China really doesn't like the Populist uprisings in the Middle East. Today a state run newspaper blasted the protests:
A Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper on Saturday attacked anti-government protest movements in the Middle East and dismissed the possibility of something similar happening in China.
Such movements have brought nothing but chaos and misery to their countries' citizens and are engineered by a small number of people using the Internet to organize illegal meetings, the Beijing Daily, published by the city's party committee, said in a front-page editorial.
"The vast majority of the people are strongly dissatisfied (with the protests), so the performance by the minority becomes a self-delusional ruckus," the newspaper said.
The editorial appeared amid anonymous calls posted on the Internet for Middle East-inspired protests in dozens of Chinese cities the past two Sunday afternoons.
While drawing few outright demonstrators, the appeals have deeply unnerved authorities constantly on guard for any sign of challenges to Communist rule. Police and security agents shooed away onlookers and assaulted and detained journalists who turned up at the designated protest sites in Beijing and Shanghai.
Foreign reporters have been repeatedly warned to stay away from the sites this weekend and threatened with unspecified consequences if they disobey.
China's censors have carefully shaped local coverage of the protests in the Middle East to discourage Chinese citizens from drawing inspiration from them. State media emphasize the protests' negative effects on the societies and economies of the countries involved and give prominent coverage to the woes of Chinese workers evacuated from Libya and elsewhere.
China is also denouncing the U.S. for any Middle East intervention:
China opposes the intervention by foreign forces in the unrest in the Middle East and relevant missions should be led by the United Nations, a Chinese spokesman said Saturday.
A similar unrest in China is "preposterous and unrealistic", said Zhao Qizheng, spokesman for China's top advisory body which is convening its annual session in Beijing.
There would not be such a situation in China, added Zhao, former head of the Information Office of the State Council, China's Cabinet.
With all of the political unrest spreading, China has been ready and waiting. First China claimed their mercantilism was to calm social unrest:
Fighting inflation is a priority for China and the government must ward off threats to social stability stemming from rapid price increases and pressure to raise the value of the yuan, Premier Wen Jiabao said on Sunday.
China also claims their currency manipulation is some sort of social policy:
Wen also said that maintaining social stability was central to the country's foreign exchange policy, and required a cautious approach to increasing the value of the yuan.
China would adjust exchange rate police "in a prudent, step-by-step, gradual way, so that our businesses can steadily adapt and overall social stability is maintained," he said.
China has about 242 million rural residents who work off the farm, and about 153 million of them are migrants who work outside their home towns, including tens of millions in export zones making cheap goods for the rest of the world.
Additionally China has claims they will redistribute their ill-gotten economic gains to the lower and middle income classes through tax relief (where have we seen this phrase before?).
Food prices rose 10.3% in China recently. Their energy consumption rose 5.9% while their economy grows at a double digit pace.
China increased energy consumption by 5.9 percent last year as factories ramped up production to fuel the world’s fastest-growing major economy, data from the National Bureau of Statistics show.
Energy use climbed to 3.25 billion metric tons of coal equivalent in 2010, the bureau said in a statement on its website today. Consumption fell 4.01 percent per unit of gross domestic product, according to the bureau.
Economic growth accelerated to 10.3 percent in 2010, the fastest pace in three years, as industrial production rose, boosting demand for fuel and electricity. Crude oil consumption expanded 12.9 percent last year while power use gained 13.1 percent, according to the bureau.
Natural gas demand rose 18.2 percent and coal consumption gained 5.3 percent, the bureau said.
Watch the propaganda from the Chinese government claiming to help the people in this regurgitated press release news report. Earlier this week China cracked down on reporters trying to show social unrest.
Yet China seems to be repressing their people at any sign of protest:
Unrest in China is on the rise. “Mass incidents,” everything from strikes to riots and demonstrations, doubled from 2006, rising to at least 180,000 cases in 2010, Sun Liping, a professor of sociology at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, the nation’s top academic institution, said in a Feb. 25 article in the Economic Observer.
U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman said in a statement today that foreign journalists had been “illegally detained or harassed as they attempted to do their jobs” and that this type of behavior was “unacceptable and deeply disturbing.”
This article shows how to block a rally in China:
Let us be clear from the start: this is not a blog post about a would-be revolution.
It’s about the demonstration of state power in a police state.
Wordpress is reporting their recent dDoS cyber attacks are coming from China and are probably politically motivated since Wordpress is a popular blogging platform. The Wall Street Journal reports China's biggest military expenditure is Internal Security:
China projected bigger spending on internal security than on defense in 2011–after spending more last year too–as the government tightens physical and technological controls to quash calls for a “Jasmine Revolution” like the one shaking the Arab world.
On the first day of the annual meeting of China’s legislature, a Finance Ministry budget report showed that actual spending on law and order last year was 548.6 billion yuan ($83.5 billion), slightly more than what was budgeted for the year.
