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With Xi's Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-jinping-authoritarianism.html china history culture authoritarianism
shared by anonymous on 26 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • With Xi’s Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen
  • There was a time, not so long ago, when a Chinese leader setting himself up as ruler for life would have stirred international condemnation for bucking the global trend toward greater democracy. Now, such an action seems fully in keeping with moves by many countries in the other direction.
  • She and other experts described this “authoritarian reversion” as a global contagion that has undermined the abiding faith that forging liberal democracies and market economies was the surest path to prosperity and equality.
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  • The list includes Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, all of whom have abandoned most pretenses that they rule according to the people’s will.
  • There are many reasons for such moves by Mr. Xi and others — including protecting their power and perks in an age of unrest, terrorism and war amplified by new technologies — but a significant one is that few countries have the standing or authority, morally or otherwise, to speak out — least of all, critics say, the United States
  • The surprise disclosure on Sunday that the Communist Party was abolishing constitutional limits on presidential terms — effectively allowing President Xi Jinping to lead China indefinitely — was the latest and arguably most significant sign of the world’s decisive tilt toward authoritarian governance, often built on the highly personalized exercise of power.
  • Authoritarian leaders now act with greater impunity — or at least less worry about international isolation.
  • President Trump’s critics say that while he may not yet have eroded democracy in the United States, his populist appeals and nativist policies, his palpable aversion to the media and traditional checks on power, and his stated admiration for some of the strongest of strongmen are cut from the same cloth.
  • The trend toward authoritarianism, while specific to each country’s history, is rooted in insecurities and fears afflicting the world today: globalization and rising inequality, the stunning and scary advances in technology, the disorienting chaos and extreme violence of civil wars like Syria’s, separatism and terror.
  • Mr. Xi, as a result, believes that only stability can ensure his vision of China’s revival and emergence as the world’s power. “He seems to genuinely believe that he’s the only person who can achieve this vision,” she said. In last fall’s Communist Party congress, Mr. Xi even presented China as a new model for the developing world — a thinly veiled argument that the United States and Europe were no longer as attractive as they once were.
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Xi Sets China on a Collision Course With History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...xi-jinping-china.html china crisis culture policy economics gap
shared by anonymous on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • If Mr. Xi stays in office for life, as many now expect, that will only formalize a process he has undertaken for years: stripping power away from China’s institutions and accumulating it for himself.
  • It helps to mentally divide dictatorships into two categories: institutional and personalist. The first operates through committees, bureaucracies and something like consensus. The second runs through a single charismatic leader.
  • Domestic politics tend to be more volatile, governing more erratic and foreign policy more aggressive, studies find. But the clearest risk comes with succession.
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  • Factional purges risk shifting political norms from consensus to zero-sum, and sometimes life-or-death, infighting.And Mr. Xi is undermining the institutionalism that made China’s authoritarianism unusually resilient. Collective leadership and orderly succession, both put in place after Mao Zedong’s disastrous tenure, have allowed for relatively effective and stable governing.
  • So China is instead promoting “ideology and collective social values” that equate the government with Chinese culture, according to research by the China scholar Heike Holbig and Mr. Gilley. Patriotic songs and school textbooks have proliferated. So have mentions of “Xi Jinping Thought,” now an official ideology.
  • China is experimenting with a form of authoritarianism that, if successful, could close the seemingly unbridgeable gap between what its citizens demand and what it can deliver.Authoritarian governments are, by definition, unaccountable. But some towns and small cities in China are opening limited, controlled channels of public participation. For example, a program called “Mayor’s Mailboxes” allows citizens to voice demands or complaints, and rewards officials who comply.The program, one study found, significantly improved the quality of governing and citizens’ happiness with the state. No one would call these towns democratic. But it felt enough like democracy to satisfy some.
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What You Should Know about Unequal Treaties - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/unequal-treaties-195456 Unequal Treaties Asia Europe
shared by g-dragon on 01 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • During the 19th and early 20th centuries, stronger powers imposed humiliating, one-sided treaties on weaker nations in East Asia.
  • The treaties imposed harsh conditions on the target nations, sometimes seizing territory, allowing citizens of the stronger nation special rights within the weaker nation, and infringing on the targets' sovereignty.
