Group items tagged

In an interview last week, Powell asserts that issues like Network Neutrality in Obama’s agenda are “in the weeds,” because “[a] lot of the FCC’s issues aren’t ‘president of the United States’ issues.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Reasonable minds can differ over the right policies to preserve the open Internet, promote next-generation broadband, safeguard online privacy, and create a connected digital democracy. Supporters of Obama (like me) can think he made a mistake in his handling of the FISA telecom immunity legislation (as I do). The absolute worst approach is to label these as insignificant technical matters that the President need not address. That’s been the mindset, with disastrous results, the past eight years. As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, John McCain was exposed to a wide range of tech policy issues. On the other hand, he admits he’s “computer illiterate.” Ask yourself how you’d feel about working for a corporation where the CEO doesn’t know how to use a computer. No matter how smart, someone who can’t open a web page, type a letter on a word processor, or compose an email message, is going to be fundamentally out of touch with the daily experience of every member of the knowledge economy.

Singapore's exports collapsed by a stunning 35 percent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia. The export boom here was tied to credit-fueled buying sprees in the United States that stopped abruptly and may take years to return, if ever. Manufacturers are grasping for a Plan B. But none of the options -- mining domestic markets, or trying to tap consumers in still-growing China and India -- offers a truly viable solution.

"The collapse of globalization . . . is absolutely possible," said Jeffrey Sachs, a noted American economist. "It happened in the 20th century in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, and could happen again. Nationalism is rising and our political systems are inward looking, the more so in times of crisis."

Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners -- or one in every 15 workers here -- by the end of 2010.

When China joined the WTO, there was also an implicit attempt to use “opening-up” to accelerate “reform.” The saying “there is no way back for an arrow when the string is drawn” is particularly true today when the world is filled with goods “made in China.” It is impossible to allow the free flow of commodities but not information when China takes part in the division of labor in globalization. It is equally impossible to allow the free flow of only the “positive” information. There is no such bargain under heaven. The information age has descended upon us. New media like the Internet and cell phones are still developing rapidly. It will cost more and more to control the dissemination of news and will eventually become impossible.

As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial."  She thinks that the Silicon Valley patrons of the Fortune Brainstorm are failing to take China seriously, and that this denial will cause them to be "blindsided" by a "truly disruptive force."

"The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion. "We have to do more than just run around chasing deals."

"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous," says a Chinese politics professor who asked not to be named.

"We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."The term fenqinghas been used in each of the past three generations to describe very different kinds of rebel.

There are no indications that the contemporary fenqing are members of the sort of organised nationalist movement seen in places such as Russia, where Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, has had a growing profile.Rather, "since the mid-1990s urban educated youth in China have become much more nationalistic rather than angry at the government", says David Zweig, director of the centre on China's transnational relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "There is a strong sense that the west, led by the US, is trying to keep China down and stop it from taking its rightful place in the world."

With large numbers of Chinese officials handling foreign affairs and nationality issues, there is no way that China could not understand what the Dalai Lama says. It is the Dalai Lama and his government in exile, who do not understand China. Just last week, before the latest demonstrations began, China accused the Dalai Lama of working to sabotage the Beijing Olympics. The reaction was exactly what China wanted: the Dalai Lama declared his firm support for China’s Olympics.

In India, the Dalai Lama's stated uncertainty about selecting his successor, combined with the fractures that lie under the surface of the exiled community, may make it likely that at his passing he will leave a resident Tibetan refugee community adrift. For all of his missteps in dealing with China, the Dalai Lama's achievement in securing the cohesion and stability of the exiled community is considerable. And he is the most universally recognisable symbol of Tibet. Given what has just transpired in Tibet, China feels that the elimination of that symbol can come none too soon.

Apparently we missed that page of the international rule book. We do recall Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though. That's the portion of the United Nations' seminal 1948 document that states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

If Chinese leaders are tired of all the international attention being given to Hu, there's a better solution than high dudgeon from the Foreign Ministry: They could set him free.

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users. Data about aggregate usage of users of the tools is published freely. You can see, for example, that the three sites most visited by users of these circumvention tools are live.com, google.com, and secretchina.com. Aggregate data like this is a terrific resource for those of us interested in researching circumvention tool usage, and not much of a privacy risk for the circumventing users if it is only stored (as well as displayed) in the aggregate.