That compared with officially reported military expenditure of 533.5 billion yuan ($81.2 billion) in 2010.
The same report showed that spending this year on police, state security, armed civil militia, courts and jails would total 624.4 billion yuan ($95 billion), an increase of 13.8% over 2010.
China’s 2011 military budget, by comparison, is 601.1 billion ($91.5 billion), representing a rise of 12.7% over last year, a government spokesman announced Friday.
The GINI coefficient is now at 0.5 and China's wealth inequality reviles Africa. Only 6% of those living in China say they are happy.
Below is raw video from the Associated Press showing the police state of China in action:
U.S. multinationals use China as their cheap labor pool and we cannot even get this administration to confront China on currency manipulation. Due to the power of U.S. multinationals offshore outsourcing American jobs to China, don't expect any support for the people inside China on human rights and social issues anytime soon.
Comments
Is social stability a priority?
Yes, Premier Wen Jiabao is, at best, a cold fish.
No hint of mercy in those cold calculating eyes ...
On the other hand, Wen appears to be sane in his remarks. At the recent March 4 opening of the National People's Congress in Beijing, Wen appeals for the support of the people based on recognition of a need for social stability.
Following Robert Oak, we could interpret Wen's remarks as the Communist Party's attempt to justify China's mercantilist policies. But does the P.R.C. really NEED to justify their wildly successful participation in a neo-mercantilist world-system to the people of China? I don't think so.
According to BBC:
"China must ensure social stability by reducing inflation and corruption, Premier Wen Jiabao has told the parliament's annual session."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12654931
If anything, what Wen is seeking to justify to the people is the political corruption that exists in China -- otherwise, Wen has nothing that needs justified! He is also, apparently, preparing the people for measures to bring the wild economic growth under control and assuring the people at the bottom that they will not be the ones asked to make the sacrifices.
Far from announcing cuts in egalitarian social safety nets, Wen announced increases in subsidies to farmers and the urban poor.
I am interested in the contrast between China and the United States.
In China, there doesn't appear to be any concern about 'balancing the budget' or eliminating government regulation. We hear no clamor for 'whatever it takes' to unleash an economic engine of unrestrained growth.
Far from denouncing the evils of government interference in market mechanisms, Wen announced measures to "firmly curb the excessively rapid rise of housing prices in some cities."
COMPARING U.S. AND CHINA:
BBC quotes Wen, as follows:
"We must make improving the people's lives a pivot linking reform, development and stability... and make sure people are content with their lives and jobs, society is tranquil and orderly and the country enjoys long-term peace and stability."
Wen sounds like a politician, yes, but I wonder why the U.S. and the P.R.C. appear not only to be heading in opposite directions as to financial soundness and sustainable trade balances but also as to national popular understandings of national goals. Conventional wisdom will opine: "What can you expect? -- we are at opposite points in some kind of cyclic system." No doubt, but how else can we realistically describe this other than as China UP, America DOWN?
I cite as my evidence the ubiquitous investment advice throughout 2010 to invest your $US .... in China!
U.S.-based investors have themselves been making the comparison clear. Whatever the political rhetoric may be, votes with dollars speak unambiguously.
Here in the U.S., media and politicians alike appear never to have heard the term 'social stability'. Like cheap gasoline, social stability is something we take for granted ... a corollary of the revealed doctrine of American exceptionalism. In public at least, we seem to have an aversion to the very words "social instability" ... even though that may well be the best possible descriptor of what we are looking at for the foreseeable future.
Social stability or instability is discussed, if at all, in religious terms, with social stability no more intertwined with national economic policy than is global warming. Yet, all the media and the political elite appear to take for granted the idea that governmental policy -- and nothing else -- can and must take responsibility for unprecedented rapid economic growth throughout the country over the next few years. The only question is how to go about it -- with governmental action or with governmental inaction.
For example, Joel Kotkin writing at forbes.com in late 2009, deplores "our Euro President" and identifies Obama with a European (and decidedly unAmerican) craving for "peacefulness and social stability above all else."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/12/barack-obama-nobel-peace-prize-europe-o...
What then is suggested as our SuperAmerican priority? Kotkin is clear about that: "for America, with its growing workforce and population, slow economic growth simply is not socially sustainable." Ir is remarkable that the basic economic-political approach of an arch-critic of Obama is no different than that of the President!
None of them -- neither Republicans nor Democrats -- have an inkling of sane monetarist policy! And as for something like a VAT or the dread T word ... forgeddaboudit! Oh yes, we can discuss such radical solutions as an absolute gold standard ... but questioning the functionality, in human terms, of the WTO system of trade or the IMF system of currency exchange ... heavens-to-betsy, no!
SUMMARY: The P.R.C. embraces classical monetarist policy, controlled growth and regulation of financial excess, while the U.S. embraces a desperate Keynesian policy (heedless of the global neo-mercantilist environment), desperate pursuit of growth (by way of voodoo economics) and mulish refusal to consider reigning in of obvious financial excesses (such as markets based on derivatives).
