China: the must-visit destination for cash-seeking politicians

Cameron is keen to benefit from China's economic power and happy to push aside human rights concerns.
By Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing

David Cameron plays table tennis on his recent three-day visit to China.

This week it was David Cameron playing table tennis, Joe Biden touting democracy, and Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych escaping a little domestic trouble. 

This weekend it is French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault talking nuclear power. 

Next week there will be Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop.
Welcome to Beijing, the must-visit destination for world leaders who need cash or clout. 

Rarely a week goes by without some leading dignitary passing through. 

African leaders come seeking investment or offering land deals. 

Europeans swing by eager for access to Chinese markets (Angela Merkel is almost a regular in Beijing, and Vladimir Putin's first overseas visit after his return to the presidency last year was Beijing).
The principal reason is obvious: the world's second-largest economy is primed to invest abroad, and western nations are in no position to wave it away.
But the promised land has a dark side – for many western leaders, China's economic allure has eclipsed its unscrupulous politics. 

They know that criticizing China's treatment of dissidents, its repressive ethnic policies and its increasing aggression abroad will carry an economic price. 

They're afraid of getting burned.
"I think China obviously uses its growing economic power to send a clear message, or signal, to foreign leaders," said Jingdong Yuan, an expert in international affairs at Sydney university's centre for international security studies. 

"The Chinese government might close some doors, or make things more difficult if they see foreign leaders deliberately challenge their interests."
Analysts have criticized Cameron's three-day trip to Beijing, which ended Wednesday, as little more than an extended apology for meeting the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in 2012, causing Beijing to freeze inter-ministerial Sino-UK ties. 

During the trip, he played table tennis with Chinese schoolchildren, traipsed along Shanghai's bund with a prominent entrepreneur, and opened an account on Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog.
Yet what Cameron neglected to do is arguably more significant. 

He did not criticize China for its recent unilateral declaration of administrative control over a swath of airspace in the east China sea, bringing territorial disputes with Japan to a boil. 

He did not mention China's human rights record, its environmental degradation, or the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, whom he met with in 2012.
Biden, who left Beijing on Thursday night, did tackle a few tough issues: in meetings with China's president Xi Jinping and premier Li Keqiang, he emphasized that Washington has a "firm position and expectations" on the country's behavior in the east China sea. 

He strongly criticized China for withholding visas from foreign journalists as retaliation for critical coverage, and encouraged a group of US visa applicants to "challenge the government," espousing the rejection of orthodoxy as a traditional American value.
"The Americans still say what they want, regarding human rights in China and Tibet, but western European leaders have been quite effectively intimidated – China has succeeded in teaching them a so-called lesson," said Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California. 

"No leader who dares to have a meeting with the Dalai Lama can escape punishment by Beijing."
Cameron arrived in China with more 130 businesspeople, the UK's largest trade delegation, and signed a raft of deals. 

He pushed for an EU-China free trade agreement and Chinese investment in a British high-speed rail project. He signed a £45m deal to export pig semen to China, to improve the quality of the country's pork.
Yet the outcomes of such vaunted trade deals are often unclear, said Pei – on official visits, both sides' top priorities are ultimately image-related. 

European leaders want to prove that they're leveraging China's economic resources for benefits at home. Chinese leaders wants to show domestic audiences that they occupy the high ground over western, democratic societies.
"I think Chinese leaders are smart enough to know that they're not going to change the suspicion, the ideological hostility towards China in the West," he said. 

"But they're going to squeeze every bit of PR out of these visits that they can."
Jonathan Holslag, a research fellow at the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies, said that since president Xi and premier Li took the reins last autumn, they have proven far more straightforward than their predecessors. 

Western politicians have been cowed.
"I think the Chinese have learned to play the game very well – and it's not a game of real power, it's a game of protocol, and it's a game of pretense," he said. 

"This creates a sort of vicious cycle. The Chinese pretend to be powerful, we position ourselves as weaker than we really are, and this allows the Chinese to push harder."

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China is not ending its human rights abuses

• It's good that China ending one-child policy and system of labor camps
• It would be naive to think that this will erase human rights problems
• The changes do not include outlawing other serious abuses
• Changes are meant to reduce objections to rule of the party

By Steve Tsang

A paramilitary policeman stands before a portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.

President Xi Jinping made a splash by announcing that China will ease its one-child policy and end its notorious policy of re-education through labor camps.

This is good news and represents an important step forward in reducing human rights abuses. 

But it would be naive to think this effort will seriously address the human rights problems in China.

If human rights were the primary concern, more specific actions would have been taken. 

Xi and the Communist Party have other priorities.

Under the new family planning policy, couples will be able to have two children if one spouse is an only child. Until now, both spouses need to be only children or they must be from the ethnic minorities to be allowed to have two children. 

This is a modest change that will mainly benefit the upwardly mobile middle class living in cities.

The easing of the one-child policy cannot end the main abuses associated with it since it does not put an end to forced termination of unauthorized pregnancies, even at very late term. 

Nor does it remove power from the local authorities in enforcing the one-child policy, who have regularly been responsible for abuses.

The changes introduced are meant to deal with the projected decline in population, which would threaten China's capacity to sustain its economic growth. 

They're also meant to lessen the burden on the state in looking after the aging population before China becomes wealthy enough to handle the demands of its "pensioners."

