Money Talks in the Clash of Civilizations

What else would you expect?

You remember Samuel Huntington’s article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 –

The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani’s phrase, the conflict between “the West and the Rest” and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values…. The third alternative is to attempt to “balance” the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

Take a look at the three maps below. 

The first is Huntington’s civilization categories.

The second maps countries that signed letters to the United Nations Human Rights Council in opposition to and in support of China’s ethnic cleansing policies in Xinjiang.

The third maps countries with substantial debt to China, as a per cent of national GDP.

The First Map – Huntington’s Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations according to Huntington (1996), as presented in his book.  Formerly-archived Geography of War, course at Middlebury College. 

The Second Map – Uighurs – Which Side are you on?

Many sources confirm that up to 1.5 million Uighurs in Xinjiang are in concentration camps, with the goal of erasing their native Muslim culture and transforming them into good Chinese citizens.

From SupChina – An extraordinary event in human rights diplomacy happened in the last week: Two unprecedented letters to the president of the UN Human Rights Council were signed by dozens of countries expressing either support for or condemnation of China’s treatment of Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region.

 Photo credit: A visual representation of countries that signed letters to the UN Human Rights Council against and in defense of China’s ethnic policies in the Xinjiang region. Map made by Reddit user Hamena95

 

Twenty-two countries signed the letter of condemnation.  They are in blue in the map above.

The Chinese government responded with a letter of its own. Reuters reports that 37 countries joined the Chinese response, commending China’s remarkable achievements in human rights.  Such counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures as have been undertaken in Xinjiang are to be applauded.  Those nations are in red in the map above.

What stands out is the US failure to condemn Chinese actions, although we understand that to be attributable to the views of our current dear leader.  The US dropped out of the Human Rights council in 2018.

What also stands out is the failure of any of the Islamic world to condemn Chinese actions against Muslims in Xinjiang.  A number of countries, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria signed on to the Chinese response to the original condemnation.  And notice the support for China in Africa where China is doing infrastructure and resource deals, and Russia.

It is easy to see Huntington’s cultural clash in the current US-China conflict. Individualism v collectivism. World hegemon v rising competitor. Modernity and traditionalism. Its surprising how quickly the world alliances have formed.  In the third map, we begin to see why.

The Third Map – Debt and Loyalty

The third map is from a new working paper on Chinese foreign lending by Sebastian Horn, Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch.  They identified nearly 2000 foreign loans and 3000 grants to more than 150 countries totaling about $530 billion from 1949 to 2017.  This is apart from purchases of foreign bonds.

As of 2018, the Chinese government holds more than five trillion dollars of debt of the rest of the world, equal to about six per cent of world GDP.   As I have noted elsewhere, this lending is mostly to low-income developing countries (LIDC), oil exporters, and countries in the path of the OBOR projects. 

From Ives Smith at Naked Capitalism – China: The Covert Credit Superpower –

The regions most indebted to China are Far East Asia and Central Asia, including highly exposed, small economies that are in geographic proximity to China such as Laos, Cambodia and the Kyrgyz Republic …. Next come Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, as well as some parts of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. The debt flows to Eastern Europe are smaller, when measured as a share of debtor country GDP, but the amounts of credit to Europe have been growing substantially over the past five years.

Note the similarities in maps two and three. 

Notably, no Islamic nation condemned China for its treatment of Muslims.  Islamic northern Africa and much of the middle east and the –stans are recipients of substantial Chinese lending.  Even India has failed to condemn China.

No middle eastern or southern Africa country joined in the condemnation. Several southern African countries have more than 25% of their GDP in debt owed to China. 

Nearly all South American countries have more than 5% of GDP owed to China.  None joined in signing of the letter. 

Notably absent from the original UN letter were Italy, Greece, Turkey and all of eastern Europe, all recipients of large amounts of Chinese loans or expected beneficiaries of the OBOR. 

Signatories to the UN condemnation letter were the “west” including Scandinavia and Japan and all the English speaking nations except the US. 

Civilizations, repression, and debt

Samuel Huntington described about ten cultures in his 1994 book.  The big three civilizations he described were the west, the Islamic world, and Sinic, mainly China.  He described potential alliances of these with other civilizations – Russia with China, the Islamic world with China, based on similar thinking about the importance of history and desire to maintain distinction from the west.  Huntington’s categories are broad, and not without critics. 