The most interesting thesis is the idea that China could use international law as a weapon, or “lawfare” for short. The authors argue that citizens of democracies increasingly demand that their countries uphold international rules, particularly ones that govern human rights and the conduct of war. Governments are, therefore, constrained by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the United Nations. The authors argue that China should copy the European model of using international law to pin down the USA: “there are far-sighted big powers which have clearly already begun to borrow the power of supra-national, multinational, and non-state players to redouble and expand their own influence.” They think that China could turn the United Nations and regional organizations into an amplifier of the Chinese worldview – discouraging the USA from using its might in campaigns like the Iraq War.

Beijing has been willing to allow the Organization of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new Human Rights Council. This subtle diplomacy has been devastatingly effective – contributing to a massive fall in US influence: in 1995 the USA won 50.6 percent of the votes in the United Nations general assembly; by 2006, the figure had fallen to just 23.6 percent. On human rights, the results are even more dramatic: China’s win-rate has rocketed from 43 percent to 82 percent, while the USA’s has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 percent. The New York Times’ UN correspondent James Traub has detected a paradigm shift in the United Nations’ operations: “it’s a truism that the Security Council can function only insofar as the United States lets it. The adage may soon be applied to China as well.” Traub may be right. China’s capacity to influence the United Nations is increasing, and soon we may be complaining about Chinese behavior on big policy issues

The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism."

By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent.

Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, U.S. companies have been barred from selling police equipment and technology to China, since lawmakers feared it would be directed, once again, at peaceful demonstrators. That law has been completely disregarded in the lead up to the Olympics, when, in the name of safety for athletes and VIPs (including George W. Bush), no new toy has been denied the Chinese state.

In all these cases, it is tempting to conclude that the regime is worried about its own survival, and, in order to rally nationalist passions, feels compelled to portray the country as a global victim.

The strongest evidence to support the theory of insecurity at the highest levels of Chinese society is the practice of the “princelings” (wealthy children of the ruling elites) to buy homes in places such as the United States, Canada and Australia. These are not luxury homes of the sort favored by wealthy businessman and officials from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Rather they are typically “normal” homes of the sort a potential émigré might want to have in reserve in case things went bad back home.

Commerce has since 1997 repeatedly refused to incorporate freedom of expression as a principle guiding the ICANN regime, despite numerous calls for it to do so in public comment sessions. The earliest of these calls came in 1997, during the drafting of the Green Paper leading to ICANN's creation, when the principles guiding the regime were first being formulated. EFF, the Domain Name Rights Coalition and many individuals asked that free expression be written into ICANN's constitution. The most recent reiteration of this call came in 2006, from the Internet Governance Project during a review of ICANN’s status. In each case, Commerce has either ignored or in some cases explicitly rebuffed these calls for recognition of free speech as a part of ICANN’s mandate.

Much of the volunteer effort has involved individuals or small groups. China is still wary of large NGOs and has none that is truly independent of the government specialising in disaster relief. But in recent years the party has begun to acknowledge more openly that there may a role for them. Official press coverage of the earthquake, although careful to highlight the party's contributions, has also paid rare tribute to the unofficial volunteers. The government has been encouraging firms to give more generously to worthy causes. From this year it has increased tax incentives for corporate donations to charities. But this applies to only a small number of government-approved organisations. For the sake of earthquake relief the authorities are letting down their guard. But the government gives little encouragement to new NGOs and often treats the small existing ones as potential germs of political opposition. The response to this disaster might ease its fears.

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."

Why does a society that, like America, impresses most people who spend time here project such a poor image and scare people as much as it attracts them? Why do China’s leaders, who survive partly by listening to their own people, develop such tin ears when dealing with the outside world?

Of course, most official voices of China now have the opposite effect. Their minor, provable lies—the sky is blue, no one wants to protest—inevitably build mistrust of larger claims that are closer to being true. And those are the claims the government most wants the world to listen to: that the country is moving forward and is less repressive and more open than official actions and explanations (or lack of them) make China seem. Many Chinese who have seen the world are very canny about it, and have just the skills government spokesmen lack—for instance, understanding the root of foreign concerns and addressing them not with special pleading (“This is China…”) but on their own terms. Worldly Chinese demonstrate this every day in the businesses, universities, and nongovernmental organizations where they generally work. But the closer Chinese officials are to centers of political power, the less they know what they don’t know about the world.