The abolishment of the system of "re-education through labor" camps is a much more significant move.

The existing policy gives local law enforcement agencies the power to detain "undesirables" -- people who are considered social misfits, prostitutes or troublemakers for authorities. 

The government can jail these people for several years and force them to work at next to no wage -- all without going through the judicial process and without receiving a conviction. 

There is absolutely no place for such a policy in any country in the 21st century. 

It's about time that China do away with it.

However, if the Communist Party were committed to tackle human rights abuses, it would have also outlawed other similar practices.

Many of those jailed in labor camps are individuals who had grievances and tried to seek redress. 

Some of them were simply petitioners. 

They were deemed by local authorities to have challenged their power, or they were seen as destabilizing elements in society.

Unless the practice of putting petitioners in "black jails" (informal detention facilities) is abolished, ending the labor camps will have limited effect in reducing human rights abuses. 

There is no indication other similarly repressive measures will be terminated.

What the party will achieve is removing a source of discontent toward the government. 

By doing so, Xi projects himself as a reformer who is going beyond where his predecessors were willing to do.

But so far, he has done nothing to allow ordinary citizens to challenge the Communist Party's monopoly of power in any way, or acknowledge that the rights of dissidents or petitioners must be protected.

What is obvious with these Xi reforms is that they are really meant for one purpose only. 

It is to strengthen the capacity of the Communist Party to govern more effectively and to reduce the reasons for the Chinese population to find the party's rule objectionable.

These changes will not alter the nature of the political system at all. 

China's political system is anti-democratic in nature and is first and foremost dedicated to keeping the Communist Party in power.

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Britain Kowtowing to China

In its rush to lure Chinese investment and tourism, the U.K. overlooks human rights and regulatory concerns.
By Yuan Ren

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (second from left) and London Mayor Boris Johnson (second from right) are accompanied by two students on a tour of Peking University.

Last year, London Mayor Boris Johnson heralded the just-completed London 2012 Summer Olympic Games as a triumph for the city and a magnet for tourism and foreign investment.
But this open invitation, apparently, didn’t extend to China.
Two months prior to the Games, the British Ambassador in Beijing, Sebastian Wood, labeled the U.K. “a fortress” to potential Chinese visitors.
This year, the UN World Tourism organization marked Chinese tourists as the single biggest source of income in global tourism: As a group, they spent $102 billion overseas in 2012, more than 30 percent more than visitors from other countries.
But while a single Schengen visa enables tourists to gain entry into most countries in the EU, the U.K. requires a separate visa that costs almost twice as much.
This, Wood argued, deterred wealthy Chinese tourists from visiting the country, and caused the U.K. to lose significant revenue to European neighbors such as France and Germany.
Last month, in an effort to undo the image of this “British fortress” and smooth ruffled feelings over Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2012 meeting with the Dalai Lama, London sent a small delegation on a five-day mission to China.
Among the delegates were London Mayor Boris Johnson and the U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, whose visit began in Beijing on October 14.
In clear contrast to previous high-level trade visits to China, both men steered clear of political controversy, as Mayor Johnson sidestepped human rights questions while Osborne confirmed that “the prime minister is not planning to meet the Dalai Lama.”
Instead, the visit focused exclusively on trade, with both sides expressing hope that the prime minister may visit China later this year.
A key component of the British visit was easing visa regulations for Chinese visitors.
At Peking University, Osborne announced the launch of a 24-hour “super priority” service that would fast-track visas for Chinese business leaders traveling to the U.K. as well as a separate process that would allow certain Chinese travel agents to apply for U.K. visas using the same application as for the Schengen.
Johnson also mentioned the huge income derived from Britain’s 130,000-strong Chinese student population, noting that “London has more Chinese students than any other city on earth, outside China.”
Reminding the audience that Harry Potter’s girlfriend was also a Chinese student, he added: “Let me make this clear to you and to the whole of China: There is no limit to the number of Chinese who can study in Britain.”
The statement, given recent events, was striking: Last year the U.K. announced a policy to reduce annual net immigration from outside the EU, shortening the length of stay for overseas students.
And while previous visas offered students the right to seek employment in the U.K. for two years, now only those who graduate with job offers can stay.
Why, then, is the U.K. suddenly reversing course with China?