Critics of the clash theory have pointed out that significant parts of the Islamic or Sinic world have modernized, particularly leadership and business interests. And any one nation, any one civilization, is far too complex to be accounted for in Huntington’s model. The populist uprisings in the US and Britain and Europe certainly point away from modernism. 

Well, ok.  The world is big and complicated.  Capitalism is no friend to democracy.  Huntington did not see a “winner” in the world civilizational struggle in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article.  

But it sure looks as if money speaks much louder than human rights talk, and Huntington was clearly onto something, way back in 1993.

For those of you want a bit more data, below is a listing of countries in Africa that have –

  • Signed on to the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative)
  • Supported China on Xinjiang
  • Supported China in the 2016 South China Sea arbitration
  • Received more than $500 million in loans from China in the period 2000-2017

This is from Sinocism –

The clash is looking less like a clash than a fait accompli.  And money is the root of … something. 

Learning from China … and Hong Kongers

Don’t trust China” is what the recent Hong Kong protesters told the G20 representatives in Osaka.

 I think that is right. It has been a sea change for me.  Fool me once.  Maybe even a few times. Still, over the last 15 years, I have come to realize that we should listen to the Hong Kongers (who don’t wish to be called Chinese).

Why believe twenty-somethings marching in the streets? Let’s remind ourselves that lying and no respect for human dignity are part and parcel of the government face to the world.  FBI director Christopher Wray’s declaration of China as a “whole of state” threat should be taken at face value.  There is no company or researcher or even student studying abroad who cannot be tapped to assist CCP.  (This of course casts false suspicion on honest Chinese everywhere.  Resistance is of course possible, and the norm, but it can be dangerous).

We have preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt.  On our most public piece of recent evidence – Huawei cannot be an innocent bystander, regardless of its own wishes.  It has been implicated or charged in theft and cyberspying for years China hacked Norway’s Visma to steal client secrets: investigators | Reuters:; Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of U.S. Targeting Chinese Giant – Bloomberg:; Cisco, T-Mobile, Motorola, Nortel, et.al.  The rap sheet over a decade or two is pretty impressive.

Don Clarke, cited at Huawei – taking a fall, hoping for a call– There’s a whole variety of pressures that the government can bring to bear on a company or individual, and they are not at all limited to criminal prosecution …. China is a Leninist state that does not recognize any limits to government power.

Mark Rosenblatt  in Real Clear Policy  citing two recent Chinese laws, the National Intelligence Law and the Anti-Spyware Law –  Specifically, “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public. The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work.”

Other evidence – politics in Australia and New Zealand are under direct attack, as are American tech companies; also, here – china cyber-cloudhopper.  A mayoral election in Taiwan appears to have been determined by fake news on social media coming from inside the mainland. Academic researcher Anne Marie Brady is under personal attack in New Zealand, presumably for research not to Mr. Xi’s liking. See Intimidation knows no boundaries and the update.  Wechat news for Chinese in the US is unabashedly Republican oriented, not only because of Democratic support for immigration and Chinese fears of university quotas.  The news stories, coming from Wechat in China, support the buffoon who is easy to exploit.

 Chinese espionage even rates its own wiki site now.

 My own path from trust to mis- began in 2004.  I taught CCP members going to school in Chicago for a year. They were sent by the government to learn about markets and government management. The students were midlevel bureaucrats, in about every discipline from police and propaganda bureau officials to stock market administrators. Over the years, many became my friends and colleagues.  I stayed in their homes, they in mine, we vacationed and worked together.

In 2009, I went to China to teach.  The world was still enamored of China, the shiny once-in-world-history transform learning to be a responsible leader in the community of nations. 

Living closely in China, one sees more sides of the world-facing sculpture constructed to be the New China –  like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.  What’s behind the curtain is not so shiny and imposing.  Nowadays, it can still be threatening.

The 2008 riots in Tibet and the 2009 unrest in Xinjiang were part of my seeing more clearly.  Suppression of the Sanlu milk scandal in 2008, for fear of soiling the glory of the Olympic Games, was another eye-opener.  Years later, my wife, who is Chinese, would never buy Chinese milk for our son.