The Internet is not the same for everybody. Despite it's reputation as a borderless, global, connected, democratic network, access and content filtering based on national boarders has become the norm. The BBC, for example, filters content for copyright reasons to visitors accessing their website from outside of Great Britain. Much more serious, however, is the heavy political censorship happening in countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. China, being the most extreme example, strictly censors political content on the web through the blocking of IP addresses and dynamic content filtering. With the support of western technology companies such as Cisco, Yahoo, and Google, The Golden Shield Project (sometimes referred to as the the Great Fire Wall of China) censors the web for China's 1.3 billion inhabitants. The Internet police in China is estimated to contain over 30,000 workers, and is responsible for blocking content such as Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, religion, and some international news.

"The heavy presence of Chinese (People's) Liberation Army officers throughout the proceedings left many wondering exactly what image the hosts were intending to project to the international community...," the newspaper said. "At a time when Tibet, Darfur and China's broader human rights record are proving delicate issues for Beijing organizers, the move to present thousands of drilled, sobersided army officers ... was surprising for its brazenness; a none too subtle projection of strength," it said. Asked about the military theme, Zhang Jigang, chief of the People's Liberation Army dance troupe, told reporters there were "excellent performers and directors" in the military. "I think this is a Chinese characteristic," he said. "All of the military arms have ... have wonderful acrobats and opera troupes. We should make use of such resources."

The fact that the Chinese people think the world loves China helps explain why it is so difficult to persuade Beijing to address human rights and other issues. The Chinese people, after all, see no need for changes to improve the country's image. In contrast, polls have shown that Americans are aware that the United States' image overseas has been badly damaged in recent years, and there is widespread agreement that work must be done to improve that image. In China, the Communist Party controls most of the information to which people have access, and that information does not include material showing how unpopular the country has become.

The people in developed countries who think it was a mistake to award the Olympics to Beijing (43 percent of Americans, vs. 41 percent who told Pew it was the correct decision) are less likely to watch.

Three in four Chinese think the world likes China, while only one in 10 thinks foreigners don't like the country. More than 80 percent believe China takes other countries' interests into account when formulating foreign policy. Just 3 percent think China's economic growth has a negative effect on other countries. Only 1 percent knew a lot about the recall of Chinese products for quality and safety reasons. if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } Pew's Global Attitudes Survey of public opinion in 24 countries, released in June, makes clear that international opinion toward China is very different from what people in China think it is.

In fact, this debate on the premier’s crying should not be a trivial matter. Its poignancy and enormous political implications have been closely related to Wen’s former mentor, Zhao Ziyang, the CCP general secretary who famously cried in Tiananmen Square, begging the protesters to leave the place that would soon become an intended killing field. If Zhao were not indecisive or did not cry in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or if he instead stood on top of a tank sympathetic to the pro-democracy forces—bravely commanding the tremendous force of the millions yearning for freedom, human rights, and for a change of the corrupt system, like Boris Yeltsin in the waning days of the Soviet Union—China may have already had a bold and visionary political leader and a brand new political reality. But in the final crucial moments that decided history, Moscow did not believe in tears, and Beijing did. A great historic opportunity was lost by Zhao for the complete lack of a strong and resolute visionary leader from within the power elite who alone could command the enormous political and military resources to change history. And now, as Zhao’s erstwhile protégé, Wen continues that legacy [7].

Prof Spence does not ignore the risks, but sees more grounds for optimism. He points to the ballooning number of university graduates, the emergence of grassroots civil groups, and the vast improvement in the education levels of top leaders as evidence that change will have to come. "The whole idea of representation is being explored. Remember China had a hard time with representative government, which fell apart under the warlord era [in 1915]. "China is backtracking into the past, looking for ways of making changes. We could wish they changed much faster, but we should be glad they are changing at the speed they are," he says. Hear Professor Jonathan Spence deliver the 2008 Reith lectures: BBC Radio 4, Tuesdays from 3 June, 0900BST