  • the Treaty of Nanjing, forced China to allow foreigner traders to use five treaty ports, to accept foreign Christian missionaries on its soil, and to allow missionaries, traders, and other British citizens the right of extraterritoriality. This meant that Britons who committed crimes in China would be tried by consular officials from their own nation, rather than facing Chinese courts. In addition, China had to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain for 99 years.
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  • The Harris Treaty of 1858 between the US and Japan further expanded U.S. rights within Japanese territory, and was even more clearly unequal than the Convention of Kanagawa. This second treaty opened five additional ports to US trading vessels, allowed U.S. citizens to live and to purchase property in any of the treaty ports, granted Americans extraterritorial rights in Japan, set very favorable import and export duties for U.S. trade, and allowed Americans to build Christian churches and worship freely in the treaty ports.
  • In 1860, China lost the Second Opium War to Britain and France, and was forced to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin. This treaty was quickly followed by similar unequal agreements with the US and Russia. The Tianjin provisions included the opening of a number of new treaty ports to all of the foreign powers, the opening of the Yangtze River and Chinese interior to foreign traders and missionaries, allowing foreigners to live and establish legations in the Qing capital at Beijing, and granted them all extremely favorable trade rights. 
  • Meanwhile, Japan was modernizing its political system and its military, revolutionizing the country in just a few short years.  It imposed the first unequal treaty of its own on Korea in 1876.  In the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876, Japan unilaterally ended Korea's tributary relationship with Qing China, opened three Korean ports to Japanese trade, and allowed Japanese citizens extraterritorial rights in Korea. This was the first step toward Japan's outright annexation of Korea in 1910.
  • In 1895, Japan prevailed in the First Sino-Japanese War. This victory convinced the western powers that they would not be able to enforce their unequal treaties with the rising Asian power any longer.
  • The majority of China's unequal treaties lasted until the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937; the western powers abrogated most of the agreements by the end of World War II
  • Great Britain, however, retained Hong Kong until 1997. The British handover of the island to mainland China marked the final end of the unequal treaty system in East Asia.
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Tiantai Buddhism in China - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/antai-buddhism-in-china-450017 china buddhism Tiantai
shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The Buddhist school of Tiantai originated in late 6th century China. It became enormously influential until it was nearly wiped out by the Emperor's repression of Buddhism in 845.
  • it thrived in Japan as Tendai Buddhism. It also was transmitted to Korea as Cheontae and to Vietnam as Thien Thai tong.
  • Tiantai was the first school of Buddhism to consider the Lotus Sutra to be the most cumulative and accessible expression of the Buddha's teaching.
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  •   It is also known for its doctrine of the Three Truths; its classification of Buddhist doctrines into Five Periods and Eight Teachings; and its particular form of meditation.
  • Tiantai Buddhism in Japan as Tendai, which for a time was the dominant school of Buddhism in Japan.
  • In 845 the Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong ordered all "foreign" religions in China, which included Buddhism, to be eliminated.
  • However, Tiantai did not become extinct in China. In time, with the help of Korean disciples, Guoqing was rebuilt and copies of essential texts were returned to the mountain.
  • Tiantai had regained some of its footing by the year 1000, when a doctrinal dispute split the school in half and generated a few centuries' worth of treatises and commentaries.
  • The Three Truths proposes a "middle" acting as an interface of sorts between the absolute and the conventional.
  • This "middle" is the omniscient mind of Buddha, which takes in all phenomenal reality, both pure and impure.
  • These were (1) the period in the Buddha's life in which a sutra was preached; (2) the audience that first heard the sutra; (3) the teaching method the Buddha used to make his point.
  • Zhiyi identified five distinct periods of the Buddha's life, and sorted texts accordingly into the Five Periods.
  • He identified three kinds of audiences and five kinds of methods, and these became the Eight Teachings.
  • Although the Five Periods are not historically accurate, and scholars of other schools might differ with the Eight Teachings, Zhiyi's classification system was internally logical and gave Tiantai a solid foundation.
  • In different ways, much of Zhiyi's teaching lives on in Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism, as well as Zen.
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What Was the Boxer Rebellion in China? - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/was-the-boxer-rebellion-195300 boxer rebellion china
shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreigner uprising in Qing China, which took place from November of 1899 through September of 1901.
  • The Boxers, known in Chinese as the "Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists," were ordinary villagers who reacted violently against the increasing influence of foreign Christian missionaries and diplomats in the Middle Kingdom.
