few billion dollars” available to help the euro.
China would surely counter that it’s just being a good global citizen. What the world needs, though, isn’t China the banker or shareholder. It needs China the stakeholder. China is a global leader and must accept the responsibility that comes with that status. The world needs China to be a constructive steward of an international system that has lost its way.
A more helpful step would be to let the yuan’s value rise. Not because the United States says it should, but because it would be in the best interest of China — a weak yuan is adding to overheating risks — and developing Asia, too.
China is focused on raising its 1.3 billion people out of poverty. The fact is, though, that it is doing so at the expense of the rest of Asia. Officials in Jakarta, Manila and Hanoi are feeling the pressure as rabid competition from China undermines living standards.
When other countries criticize China, it reflexively defends all policy as domestic matters that are off-limits to outside scrutiny. That may be true of China’s aggressive Internet-censorship tactics. It’s not true when China’s priorities on everything from trade to piracy to finance to pollution to North Korea make international cooperation more unwieldy than ever.
In the long run, handing over the Mona Lisa makes more sense than the West’s growing indebtedness to an economic giant intent on relations where benefits flow in just one direction.
By William Pesek Bloomberg View columnist.
The recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned political activist and intellectual Liu Xiaobo, combined with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s speeches over the past few months calling for political reform, have set off a renewed interest in where China is headed politically.
Many China-watchers and Western governments hope China would become a liberal democracy.
Wen has been speaking of political system reform, the Chinese phrase for which was first used by the late Deng Xiaoping in 1986.
Deng believed that political reform should accompany economic reform, but he never had the chance to articulate the substance of such political reform.
The Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent crackdown in 1989 decisively changed the course of political reform in China.
As a result, non-economic reforms post-Tiananmen have focused on increasing administrative capacity and accountability.
Wen has been somewhat more forthcoming with his thoughts about political reform.
While his calls for political reform are noble, it is difficult to define whether his words signify a departure from past political reform, and more importantly, what his words mean within a government where it is more often what is not said that matters most.
Recent commentary on Wen’s calls ignore the fact that many ordinary Chinese people are simply uninterested in politics, for three reasons.
First, there is the uniquely Chinese social contract between the government and its people.
As long as people can strive to buy their own flat, a BMW and a Louis Vuitton handbag, the government has their support.
It’s a social contract built on attaining material wealth through continued economic growth or the ability to realize the “Chinese dream.”
The government exists to provide a means to achieve this material wealth.
When growth threatens to falter, the government takes any and all steps to put it back on track.
This social contract has reoriented the population’s focus from seeking political ideals through reform to issues of consumption and consumerism.
The government is under no pressure at the moment to undertake any political reform deemed unnecessary to uphold this contract.
Second, the Chinese government has managed to depoliticize the majority of the population.
A large number of Chinese people find politics to be uninteresting and express bemusement at how consumed Westerners are with politics.
Many do not find political reform in the vein of liberal democracy to be relevant to their economic livelihood.
The third factor is closely tied to the second, which is the 1989 Tiananmen protests and subsequent crackdown on the student-led movement.
Tiananmen was a fulcrum for political reform in China; if successful it could have placed China on a very different political trajectory.
Instead the government crushed the movement, either arresting the intellectuals who took part like Liu Xiaobo or forcing them to scatter around the world.
In its wake, a generation of Chinese intellectuals emerged who are extremely proud of China’s rise as a global superpower.
Any concerns that China’s authoritarian regime is holding the country back has been supplanted with strong support for the government and its accomplishments.
Young people today know nothing about Tiananmen or what the students were asking for in their protests, except for what might be whispered in passing by those who remember.
The lack of widespread knowledge about Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize, let alone who he is, should remind China-watchers how uninformed most of the population really is.
The long-term effect of Tiananmen was the loss of a voice of a generation of intellectuals who could have risen to the ranks of power and primed the population for significant political reform.
Any talk of political reform is nothing more than a shibboleth designed to appease those both inside and outside China who cling to the hope that liberal democracy will come to China sooner rather than later.
It is easy for Wen to talk of a government that should be bound by its laws and constitution, but it should not be lost on China-watchers that most Chinese know little about their rights supposedly enshrined in the Chinese constitution or are even aware of recent current events affecting their country.
The government’s string of successes have left the majority of the people more inclined than ever to support the current regime and less willing to engage in the boring talk of political reform.
Until the majority of Chinese people care enough to alter their social contract to encompass Western-style political reform, such talk will remain at best a theoretical tug-of-war played out behind the scenes at the highest echelons of government.
Peter M. Friedman is a lawyer in New York who recently returned from teaching at Linyi Normal University in Linyi, China.
BEIJING — Chinese court officials say they are struggling to handle a surging number of labor dispute cases that have arisen in part because of the global financial crisis, according to a report on Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper.
The number of labor disputes brought to court also has grown as the Chinese government has generally sought to improve workplace conditions and make workers more aware of their rights. A rash of factory strikes this year, most notably at plants that make parts for Japanese automobile companies, has cast a spotlight on working conditions in manufacturing hubs along the coastal provinces.