***

China has made significant investments in British industry and infrastructure.
These include shares in London’s water supply as well as a project to expand Heathrow Airport, the latter worth £800 million ($1.28 billion) and expected to create 16,000 jobs.
To further promote trade, the two countries struck a deal allowing direct trading between their respective currencies, based on an 80 billion yuan ($12.7 billion) quota for London-based firms to invest in China.
The U.K. is now the only foreign country to manage China’s tightly controlled currency.
The U.K. has even eased regulations for Chinese banks to set up branches in London, relaxing rules brought in as a result of the financial crisis that required most foreign banks to set up “subsidiaries” that operate under tighter controls of the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA).
Such “counterproductive” measures, as one journalist called them in the South Morning China Post, reportedly pushed several Chinese banks to switch operations to Luxembourg.
While many in the banking industry saw the news as undermining the PRA’s independence, others, such as TheCityUK, an independent membership body promoting financial services, “strongly welcomed” the announcements, which it saw as “potentially increasing funding for U.K. infrastructure and investment in other sectors.”
Even more contentious is China’s foray into Britain’s nuclear power industry.
During his visit George Osborne announced that Chinese state-owned companies would take a minority share in the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in southwest England, the first to be constructed in the U.K in 20 years.
As is the current government’s policy on new nuclear projects, the station will be completely privately funded, led by the French government-owned company EDF Energy.
Osborne also revealed a longer-term plan for the Chinese to become “majority owners” in future power stations built in the U.K., which he said will be paid for with “Chinese money,” to ensure “lower energy bills for families in Britain.”
While some, like Ed Davey, the U.K. Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change called China’s support “vital” to the country’s energy prospects, others, like Isabel Hilton, Editor of China Dialogue, have questioned whether Britain is just a pawn in China becoming “the world's next big nuclear exporter.”
Questions over safety risks for Britain also point to China’s record on corruption and weak regulatory frameworks. 
John Large, the U.K. government’s advisor on nuclear energy, raised concerns that China is “rooted in a government system without independent [safety] regulators.”
But such anxieties were dismissed by the Chancellor, who emphasized during his visit that the Chinese role in nuclear projects will be “subject to British safety rules leased by the British,” and that China is “a very straightforward and transparent partner.”
But is this realistic?
Last month, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International placed China at the bottom of the BRICS club of emerging markets for being the least open and most prone to corruption. 
Of the 11 companies given “0” ratings for transparency, nine were from China, including Huawei Technologies, a private firm that has been entangled in allegations of spying for the Chinese government. Huawei plans to invest $200 million in building a research and development center in the U.K., as announced by George Osborne during his visit to its headquarters in Shenzhen.
Does China’s increasing stake in U.K. businesses and industry presents tangible risks for the U.K.?
While countries like the U.S. have barred Huawei from its telecoms industry over security concerns, the U.K. has continued to allow Huawei to integrate its technology into British telecommunications systems, even though the U.K. Parliament's security watchdog warned in June this year that the company’s alleged links to the Communist Party were “concerning” and questioned whether “Huawei’s intentions are strictly commercial or are more political.”
This latest trip in China, labeled by some as “China mania,” has led some observers of the Sino-British relationship to warn that London was kowtowing to the Chinese by making an unprecedented number of compromises.
Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, called Osborne and Johnson “wide-eyed and innocent” for making “one-sided economic concessions.”
In spite of these concerns, Johnson and Osborne’s delegation insists that Britain’s economic development takes priority.
But while David Cameron’s last visit to China in 2011 emphasized that “a dialogue covering human rights” was a key part of how “[the China-UK] relationship should work,” the absence of such conversations in the latest trip indicates that the U.K. is giving up its moral high ground for closer economic ties with China, as France and Germany have done.
In contrast to the U.K. media frenzy, the Johnson-Osborne trip elicited less sentiment on the Chinese side, where reporting has been more positive.
According to writer Jonathan Fenby, China’s coverage highlights the U.K. as “just one of many” business opportunities for China and “far from a leading destination for Chinese investment,” lagging behind the likes of Germany, with its $200 billion dollars worth of investment.
While the success of the Sino-British trade relationship hinges on a balance of political tact and strict regulatory checks with strong accountability, the U.K. government’s latest move signals the end to British integrity. 
Jonathan Mirsky, a former East Asia editor of the Times writing in the New York Review of Books, sees the new relationship as a sell-out, on what he calls “precisely the things that have made Britain great: freedom, democracy and above all, speaking truth to power.”

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Critics want Trudeau to apologize for China comment

Canada Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau under fire for expressing admiration for China's 'basic dictatorship'
CTV News

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is getting an earful of criticism from human rights activists and others over his recent comments about "admiration" for China's dictatorship.
"We do want Mr. Trudeau to have a public apology, and also we want him to schedule a time to meet with us," said Sheng Xue, who moved to Canada shortly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Sheng held a news conference in Toronto on Saturday to denounce controversial comments Trudeau made during a fundraiser Thursday.

Trudeau met with criticism for the second time in as many days Friday, after telling a Toronto fundraising crowd that he admired China’s “basic dictatorship.”
Speaking to a sold-out crowd of women, Trudeau was responding to a question about which nation’s administration he most admired.
The Liberal leader said: “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green... we need to start investing in solar.’”
His remarks became fodder for the Conservatives, who are already keeping close tabs on the leader’s record.
“Let me get this straight: He has talked about policy, He supports the status quo in the Senate. He supports dictatorship. He wants a carbon tax and he wants to legalize marijuana,” Conservative MP Paul Calandra said.
Alberta MP Tim Uppal, also a Conservative, suggested Trudeau’s comments “demonstrate he’s not fit to lead the greatest democracy in the world.”
Trudeau’s comments were also met with scorn by the New Democrats, who are fighting to defeat the Liberals in an upcoming byelection in Toronto Centre.
“I’m not a big fan of dictatorships, I rather prefer democracies,” NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said at a campaign event in Toronto Friday. 

