Time To Get Tough With China

Vice President Biden cooled tensions in his talks with Chinese leaders, but many in Asia and the U.S. now question whether that’s the right course.

By Leslie H. Gelb

“We’re being too soft on China”—such are the increasingly audible whispers of an ever mounting number of China’s neighbors and U.S. foreign policy experts. 

They are still mostly whispering because of the enormity of such a change in policy direction. And they certainly don’t wish to trigger crises. 

But they do feel that the U.S. needs to get tougher with Beijing. 

To them, China unilaterally asserts its rights and demands, doesn’t budge, wears everyone down, waits and waits until everyone shrugs and goes along. 

Vice President Joe Biden handled his visit with Chinese rulers in the traditional manner: that is, he was strong in defending American values and concerns, but always far short of confrontation. And Chinese leaders mistook his care as weakness. 

Perhaps they’ve seen this as weakness all along.
Or as Winston Lord, a former ambassador to China, put it: “The Chinese do not shy from provocation and count on eventual foreign forebearance. It is time to parry this pattern and be willing to risk some dustups."
Such commentary on the Biden visit did not rise above murmurs here and there. 

Those pushing for a tougher line toward China realize such a policy shift takes time, and can’t be decided upon in the space of a week or so, the time it took to digest China’s imposition of its new Air Defense Identification Zone or ADIZ over the Japanese islands in the East China Sea. 

If Washington is to adopt a tougher stance toward Beijing, it needs a lot of methodical calculation. 

And U.S. diplomats would have to ensure beforehand that Asian nations would follow suit, so that Washington did not string itself out alone. 

The Obama administration is not near such a policy departure. 

And so, Biden deftly carried out his prescribed paces, perhaps disturbing no one greatly beyond the Japanese. 

Japan is less and less inclined to let Beijing push it around. In this regard, they’re out in front of the U.S. government, but they are not alone.

Many Asian and American policy experts were quite unhappy about China’s new ADIZ—and with the Obama administration’s quick acceptance of China’s right to do so. 

Washington alerted U.S. commercial airlines (not military aircraft) to comply in order to avoid mishap. 

There was good reason, however, not to do so. 

Washington acknowledges the right to establish ADIZ’s. 

But by U.S. policy, commercial aircraft flying through such zones need identify themselves only if they intend to enter Chinese airspace. 

More to the point, Beijing’s new ADIZ was announced without warning or consultation over an unusually large area, and an area that was in hot dispute with Japan. 

Japan and South Korea did not go along with the new China ADIZ, and the White House or State Department should have coordinated the U.S. response with these and other countries.
It’s not a stretch to assume that Chinese leaders took the U.S. response as caving in to their excessive demands. 

Tokyo certainly came to that precise conclusion. 

Apparently, Biden made no hard line effort to walk this cat back in Beijing. 

Instead, he seems to have asked his Chinese counterparts simply not to “enforce” the new ADIZ rules. 

Later in his Asia trip, in South Korea, the U.S. position appeared to have hardened, with a U.S. briefer saying that the U.S. and others did not accept China’s ADIZ. 

In the familiar refrain of diplomats, only time will tell.
The new ADIZ is only the latest in a long line of lamentations about Chinese treatment of American interests. 

There’s the cyberwarfare against U.S. defense industries. 

There’s Chinese flagrant violation of intellectual property rights. 

There’s the near total resistance to opening up Chinese internal markets to fair competition and to letting outsiders own a majority share of businesses. 

There’s strong resistance to accepting the WTO trade rules on the grounds that though China is an economic juggernaut, it’s really a “developing country” and thus not subject to the same rules as America, Japan, Germany, et al. 

There’s the constant intimidation of American journalists and news organizations. 

Biden did note the latter publicly as a matter of American values. 

Did Beijing even notice?

Asian nations certainly feel Beijing has been pushing them around, increasingly. 

That’s why they pressured the Obama team to “pivot” or “rebalance” its policy and resources from Europe and the Mideast to Asia and the Pacific, a course already favored by the Obama team. 

To be sure, and at the same, Asian leaders worry about being too closely associated with a tougher U.S. They want Americans to be tougher, but they don’t want Beijing to blame them for it. (It’s the old story with America’s friends and allies.)
Then, there’s the question that troubles all serious policy makers—exactly what leverage does Washington actually hold over Beijing? 

No military expert dreams of challenging China’s military power on the Asian mainland. The manpower gap is insurmountable. 

But at sea and on the coastlands, the U.S. Navy and Air Force remain clearly superior. China’s knows all this. 

But the last thing anyone desires is a military confrontation. 

There’s no telling where this would lead. 

By the same token, however, China can’t simply be allowed to make its own rules at sea by asserting its unilateral rights and dispatching ships and fighter planes to enforce them. 

So far, China has been doing the asserting in both the East and South China seas, resource rich areas, much to the dismay of the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan.
But the real leverage between the U.S. and China comes down to economic horsepower. 

However much military strength is needed, and it is, policy makers understand full well that power in the region stems from domestic economic strength and vitality, plus trade and investment power. 

China’s economy still marches upward and has already surpassed Japan’s. 

The American economy is limping along. 

Congress hasn’t passed a budget in six years. It regularly brings the nation to debt default. 

It won’t increase funds for physical and intellectual infrastructure, where America is clearly falling behind. 

If China or anyone else, for that matter, is going to pay attention to America’s wishes and demands, Congress will have to stop acting like a Banana Republic. 

The Tea Baggers say they want a strong America; they’re destroying it.
Ambassador Lord provided this perspective: “We need a firmer posture toward Beijing which means getting our domestic political and economic acts together, investing in the future; giving our Asian rebalancing more heft by successfully concluding the critical Pacific trade pact; and helping to reconcile our two most important Asian allies, Japan and South Korea."
Stapleton Roy, another former U.S. ambassador to China, who opposes the tougher line, put his case rather pithily: “You talk about getting tough on China,” he chuckled, “We first should get tough on ourselves.”

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The US Waffles on China’s Air Defense Zone

State Department concerns appear to trump military ones
Asia Sentinel

A computer screens display a map showing the outline of China's air defense zone in the East China late last month.

Asian nations looking for US protection in the face of concerns about China’s hegemonic designs on east and Southeast Asia are left baffled by Washington’s response to China’s controversial declaration of an air defense zone covering most of the East China Sea.
The first US reaction, clearly driven by highest level military concerns, was to send military aircraft through the zone without notifying the Chinese authorities. 

Japan and Korea did likewise and Japan’s civilian aircraft similarly ignored this great leap forward in China’s de facto claims over airspace close to the territorial waters of Japan and South Korea.
But since then the US, seemingly driven by a State Department that often appears to place short- term relations with China ahead of longer-term strategic questions, has adopted a somewhat ambiguous posture. The visit to the region by US Vice-President Joe Biden could have been used to condemn the Chinese action unequivocally and bolster Japanese and South Korean confidence in US determination to stand by them in rejecting Chinese presumptions.
As it happened, however, the US seemed set on avoiding provoking China into yet more aggressive claims – even though it was China’s announcement of the zone shortly before Biden’s visit, which was the immediate provocation.
Much of the western media also appeared to portray the air zone issue as simply an extension of China’s dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands when even a glance at a map of the Chinese self-proclaimed zone shows it encompasses almost the whole airspace over the East China sea, not just the southwestern portion close to the Senkakus. 

Such misinterpretation must be music to China’s ears.
While in Beijing, Biden is reported to have told Chinese President Xi Jinping that the US rejects the zone claim and looks to China to ease tensions by effectively not doing anything to enforce its claims. 

It could, for example, not do anything about plans, civilian or military, which fail to provide their flight plans to the Chinese authorities. 

Nonetheless, the claims are now on the record and having made them, President Xi may come under nationalist and populist pressure to try to enforce them.
The US position has clearly been weakened by its advising its own airlines to file their flight plans with China – unlike Japan. 

Not surprisingly, Japan has not been pleased with this failure to back its own position of declining to provide civilian flight information to the extent China demands. 

The US has explained its action by reference to the safety needs of civilian aircraft. 

However, that implies that China represents a risk to civilian aircraft which do not comply. 

Clearly China is not going to start shooting down commercial aircraft so the US response is in effect surrender to a theoretical threat. 

Stouter hearts would have called China’s bluff.
Many countries declare air defense zones which go well beyond their territorial waters as well as flight control zones for the safe operation of civilian aircraft. 

But these have no formal international standing and require neighboring countries to cooperate rather than compete in demanding exclusive rights.
The vast extension of China’s zone could be seen, most worryingly, as a preliminary move to be followed at some future date with attempts to enforce it first of all in the vicinity of the Senkakus, islands which the US recognizes as Japanese. 