  • Yihetuan literally means "the militia united in righteousness."
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  • During the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans gradually imposed themselves and their beliefs more and more intrusively on the ordinary people of China, particularly in the eastern coastal region.
  • Suddenly, rude barbarian foreigners had arrived and begun to push Chinese people around, and the Chinese government seemed unable to stop this grave affront.
  • In reaction, the ordinary people of China decided to organize a resistance.  They formed a spiritualist/martial arts movement, which included many mystical or magical elements such as the belief that the "Boxers" could themselves impervious to bullets.
  • The English name "Boxers" comes from the British lack of any word for martial artists, thus the use of the nearest English equivalent.
  • Initially, the Boxers lumped the Qing government in with the other foreigners who needed to be driven from China.  After all, the Qing Dynasty was not ethnically Han Chinese, but rather Manchu.
  •  Caught between the threatening western foreigners on the one hand, and an enraged Han Chinese populace on the other, the Empress Dowager Cixi and other Qing officials were initially unsure how to react to the Boxers.
  • the Qing and the Boxers came to an understanding, and Beijing ended up supporting the rebels with imperial troops.
  • Although the rulers and the nation survived this assault (barely), the Boxer Rebellion really signalled the beginning of the end for the Qing.  Within ten or eleven years, the dynasty would fall and China's imperial history, stretching back perhaps four thousand years, would be over.
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Pressure North Korea, Antagonize China - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...547073 north korea
shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Not long after North Korea test-fired its longest-range missile yet, the Trump administration settled into its familiar diplomatic routine of putting pressure on China—or blaming the country outright.
  • But realistically, if there were an economic way to exert more on pressure North Korea, it would have to come from China.
  • The U.S. wants North Korea to commit to denuclearization before it begins talks, something Pyongyang will not do. But China has another worry: regime collapse in North Korea, which could create a refugee problem on its border and, ultimately, a reunified Korean Peninsula allied with the United States.
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  • This means that China perceives its security threatened from several different directions—not just from the North Koreans. “North Korea’s continuous provocation directly undermines China’s security interest, [and] provides an excuse, from the Chinese perspective, for U.S., South Korea, and Japan to strengthen their security alliance,” Zhao said.
  • Still, even if  China is willing to take more steps against the North, Zhao said, “but realistically I don't think there’s much left for China to do.”
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China says carrier group reaches 'initial' combat capability | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...initial-combat-capability.html china politics attack war US
shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • China's aircraft carrier Liaoning (C) takes part in a military drill of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the western Pacific Ocean, April 18, 2018.  (REUTERS) Just a week after the Pentagon disinvited China from military exercises because of its “militarization” of the South China Sea area, the Communist country announced the carrier group led by its first aircraft carrier had reached "initial systematic combat capability."
  • The ship is conventionally powered by steam turbines, according to CGTN, and is capable of carrying different types of aircraft, including the J-15 fighters, as well as surveillance and anti-submarine helicopters.
  • Little is known about China’s aircraft program which is a state secret, but the country recently began sea trials of its first domestically-produced aircraft carrier that has yet to be named.
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  • The new carrier is based on the former Soviet Union's Kuznetsov class design, with a ski jump-style deck for taking off and a conventional oil-fueled steam turbine power plant.
  • The country has used its naval fleet to stake claim to virtually the entire South China Sea and to range farther into the Pacific and Indian oceans – a provocative move that has heightened tensions with the U.S. Last Wednesday, the Pentagon said it was disinviting China from the Rim of the Pacific Exercises following reports the country was again secretly beefing up its military operation. 
  • Wu Qian, spokesperson Ministry of National Defense, said the "provocative action" was a "serious infringement" on China's sovereignty.
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Is the US-China trade war back on? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-44311522 US trade war politics trump crisis
shared by anonymous on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • Just a week after it looked like the US and China had agreed to put their trade war on hold, Washington now appears to be escalating trade tensions with Beijing.Analysts say this move could cast a shadow over the potential success of talks between the US and China in Beijing over the next couple of days.
  • The US also wants to address the intellectual property theft that it alleges Chinese firms have benefited from, and the country's Made in China 2025 programme, which is a multi-billion dollar plan to help transform its high-tech industries into world leaders by 2025.