There are, of course, innumerable other incidents of moral decay and lying, some reported in the Chinese media. For comparison, the US has no shortage of corruption, murder, mayhem, and cheating in business and government.  But more of that malfeasance is available in the news, and sometimes lawsuits and media and whistleblowers can help restore human dignity.  But see this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and – well, you get the idea.

By 2012, my view had changed. I had first hand exposure to police and hospitals and doctors and universities and media, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, citizen and peasant – and a lot of guanxi exercised on my behalf. I saw a university dean jailed not for a crime but for political retribution. I see now a university party leader heavily suspected of corruption, cheating faculty and no one will dare to complain. I see how judges and police and teachers deal with the moral quandaries.  I learned a great deal about Chinese as moral individuals in an immoral system.  I developed an idea – honor and respect individual Chinese; mistrust Chinese people; fear the Chinese government.  That still seems right to me.

None of this is new; China Law Blog, now-retired China Accounting Blog, and major media have been documenting for years how malfeasance – basically, all forms of lying – has cost American business and threatens models of business and law in which good will and good faith are basic to ideas of civility, fair dealing, and due process. 

The world is no longer so naïve about Chinese government intentions.  In 2009 American intellectuals thought a modern Chinese economy would bring democratic change.  Mr. Xi has disabused them of that notion.   Don Clarke has written about the Uyghur concentration camps, entirely outside the purview of the Chinese legal system.  This is what Hong Kongers see. 

The notion of Chimerica, the international economic partnership, is clearly no more.  Now, how does one deal with an ex when the breakup is a matter of lying?  Trust is off the table – even Reagan told us that, in the 1987 SALT treaty – “trust but verify.”  Now, the US negotiators want to insert such provisions into any trade agreement about IP theft.  While an admirable goal, Chinese will never agree to such a limitation, could not enforce it, and in any case, sanctions are after the fact. 

Now comes an open letter in the Washington Post to Trump from more than a hundred “scholarly, foreign policy, military and business” individuals advising return to the days of wishin’ an’ a hopin’ on China policy.  Bill Bishop’s sound reply at Sinocism is here, at item number three.  “Can’t we all just get along?” is so twentieth century. 

Turn the other cheek in international economic and political matters is no prescription for achieving a final reward.  The partnership breakup is a done deal. The only way forward for America is some limited decoupling, along with doubling down on the ideals of honesty and fairness and respect for human dignity that made Hong Kongers appeal to Americans at the G20.  Going forward, we should all learn from Hong Kongers.  We can’t go back to those innocent days of a decade ago.  You also remember – denial is not just a river in Egypt. 

Brief Note on the Trade Shootout

It is no surprise to anyone familiar with Chinese thinking on foreign policy or negotiating practice that China is  balking at changing its laws to reflect what the American negotiators apparently thought had been previously agreed. From the Reuters article –

 In each of the seven chapters of the draft trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: Theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.

One can marvel at American stupidity, if that is what is involved; or simply invoke the negotiating principle that no items are agreed to until all items are agreed to. One can call it Chinese perfidy, but that would simply imply that the Americans are so uninformed about Chinese negotiating tactics that they should not be in the same room with their counterparties at all.  To paraphrase Harold Washington on politics, trade negotiations ain’t beanbag.

So let’s get past the propaganda and posturing. This below is what no negotiating is going to change.  It is at the heart of some American thinking on the trade battle.

This is from Dan Harris at China Law Blog, the best China business advisory online – Doing Business Overseas? Have you Checked Your Trademarks?

From time to time when we write something here with which a reader      disagrees, we get a comment or an email accusing us of scare-mongering…. If I can scare a few more companies into not losing their trademarks I will have achieved my goal.

… stealing a brand name is a lot easier (and usually a lot more profitable) than stealing a product design. Our international IP lawyers deal with probably three trademark theft cases for every one design case.

Why does any of this matter?

It matters because if someone beats you to registering “your” trademark and you are having products made with that trademark on it, the person or company who owns “your” trademark can stop you from manufacturing your product or exporting the product with the trademark on it. The The trademark owner can also register its mark with its own country’s customs authorities and then have customs seize the trademarked product at the port, preventing your shipment from leaving the country in which it was made. This is a particularly nasty surprise in those cases where the foreign buyer has already paid for the product.