“I don’t understand how someone can say that their favourite government is a dictatorship.”
Trudeau took to social media Friday to explain himself.
“I pointed out that globally, Canada is up against big countries (China, for one) that can address some major issues quickly,” he wrote on Twitter.
“It’s ridiculous for anyone to suggest that I of all people would trade our rights and freedoms for any other system of (government).”
Trudeau made the remarks during a ladies-only fundraiser billed as “Justin Unplugged,” which invited women “to (really) get to know the future prime minister.”
Prior to the event, some female MPs expressed their outrage over the ladies-only online invitation, calling it “stupid” and “demeaning.”
Late Wednesday evening, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel tweeted: “What’s the biggest issue facing women? This kind of crap. #allissuesarewomensissues #patronizing"
In a Facebook post, NDP Deputy Leader Megan Leslie said the event “isn’t just demeaning, it’s stupid.”
“Stupid stupid stupid. All issues are women's issues. And you know what, we can wear pants and drive cars and vote and have jobs and we can have political opinions. The economy is a women's issue, Justin. Health Care is a women's issue, Justin. And you know what? Keystone XL *ahem* is a women's issue.”
Using the Twitter hashtag, “ask Justin,” others took to Twitter to mock the evite and event.
“Dear Justin, Will the Keystone XL pipeline make my butt look fat? #askjustin,” wrote @tenzinster.
“#askjustin Have you ever tried an organic apple cider hair rinse?" wrote @chantalbraganza.
Organizers defended the event Thursday, saying it was intended to reach out to women who are not always politically engaged.
Liberal consultant Amanda Alvaro issued a statement saying the evite was designed to “elicit interest and intrigue” and not to evoke a standard political invitation.
The questions it posed “are not sexist questions. These are questions, among others, meant to provoke conversation and inspire interesting dialogue. The intent was not to offend anybody.”
Alvaro also said the invitation had been circulating for a month, and blamed the uproar over “partisan commentary” that came out over the last day.

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Tibetans Call China’s Policies at Tourist Spot Stifling

   

By DAN LEVIN

 XIAHE, China — Buddhist monks in flowing burgundy robes hurried along the dirt paths of the Labrang Monastery, trying their best to ignore the scrum of Chinese tourists following their every move, many with cameras fit for paparazzi.
Pilgrims and those less spiritually inclined wandered through the ornate complex here in the mountain town of Xiahe to gaze upon towering Buddha statues bathed in incense.
Some tourists held back to indulge in distinctly unenlightened pursuits, smoking cigarettes and pouting at smartphones in the high-tech vanity ritual known as the selfie.

A Tibetan monk and pilgrims in prayer at a Buddhist temple near the Labrang Monastery in Xiahe.
Chinese tourists on the Qinghai grasslands near Xiahe.
Tourists watch Tibetan monks emerging from a hall at Labrang Monastery.

One of the most important sites in Tibetan Buddhism, Labrang presents an idyllic picture of sacred devotion that is carefully curated by the Chinese government, which hopes to convince visitors that Tibetan religion and culture are swaddled in the Communist Party’s benevolent embrace.
But behind closed doors, many of the monastery’s resident monks complain about intrusive government policies, invisible to tourists, that they say are strangling their culture and identity.
“Even if we’re just praying, the government treats us as criminals,” said a young monk, who like others interviewed recently spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid government repercussions.
Such frustrations, many monks say, are what have driven more than 120 Tibetans to set fire to themselves since 2009, including 13 in the Labrang area, in a wave of protests that has gone largely unreported in Chinese news media.
International human rights advocates say that rather than address the underlying grievances — including Beijing’s deeply unpopular campaign to demonize the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader — Chinese authorities have responded with even harsher policies that punish the relatives of those who self-immolate and imprison those who disseminate news of the protests to the outside world.
Exile groups and analysts say Labrang and a handful of other monasteries across the vast Tibetan plateau in Central Asia have become showcases for Beijing’s strategy, which seeks to stifle dissent in well-trafficked tourist sites without scaring away visitors.
Monks here describe a largely unseen web of controls that keep potential troublemakers in line: ubiquitous surveillance cameras, paid informers and plainclothes security agents who mingle among the busloads of tourists.
Hidden from the throngs are the political education sessions during which monks are forced to denounce the Dalai Lama.
Stiff jail sentences await those who step out of line.
“If we don’t obey, it will be terrible for us,” the monk said.
Founded in the early 18th century, the Labrang Monastery is tucked into the dusky hills of northwestern Gansu Province.
Each day, hundreds of Chinese tourists arrive to spin colorful prayer wheels lining the monastery perimeter and sip tea at hotels designed to resemble Tibetan nomadic tents.
Along the town’s main street, they buy turquoise-encrusted amulets, dress up in monks’ robes and take turns trying on the ceremonial yellow hats that resemble mohawk-style haircuts.
Officials hope that a recently completed airport will draw even bigger crowds.
In a monastery courtyard surrounded by whitewashed mud walls, a Chinese family from the provincial capital, Lanzhou, knelt down to pray to Buddha.
“If you ask nicely, he’ll make your wish come true,” said the mother, Ming Yang, who acknowledged that her understanding of Buddhism ended there.
With an eye on the lucrative prestige of a Unesco World Heritage listing, the central government is giving the monastery a $26 million face-lift.
Around 1,000 monks and 65,000 volumes of Buddhist scripture are housed in the sprawling complex, which local officials say is in dire need of structural improvements.
Yet locals complain that much of the construction is aimed at increasing tourism, rather than benefiting Tibetans.
“It looks fancy, but in reality all the improvements are for Chinese people,” one said.
Tourism is rapidly reshaping much of the Tibetan plateau.
According to the Xinhua state news agency, six million tourists visited Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, in the first eight months of this year, a 20 percent increase over the same period in 2012.
The boom has attracted several international hotel chains to the city, which is under de facto martial law.
In May, Tibetan exile groups started a boycott campaign against the InterContinental Hotels Group, which is building a 2,000-room luxury resort next to the historic residence once occupied by the Dalai Lama.
In the wake of violent anti-Chinese protests that swept Tibet in 2008 and the wave of self-immolations that followed, security forces have tightened their grip.
The crackdown reaches deep into the folds of Tibetan spirituality.
According to the International Campaign for Tibet, officials have posted notices in Tibetan areas declaring it illegal to pray for self-immolators or to show solidarity “by burning incense, chanting religious scriptures, releasing animals from killing and lighting candles.”
At least two monks have been jailed for praying on behalf of self-immolators, the group said.
Exile groups say such tactics only alienate Tibetans further.
“Even lighting a butter lamp or incense stick becomes an act against the state,” Kate Saunders, communications director for the organization, said from London.
Yet local enforcement has been erratic.
Nowhere is this more clear than at Labrang, where a framed photo of the Dalai Lama sits on an altar beside a large golden Buddha.
For years, the government has banned photos of the Dalai Lama and forbidden Tibetans to worship him as a religious figure.
Monks at Labrang said they believed that local officials had decided to quietly tolerate such photos in an effort to head off further unrest.
On the tour, few of the Chinese day-trippers seemed to recognize the older, bespectacled man Beijing has called “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
The monk guiding the group made no mention of his identity, lest it threaten the ticket sales and donations needed to cover operating costs.
But being the main attraction on a Buddhist safari has spiritual drawbacks.
“Chinese tourists just barge in when we’re studying,” a middle-aged monk said as he fingered a set of prayer beads.
“It knocks on our minds, but they don’t care.”
Such complaints appear to be falling on deaf ears.
During a tour of the region in July, China’s top official in charge of ethnic minorities, Yu Zhengsheng, insisted that economic development was the panacea for what ailed Tibetans.
In the same breath, he condemned the Dalai Lama’s “middle way,” which calls for genuine autonomy in Tibet but not independence, saying it conflicts with China’s political system.
“Only when people’s lives have been improved can they be better united with the Chinese Communist Party and become a reliable basis for maintaining stability,” he said, according to Xinhua.
But local Tibetans seethe at China’s refusal to recognize their most basic aspirations.
“Our hope is that the Dalai Lama can return,” said a monk, looking out for eavesdroppers while sitting at a cafe.
“Without him, there is no chance our religion and culture will survive.”