It is also noteworthy how close the zone goes to Japan’s territorial waters in the vicinity of the Ryukyu Islands, and of Okinawa, with its US bases in particular.
In another direction, next on China’s agenda could be declaration of a similar zone above the South China sea, following the infamous nine-dash line of its claims there which take it almost up to the territorial waters of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia, and very close to Indonesia’s Natuna islands. 

China’s ambassador in Manila Ma Keqing was quoted as saying that China had the right to set up a similar zone over the South China Sea.
Exactly how that “right” is defined has not been made clear. 

But if such a right exists, presumably other countries, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, have similar rights to air defense zones extending close to China’s coast and its military airfields.
Given China’s world view and its history of expansion over most of the past 500 years (only during the period 1840-1945 was it on the defensive, against the west and Japan) it is hard to predict how far its ambitions now go. 

But Asian neighbors might like to see the US put more backbone into its response if they are to believe that its “tilt” towards Asia and the centrality of the western Pacific to US long-term strategic interests.

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China Declares Lunar Defense Obliteration Zone

“China’s historical ties to the moon date back at least five thousand years, perhaps more.” -- Chinese expert

www.miniharm.com

BEIJING — Following the successful launch of its first lunar rover, the Chinese government has declared a defensive zone extending vertically from China into space and encompassing the moon.
The Lunar Defense Obliteration Zone, according to newly appointed space minister Wu Houyi, “will protect China’s core interests and interplanetary sovereignty.” 

All foreign spacecraft, satellites, comets and space debris must notify China before passing through or into the zone.
Due to orbital complications, the boundaries of the LDOZ will shift daily in accordance with the position of the moon relative to its sovereign power. 

China’s Ministry of Space has issued diagrams of the shifting boundaries, dubbed “the lasso.”
Many countries have disputed China’s ability to establish such a zone, but Chinese officials are adamant about the country’s claim to Earth’s only natural satellite.
Orbital variations of the LDOZ.

“China’s historical ties to the moon date back at least five thousand years, perhaps more,” said Chen Guang, an official historian from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 

“We made a whole calendar based on it for Christ’s sake.”
As for the political ramifications, the Ministry of Space has promised not to impose terrestrial laws on the celestial object, nor push immediately for reunification.
“The moon will retain full autonomy,” Wu told reporters on Thursday, “and will continue to orbit the Earth as normal under the ‘One Country, Two Circumgyrating Bodies’ system.”
So far, the LDOZ has received widespread support from the public and government-issued propaganda posters have cropped up around Beijing and Shanghai bearing the slogan “China Dream, Moon Dream.”
One Weibo user, @永远玉兔 (Jade Rabbit Forever), suggested that China should enforce the defensive zone by constructing a giant laser which will point at whichever country is currently meeting with the Dalai Lama, and at Tokyo the rest of the time.
As America and Russia are expected to dispute the territorial boundaries, Chinese scientists, according to leaked classified documents, are investigating the feasibility of striking an obsolete satellite to trigger a chain reaction of space debris that will orbit the earth every 90 minutes, preventing all access to the LDOZ.

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Lonely Chinese Men Are Looking to Vietnam for Love

By Freya Wang

China's imbalanced sex ratio also contributes to the shortage of brides on the Chinese marriage marketplace.

Unlucky in love on the mainland? 

Why not go to Vietnam, where Chinese bachelors can find “true love”, or more specifically, where they can “search for brides who won't demand apartments or private vehicles as a precondition for marriage.” 

This, according to an advertisement from a famous Chinese group-buying website 55 Tuan offering a free trip to Vietnam for a number of lonely hearts in celebration of China's Bachelor's Day on November 11.
Faced with the increasingly high cost of marrying Chinese women, whose families often demand expensive gifts in exchange for their daughter's hand, and the country's imbalanced ratio of men to women, more and more bachelors in China are looking abroad for love. 

All together, 28,629 hopefuls participated in 55 Tuan's give away.

Advertisement from website 55 Tuan offering a free trip to Vietnam for a number of single men in celebration of China's Bachelor's Day on November 11.

China's competitive and expensive marriage marketplace
In the past few years, more and more men have expressed their frustration on the Chinese web with the high cost of marriage in China. 

It is customary that the Chinese bride’s family will make a list of very specific demands for the future groom as a pre-condition of the marriage. 

The ownership of an apartment and a car as well as a steady job with a high salary are the top priorities on the bride's parents’ wish list. 

But it is almost impossible for a bachelor of average income to buy an apartment all by himself.
In contrast, it only cost tens of thousands of yuan (approximately a few thousands US dollars) to marry a Vietnamese girl, which is affordable for most Chinese bachelors. 

Plus, a popular notion says that Vietnamese girls are hardworking, simple and devoted to the family.
China's imbalanced sex ratio also contributes to the shortage of brides on the Chinese marriage marketplace. According to an article [zh] on ifeng news, the current ratio of men to women in China is 119:100. 

In some regions, that the ratio reaches 130:100. 

The imbalance is rooted in feudal Chinese culture, which values boys more than girls. 

Coupled with the one-child policy and modern technology that allows parents to know the gender of a baby early on in the pregnancy, the preference for boys has resulted in extremely lopsized gender ratios in newborns, particularly in some remote rural areas. 

For example, the ratio among infants in Wuxue 武穴, Hubei province, is as high as 198.3:100, according to China's fifth population census [zh].
In the case of Vietnam, it once was the opposite — women outnumbered men. 

But in recent years, the male population has slightly outnumbered the female, and that problem has been exacerbated as more and more Vietnamese girls choose to marry foreigners in order to seek a better life. 

Since the end of last century, more than 294,000 Vietnamese girls from poor areas have married foreigners [zh], among which Chinese and Korean are the most popular choices.
Nevertheless, the frequency of Vietnamese-Chinese cross-border marriage fraud has increased [zh]. 

More and more Vietnamese brides flee their Chinese husbands soon after they arrive in China. 

In some cases, the arranged marriage agents are involved in the scam. 

In response to the situation, the Chinese police department has claimed that[zh] they will crack down on commercial Vietnamese bride arrangement services.

‘Why not marry a foreign girl for cheaper?’
Against such a backdrop, 55 Tuan's advertisement stirred up a lot of discussion online. 

The website defended that the lottery event was to provide a free group tour for lucky bachelors to Vietnam. The marriages, if any, will be purely based on love.
While commercial cross-border arranged marriages and mail-order brides are considered by global civil society to be a form of human trafficking and thus immoral, a substantial number of Chinese netizens on popular microblogging website Sina Weibo are against the police crackdown on these “marriage services”.
Writer Shang Jianguo believed the Chinese consumers’ desire for “group buying” of Vietnamese brides only reflected the escalating problem of the imbalanced gender ratio and its impact on the marriage market:
团购越南新娘折射剩男问题。第六次人口普查数据显示，80后非婚人口男女比例为136:100，70后非婚人口男女性别比例206:100。30-39岁男性中有1195.9万人处于非婚状态。同龄女性中有582万人处于非婚状态。The phenomena of “group buying of Vietnamese brides” indicates the social problem of leftover men. According to the sixth population census, the gender ratio of unmarried post-80s generation is 136:100, 206:100 for post-70s. 11,959,000 males between 30 and 39 years old remained single, while only 5,820,000 females are single.

@Zhazi77 has reached marriage age and has started worrying about his future:
作为一个研究森不知道能不能毕业，毕业能不能找得到超过两千五一个月工资的穷人家的小孩，我要是能在三十五岁之前结婚就真的感谢全世界了。I am a master's student. Born into a poor family, I don't know if I can earn more than 2,500 RMB (approximately 400 US dollars) per month upon graduation. I would be thankful to the whole world if I could get married before I reach 35!

Jiu Hengxing, an IT business microblog account, wrote that marriage is a form of economy and thus it is rational to seek brides overseas:
在大城市里，没有房子、车子，相亲成功概率低，就算姑娘同意，还要过丈母娘这关！随着国内结婚成本的增高，一些中介抓住了空子，比国内结婚更省钱又能娶到国外老婆，有何不可？It is very hard to find a bride on a blind date if you don’t have an apartment or car in a big city. Even if the girl is willing to marry you, you still have to deal with her mother. Since the cost of marriage has increased, why not marry a foreign girl for cheaper?

As the marriage economy is tied up with property development in China, “Big eye brother” mocked the police intention to crack down on “group buying” of Vietnamese bride as serving the interest of property developers:
当然要严打，都去娶越南新娘了，内地的房地产经济怎么办？Of course the police need to take action [against the Vietnamese bride arrangement services], because if all men marry Vietnamese women, what would we do with the real estate economy in mainland China?

