Friday Catblogging

Dashanzi exhibition

One of my favorite Chinese teachers invited me to see an exhibit of Cultural Revolution photographs - photographer at left.

Photos from Guilin and Yangshuo

Photos from our trip to Guilin and Yangshuo, Guangxi Province (technically an autonomous region in southwest China)



River cruise from Guilin to Yangshuo



Terraced fields near Longsheng



Local women of the ethnic Zhuang people

Today, Beijing, tomorrow, Guilin!

Jeremy's parents arrived on Tuesday and after a quick trip to the Great Wall and other sights, the three of them went to Xi'an to see the terracotta soldiers. (I went in 2001 and was underwhelmed.) At my suggestion, we included Guilin on the itinerary for some magnificent scenery - limestone cliffs like you've never seen. Pictures to follow when we return on the 7th.

From the Economist

China

Atomised

Jun 1st 2006 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

Beijing no longer commands instant obedience from China's local authorities

Get article background

THE Chinese Communist Party is a highly centralised beast, with a power structure little changed from the days of Mao Zedong. Over the next year or so it will be engaged in what official reports describe as one of the biggest shuffles of leaders at every level, with hundreds of thousands due to change their jobs. Nominally, appointments are made by local party committees. In practice top appointments in the provinces have always been made by leaders in Beijing. But that does not mean that Beijing is in complete control.

A good career in the party still depends on following, or at least appearing to follow, the centre's orders. But local leaders calculate that as long as their areas achieve rapid economic growth with minimal unrest, then they have considerable leeway to do as they will. The party no longer really frets about the ideological purity of its leaders. And since the days of Mao each new generation of leaders in Beijing has been increasingly less able to command instant obedience across the country.

To be sure, China is not heading towards a break-up, anarchy or the warlordism of the pre-communist era. The armed forces and the police remain under the party centre's grip. At the provincial leadership level, too, the authority of the centre is secure. Many residents of regions with large numbers of ethnic minorities, especially Tibet and Xinjiang, resent being controlled by Beijing, but their leaders are party loyalists. Provincial leaders, in fact, display far more ideological harmony than was the case in the 1980s or early 1990s. At that time, some were conspicuously conservative or reformist. Ye Xuanping, a popular native leader of Guangdong Province next to Hong Kong, was often reported to be building the region into a personal power base. Worried central leaders moved him to a sinecure in Beijing in 1991.

The problem today is more a profusion of township, county and prefectural leaderships whose efforts to propel growth in their regions produce impressive statistics, but often at a heavy social, environmental or macroeconomic cost. In the last two years the government has been worrying that the economy might overheat and has been trying to curb investment in industries whose capacity has been growing too quickly. But local officials have often simply ignored these measures. As Zhang Baoqing, a former deputy minister of education, put it to an official newspaper last year, China's biggest problem is that orders issued in Zhongnanhai, the party headquarters in Beijing, sometimes never leave the compound.

In March last year, amid growing public complaints about fast-rising house prices, the government issued directives aimed at cooling the market. Shanghai, the main target of these measures, dutifully tightened controls. But house prices in other big cities have climbed rapidly—Beijing's by more than 17% in the first two months of this year compared with the same period a year ago. Beijing's city government is not entirely to blame. Demand is growing as the city prepares to host the Olympic Games in 2008. Interest rates are low. China is reluctant to raise them sharply for fear of putting further pressure on the yuan to appreciate. That could hurt exports and push up unemployment.

But local governments control land supply and have a vested interest in keeping prices high. In 1994 the central government changed the way it shared tax revenues with the provinces, leaving the centre with a much bigger portion. But sub-provincial governments still shoulder the main burden of the provision of health care and schooling (which they do only patchily). Land-related transactions have become a crucial source of local governments' revenue. They are further helped by their ability to persuade state-owned banks—ill-equipped to make sound lending decisions—to grant loans.

In the late 1990s, when China began to privatise urban housing, the central government ordered that the bulk of new housing projects should be low-cost and restricted to middle- and lower-income families. Developers of such housing were to be given big tax benefits. But local governments saw little to be gained. In Beijing only one-tenth of new housing space belongs to this category. Regulations announced this week require local governments to boost the supply of cheap housing. There will not be an enthusiastic response.

Local leaders rarely incur heavy political penalties for failing to carry out the central government's economic directives. Officials in Beijing frequently order clampdowns on the makers of pirated goods. Offending factories are sometimes closed. But local officials who condone such operations as a way of boosting their local economies are seldom punished. Nor are officials who turn a blind eye to polluting industries, unless they cause big accidents or trigger unrest. Transgressions are so widespread that it would be destabilising to launch a crackdown. But just to make sure that career-damaging information does not reach Beijing, local governments often arrest petitioners who travel to the capital to raise complaints.

Central leaders are comforted by the knowledge that direct political challenges to their authority by local governments are extremely rare. Li Fan, an independent consultant in Beijing who advises local governments on election-related issues, says there is strong demand among lower-level officials for political reform. But very few rural townships have pushed experiments with freer elections or more open government beyond the party's guidelines. And none has tolerated organised opposition or open attacks on the party leadership. China's local leaders know where to draw the line.

Friday catblogging!

Finally, I get to participate in Friday catblogging, invented/popularized by Kevin Drum, whose blog I scarcely read except for the cute cat photos.