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Xia Yeliang: The China Americans Don't See

   

A Peking University economics professor who was sacked for his political views explains the underside of elite Chinese higher education. 
 By DAVID FEITH

The 21st-century romance between America's universities and China continues to blossom, with New York University opening a Shanghai campus last month and Duke to follow next year.
Nearly 100 U.S. campuses host "Confucius Institutes" funded by the Chinese government, and President Obama has set a goal for next year of seeing 100,000 American students studying in the Middle Kingdom.

Human Rights Watch Director of Global Initiatives Minky Worden on China's latest human rights hypocrisy
Meanwhile, Peking University last week purged economics professor Xia Yeliang, an outspoken liberal, with hardly a peep of protest from American academics.
"During more than 30 years, no single faculty member has been driven out like this," Mr. Xia says the day after his sacking from the university, known as China's best, where he has taught economics since 2000.
He'll be out at the end of the semester.
The professor's case is a window into the Chinese academic world that America's elite institutions are so eager to join—a world governed not by respect for free inquiry but by the political imperatives of a one-party state.
Call it higher education with Chinese characteristics.
"All universities are under the party's leadership," Mr. Xia says by telephone from his Beijing home.
"In Peking University, the No. 1 leader is not the president. It's the party secretary of Peking University."
Which is problematic for a professor loudly advocating political change.
In 2008, Mr. Xia was among the original 303 signatories of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law in China.
"Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises," declared the charter, written primarily by Mr. Xia's friend Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who is currently serving an 11-year prison term for "inciting subversion of state power."
Mr. Xi, 53, says he had a mostly apolitical youth in Anhui province, west of Shanghai, where both of his parents were shipyard workers for China's navy.
He never considered himself a communist and says he always felt drawn to the West, thanks partly to foreign picture books from his childhood.
He imagined life as a painter or translator, and after graduating college in 1984 went to work as an interpreter for the government's Foreign Affairs Office.
His political awakening came later, in 1987-89, when he studied management at the University of Toronto, visited several European democracies—and read Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose."
Friedman's writing helped make Mr. Xia a classical liberal and, by the mid-1990s, a student of economics. Today he cites F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James Buchanan and Gary Becker among his intellectual idols.
The list also includes Xiakuai Yang, the Chinese economist—and Mao-era political prisoner—who convinced him that China cannot thrive without imitating the institutions, and not just the technologies, of the West.
Institutions like multiparty constitutional democracy, which Mr. Xia and his Charter 08 comrades demanded five years ago.
The following year, Mr. Xia went out on his own to condemn government censorship in an open letter to Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan, who now sits on Beijing's seven-man supreme decision-making body.
Last year the professor helped start an online petition demanding an investigation into the suspicious death of democracy activist Li Wangyang, and more recently he has taken to Weibo (China's Twitter) to criticize new President Xi Jinping and his signature "Chinese dream" vision of party-led national greatness.
Such is the context for Mr. Xia's firing, but Peking University insists that the matter is purely academic.
"Xia Yeliang's teaching evaluation scores were for many years in a row the lowest of the entire university," school officials said this week, adding that 25 professors have been similarly fired since 2008.
"Slander," replies Mr. Xia, who says that his evaluation scores were stronger, and that in any case the school's dismissal process was a sham based on "no written rule."
Mr. Xia says he first heard of the dismissal proceedings in June, when the party secretary of the school of economics gave him a dressing-down over the telephone: "You could make suggestions and recommendations and we can send that to the leaders," Mr. Xia recalls being told, "but you don't have to say it this way in public. This is ruining the image of the party and the government."
He had been hearing similar messages since 2009, when university authorities warned him to "take good care" of his position on the faculty (as he told the Associated Press at the time).
The state-run Global Times newspaper, for its part, denounced the professor last month as an "extremist liberal... advocating freedom and democracy," even as it too claimed that his professional troubles are entirely nonpolitical.
This claim would be easier to credit if Mr. Xia hadn't already endured years of intimidation and abuse, on campus and off: blacklisted from providing commentary on state television, fired from two research institutes, tailed by plainclothes police, detained and interrogated repeatedly, harassed by nighttime phone calls, kept under house arrest for days, constantly monitored and occasionally hacked online.