But Yuan Yi, a journalist, did not think that such relationships will last long:
看完纪录片对越南新娘嫁到台湾全程有了解，因为贫富悬殊很多越南美女嫁往台湾内地。异国婚姻克服文化习俗差异才能长久。I learned about the whole process of marrying a Vietnamese girl after I watched a documentary on Vietnamese brides in Taiwan. Lots of Vietnamese beauties marry a man in mainland China or Taiwan because of the wealth gap. But cross-border marriages can only last long if the couple can overcome their cultural differences.

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Joe Biden: The Bull in the China Shop

The vice president creates waves with comments in China, but he was right to make them.
By Elizabeth C. Economy

In the midst of an already diplomatically challenging trip to Japan, China, and South Korea, U.S. vice president Joe Biden managed to make life just that much more difficult for himself. 

The vice president had a number of thorny issues already on his agenda, such as advancing the cause of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, discussing how to make progress on North Korea, trying to get Japan and South Korea on the same page, and most importantly, trying to persuade Beijing to step back and renounce its establishment of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that overlapped with the pre-established ADIZs of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan or at the very least, to avoid declaring any new ADIZs.
Despite this full plate of unenviable tasks, Vice President Biden couldn’t resist igniting a mini-media firestorm in Beijing when, in the name of creativity and innovation, he called on young Chinese seeking to visit the United States to “challenge the government, challenge your teachers, challenge religious leaders.” 

He went on to praise the importance of new immigrants to the United States in reinvigorating “the spirit of America” and reinforced that “stamped in the DNA of every American” is an “inherent rejection of orthodoxy.”
At first glance, his remarks seem at best impolitic, at worst downright harmful to the overall cause of furthering cooperation with China. 

Yet, upon further reflection—which the vice president may or may not have undertaken prior to uttering his call to arms—his comments signaled one of the most important policy thrusts of the entire visit.
As China cracks down politically at home and promulgates its own ideals abroad through its Confucius Institutes and state-run media, it matters that U.S. officials reiterate American political values. 

Not doing so in an effort to appease Chinese sensibilities not only is craven but also doesn’t win any favors from Beijing. 

This past week during his own visit to China, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron showered nothing but praise upon his Chinese hosts; in return he earned a scathing editorial in the Global Times and was forced to stand by and watch as one of his journalist countrymen was barred from his press conference with Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

Similarly, when Bloomberg fired star reporter Michael Forsythe in November—apparently for leaking to the New York Times that Bloomberg was kowtowing to Chinese pressure by holding back on the publication of a politically sensitive piece—the news corporation was rewarded with nothing better than visits by Chinese police to their newsrooms in Beijing and Shanghai.
In fact, Vice President Biden took on the issue of Chinese treatment of U.S. journalists and media companies directly in his talks with Chinese president Xi Jinping. 

U.S. media companies have long been stymied in their efforts to report openly and critically on China for fear of reprisals from Beijing. 

As Mark Landler reported in the New York Times, nearly two dozen New York Times and Bloomberg journalists are awaiting accreditation from Beijing; without it they will be expelled, effectively shutting down their China bureaus. 

The question now is whether the U.S. government will take further steps to pressure China on this issue. Would Washington be willing to delay the visas of Chinese journalists? 

Is there an issue of market access that could be advanced through the World Trade Organization? 

It may seem foolish to risk the overall relationship with China for such issues: The ADIZ, for example, represents a more immediate threat to regional security than access to China for U.S. journalists. 

However, the political values the vice president is advancing—transparency, openness, and accountability—in the final analysis are reflected not only in the way that China does business at home but also in how it behaves abroad. 

Biden is right to hold China to account on both fronts.

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The Thorny Challenge of Covering China

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

HOW do major American news organizations write about a Communist country with the world’s second-largest economy — a country that doesn’t believe in press rights and that punishes tough-minded coverage?
Aggressively? Cautiously? Fearlessly? Competitively?
The country is China. 

The news organizations include The New York Times, as well as its closest competitors. 

And those questions are on the minds of top editors and executives of news organizations. 

The Chinese market is a lucrative one, important to their profitability; and, separately, news value is high. There are crucial stories to be reported in this fast-changing nation of more than 1.3 billion people, the most populous country in the world.
The answers are playing out on newspaper front pages and websites, in newsroom personnel decisions and on corporate balance sheets.
Consider some of what’s happened:
• Last year, The Times published a story by David Barboza about the enormous wealth of China’s ruling family. 

The article won a Pulitzer Prize — and caused the Chinese government to shut down The Times’s website in China, an important part of its growth as a global business, at a cost of about $3 million in lost revenue to The Times so far.
• On Nov. 9, The Times published an article on its front page about one of its chief business-news competitors, Bloomberg News, describing how the organization had decided against the planned publication of an article for fear of reprisal by the Chinese government. 

The Times story, which came from unidentified Bloomberg employees, included denials by Bloomberg news executives, including the editor in chief, Matthew Winkler, that the story was killed.
A few days later, Bloomberg made a written complaint to me, through its ethics consultant Tom Goldstein, a former Columbia journalism dean. 

Mr. Goldstein called the article unfair and inaccurate. 

He criticized The Times for “sabotaging a competitor” by describing the news in the unpublished article.
After I began investigating the complaint by interviewing journalists at Bloomberg and at The Times, Bloomberg postponed and then canceled my scheduled interview with Mr. Winkler. 

A public relations representative told me that a follow-up Times article on Nov. 25— a broader look at Bloomberg’s corporate mission — was “much more accurate” and made the interview unnecessary.

The core of the Times story had to do with media self-censorship in China: A top American news executive’s telling his reporters that a story was being pulled back at least partly because it might get their news organization kicked out of the country. 

The details of Mr. Winkler’s conference call, in which he spoke to the reporters, are “verifiable,” The Times’s foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, told me. 

Other journalists, inside and outside The Times, mentioned the existence of audio recordings of that call.
I believe the initial Times article was essentially solid — and certainly eye-opening. 

Still, one can reasonably question whether it was sound judgment to put an article focused on a competitor’s news decision at the top of The Times’s front page.
• Fortune magazine reported last week that Chinese authorities barged into Bloomberg News offices in Shanghai and Beijing to conduct inspections shortly after The Times wrote about the disputed and still unpublished article. 

Chinese officials also demanded an apology from Mr. Winkler, Fortune reported. 

Mr. Winkler has built Bloomberg News into a top-flight news organization, one that has clearly done some of the best reporting from China. 

Publicly, Bloomberg has continued to say that its article was held back for more reporting, not permanently killed. 

One of the reporters of that article, Michael Forsythe, was suspended from Bloomberg; he later left the company. It would not be surprising if Mr. Forsythe soon joined the reporting staff of The Times.

• American reporters in China are having problems getting their residency visas renewed and soon may be forced to leave the country. 

What once was “an annual nonevent” has become “a very big worry,” said Jill Abramson, the executive editor at The Times. 

“I’m concerned that we won’t be able to do the unfettered coverage we need to do for our readers.”
The Times has a dozen people reporting on China who have New York Times accreditations from the Chinese government, including a photographer and a videographer. 

All are in Beijing except Mr. Barboza, who is based in Shanghai. 

The Times also has several correspondents and an editing operation in Hong Kong.
• The websites of The Wall Street Journal and Reuters were both recently blocked, and Bloomberg’s has been blocked for many months. 

And after officials ordered some companies to stop paying for Bloomberg’s data terminals — central to the company’s distinctive business model — the growth in sales slowed in China, a major potential market.
In short, the stakes are high and the circumstances difficult, both for news gathering and for news-based businesses.
From a news perspective, The Times has an advantage: It is still that rarity, a family-owned news organization. 

As Ms. Abramson noted, its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., “doesn’t flinch” from running critical China stories.
James L. McGregor, former Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, offered this blunt assessment in The Times’s Nov. 25 article: “It’s looking increasingly like as a media company, you have a choice in China. You either do news or you do business, but it’s hard to do both.”
So far, The Times — and, to varying degrees, its competitors — has continued to “do news.” 

That’s worthwhile, and challenging, and not very likely to get easier.

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Bank Charted Business Linked to China Hiring

By BEN PROTESS and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

An office of JPMorgan Chase in Beijing.

Tang Shuangning of the China Everbright Group. After his son was hired by JPMorgan, the bank’s business with China Everbright and a subsidiary appeared to pick up.

Federal authorities have obtained confidential documents that shed new light on JPMorgan Chase’s decision to hire the children of China’s ruling elite, securing emails that show how the bank linked one prominent hire to “existing and potential business opportunities” from a Chinese government-run company.
The documents, which also include spreadsheets that list the bank’s “track record” for converting hires into business deals, offer the most detailed account yet of JPMorgan’s “Sons and Daughters” hiring program, which has been at the center of a federal bribery investigation for months. 