  • China has already expressed its discontent with the action. The Ministry of Commerce says the White House's action is "both unexpected and within expectation," and that China has the "confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people, and the core interests of the country".
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  • "Washington suffers from a delusion whereby it feels the US is strong enough to force other countries to accept their unreasonable demands," said Wednesday's editorial.
  • Well, for one thing, Vinesh Motwani of Silk Road Research tells me that we're unlikely to see very much come from Mr Ross' upcoming visit to China.Which means that a trade war between the two sides is far closer than it was late last week.
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China is closing itself off as coronavirus cases spike worldwide - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html coronavirus closing spike
shared by annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • China is closing its border to most foreigners amid fears of imported novel coronavirus cases causing a second outbreak in the country where the infection was first detected.
  • On Monday, Beijing city authorities announced that all international arrivals would be quarantined and tested for the virus at designated government facilities. Other cities have implemented stringent home quarantine requirements on international arrivals. Last week, a Chinese Australian woman was deported after neighbors recorded her breaching isolation controls to go jogging.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
       
      this seems like a good idea. ideally, every country would have the resources to do this
  • Across China, reports have appeared in recent days of businesses banning foreign nationals from entering their premises. Accounts have even emerged of housing estates and office complexes barring non-Chinese from the premises. All of that is despite the fact 90% of imported cases are linked to Chinese citizens returning from overseas, particularly the hundreds of thousands of students forced home by university closures.
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  • "in view of the rapid spread of Covid-19 across the world, China has decided to temporarily suspend the entry into China by foreign nationals holding visas or residence permits" as of March 28.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
       
      makes sense. they reported no new cases about a week ago, and then had a new case as a result of someone returning to the country
  • country is returning to normal.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
       
      yay!
  • At a Beijing gym popular with expats, managers posted a sign saying "foreign friends" would no longer be allowed to enter, "because of (the) overseas epidemic threshold." CNN also saw doormen at a bar in Sanlitun, a popular Beijing nightlife area, refusing entry to non-Chinese-looking patrons.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
       
      seems questionable, i'm sure there are many non-chinese people who live in China, and haven't left the country
  • Jim Boyce, a Beijing resident who posted on Twitter about restrictions on foreigners, said that one barber shop which put up a sign barring non-Chinese still allowed at least one expat to get his hair cut there.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
       
      this doesn't make sense.
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China Pushes to Churn Out Coronavirus Gear, Yet Struggles to Police It - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-coronavirus-masks-tests.html
shared by nrashkind on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • One man made fake Honeywell N95 respirators at a makeshift factory on a farm
  • Pharmacies sold ineffective knockoffs of a Chinese version of Clorox.
  • In one Chinese province, authorities seized more than seven million masks that were substandard, mislabeled or counterfeited.
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  • China’s vast manufacturing machine has moved into overdrive to supply the country and the world with masks, testing kits, respirators and other gear to fight the global coronavirus pandemic.
  • Companies big and small that once manufactured other items are now in the business of making anti-coronavirus gear — and regulators in China are struggling to enforce standards while encouraging the flow.
  • Spanish health officials said they bought the tests from an unnamed third-party distributor but argued that they did not need to wait for a certified list from China
  • Still, the news was unwelcome for Spaniards who have waited for several days for their government’s promised rollout of hundreds of thousands of tests to help track the spread of the virus
  • In a statement on social media, Bioeasy said that Spanish officials did not understand how to conduct the test and that it made videos and issued instructions to help them
  • As it has in other industries, from cars to electronics, China has become essential to the medical supply business and has challenged outdated notions that it primarily makes cheap, shoddy goods. Even before the coronavirus struck it made roughly half the world’s protective masks and has become a major force in the manufacturing of day-to-day medical gear.
  • But even as it encourages production, the Chinese government has also had to step up enforcement efforts to stop defective and uncertified products
  • The problem isn’t confined to China.
  • In the United States, an initial coronavirus test kit rolled out by government officials contained a faulty indicator
  • Regulators have shut down tens of thousands of shops making fake masks,
  • Earlier this month, Chinese regulators vowed to step up cooperation with local law enforcement to stamp out counterfeits and shoddy goods
  • At the same time, local officials have worked to streamline the certification process to bring new capacity and new devices online.