With these measures failing to silence him, denying him a livelihood is an obvious way for the government to escalate.
And why wouldn't Peking University play enforcer?
Well, perhaps the school could be discouraged if it had to pay a price—within China, where it still maintains some reputation for relative liberalism, or more likely abroad, where it has established lucrative partnerships with Western universities that supposedly cherish liberal principles.
These include Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and the University of Toronto.
But as he waited between his June conversation with the Communist Party secretary and the university's ruling, only Wellesley College in Massachusetts took up his cause (with 40% of professors calling to make his fair treatment a condition of the school's continued ties with Peking University).
No other Western schools have raised their voices in the days since his ouster.
"I don't want to encourage them to cut off the exchanges and the cooperation," says Mr. Xia of Peking University's partners in the West.
"I don't want to be blamed by people from both sides. I think that they have the freedom to choose."
OK, but if he were among the deciders?
"If I were working in the U.S., I would say always take academic freedom as a basic principle. I don't want to sacrifice the principle to have some kind of cooperation or exchange."
He continues: "Some American faculty members and leaders like to favor the Chinese Communist Party and the government. Because those guys, when they come to China, sometimes they are treated as honored guests."
That includes, he says, fat speaking fees, grand banquets and five-star accommodations.
Of the Wellesley faculty, Mr. Xia says, "I'm very grateful for their support."
Yet clearly it wasn't enough.
"If Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia [and] Chicago did the same thing," he notes, Peking University might have held off: "The top leaders would seriously consider it."
Even now some outside pressure might help: "I don't know whether they could call me back or not, but they might try to make some kind of compensation."
Mr. Xia speaks pointedly about the broader matter of China and the West.
Westerners have a mistaken impression of his homeland, he says, "because the Chinese economy looks so good, and people are getting a better material life. But I think that we have very huge social costs. With pollution, with poisonous food, with a very bad, party-controlled ideological education system. I think that it's very dangerous."
He is scathing about what he sees in universities: "The nature of the scientific research in China is just unbearable. We expend huge expenditures for scientific research, but there's very little real scientific research done."
Some 70% of research funds, he says, goes to personal use—"travel, hotels, meals, computers, mobile phones, iPads, printers, all things you can imagine"—and professors routinely falsify invoices.
"Universities have the same problem" as the China Railway Construction Corp., he says, where officials were recently disciplined for spending $135 million on receptions for guests last year.
Which brings us back to the U.S.-China academic romance.
Chinese universities, Mr. Xia argues, "need famous foreign brand names to protect their very vulnerable capabilities for research and teaching."
The Chinese may "boast" that Peking University is one of the world's best, "but no people really believe that." 
Nowadays in China, he says, "the middle-class and rich persons and officials' children—they're sent to the U.S. to study. They know which schools are good and which are worse."
President Xi and his disgraced former rival, Bo Xilai, chose Harvard for their children.
Western academic ties provide China with "a kind of coating or makeup," says the professor.
"Because in Chinese universities we don't have real freedom of academic research, so there's no way to train great masters. Whether it's in science or in humanities and arts—no way."
Asked about China's prospects for change in light of recent events, Mr. Xia surprises with some optimism. Waiting for a Chinese Gorbachev would be like "Waiting for Godot," he argues, but there are stirrings from below, including the Internet's power to educate citizens, expose officials and organize movements; the increasing willingness of business leaders to challenge the political status quo; and the roughly 200,000 local-level protests a year against injustices such as unpaid military compensation, environmental degradation and illegal land seizures.
"Within 10 to 15 years," he believes, China's Communist Party will collapse. 
"I'm very optimistic about that."
The professor's personal situation is another story.
He'd like to continue teaching, "but I don't think any university in China would dare to accept me."
His wife works as an accountant—at Peking University, of all places.
And he accuses the administrators who fired him of threatening her job, too, by warning that his treatment could worsen if he spoke out publicly.
"I feel sorry for my family members," he says.
"In China if you want to make institutional change, you must prepare to sacrifice or pay some high cost."
It's admirable, then, that on Thursday Wellesley College said it wants to host Mr. Xia as a visiting scholar through its aptly named Freedom Project.
The brave economist could be a powerful presence in an American academy that often checks its principles at the door when it enters China.