The spreadsheets and emails — recently submitted by JPMorgan to authorities — illuminate how the bank created the program to prevent questionable hiring practices but ultimately viewed it as a gateway to doing business with state-owned companies in China, which commonly issue stock with the help of Wall Street banks.
The hiring practices seemed to have been an open secret at the bank’s headquarters in Hong Kong, according to the documents, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times. 

In the email citing the “existing and potential business opportunities,” a senior JPMorgan executive in Hong Kong emphasized that the father of a job candidate was the chairman of the China Everbright Group, a state-controlled financial conglomerate. 

The executive also extolled the broader benefits of the hiring program, telling colleagues in another email: “You all know I have always been a big believer of the Sons and Daughters program — it almost has a linear relationship” with winning assignments to advise Chinese companies. 

Until now, the indications of a connection between the hires and business deals have not been so explicit.
In addition to the documents, interviews with current and former JPMorgan employees suggest that some people inside or affiliated with the bank bristled at the hiring strategy. 

At least two whistle-blowers have raised concerns, with one filing a complaint in April 2011 with the Hong Kong stock exchange and another coming forward to American authorities this year. 

Underscoring the worries, a junior banker in Hong Kong resigned from JPMorgan in December 2011, writing in an email that “I do not think my family is in a position to help you to the extent as others did: bring their family business to the firm.”
The scrutiny of JPMorgan, which has not been accused of any wrongdoing, could provide a template for federal authorities as they expand their investigation to include the hiring practices of at least five other Wall Street banks conducting business in China, according to interviews with people briefed in the inquiry who were not authorized to speak publicly. 

Those investigations from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are at an early stage, involve Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. 

All five banks declined to comment.
JPMorgan is cooperating with the government inquiries from the S.E.C. and the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which are examining whether the bank improperly swapped job offers and consulting contracts for business with state-owned Chinese companies. 

China’s economy is highly regulated, and many of its biggest companies are state-controlled.
There is no indication that executives at JPMorgan’s headquarters in New York were aware of the hiring practices described in the documents. 

And authorities might ultimately conclude that the bank’s hiring, while aggressive, did not cross a legal line.
JPMorgan declined to comment.
The S.E.C. and the prosecutors in Brooklyn also declined to comment.
The breadth of the investigations underscore how pervasive the hiring practices may have become in China. For two decades, Wall Street banks have sought out China’s so-called princelings, turning family and friends of senior officials into bank employees and consultants.
The documents reviewed by The Times, along with the interviews, suggest that some executives at JPMorgan felt a need to scramble to compete with Wall Street rivals that already had footholds in China. JPMorgan may have adopted some of their hiring strategies — and even shared employees and consultants.
Fullmark Consultants, a firm that JPMorgan hired in 2006 to help improve its standing in China, also did business with Credit Suisse, according to interviews. 

Fullmark, which received a $75,000-a-month contract over two years from JPMorgan, was run by Wen Ruchun, the only daughter of Wen Jiabao, who at the time was China’s prime minister, with ultimate responsibility over state-owned companies. 

In the contract with JPMorgan and other clients, which is now at the center of the federal bribery investigation, Ms. Wen used the alias “Lily Chang.”
The S.E.C. and prosecutors are building their investigation around the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that makes it illegal for United States companies to exchange “anything of value” with foreign officials to win “an improper advantage” in obtaining business. 

Federal authorities have adopted a tougher stance in recent years, taking aim at American companies suspected of acting with “corrupt intent,” or with an expectation of trading a job for government business.
It is unclear whether JPMorgan ever reached an upfront agreement with Chinese government officials. 

And the records reviewed by The Times do not suggest that the employees were unqualified. 

According to documents and interviews with current and former employees, JPMorgan created the “Sons and Daughters” program in 2006 with the expectation that the hires would receive heightened scrutiny.
But by 2009, the “Sons and Daughters” program was putting the job candidates on the fast track to employment. 

The documents show that applicants from prominent Chinese families faced less stringent hiring standards — and fewer job interviews — than the average junior-level hire.
The bank once proposed another program for “full-time referrals” that would have offered the well-connected hires a one-year contract worth $70,000 to $100,000. 

The program, internal documents said, might offer “directly attributable linkage to business opportunity.”
JPMorgan also briefly kept “historical deal conversion” spreadsheets, according to interviews with people briefed on the investigation. 

In one column, JPMorgan listed job candidates; in another, the bank recorded its “track record” for winning business from companies tied to those candidates. 

Other spreadsheets listed well-connected hires and the revenue JPMorgan earned from deals with private and state-owned Chinese companies linked to those hires, documents show.
In discussions with authorities, the people briefed on the investigation said, JPMorgan has explained that it did not connect revenue to the “Sons and Daughters” program. 

Instead, the bank has said, the spreadsheets were meant to assess whether JPMorgan bankers, in hopes of securing full-time jobs for some interns in the program, had exaggerated the revenue received from state-owned companies.
The spreadsheets included about 30 employees with ties to state-owned companies or Communist Party officials, including the daughter of the deputy minister of propaganda, a relative of a Chinese financial regulator and the nephew of the executive chairman at Sinotruk, which is part of a state-owned trucking enterprise.
JPMorgan also tracked the revenue it received from private Asian companies that referred job candidates to the bank, a practice that would not fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. 

One hire was connected to Fubon Financial Holding, a financial services conglomerate in Taiwan that, according to the spreadsheet, produced 2009 revenue of $900,000 for JPMorgan.
JPMorgan bankers in Hong Kong coveted the business with Fubon. 

In an August 2010 email reviewed by The Times, a JPMorgan banker in Hong Kong explained that the bank had “picked up a new mandate in Taiwan today,” but that holding onto the deal would depend on securing a job for someone related to a company executive.
“All we have to do,” the banker said, is secure the relative “a full-time analyst job at JPM in N.Y.”
The problem, another employee in Hong Kong acknowledged, was that the candidate’s “napping habit will be an eye-opening experience for our N.Y. colleagues.”
While the email appears to suggest a quid pro quo, the message is unlikely to alarm federal authorities, because it involves a private company rather than a state-owned enterprise.
But the bank’s hiring of Tang Xiaoning, a onetime Goldman and Citigroup employee whose father is the chairman of the China Everbright Group, appeared to encapsulate the spirit of the “Sons and Daughters” program for state-owned clients.
The father, Tang Shuangning, approached a JPMorgan executive in Hong Kong in March 2010 about a position for his son, records and interviews show. 

The executive, who led JPMorgan’s China investment banking unit, welcomed the request and urged his colleagues in an email a day later to discuss “how we can leverage more on this account going forward.” 

But in an internal compliance form, the executive played down the significance of hiring Mr. Tang, documents show, saying there was “no expected benefit.”
By that point in March 2010, JPMorgan appeared to do little if any business with China Everbright, according to securities filings and news reports.
But shortly after Mr. Tang’s father approached JPMorgan, a China Everbright subsidiary hired the bank to advise on a $300 million private offering of shares, according to interviews. 

And in 2011, after Mr. Tang worked at JPMorgan for several months, China Everbright’s banking subsidiary hired JPMorgan as one of several financial advisers on its decision to become a public company, a deal that was delayed amid turmoil on the world’s markets.
About that time, JPMorgan offered a second one-year contract to Mr. Tang, who was prevented from having any role in working on China Everbright deals. 

Mr. Tang, executives said at the time, had received generally positive performance reviews. 

He also had previously earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University.
While Mr. Tang worked at JPMorgan, the assignments from his father’s company continued to pile up for the bank. 

In 2012, China Everbright International, a subsidiary focused on alternative energy businesses, hired JPMorgan to advise on a $162 million sale of shares, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, a research service.
In May of that year, as Mr. Tang’s contract was expiring, JPMorgan faced a turning point. 

But at the urging of the JPMorgan investment banking executive, Mr. Tang received another extension.
“Given where we are on China Everbright, I think we may need another contract for Xiaoning,” the executive wrote.
Zhang Rong, the junior banker who resigned from JPMorgan in December 2011, also highlighted the bank’s hiring strategy. 

On an overnight flight from Hong Kong to the United States, Mr. Zhang drafted a resignation letter that lamented how “All of my efforts seemed meaningless to you and you tend to judge me solely on the relation part of me.”
Mr. Zhang said he was quitting because he could no longer “live under the shadow of my father.” 

The father, he indicated, had ties to the China Post Group, which runs the Chinese postal service and other subsidiaries.
In a statement, the China Post Group denied that Zhang Rong was connected to the company or its top executives. 

The company declined to provide further details.
Mr. Zhang promised in the email that his father would still “try his best to coordinate the meeting” between JPMorgan and China Post. 

And Mr. Zhang, who sent the email just days before Christmas, assured JPMorgan that he did not harbor any hard feelings.
“Wish you and your family merry Xmas and happy New Year!”