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Trump Is Inciting a Coronavirus Culture War to Save Himself - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608638 trump culture war pandemic response morality racism analysis politics
shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump had a message for the Chinese government at the beginning of the year: Great job!
  • “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump tweeted on January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
  • Over the next month, the president repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus, which appears to have first emerged from a wildlife market in the transportation hub of Wuhan, China, late last year. Trump lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus,” and emphasized that the U.S. government was “working closely” with China to contain the disease.
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  • For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic
  • Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.
  • Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.
  • The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon
  • Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.
  • “I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
  • n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation
  • Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.
  • The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.
  • Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.
  • Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.
  • According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”
  • Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
  • The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop
  • It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.
  • Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism
  • The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.
  • Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective
  • This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.
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China shows way to ease lockdowns before vaccine, says report | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ggests-report-imperial-college ease distancing restriction exit pandemic measures crisis
shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • China’s tough lockdown and physical distancing measures in Wuhan and other provinces appear to have successfully ended new locally transmitted coronavirus infections and may chart a route back to normal life, according to a report from Imperial College London.
  • it is possible to lift the physical distancing restrictions, as China has begun to do, without a resurgence of the epidemic.
  • “At this difficult time, these results suggest that, after containment, a carefully managed and monitored relaxation of effective large-scale lockdowns may be possible even before an effective vaccine is available,”
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  • Ferguson said their analysis “provides some hope for countries currently in various levels of lockdown that once case numbers are brought to low levels, it might be possible to relax social distancing – provided equal measures to limit the risk of the resurgence of transmission are introduced”.
  • The analysis shows that “intermediate levels of local activity can be maintained while avoiding a large outbreak”, the report says
  • That would mean testing everyone with symptoms and following up and isolating their contacts, in order to stamp out any further flare-ups of infection.
  • He stressed, however, that relaxing the lockdown policies would depend on “rapid and ubiquitous testing and rigorous case and contact isolation policies”.
  • after very intense social distancing which resulted in containment, China has successfully exited their stringent social distancing policy to some degree.
  • The report adds: “Globally, China is at a more advanced stage of the pandemic. Policies implemented to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in China and the exiting strategies that followed can inform decision-making processes for countries once containment is achieved.”
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Are China and Japan Moving Towards a Rapprochement? | The Diplomat - 0 views

thediplomat.com/...moving-towards-a-rapprochement China Japan history politics crisis
shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the China-Japan relations have achieved important progress against all odds.
  • In fact, both China and Japan have been frequently signaling each other, in direct or indirect ways, in recent months.
  • t was the first time in 37 years that none of a ruling cabinet member visited the shrine for the event. Consequently, the news was widely reported in China.
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  • Chinese vice premier Liu Yandong also sent congratulatory messages.
  • on the Chinese side, Wang studied Japanese in college and speaks Japanese well;
  • Yohei is famous for his friendly attitude toward China. Until now, Yohei has been frequently invited by Beijing to attend various political events.
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Hong Kong: China approves 'patriotic' plan to control elections - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-china-56356046 hong kong china control elections Politics
shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China's legislature has approved a resolution to overhaul Hong Kong's electoral system - its latest move to tighten control over the city.
  • The "patriots governing Hong Kong" resolution was passed at the National People's Congress (NPC) on Thursday. It will reduce democratic representation and allow a pro-Beijing panel to vet and elect candidates.The former British colony was handed back to China in 1997 under a model called "one country, two systems".Under the deal, which gave the territory freedoms not available in mainland China, Hong Kong also had its own mini-constitution and an elected parliament.The latest Chinese move follows a series of measures that have tightened Beijing's grip on Hong Kong, including the passing of a national security law and a crackdown on activists and opposition politicians.Detailed legislation will now be drafted and could be enacted in Hong Kong within the next few months.
  • Once again, China is arguing that this reform - with its political loyalty test for candidates - is necessary to ensure stability. But critics will argue it abolishes another fundamental underpinning of the city's special freedoms - the ability to channel dissent through the political process itself.The pro-democracy protests, although sometimes violent, were accompanied by mass popular support with as many as two million taking peacefully to the streets. In late 2019, the democrats won a landslide in Hong Kong's local elections, the city's only truly democratic ballot. That may have spooked Beijing more than barricades and petrol bombs. But is its victory now complete? "It is very sad," the former Democratic Party chairperson Emily Lau told me. "But I insist this doesn't mean the game is over for Hong Kong because the fight will go on."