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Clashing Views of China’s Human Rights Record at U.N. Hearing

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Security cameras watching over Tiananmen Square in Beijing near a portrait of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

Examining the hundreds of pages of submissions to the latest United Nations hearing on human rights in China, a reader might almost think that two very different countries face scrutiny in Geneva on Tuesday.
The reports from the Chinese government and its proxy groups to the United Nations Human Rights Council depict a country making constant advances in the welfare and rights of its citizens. 

To be sure, there are some development and legal problems, the reports say, but nothing that cannot be fixed by more laws and better enforcement of those laws.
China is “establishing a robust system of human rights safeguards,” says the government’s report to the hearing, part of a rotating “Universal Periodic Review” process, started in 2008, that each United Nations member must face every four or five years. 

This will be China’s second review, after the first in 2009.
China, the government’s report says, “fosters a fairer and more harmonious society, and works to ensure that every citizen enjoys a life of ever-greater dignity, freedom and well-being.”
By contrast, the submissions from international human rights groups and from independent Chinese ones depict a jarringly different country — one in which violations of rights remain rife, prison sentences for political charges have worsened and the government’s promised efforts to bring legal protections into line with international rules have been tardy, cosmetic or stalled.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other international and independent Chinese advocacy groups exude disappointment and frustration in their submissions. 

“Failed to make progress,” “regressive steps,” “little improvement,” “severe suppression,” “steps backward” — bleak phrases like these stand out in their submissions, which have been collected online.
“Torture and cruel treatment are still routinely employed to retaliate against and intimidate human rights defenders,” says a submission from Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an international group that works closely with grass-roots rights advocates. 

“The Chinese government has made little improvement in the critical areas of concern.”
The United Nations review is emblematic of the broader contention over human rights in China. 

In a hearing of more than three hours, Chinese officials will answer questions from other United Nations member states, which, reflecting their views on China, will vie either to flatter or to press Beijing. 

Dozens of advocacy groups have also submitted views in writing, and quite a few have representatives in Geneva as observers at the hearing.
Ultimately, China’s own tensions are also on display in its handling of human rights.
The government maintains that it is a faithful adherent of international norms and rules on rights, although it takes a different view from Western countries as to what those norms and rules entail. 

“China respects the principle of universality of human rights,” says the government’s report to the meeting in Geneva.
But the Chinese Communist Party regularly depicts “human rights” as a vehicle used by Western forces and their Chinese followers to undermine and eventually topple one-party rule. 

Throughout this year, party-run journals have railed against “universal values,” described as an ideological Trojan horse riddled with subversive credos. 

An internal party directive issued in April spelled out these accusations.
“The intent behind promoting ‘universal values’ is to shake the ideological and theoretical foundations of party rule,” said the directive, widely known as Document No. 9. 

“They believe that Western freedom, democracy and human rights are universal and ever-lasting.”
The Chinese government has detained or intimidated Chinese citizens who have sought a say in their government’s submission or tried to travel to Geneva for the meeting, said Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China, an advocacy group with offices in New York and Hong Kong. 

Those detained include Cao Shunli, a woman who disappeared in September as she was preparing to take a flight to Geneva, Ms. Hom said.
“This time, the big difference is China’s own citizens,” she said by telephone from Geneva, where she was planning to attend the session on China. 

In May, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs used a hard-to-find notice on its Web site to give citizens about two days notice to submit any views about the rights review, she said.
Ms. Hom said: “You are having this kind of very conscious, heavy-handed threatening of citizens who are simply trying to participate as is their right.”

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The Human Rights Implications of China’s Slowdown

China’s economic slowdown will have an adverse impact on human rights. In fact, it already is.
By Su-Mei Ooi and Patrick Poon

Since Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang took power in March, activists in China have come under increasing pressure from authorities. 

As more and more detentions and arrests took place over the summer, human rights defenders have come to expect further violations of civil and political rights. 

The pattern of recent violations and its correspondence with a slowdown in economic growth seems to suggest that any further economic trouble is likely to have a negative impact on human rights in the near term.
Among those most recently detained have been human rights defenders, the most renowned of whom is Dr. Xu Zhiyong, founder of the now-banned NGO Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng and, later, Gongmin), which provided legal assistance to disempowered groups seeking redress for official abuse. 

Xu is also co-founder of the New Citizens' Movement, a loosely connected network of human rights defenders, dissidents and ordinary citizens, who since 2012 have been demanding that government officials disclose their wealth. 

Their appeal is actually in line with President Xi's efforts to crack down on corruption and impose austerity measures on government officials, but Xu's arrest now raises questions about this commitment, and suggests that China is becoming even less tolerant of dissent than before.
Formerly a lecturer in law at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and a visiting scholar at Yale Law School, Xu's detention on 16 July attracted immediate international attention. 