WHAT ARE OUR VALUES HERE IN THE HOMELAND?
Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein is thought of as the originator of world-system theory. Early in 2001, well before the 9-11 events, at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Wallerstein predicted 60 years of global social instability.
On March 1, Wallerstein published Commentary 300 on "The Wind of Change -- in the Arab World and Beyond" -- using the metaphor of the 'wind of change' and warning that the powers formerly known as 'the West' no longer hold sway over the existing world system.
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm
I am of the Henry C. Simons school of thought in that I believe that values should determine all political-economic thinking, policies and decisions -- not the other way around.
And, yes, to quote Oak:
"Due to the power of U.S. multinationals offshore outsourcing American jobs to China, don't expect any support for the people inside China on human rights and social issues anytime soon."
Nonetheless, we cannot avoid questions that arise out of an objective consideration of Wen's remarks:
Is social stability something that WE value? Is it a priority for US? I mean for US, the people ... and heck with the government and the political elite in Washington.
Obviously, as the U.S. backpedals away from democratization in the Middle East, our government thinks that it places a high priority on stability whenever oil is involved. However, this pursuit of stability seems to be based on feckless strategies informed by bumbling intelligence -- all reaction and no preparedness.
It may be that China is about to fall apart and the Communist leadership there is fearful of a mass uprising, growing even as we speak. Or not.
Meanwhile, what concerns me is what are we doing for ourselves here in the Homeland?
What do we choose? Reality-based social stability or a desperate national gamble ... based on what?
Repression - just another technocratic tool?
Don't want to appear ignorant of the problems of the repression that the People's Republic has long embraced.
When I consider the remarkable results obtained by the technocratic leadership of the People's Republic of China, it appears likely to me that Wen and associates make maximal use of quantitative behavioral statistics.
I imagine Wen and associates to be an elite at the top of the Communist Party, but not really the Communist Party itself. In addressing the opening of the Congress, Wen speaks essentially to CP delegates about the 'people', reminding the CP members that, after all, they are supposed to be the party of the people -- common people, working people.
I assume that Wen and associates do not simply gather demographic and econometric data, they use recent historical data to generate future data.
Thinking along those 'social engineering' lines, the top technocrats probably see repression and repressive measures as just one more adjustable input in a complex system. Just as the Fed, for example, can turn up the volume on dollar-creation output, so can Wen and associates (through the Bank of China and many other institutions with more power but less independence than our Fed) turn up or tune down various inputs to the total socio-economic system based on a picture that they derive from recent historical data outputs in their dynamic data collection-analysis-control system.
The problem is that the CP base of Wen's state power mechanism (the totality of China's politico-socio-economic engine) is as corrupt as any other one-party autocracy. Wen probably realizes that he cannot simply turn a dial to dampen the volume of corruption, but he hopes that he can avail himself of the alternative -- turning a dial to increase the volume of repression and thus decrease the volume of dissent. Then he will wait a while (five years of the current Five Year Plan?) and see how it has worked. It's like macroeconomics or the excuse of the apologists of trade globalization: "There are always winners and losers." We don't worry about the losers, because the big picture is all that matters.
We believe that the way to address irregularities resulting from corruption is through the courts. Of course, it's a slow and inefficient process, as we see in the case of Benj. Franklin S&L bank --
http://www.benfranklinoregon.org/AboutUs.htm
But, in China, the judicial system and traditions are poorly developed.
However, I note that Wen did put corruption right up there with inflation, as an evil that needs to be controlled. And the top technocrats do understand and implement the principles of monetarism.
Will corruption ultimately bring down the engine of prosperity in China? Maybe. The problems with corruption that puts politics into the middle of business decisions include not only the resentment of those who have been deprived of their just rewards, but also that the results may be spectacularly inefficient, resulting in accretion over time of dead-weight that must be carried by more productive units in the economy.
Or will democracy somehow magically come to rule, as the supposed ineluctable result of trade globalization and the adoption of the forms of free enterprise in a politically managed neo-mercantilist system?
Or will democracy and civil liberty eventually emerge as the result of long hard-fought struggles, including the sacrifices of liberty-loving patriots?
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, the U.S. needs to pull together, because we are essential to the security of Taiwan, the RoK, and perhaps even of Japan. Certainly, the immediate price that Wen must pay for the policies of repression is that Taiwan and the RoK -- where the people have already earned their civil liberties the hard way -- will distance themselves from the prospect of a Greater China.
And, finally, returning to the question of what WE will do here in the Homeland: Will we be able to control inflation and corruption? Or will democracy and civil liberty wither away?
China bank crisis fall-out from real estate bubble?
Has political corruption played a role in this?
Or are the top technocrats less competent than I suppose them to be?
Or both?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-08/china-faces-60-risk-of-bank-cri...