We adopted a kitten from Animal Rescue Beijing a couple weeks ago. Her name is 美美 (meimei, pronounced may-may) and she's nearly a year old, or so we guess from her size. I was persuaded to adopt her by the kindly lady below, who says she rescued Meimei herself from the streets of Hainan, a tropical island off of China's southern coast. Meimei had apparently been living off scraps of food discarded by people at a street food stand. Her leg has healed completely, so despite her "handicap," she regularly tears up the apartment each night, sleeping during the day (see photo above).

Beijing Swings!

terpsichorean (turp-si-kuh-REE-uhn, turp-si-KOR-ee-uhn, -KORE-)

1. adjective: Of or relating to dancing.
2. noun: A dancer.
   

[From Terpsichore, the Muse of dancing and choral song in Greek mythology.
The word Terpsichore is the feminine form of terpsichoros (delighting in the dance), a combination of Greek terpein (to delight) and khoros (dance), which is ultimately from Indo-European root gher- (to grasp or to enclose) that's also the source of chorus, carol, choir, garth, court, and garden.]
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To my delight, Beijing has a lively swing & lindy hop scene! Jeremy and I went last Thursday and I went again on Monday. Even though I've been away from swing dancing for a good while, it was wonderful. It was as close to Stanford as I'd seen in a long time - just on a smaller scale, with more Chinese thrown in.

More penguins from East Asia

This time from a bakery near the Beijing World Trade Center.

That Tokyo conference

Since I haven't been at liberty to discuss the conference publicly, I thought I'd post this bit from Knight Ridder:

WASHINGTON - Last month, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea wanted to meet privately with his North Korean counterpart, hoping he could persuade Pyongyang to return to talks on eliminating its nuclear weapons program.

But the meeting between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and North Korean Vice Premier Kim Kye Gwan on the sidelines of a conference in Tokyo never took place.

Hill's superiors in Washington forbade him from talking directly to the North Koreans, said three U.S. officials, a conference participant and another knowledgeable expert. All requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

...

Hill, the assistant secretary of state, was urged to attend the Tokyo conference after two senior North Korean diplomats agreed in consultations involving two former senior American diplomats that it would be a chance for him to meet privately with Kim, the North Korean envoy, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions who asked to remain anonymous.

This person and a conference participant said Hill saw it as a chance to persuade Kim to rejoin six-nation talks on eliminating North Korea's nuclear arms program. The isolated Stalinist regime has boycotted the talks since the United States took action to halt what it charges are Pyongyang-run money-laundering, drug-running and counterfeiting operations.

Kim met privately with officials from the other nations - Russia, China, South Korea and Japan - involved in the moribund negotiations, said three U.S. officials and the conference participant.

Speaking at a conference in Washington on Tuesday, Hill insisted that "it was my call" not to meet Kim.

"Is someone impeding me from having bilateral contacts? The answer is yes, and it's the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)," he said. "We are not prepared to sit outside the six-party process and let the DPRK boycott the process and look for favors to get them back."

May Day

This week is a national holiday in China, perfect for some R&R. The umbrella I'm holding is not for rain but to ward off the sun--it was 90 degrees! Here we're standing in front of the entrance to Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace (destroyed twice by foreign troops in the 19th century. Here's the official story)

The construction noise has started again upstairs. Fortunately, it was quiet when our guests came over yesterday. Our Chinese friend, Sarah, had her parents come up from Nanjing for the May holiday. They traveled 10 hours on an overnight train to see their daughter for 2 days! We had them over for a mid-afternoon snack: apple crisp, baked to perfection (Jeremy's expertise), sliced mango, and watermelon seeds. They had never had baked apples before, but they seemed to enjoy it! To my consternation, there were no leftovers.

The infamous Yasukuni Shrine

Interestingly, every Japanese person I spoke to about the shrine told me that the privately-run museum presents a very distorted view of history (see below).

The best bread of my life

These two items, bought at the Ueno subway station, were the best two pieces of bread I have ever eaten in my life, despite the fact that the one on the right was green-colored, with a few sweet grean beans inside. Unfortunately, together they cost me 1900 yen, about 19 US dollars.

Photos from around Tokyo

Even the bathrooms (okay, especially the bathrooms) are gorgeous by comparison.

Kawaii! (cute in Japanese)

This one's for Josephine!

Springtime

The press contingent

Also parked outside the hotel, waiting for some action

Outside our hotel in Tokyo

Outside our hotel in Tokyo, there are riot police stationed... for fear that right-wing Japanese groups will harass the North Koreans.

Background on the North Korea-Japan abductee issue

To Tokyo

I leave this morning for 10 days in Tokyo, to rapporteur for a conference on Northeast Asian security that's been called the "track 1.5 version of the 6-party talks". Pictures to follow when I return!

Fulbrighter

On Friday I got an email with good news: I've won a Fulbright award for next year! All those hours writing and rewriting have paid off.

Old haunts

I thought I swore never to go back to IKEA Beijing. But we did, and despite our exhaustion bought several armfuls of household furnishings, including a bookcase and coffee table. Rather than paying IKEA to deliver the next day, we saved ourselves 10 yuan by haggling with one of the minivan drivers crowding the exit to snag a customer.