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  • Since the law has been enacted in June, around 100 people have been arrested, including China critic and media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was denied bail and is in detention awaiting trial.
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China Wants More Babies. Some Men Choose Vasectomies. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-vasectomies.html Culture politics
shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
  • The government’s three-child policy announcement this week was the latest effort to reverse some of those practices, but some men are now seeking the procedure on their own.
  • The lifestyle is also in direct conflict with the Chinese government’s effort to avert a coming demographic crisis. On Monday, Beijing once again revised its family planning policy, allowing families to have three children instead of two.
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  • Today in China, several insurance companies market directly to “Double Income, No Kids” households. Matchmaking agencies are advertising their services to single men and women who don’t want children.
  • According to the latest census, the average household size is now 2.62, down from 3.1 in 2010.
  • “If I got married and had a child, I would still belong to the bottom class,” Mr. Huang said, referring to his background as a child of struggling factory workers. “When the time comes, I could also leave my child at home just like my parents. But I don’t want that.”
  • Choosing voluntary sterilization, especially as a young unmarried man, is still seen as culturally taboo in China’s patriarchal society. In many cities, doctors require a proof of marriage certificate and a partner’s consent.
  • “Raising a child is a high-price, low-return task,” he said. “I think having one is very troublesome.”
  • “They just refused to do it for me and said, ‘Because you’re unmarried without any children, you are openly going against the country’s birth policy,’” said Mr. Jiang, who is single.
  • For decades, Chinese people were conditioned to have children out of tradition, filial obligation and, ultimately, a fallback for retirement. But an expanding social security net and a proliferation of insurance plans have given people more options.
  • China now has the world’s largest number of single people. In 2018, the country reported 240 million of them, accounting for about 17 percent of the total population. Although the percentage is still smaller compared to the United States, the number has risen by about a third since 2010.
  • According to a 2018 study published by the Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, the direct economic cost of raising a child from 0 to 17 years is about $30,000, seven times the annual salary of the average Chinese citizen.
  • Mr. Huang, a 24-year-old graduate student in computing in the city of Wuxi, said he met his prospective partner, a 28-year-old woman, on a DINK forum. “I constantly tell her how high and scary the costs of childbirth are to women,” he said.
  • Mr. Huang, 27, is striving for a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids,” or DINK. The acronym has been around for decades, but only recently entered the mainstream in China, where rising costs and other economic woes have caused many young people to avoid parenthood.
  • “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
  • The announcement was meant to encourage couples to make more babies, but men like Mr. Huang say they would rather remain childless — even going under the knife to ensure it.
  • Housing agents offer apartments that cater to childless couples. Bedrooms once pitched as future nurseries are being converted into home gyms.
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Opinion | The Real Reason Behind China's Three-Child Policy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-three-child-policy.html history opinion policy china
shared by aleija on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • More than five years after the Chinese government abandoned its one-child policy, allowing married couples to have two children, it has now announced that they could have up to three.
  • The move came suddenly after results last month of a once-in-a-decade census. China reported only 12 million births in 2020, the fourth consecutive annual decline. The fertility rate for the year, 1.3 children per woman, was far below the level needed to just maintain the population, 2.1.
  • Allowing married couples to have three children will not increase fertility, or not by much. Fertility is low in China not because many women with two children really want to have more and haven’t been allowed to. It is low because many women don’t want to have a second child or any child at all.
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  • The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.
  • Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)
  • And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”
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How China's Economy Bounced Back - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-gdp-growth.html China Covid
shared by xaviermcelderry on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Since it opened in March, when China was still in the grip of Covid-19, the factory has struggled to find enough machinery operators or quality control technicians. Now workers are flocking to Changmingzhen, a once-quiet farming town ringed with green mountains and rice paddies, from which young people once fled for better jobs elsewhere.
  • But when China reports economic figures for 2020 on Monday, they are expected to show its economy grew despite losing early weeks to the lockdown.
  • The slight 50-year-old said she received a rent-free apartment, free cafeteria meals and other benefits, as Laoganma competes with other companies for workers. The menu isn’t always to her liking, but that’s a small price to pay.