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‘China’s planned ADIZ over West Phl Sea to trigger tension’

“The world shares the same understanding that the regional tension should not be raised by Beijing’s unilateral course of action.” -- Itsunori Onodera

By Jaime Laude 

Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera and his Philippine counterpart, Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, meet at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City yesterday. 

MANILA, Philippines -- Visiting Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said yesterday that China’s plan to establish an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the West Philippine Sea would further trigger tension as Beijing’s unilateral action would be opposed by other nations in Southeast Asia.
Emerging from a bilateral meeting with Department of National Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin at Camp Aguinaldo, Onodera pointed out that an ADIZ over the South China Sea would cause alarm not only to the Japanese government but to the international community as well.
“I think the world shares the same understanding that the regional tension should not be raised by Beijing’s unilateral course of action,” Onodera said.
Japan and China are locked in a territorial row over a chain of islands known as Senkakus in the East China Sea.
Tension has been mounting in the region following China’s establishment of ADIZ over the area, a moved defied by the Tokyo government and the US military.
Beijing recently announced it is also establishing an ADIZ over the South China Sea to further boost its maritime claim in the hotly-contested region against other claimant countries including Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“The United States, South Korea, Taiwan and European Union and other countries are expressing strong concern over this. If the new ADIZ will be set in South China Sea or the West Philippine Sea, I think the government of Japan needs to express its concern similarly to what we have stand in East China Sea,” Onodera said.
Aside from several reefs that Beijing has converted into forward naval bases in the South China Sea, it has also established what it calls Sansha City on the Woody Island in the Paracels to manage its supposed territorial waters in the East and South China Seas.
Several Chinese warships have been conducting regular patrols over the two areas. 

As China’s naval operations are continuously being challenged by Japan in the East China Sea, they have remained largely uncontested in the South China Sea and West Philippine Sea.
China has been maintaining warships in Panganiban Reef and Subi Reef in Palawan. 

Only this year, China deployed two maritime surveillance vessels within the vicinity of Ayungin Shoal.

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Impending Japan-China war has the makings of a Clancy classic

BY MARK SCHREIBER

Japanese soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force train in urban assault with American Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Brigade Oct. 17, 2008 during a bilateral exercise at Fort Lewis' Leschi Town.
On Nov. 23, China announced the creation of a newly expanded air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, overlapping a large expanse of Japanese territory. 

The move has produced a visceral reaction in the Japanese vernacular media, particularly the weekly tabloids. 

Five out of nine weekly magazines that went on sale last Monday and Tuesday contained scenarios that raised the possibility of a shooting war.
One can only wonder what sort of tale American “techno-thriller” writer Tom Clancy — author of “The Hunt for Red October” (1984, involving the Soviet Union) and “Debt of Honor” (1994, involving Japan) — might have spun from the scenario that’s now unfolding in the East China Sea.
Alas, Mr. Clancy passed away of an undisclosed illness on Oct. 1, so instead the task has fallen to Japan’s gunji hyōronka (military affairs critics) or gunji jānarisuto (military affairs writers), whose phones have been ringing off the hook.
First, let’s take Flash (Dec. 17), which ran a “Simulated breakout of war over the Senkakus,” with Mamoru Sato, a former Air Self-Defense Force general, providing editorial supervision. 

Flash’s scenario has the same tense tone as a Clancy novel, including dialog. 

On a day in August 2014, a radar operator instructs patrolling F-15J pilots to “scramble north” at an altitude of 65,000 feet to intercept a suspected intruder and proceeds from there.
Sunday Mainichi (Dec. 15) ran an article headlined “Sino-Japanese war to break out in January.” 

Political reporter Takao Toshikawa tells the magazine that the key to what happens next will depend on China’s economy.
“The economic situation in China is pretty rough right now, and from the start of next year it’s expected to worsen,” says Toshikawa. 

“The real-estate boom is headed for a total collapse and the economic disparities between the costal regions and the interior continue to widen. I see no signs that the party’s Central Committee is getting matters sorted out.”
An unnamed diplomatic source offered the prediction that the Chinese might very well set off an incident “accidentally on purpose”: “I worry about the possibility they might force down a civilian airliner and hold the passengers hostage,” he suggested.
In an article described as a “worst-case simulation,” author Osamu Eya expressed concerns in Shukan Asahi Geino (Dec. 12) that oil supertankers bound for Japan might be targeted.
“Japan depends on sea transport for oil and other material resources,” said Eya. 

“If China were to target them, nothing could be worse to contemplate.”
In an air battle over the Senkakus, the Geino article continues, superiority of radar communications would be a key factor in determining the outcome. 

Japanese forces have five fixed radar stations in Kyushu and four in Okinawa. 

China would certainly target these, which would mean surrounding communities would also be vulnerable.
One question that seems to be on almost everybody’s mind is, will the U.S. military become involved?
Shukan Gendai (Dec. 14) speculated that Chinese leader Xi Jinping might issue an order for a Japanese civilian airliner to be shot down. 

As a result of this, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier would come to Japan’s aid and send up fighters to contend with the Chinese.
“Unlike Japan, the U.S. military would immediately respond to a radar lock-on threat by shooting down the Chinese planes,” asserts military analyst Mitsuhiro Sera. 

“It would naturally regard an aircraft flying overhead as hostile. They would shoot at it even if that were to risk discrediting the Obama administration.”
“With the creation of Japan’s National Security Council on Dec. 4, Japan-U.S. solidarity meets a new era,” an unnamed diplomatic source told Shukan Gendai. 

“If a clash were to occur between the U.S. and China, it would be natural for the Self-Defense Forces to provide backup assistance. This was confirmed at the ‘two-plus-two’ meeting on Oct. 3.”
“China is bent on wresting the Senkakus away from Japan, and if Japan dispatches its Self-Defense Forces, China will respond with naval and air forces,” Saburo Takai predicts in Flash.

“In the case of an incursion by irregular forces, that would make it more difficult for the U.S. to become involved. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would protest through diplomatic channels, but China would attempt to present its takeover as a fait accompli."
“China fears a direct military confrontation with the U.S.,” Takai adds. 

“A few days ago, two U.S. B-52s transited the ADIZ claimed by China, but the flights were not for any vague purpose. I suppose the Chinese tracked the flights on their radar, but the B-52s have electronic detection functions that can identify radar frequencies, wavelength and source of the signals. These flights are able to lay bare China’s air defense systems. It really hits home to the Chinese that they can’t project their military power.”

Which side, wonders Shukan Gendai, will respond to a provocation by pulling the trigger? 

The game of chicken between two great superpowers is about to begin.

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U.S. senators to Chinese ambassador: Senkakus under Japanese control

Japan Times

WASHINGTON – A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to the Chinese ambassador to the United States on Thursday that criticizes Beijing’s establishment of an air defense identification zone and recognizes the Senkaku Islands as being under Japanese control.
The four members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Chairman Robert Menendez, said in the letter to Cui Tiankai that they view the unilateral ADIZ declaration as “an ill-conceived attempt to alter the status quo.”
“China’s declaration of an ADIZ over areas of the East China Sea does not alter the U.S. acknowledgement of Japan’s administrative control over the Senkaku Islands,” the letter said.
The senators include Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the committee.
The senators took the action because of the U.S. government’s strong reaction to the ADIZ, which overlaps similar zones previously set up by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
China is also demanding that all aircraft entering the zone submit flight plans and has cited the possibility of military action.
Washington has said the bilateral security treaty with Japan, under which the United States is required to defend Japan, covers the Senkakus.
“This declaration reinforces the perception that China prefers coercion over rule of law mechanisms to address territorial, sovereignty or jurisdictional issues in the Asia-Pacific,” the letter said.
Given that China is involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea with countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam, the senators urged Beijing not to implement the ADIZ and to “refrain from taking similar provocative actions elsewhere in the region.”
The Senate unanimously adopted a resolution in July that condemned “the use of coercion, threats or force” in the South China Sea and the East China Sea to assert disputed maritime or territorial claims or alter the status quo.

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Horse urine a profitable industry in China

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Our Kind of Traitor

Huawei paid US government intelligence adviser

By STEPHEN BRAUN

Huawei's mole: Theodore H. Moran
WASHINGTON -- A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage threat, The Associated Press has learned.
Theodore H. Moran, a respected expert on China's international investment and professor at Georgetown University, had served since 2007 as adviser to the intelligence director's advisory panel on foreign investment in the United States. 

Moran also was an adviser to the National Intelligence Council, a group of 18 senior analysts and policy experts who provide U.S. spy agencies with judgments on important international issues.
The case highlights the ongoing fractious relationship between the U.S. government and Huawei, China's leading developer of telephone and Internet infrastructure, which has been condemned in the U.S. as a national security threat. 