He was previously detained for three weeks in late July 2009 after Gongmeng was shut down and fined 1.4 million yuan for failing to pay taxes.

Prior to his recent detention, Xu, deemed a threat to stability, had already been placed under house arrest for three months while the NPC and CPPCC held meetings. 

International interest in his case is due in part to the fact that Xu’s arrest on suspicion of "assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place" seems incomprehensible. 

Xu’s role in the New Citizens' Movement is better likened to spiritual leadership in calling for citizens' participation in pro-establishment actions. 

In a blog post explaining his vision for a "New Citizens' Movement" on May 29, Xu wrote that the political movement was not meant to encourage the overthrow of the current regime, but to build a civil society that “will do away with tyranny.”
According to information compiled by Chinese media expert and online activist Wen Yunchao, and Xu's friend and legal scholar-activist Teng Biao, more than 100 dissidents have been detained or arrested in the first six months of this year. 

About a fifth of them took part in the New Citizens' Movement, while 38 others were taken into custody for organizing and participating in other public collective actions not directly related to the New Citizens Movement. 

The number of detained activists is increasing, with the latest being well-known Guangdong rights activist Guo Feixiong, aka Yang Maodong, who was detained on August 8 on suspicion of "disrupting public order." 

Guo had helped organize a signature campaign to urge the National People’s Congress to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in March.
This wave of arrests and detentions of activists that emphasize citizens’ rights and call for greater government accountability is telling. 

China has been experiencing a slowdown in economic growth for the last five quarters. 

Projected fears of what the future holds for China’s economy might explain heightened sensitivities to grassroots demands to deal seriously with seemingly intractable governance issues that are likely to drag seriously on growth when investment-led strategies are no longer feasible. 

On the one hand, any serious fight against corruption will require the support of party elders in the CPC; on the other, the failure to grapple with the problem over the years has already begun to spook international investors. 

It may therefore seem necessary to muzzle voices that call for too much too quickly, when heightened expectations generated by Xi’s own rhetoric cannot realistically be met. 

As many more start to feel the squeeze of a slowing economy, these demands might also find resonance with a growing social base.
In the face of economic trouble, China’s leaders have also had to seriously consider how China’s economy can be rebalanced away from investment-led growth towards a version that is driven by consumption. 

After many false starts, this necessary task promises to be complicated and fraught with political difficulty, and all eyes are now on the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee, scheduled for November. 

Many remain skeptical that real economic reform will take place precisely because of the kinds of changes necessitated by the rebalancing. 

Reform of China’s financial sector, state enterprises and the hukou system are just some areas that will create conflicts of interest at a juncture where the new administration has still to consolidate its power base. Rebalancing China’s economy is also easier said than done. 

A comfortable middle class with disposable income is indispensable to the consumption-led growth model, yet such a middle class is missing in China. 

While rolling back state-owned enterprises in the economy might mean greater space for resource-starved small and medium enterprises to thrive as a basis for consumption-led growth, a tightening of monetary policy could at the same time create a cash crunch that would affect middle-income business development adversely. 

Ultimately, rebalancing will require that both investment and consumption decelerate in the short term, making it extremely difficult to continue delivering on even current rates of growth. 

In the face of such political and economic uncertainty, the last thing that China’s top leadership now needs is activists who frame past policy failures in terms of the “tyranny” of an oligarchic government. 

As such, more crackdowns can be expected.
The real reason why China’s economic slowdown is likely to negatively impact human rights domestically lies not with the fact that demands for government accountability draw negative attention to governance issues that cannot be effectively dealt with in the immediate term or difficult reforms that might not work out. 

In truth, it is not only the legitimacy of Xi’s administration that will be called into question if such demands cannot be met, but the “performance legitimacy” of the CPC to date. 

This is because, some of the greatest threats to the future of China’s economic prosperity lies with the pathologies of China’s investment-led growth model, one of which is of course endemic corruption. Understanding China’s economic slowdown as merely an instance of inevitable middle-income trap that requires a rebalancing of the economy toward consumer driven growth is to miss the more disturbing structural problems that cast a dark shadow over China’s economic future.
One of the key pathologies is that of overwhelming local government debt, which is causing real concern about the overall state of China’s financial sector. 

A 2010 audit report found that the 10.7 trillion yuan debt was caused by at times questionable infrastructural investment decisions made by local officials, whose career advancement prospects are dependent upon short term growth, along with official excesses following the 2008 credit binge. 

This debt continued to grow, rising 13% by 2012, after Beijing’s clean-up order, as spending on infrastructure and development projects continued – despite diminishing returns on investment. 

The National Audit Office has since been charged by the State Council to conduct an urgent audit in July, as serious doubts surface about just how much of this debt consists of bad loans. 

In the meantime, a 2012 Amnesty International report already suggests that instances of violent forced evictions have increased as local officials seek to offset huge debts by seizing and selling land to property developers. 

As forced evictions, poor social programs and environmental problems continue for the sake of dubious developmental projects, dissatisfaction with the government will rise and activists such as Xu will continue to call for greater governmental accountability, necessitating tighter controls over dissent.
China’s economic slowdown has already had and will continue to have negative implications for human rights in the near future. 

It is indeed ironic that at such a time, China is preparing to bid for re-election to the United Nations Human Rights Council in November.

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