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  • China froze a $15 trillion economy last February. It used brute force to isolate cities and provinces and drag people into quarantine.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • Beijing has a harder time fixing other problems. Shoppers remain skittish, and may become more so as the virus has resurfaced in several cities lately. Its economy still relies less on innovation and services than on making stuff. Legions of college graduates still find satisfying jobs in short supply.
  • The villagers in Changmingzhen may not agree. It is in southwestern China’s Guizhou Province, in a county that was so poor five years ago that it became a target for China’s antipoverty campaign.
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How the US could help Uighur Muslims in China with 5 steps - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...uslims-trump-forced-labor-help Politics US trump history crisis Culture
shared by kaylynfreeman on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • That rare consensus in Washington has generated some action, most importantly the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month. The law imposes sanctions on foreign individuals and entities involved in abuses in Xinjiang and requires the president to periodically “send Congress a list identifying foreign individuals and entities responsible for such human rights abuses.
  • The US has invoked that and other laws to sanction several Chinese companies and individuals — most prominently Chen Quanguo, who governs Xinjiang and is a top member of the politburo in China.
  • But many activists and experts say it’s not enough, and that the US can and should do more to pressure China.
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A Year Later, Wuhan, the First Post Coronavirus Pandemic City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wuhan-china-coronavirus.html pandemic china response
shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A year ago when Wuhan shut down, it offered the world a forewarning about the dangers of the virus. Now, it heralds a post-pandemic world where the relief at unmasked faces, joyous get-togethers and daily commutes conceals the emotional aftershocks.
  • The Chinese Communist Party has been singularly successful at stifling infections and vaulting Wuhan back to life faster than any foreign counterparts. But China, too, is singularly powerful at controlling remembrance of disasters, erasing troublesome facts and omitting critical questions from its official narrative.
  • Even in Wuhan, it can be easy to forget that time when shutting off a whole city seemed like a unique, draconian experiment on 11 million people. Coming from the city became a source of stigma last year; now it is a point of pride.
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  • Where the city’s months in isolation once stood out as brutally exceptional, the recent daily death toll from the virus in the United States has sometimes approached China’s official total for the whole pandemic — undergirding confidence in Wuhan’s return.
  • The exhibition extols the role of the military, and a diorama celebrates the medical teams from across China who came to Wuhan’s aid. Doctors and other “martyrs” who lost their lives fighting the pandemic in Wuhan are memorialized on a white wall, but the thousands of civilians who died have no wall of their own.
  • Many in Wuhan now embrace the version of events offered by the Chinese government, and say that their “city of heroes” waged a proud fight against a virus that has gone on to humble wealthier countries. Some residents view the early failures in a more forgiving light, after seeing the trail of calamities in the United States and other democracies.
  • “The Wuhan epidemic was dealt with well, really well,” she says. “It fully showed the superiority of China’s policies.”
  • China is the only major economy that has continued to grow in the pandemic.
  • Even before China’s crisis ended, leaders began pushing local officials to jump-start economic life. Infrastructure projects have been revived in Wuhan, and the city’s consumer electronics factories have found ready buyers in countries hamstrung by the virus.
  • He is not desperate for the vaccine. “It’s a very safe environment now,” he says. “It’s no big deal if I get one or not, but I will if they want me to.”
  • People who suffered infection say that neighbors and relatives still treat them with suspicion, as if they might still spread the disease — despite medical assurances to the contrary.
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Opinion | Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-covid-vaccine.html Politics US Culture policy
shared by cartergramiak on 25 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • By its own telling, the Chinese government has done very well, with daily infection figures nationwide rarely exceeding 100 between March 7, 2020, and Jan. 8, 2021.
  • Only, China’s comparative success now risks hurting the country. Having been largely spared by the pandemic, most Chinese people remain susceptible to infection, and yet some seem disinclined to get vaccinated because of a false sense of safety. In addition, the Chinese government is over-exporting vaccines made in China.
  • “I will not take it unless it is mandatory,” a friend of mine who lives in Shanghai told me recently about getting a vaccine. “The chances of infection here are very small.”
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  • The benefits have been real: in terms of lives saved, of course, and also in terms of politics, economics and prestige. To some, China has come to seem as something of a “new safe haven”; it was also the only major economy to register growth last year.
  • China’s comparative success at containing the coronavirus has put it in a bind: The population feels much safer than it should even as it remains very vulnerable to infection and is likely to for quite a while longer.
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