Huawei has aggressively disputed this, and its chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, has said the company has decided to abandon the U.S. market.
Moran, who had a security clearance granting him access to sensitive materials, was forced to withdraw from those roles after Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., complained in September to the intelligence director, James Clapper, that Moran's work on an international advisory council for Huawei "compromises his ability to advise your office."
"It is inconceivable how someone serving on Huawei's board would also be allowed to advise the intelligence community on foreign investments in the U.S.," Wolf wrote.
Moran, who earlier had declined to discuss the matter, said in a statement Friday to the AP, "I was totally transparent." 

He said he told the National Intelligence Council in 2010 about his membership on Huawei's advisory panel.
"I complied with all conflict of interest reports and procedures of the National Intelligence Council," Moran said.
A spokesman for Clapper's office confirmed Friday that Moran was no longer associated with the intelligence council "effective September 2013" but declined to answer further questions, citing the U.S. Privacy Act.
Moran's resignation also was confirmed by Wolf and two federal officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
"If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that's his prerogative," Wolf told the AP. 

"But he shouldn't be on a critical advisory board that provides intelligence advice on foreign investments in our country."
In a policy paper distributed by Huawei, Moran wrote in May that, "targeting one or two companies on the basis of their national origins does nothing for U.S. security in a world of global supply chains." 

Moran criticized what he described as "a policy of discrimination and distortion that discourages valuable inward investment from overseas, while providing a precedent for highly damaging copycat practices in other countries."
The House Intelligence Committee last year said Huawei and another firm, ZTE, posed a threat that could enable Chinese intelligence services to tamper with American communications networks. 

The committee recommended that the companies be barred from doing business in the country.
"To the extent these companies are influenced by the state and provide Chinese intelligence services access to telecommunication networks, the opportunity exists for further economic and foreign espionage by a foreign nation-state already known to be a major perpetrator of cyber espionage," the committee wrote in its report.
Huawei's vice president for external affairs, William Plummer, declined to discuss Moran's resignation, but said U.S suspicions about Huawei have created "a political smokescreen." 

Plummer said Moran and other advisers discuss trade, policy and commerce with Huawei's executives.
Earlier this year, as a condition of allowing SoftBank Corp. to buy Sprint for $20.1 billion, the Obama administration forced the companies to promise not to use Huawei equipment and seek approval for future vendors.
In 2007, Huawei joined with Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, to buy 3Com Corp., an American computer equipment firm. 

Romney had left the firm by then. 

The bid collapsed amid national security concerns cited by Congress and the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an inter-agency panel that scrutinizes financial moves by foreign firms inside the U.S.
Last month, two Senate committee chairmen asked Clapper about the potential national security threat posed by Huawei's growing partnership with South Korean telecom firms.
The intelligence director's office would not describe Moran's duties for its panel on foreign investment or the National Intelligence Council. 

It was not immediately clear whether Moran's previous work was being reviewed for possible bias or if the government was investigating whether other intelligence advisers also may have been paid by foreign companies. 

It also did not explain why Moran was forced to step down now, three years since he had been hired by Huawei and after he had disclosed his affiliation as early as 2011 in biographical material published as part of his participation in a conference in Vienna.
Wolf, in a letter to the intelligence director, asked for a list of other members and advisers to the National Intelligence Council and a copy of its conflict-of-interest policy but he never received the information.

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Dark matter

By G.e.

A long way from his rightful place

EVERY year at this time The Economist publishes an annual almanac predicting big events and trends to watch out for in the year coming. 

I’m publishing below a companion piece of the sort you won’t find in The World in 2014, because it is about the absence of change. 

For Liu Xiaobo, 2014 does not figure to be a special year. 

He is expected to endure it in the same way as he has this year. 

The same may be true for his wife, Liu Xia, though she manages on occasion to make herself heard, including a recent request for some basic freedoms.
Mr Liu was arrested five years ago this week, and he was sentenced four years ago this month. 

He has not been heard from directly since. 

At the ceremony awarding him the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (pictured) his absence was marked by the empty chair he should have been sitting in. 

Uttering his name is in itself a political act. 

Perry Link, an eminent American China scholar long blacklisted from re-entering the country, writes that academic colleagues do not mention Mr Liu for fear of jeopardising their ability to work in China. 

I wanted to write about the absence of Mr Liu from the daily conversation, for in another sense he is ever-present:
Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, once wrote that intellectuals are “the soul of a nation”. 

He saw this as a tragic assignation. 

The intellectual he describes is a “lonely forerunner” who “can discern the portents of disaster at a time of prosperity, and in his self-confidence experience the approaching obliteration.”
Mr Liu is fulfilling his own prophecy. 

He is unlikely to be heard from in 2014. 

He remains in a Chinese prison cell, in the north-eastern city of Jinzhou—not terribly far from Changchun, the city in neighbouring Jilin province, where he was born in 1955. 

He is less than halfway through an 11-year prison sentence for his intellectual crimes (officially, “inciting subversion of state power”). 

His wife, Liu Xia, may not be heard from either in 2014; she is under strict house arrest despite not having been charged with any crime, and has had only rare contact with foreign reporters. 

Her brother, Liu Hui, too will not be heard from; he was sentenced in 2013 to a harsh prison term for alleged financial fraud, a punishment, some believe, meant to cow the family into total silence. 

Obliteration indeed.
But to the Communist Party’s enduring frustration, the Nobel prize assures that Mr Liu cannot be totally annihilated. 

He is the dark matter in every earnest discussion about China’s future, the invisible antagonist in any talk of progress and reform.
That would suit Mr Liu. 

Before he was a dissident of government, he was a dissident of his own flock, antagonising most anybody. 

In the late 1980s Mr Liu, a philosopher by training, reveled so much in attacking fellow writers and thinkers that he all but isolated himself without the help of any authorities. 

He dismissed the literature of the post-Mao era as mostly worthless (in a speech to its most celebrated practitioners); he dismissed an older set of intellectuals as “cultural pets” of their foreign Sinologist “discoverers”. 

By the time he was arrested and made an example of, in June 1989 after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, he had made himself a rather convenient target. 

“He is an ideal sacrifice,” wrote Geremie Barmé, an Australian Sinologist, after Mr Liu’s arrest in 1989. 

“Many will make pro forma protestations at his treatment, but few will feel any real sympathy for this irascible and unrelenting critic.” 

And yet the official denunciations of Mr Liu and his refusal to give in—his continued, conscientious defiance not just in 1989 but through years of all sorts of detention afterward—earned him fame and admiration. 

In attempting to obliterate the man, the authorities created Liu Xiaobo, the symbol of individual bravery and defiance.
The irony is that many of Mr Liu’s peers deemed him not radical enough. 

He was by the standards of other activists a moderate who advocated “rational” and deliberate action on democracy, and he always resolutely espoused nonviolence. 

His most radical feature was a stubborn romanticism about his cause. 

In 2008 he co-authored a document, Charter 08, that called for an end to one-party rule. 

It was an echo of Charter 77, co-authored by Vaclav Havel in resistance to Soviet rule, and it resulted in Mr Liu’s arrest and current imprisonment. 

For his trial on December 23rd 2009, Mr Liu wrote a statement that would be read aloud at his Nobel ceremony the following year: “I have no enemies, and no hatred”, he declared, even for the individuals who carried out the state’s will against him. 

As the statement was read an empty chair denoted Mr Liu’s absence, the dark matter in the room.
Others share Mr Liu’s fate without the fame. 

Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer, was disappeared and tortured, and disappeared again, before authorities acknowledged imprisoning him in remote north-western China. 

He has to an extent been obliterated. 

Still other prisoners of conscience languish unremembered. 

In their absence the earnest conversations about China’s reforms continue.

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China meets its own worst enemy

An assertion of power backfires
By Steve Chapman

To achieve any ambitious goal, you have to want it badly enough to work and sacrifice. 

But there is such a thing as trying too hard. 

Overzealous pursuit of your heart's desire can end up chasing it away.
The Chinese government may be learning that right now. 

China, a great civilization brought low by foreign powers in the 19th and 20th centuries, has long burned to acquire a global stature corresponding to its self-image.
Its transformation from an economic catastrophe to an export machine has made it a much bigger player in world affairs. 

But sometimes efforts to assert itself generate not respect and cooperation but fear and resistance.
The decision to establish an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea didn't have to set alarm bells clanging from Seoul to Tokyo to Washington. 

Other countries have their own along their coastlines, and Beijing can make a reasonable case that it's entitled to one as well.
But the Chinese didn't make the case; they just proclaimed it. 

The change came in such an abrupt and surprising way as to make it impossible for anyone to cheerfully accept. 

China failed to consult with its neighbors in advance, took in islands long under Japanese jurisdiction and established rules beyond what other countries impose.
In attempting to expand its reach, the regime got its fingers scorched. 

Japan not only objected vigorously but mobilized support from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which includes 10 of China's neighbors. 