China Daily reported Wednesday that statistics from the Supreme People’s Court showed 295,000 labor dispute cases brought to court in 2008, an increase of 95 percent from the previous year. That statistic is slightly higher than the 280,000 that Chinese news organizations had previously reported.
The figure in 2009 was 318,600, and it was 207,400 in the first eight months of this year.
In early 2008, the Chinese government enacted two laws — the Labor Contract Law and the Law on Mediation and Arbitration of Labor Disputes — that did much to raise worker awareness, even if strict enforcement was lacking, scholars of Chinese labor issues said. The first law tries to guarantee contracts for full-time workers, while the second law is intended to streamline the system of arbitration and lawsuits.
In late 2008, many low-margin manufacturing companies in the coastal provinces shut down. Provincial governments had wanted to clear out some of these companies anyway, and their demise was accelerated by the global financial crisis, which had dealt a blow to exports from China. The wave of factory shutdowns, coupled with rising worker awareness from the laws enacted that year, led to the surge in labor dispute cases.
Foreign scholars of Chinese labor law say the Chinese government could help stem the flood in court cases by allowing truly independent labor unions that could better address worker grievances. At the moment, only the government-run union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which has more than 170 million members, is permitted. The union says it represents workers, but it has close ties with management.
China Daily reported that on Tuesday the Supreme People’s Court issued its third judicial interpretation since 2008 about hearing labor dispute cases in order to try to “better safeguard workers’ rights and to balance the bilateral interests of the employers and employees.”
The interpretation gives several conditions under which courts must accept labor lawsuits. These include when a worker does not receive proper social insurance and asks for compensation, when disputes arise after the restructuring of a company and when an employee demands overtime pay that is due.
The interpretation also tries to clarify who can be sued in disputes in which employees are hired by middleman-type labor agencies to do work for a company. New York Times
EACH year, the human rights report on China makes gloomy reading. Each year, we are told "the government's human rights record remained poor" and, not infrequently, that the situation had deteriorated.
Next year, hopefully, there will be at least one bright spot. This is because China has just announced that evidence obtained through torture will no longer be admissible in court cases, especially in death-penalty cases.
Previously, torture was supposedly illegal but evidence obtained through duress was routinely accepted so there was little reason for the police to stay their hand in order to obtain confessions and to force reluctant witnesses to provide the required statements.
Actually, China, in theory, outlawed torture in 1996. But its definition of illegal acts was so narrow that interrogators could employ a wide range of techniques that contravened standards set by the United Nations.
Manfred Nowak, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, visited China in 2005 and was allowed to go to prisons, detention centres and "re-education through labour" camps in Beijing as well as Tibet and Xinjiang.
He said he observed a "palpable level of fear and self-censorship" among the prisoners that he had not seen in other countries.
Nowak said he "believes the practice of torture, though on the decline -- particularly in the urban areas -- remains widespread in China".
This finding was immediately rejected by China, which pointed out that Nowak had only been to three cities -- Beijing, Lhasa (the Tibetan capital) and Urumqi in Xinjiang.
However, the new regulations on the inadmissibility of evidence obtained through torture implicitly acknowledge that torture remains a serious problem in China.
Two new rules on evidence were jointly issued by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Justice.
The rules relate to evidence review in death-sentence cases and to excluding illegal evidence in criminal cases.
The new rules were issued in the aftermath of widespread indignation over disclosure of a murder conviction in Henan province where the alleged murderer, Zhao Zuohai, had spent 11 years in prison before the supposed murder victim, Zhao Zhenshang, showed up alive and well.
The murder suspect said he was tortured into confessing to a non-existent murder.
It turned out that the two men had had a fight in 1997 during which Zuohai was struck on the head.
The other man then ran away for fear of prosecution and remained away for 11 years.
After Zuohai went to prison, his wife remarried and two of his children were adopted by the new husband.
A Henan court has designated May 9 -- the day Zuohai was released -- as "Wrongful Conviction Warning Day" for the province. The warning should not be confined to Henan but given to judges across the country.
The Zhao Zuohai case was not the first time something like this had happened. In 2005, another man, who had confessed to killing his wife, was released when she returned home after 11 years. She had run away with another man.
In both cases, police had misidentified a body.
In a sense, the men in these two cases were fortunate. At least, they were still alive when exonerated. Others wrongfully convicted were executed before the mistakes were discovered.
That is why China is now putting special emphasis on death-penalty cases. The country executes more people a year than the rest of the world combined.
The new rules mark a significant step forward both for the legal system and for the protection of human rights. Making prosecutors responsible for showing that evidence used was not obtained illegally is a change in the legal mindset.
It means that instead of the emphasis on not allowing the guilty to escape punishment, the new thinking is not to allow innocent people to be convicted. However, it remains to be seen how these new rules are applied.
Chinese law books -- not to say the Chinese constitution -- are full of nice-sounding laws that are only selectively applied.
Moreover, the Chinese legal system still has a long way to go. For example, the basic right of each defendant to a lawyer has yet to be recognised.
And, of course, as long as judges work under the leadership of the Communist Party, there will be no independent judiciary and no true rule of law.
But the vast majority of cases are not political, so the credible dispensing of justice by courts in nonpolitical cases would be a big step forward. Frank Ching for the New Straits Times