South Korea carried out military exercises in the area and told its airlines to ignore the Chinese demand.
The U.S. Air Force sent a couple of B-52s rumbling through the space in an ostentatious show of disrespect. President Xi Jinping had to endure the torture of a Joe Biden lecture. 

Oh, and if Chinese fighters provoke actual combat with their Japanese and American counterparts, they are likely to be shot down.
How does all this make China stronger and more influential? It doesn't. 

It repels its neighbors and spurs them to band together. 

It encourages Washington to retain a big military presence in the Pacific. 

Those in power in Beijing ought to understand as much, because they usually try to avoid steps guaranteed to cheese people off.
Twenty years ago, as China was building up its military and asserting itself in the region, experts feared it would end up going to war with various nearby countries over territorial claims, or that it would use force to keep Taiwan in line. 

But neither scenario came to pass. 

China, unlike some countries I could mention, hasn't fought a war since 1979. 

Taiwan is as independent, in practice, as ever.
Meanwhile, China has worked to behave like an upstanding member of the community of nations — joining the World Trade Organization, channeling aid and investment to Africa, hosting the Olympics and joining efforts to stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons.
This was a huge shift from the militancy of Mao Zedong, who saw himself as the enemy of the West, defied global norms of conduct and occasionally cackled about winning a nuclear war.
But nationalism can warp the government's judgment, as it did this time. 

China's rulers might take a page from the history of another country that has often played an outsized role in its part of the world: Germany. 

Or, rather, two pages.
In the early 20th century, Germany aspired to play a larger role in Europe, and it feared being encircled by enemies. 

But its behavior, such as building a navy to compete with Britain and forging an alliance with Austria-Hungary, stimulated other nations to coalesce against it, which led to defeat in World War I. 

Its ambitions destroyed its own ends.
After the fall of the Third Reich, by contrast, Germany put aside narrow national interests and made a priority of respecting and accommodating its neighbors. 

Its once-terrifying military became a servant of the Western alliance. 

Through humility and restraint, Germany somehow rose to the point that it is now, in the words of a BBC commentator, "Europe's indispensable power."
The Chinese leaders are doubtless familiar with Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's adage that it is better to be feared than loved. 

They shouldn't forget the more pertinent advice of an underrated international relations theorist from Nazareth. 

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, he said, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

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A Leader in Mao’s Cultural Revolution Faces His Past

By JANE PERLEZ

“I was too scared. I couldn’t stop it. I was afraid of being called a counterrevolutionary, of having to wear a dunce’s hat.”-- CHEN XIAOLU

BEIJING — ON the surface, at least, there is not much about Chen Xiaolu to suggest a lifetime of regret.
The son of one of Communist China’s founding generals, he enjoyed privilege at an early age and then a career as a business consultant that took him around the world. 

Now 67, he relaxes on golf courses in Scotland and southern France and eschews the dark suits and high-maintenance black hair of most affluent Chinese men for casual shirts and a gray buzz cut.
But beneath the genial exterior is a memory that has haunted him for nearly 50 years. 

There he was, back in high school, a fresh-faced member of the volleyball team and a student leader in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, ordering teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads. 

He stood there, excited and proud, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers.
Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads. 

He did not object. He simply fled. 

“I was too scared,” he recalled recently in one of several interviews at a restaurant near Tiananmen Square, not far from his alma mater, No. 8 Middle School, which catered to the children of the Mao elite. 

“I couldn’t stop it. I was afraid of being called a counterrevolutionary, of having to wear a dunce’s hat.”
A ripple of confessions about the Cultural Revolution from former Red Guards, most of them retired men of modest backgrounds, has surfaced in the last few months. 

But it was Mr. Chen’s decision to step forward in August with a public apology that has drawn the most attention, raising hopes that a nation so determined to define its future might finally be moving to confront the horrors of its past.
He did so, he said, not only for personal redemption but also for profound reasons to do with China’s political development that must include the rule of law.
“Many people are thinking back fondly to the good old days of the Cultural Revolution, and are saying it was just against corrupt officials,” he said in an interview. 

“But many things happened in the Cultural Revolution that violated people’s rights. The majority in China did not really experience the Cultural Revolution, and those of us who did have to tell people about it.”
Mr. Chen’s remorse stands out because of his stature, then and now. 

He is quite candid that as the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its longtime foreign minister, he was handed the mantle of immense authority during the decisive, early days of the Cultural Revolution.
“I bear direct responsibility for the denouncing and criticism, and forced-labor re-education of school leaders, and some teachers and students,” Mr. Chen wrote in a blog post on his school alumni website in August that quickly circulated on the Internet. 

“I actively rebelled and organized the denouncements of school leaders. Later on when I served as the director of the school’s Revolution Committee, I wasn’t brave enough to stop the inhumane prosecutions.”
“My official apology comes too late, but for the purification of the soul, the progress of society and the future of the nation, one must make this kind of apology,” he concluded.
The apology has drawn a mixed response. 

Slightly more than half of the comments on the alumni website commended him. 

On Chinese websites, many questioned why it was necessary to pick over old wounds.
THE Cultural Revolution remains largely hidden from view in China as successive governments have discouraged discussion of the turmoil and terror that Mao orchestrated to perpetuate his rule but that almost brought the country to its knees.
Deng Xiaoping repudiated the Cultural Revolution in 1978, and the party has acknowledged it was a mistake, but a full accounting has never occurred.
A particularly delicate subject for the party has been the number of people killed.
In Beijing alone, about 1,800 people died during August and September 1966, the height of the frenzy, when Mao first deployed students as Red Guards to turn against the party, according to the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. 

Estimates range from 1.5 million to three million dead across China from 1966 to 1976.
A Chinese historian of the Cultural Revolution, Xu Youyu, described Mr. Chen’s apology as “very unusual” because former Red Guards — an entire generation of Chinese now in their 60s — generally justify their actions during the Cultural Revolution and prefer to emphasize their role as victims rather than perpetrators; they rarely apologize in private, much less in public.
The fateful criticism ceremony of teachers at the Zhongshan Concert Hall, near the Forbidden City, that Mr. Chen organized was brutal even before it began, said Huang Jian, the chairman of the alumni group.
On the way to the auditorium, students “wielded whips,” lashing at the school principal, Wen Hanjiang, as they frog-marched him, Mr. Huang said. 

Mr. Wen, now 89 and living in Beijing, where Mr. Chen recently visited him, was beaten on the stage, too.

Back at the school, the atmosphere darkened. 

The school’s senior party official, Hua Jia, committed suicide. 

She took her life after two weeks of beatings and being fed only bits of food in a storeroom where she was imprisoned, Mr. Chen said.
Someone told him of the suicide, and he rushed to the room to find the body on the floor.
“She used a string tied to the windowsill, put her head through the noose and then knelt down to hang herself,” he said. 

Mr. Chen offered the details quickly and quietly, a tinge of embarrassment in his words. 

It turned out, he said, she had been a loyal member of the Communist Party for 30 years.
During the early turmoil, Mr. Chen lived at home with his parents at Zhongnanhai, the sprawling compound in the center of Beijing where senior party officials were assigned traditional courtyard-style houses and luxuries existed unknown beyond the high walls.
His father insisted that the family could not discuss the Cultural Revolution at home, he said. 

“To put it simply, my father said you must participate in the Cultural Revolution but be careful and prudent.”
They maintained a “Chinese screen” of silence about the violence, he said. 

“I never told my father anything about the suicide” of Ms. Hua, he said. 

“My father knew someone could use me to target him.”
LIFE was easy at Zhongnanhai. 

The children were often summoned to watch Mao swim in one of two 50-meter pools — outdoors in summer, indoors in winter. 

There were basketball games, rowing on a lake and weekend movies.
But soon, trouble struck at the heart of the Chen family. 

In a speech in early 1967, Chen Yi dared to criticize the Cultural Revolution. 

Mao sidelined him, and the man who had greeted every foreign leader to the new China was subjected to a humiliating self-criticism session and ordered to stay at home.
After his father was disgraced, Mr. Chen stopped living at home “to keep more distance.” 

In the summer of 1968, Mao dispersed the students to the countryside. 

Prime Minister Zhou Enlai spared Mr. Chen that fate by sending him to the army.
In 1972, Chen Yi died of colon cancer, a broken man. 

Chen Xiaolu came home from the army for the funeral. 

Out of the blue, he said, Mao turned up dressed in pajamas and a winter topcoat to pay respects to his father. 

In front of the Chen family, Mao reinstated Chen Yi in the pantheon of revolutionary greats by calling him a “good comrade.”
That afternoon, Mr. Chen drank beer with a school friend, Ji Sanmeng, and shared a poem, Mr. Ji recalled, about how his father, a hero, had endured ill treatment for the past five years at the hands of Mao and his men.
By then, Mr. Chen’s faith in Mao had evaporated, although he never said so publicly.

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Decades After the Cultural Revolution, a Rare Letter of Remorse

By JANE PERLEZ

In an apology for his actions as a student during the Cultural Revolution, Chen Xiaolu, the son of China’s famed Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, published a notice in his school alumni blog in August. 

A profile based on interviews with Mr. Chen in the Saturday editions of the New York Times and the International New York Times refers to the apology, a rare expression of remorse from someone involved in carrying out Mao’s orders. 

Mr. Chen explains the apology was too long in coming, and says reflections on the past are necessary in order for China to move forward.
The apology attracted wide interest online, and also from colleagues who attended Middle School Number Eight, a prestigious school in the center of Beijing that catered to the children of the elite. 

Some of Mr. Chen’s teachers are still alive, including Wen Hanjiang, the school principal, now 89. 

Mr. Chen recently visited Mr. Wen, who was badly beaten during the dark days of the Cultural Revolution at the school. 

The elderly man accepted his personal apology, as did the other teachers who still live in Beijing and whom he visited, Mr. Chen said. 

In early October, Mr. Chen organized a dinner with former teachers and students, a convivial affair, he said, where the past was discussed in a friendly and forgiving way.
At the start of the apology, he refers to grainy black and white photographs from the summer of 1966 when the school was in turmoil, and the students, ordered by Mao to crush the old structures of power, were in charge. 

The photos show teachers being forced to do menial labor — digging a ditch, carrying heavy loads — while cocky students look on.
On a personal note, I met Chen Yi, the father of Chen Xiaolu, when he was foreign minister. 

I was in China at the time as a university undergraduate from Australia on a summer vacation in January 1967, and my fellow students and I were surprised, when we arrived, to find the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. 

We traveled by train up the eastern seaboard to Beijing with stops in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing. 

At our meeting at the Great Hall of the People Chen Yi was jovial, offering cigarettes and bantering about our trip. 

He was dressed in a rumpled Mao suit as he talked the language of the Cultural Revolution. 

There was little hint that the next month he would speak out against what Mao had wrought. 

Forty six years later his son decided to follow his example.
The following is a complete translation of Chen Xiaolu’s message of apology.

I want to thank our classmate for preserving these precious photographs, and to thank Huang Jian for making them public on August 18th. 

That period of time is unbearable to look back upon, but those are days that we’ll have to face our whole lives. 

As a student leader at Middle School Number Eight and the director of the school’s Revolutionary Committee, I bear direct responsibility for the denouncing, criticism and forced labor re-education of school leaders, some teachers and students. 

In the early stages of the movement, I actively rebelled and organized the denunciations of school leaders. 

When I later served as the director of the school’s Revolutionary Committee, I wasn’t brave enough to stop the inhumane persecutions, because I feared I would be accused of protecting the old ways and being a counter-revolutionary. 

It was a terrifying time.
Today I want to use the Internet to express my sincere apology to these people. 

Middle School Number Eight’s Old-Three-Classes student union is currently organizing a get-together with school leaders and teachers. 

I hope I can represent those Old-Three-Classes classmates who have hurt these school leaders, teachers and students in expressing our deepest apologies to them. 

I want to ask, will our classmates authorize me to make this kind of apology?
Recently you’ve seen in society a trend of trying to reverse the verdict on the Cultural Revolution. 

I believe that how one interprets the Cultural Revolution is matter of individual freedom, but unconstitutional and inhumane violations of human rights shouldn’t be repeated in any form in China! 

If it is repeated, we can’t even begin to speak of the happiness of the people, the wealth and power of the nation, or the Chinese Dream! 

My official apology comes too late, but for the purification of the soul, the progress of society, the future of the nation, one must make this kind of apology. 

Without reflection, how can we speak of progress!
Chen Xiaolu

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The Meaning of China’s Crackdown on the Foreign Press

By Evan Osnos

The Chinese government is threatening to expel nearly two dozen foreign correspondents, working for the Times and Bloomberg News, in retaliation for investigations that exposed the private wealth of Chinese leaders. 

It is the Chinese government’s most dramatic attempt to insulate itself from scrutiny in the thirty-five years since China began opening to the world. 

We won’t know if it’s prepared to follow through on the threat for another week or two, when correspondents’ annual visas begin to expire. 

So far, it has declined to renew them. 

Unless the government changes course, reporters and their dependents will be required to leave the country before the end of the year.
But following through is only part of the point. 

The real purpose is intimidation: to compel foreign news organizations to adopt a more compliant posture in their daily decisions, small and large. 

In attempting to shield themselves from the gaze of the world, the new generation of Chinese leaders has unwittingly provided one of the clearest views yet into their thinking, and their self-perception, as they confront the challenges that will define China’s future.
Before the government threatened to expel the foreign staffs of the Times and Bloomberg, there were already signs that a strategic change was underway. 

As I wrote last month, news organizations are facing a time of reckoning in China. 

The American correspondent Paul Mooney was denied a visa in November, joining a list of other journalists, including Andrew Higgins and Melissa Chan, who have been prevented from entering the country, or forced out, in the past two years. 

Chan, who was working for Al Jazeera English, was the first foreign correspondent expelled in thirteen years. At the time, we did not know what to make of the news; we now know that Chan’s expulsion, in May, 2012, was a milestone, not an aberration.
The present threat to expel journalists unwinds a decision, made five years ago, to signal greater openness to foreign correspondents. 

In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission. 

It was a largely symbolic restraint—reporters travelled anyway—but removing it was symbolic as well, and that was the intent: it was designed to show the world that the host of the Olympics was confident and strong enough to bear whatever journalists might uncover in their wanderings.
Two things seem to have compelled the government to reverse course. 

In 2011, the uprisings in the Arab world unnerved the Chinese government by raising the prospect that the combination of technology, information, and dissatisfaction could undermine even a government that appeared secure to itself and outsiders. 

“If we waver,” Wu Bangguo, a senior official, told a meeting in Beijing in March, 2011, “the state could sink into the abyss.” 

The Arab Spring created a climate of sensitivity, but it was the events of the following year that tipped the balance. 

In 2012, the Times used Chinese records to calculate that the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had acquired a fortune of $2.7 billion during his time in office. 

Bloomberg produced a similar story on the incoming President, Xi Jinping. 

In retaliation, the government took steps to punish the bottom line of both companies: it blocked a Times Web site aimed at Chinese readers, and it ordered financial customers not to buy any new Bloomberg terminals. 

Those measures remain in place.
Before President Xi and the fifth generation of Communist Party leaders took office, last November, China-watchers wondered if he would address his people’s growing appetite for information by giving them a bit more space and bit more truth—to let them blow off steam, and satisfy their sense of slow and steady progress, as a way of preventing more radical change. 

The leaders are choosing the opposite tack: they are seeking to create more economic opportunity but less political and intellectual opportunity. 

Over the course of the past six months, they have narrowed the range of free expression on the Internet and tightened their hold over professors and activists who criticize the government. 

Attempting to chill the activities of the foreign press is the latest step. 

They are betting that their people will tolerate a narrower realm of ideas than they enjoyed a year or two ago. 

That is a risky bet; taking things away from people who have come to expect more does not generally relieve the source of pressure.
China is gradually losing interest in soft power. 

The Party spent much of the past decade seeking to project a more attractive and welcoming image to the world; it placed billboards in Times Square, expanded the reach of its news outlets to broadcast more of its views to Africa and Latin America, and built hospitals, roads, and soccer stadiums in developing countries. Those efforts will continue, but the leadership is signalling that it has concluded being liked is less important than simply surviving. 

I spent some time with a senior Chinese diplomat recently, and when I asked what motivated the threat of expulsion, the diplomat said that the Times and Bloomberg were seeking nothing short of removing the Communist Party from power, and that they must not be allowed to continue. 

That argument surprised me: I had expected a bland procedural defense—this was a blunt expression of fear.
The government is adapting a policy that it has used with other businesses, but it is one that misunderstands the incentives for news organizations. 

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking, or intellectual-property violations, in order to protect their broader interests in the country. 

But over the years, that strategy failed: foreign companies began to complain openly, and the United States government took up their cases. 

News organizations have little reason to keep quiet; unlike a company selling industrial equipment, a company selling news depends, for its survival, on the perception of objectivity and credibility. 

Staying silent was not an option.
In a visit to Beijing on Thursday, Vice-President Joe Biden took up the cause of the foreign correspondents, and in doing so he officially, and rightly, ended the practice of keeping these issues unspoken. 

We will soon know if the Party is prepared to deliver on its threat. 

The deeper meaning of these efforts, however, is already clear. 

The new generation leading China fears that the effort to itemize its financial gains is a story so deep and dangerous that it is worth sacrificing China’s broader goals, at home and abroad, in order to prevent it from being told.

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