Who is going to register your trademarks? It is typically someone you know, like someone tied to your factory, one of your competitors or even a disgruntled employee. One of our China lawyers loves to talk about what happened a few years ago when he gave a series of lectures in China on how to protect your brand and product when manufacturing in China. After the talks, he went to dinner with a group of foreign company production managers who talked of how they had for years been urging the foreign companies for whom they worked to register their trademark. The foreign companies consistently refused, claiming such registrations were a waste of money. These production managers then told our China lawyer the following:

We are going to form our own trading company. We will register all the   important trademarks of our employers in China in the name of that trading company. When we get fired, we will register “their” marks with China customs and completely shut down their Chinese operations. It will serve them right for being so stupid and lazy.

Now just for the record, the laws in many countries would not allow these employees to get away with this, but the mere fact they were plotting this ought to scare many of you. In my view, your bigger threats to register your brand name where you manufacture is someone tied in with your manufacturer (they do this so they can stop you from going to someone else) and your competitors (they do this so they can stop you).

Note though that these operation managers did not say they were going to steal their employer’s product design…. But this small expense might give them considerable power over their former bosses.

Is a law or regulation negotiated at the central government level going to put a stop to what is legal, if unethical, in China?  No agreement in law or regulation will stop this sort of practice, if for no other reason than China is big and law and regulation are heavily decentralized.  Forget Mr. Xi’s language about rule of law and forget the pronouncements from the new Foreign Investment Law and forget the new National Supervision Commission combining government and CCP regulation of conduct.

There is one, and only one, issue in the trade shootout, and that is IP theft, whether theft by cyber or by hand.  By this point in 2019, after decades of dealing with Chinese companies, everything else is attributable to American naivete and some assumptions about beanbag. 

The culture of lying and deception in business should be well understood by now.  As I always say, this means no disrespect to those Chinese business owners who manage to conduct business honorably, whether one uses Confucian or western standards of conduct.  The Silver Rule is fundamentally no different than the Golden Rule – treat others as you would want to be treated.  Sunzi and San shi liu ji are about deceiving an enemy.  Business partners in the west are not usually thought of as enemies.

As I wrote in No Way Out from the Middle Kingdom –

Think about it this way – is there another major American trading partner where one need fear being kidnapped over a real or imagined payment dispute?  Is there another American major trading partner for which the best trade advisories scream, danger, danger, danger?

Caveat emptor, especially in China.   Perhaps an urgent note to our dear leader and his negotiators would be useful. 

When Internet Blocking Fails

An internet not coming to a computer near you …

CCP gets more paranoid than usual around June 4 of every year, particularly those years a multiple of five from 1989.   This year is 30 years since the Tian’anmen massacre.

I was in Chicago around June 4 of 2009, but I made the 2014 anniversary.  Internet blocking began early in May.  Every foreigner in China gets accustomed to internet and social media blocking, but in 2014 the online ban was nearly total.  It was a lesson in how particular the censorship could be.   You know, it’s China – it’s complicated.

At my school in Hangzhou, there were two internet services for students – one for Chinese, one for foreigners.  I got the foreign service, since I was living in the foreign faculty housing.  This was post-google ban in China, so it was expected that gmail would not go through.  Surprisingly, I could receive gmail, but could not respond to a gmail address, whether I used my own gmail or another server.  My principal means of communicating with students outside the classroom – for homework, paper information, changes in class scheduling – was via email.  My Chinese students could receive my emails from my aol account.  Some of my foreign students who lived off-campus, outside of the school server, could not.  When students told me they had not received my emails, at first I put that down to normal attempts to get around responsibility.  I was wrong.  My students could not receive my emails, and I could not receive theirs.

Herein lies the lesson about blocking particularity.  Blocking could be done, is done, at any of several different levels – national, provincial, city, district or individual school. The flow of information could be turned on or off like a hose, and could be titrated to whatever level was desired.  In 2014, I could send some emails – but one email might take four or six hours to send.

In 2015, one of my computers was blocked completely in Hangzhou – no internet access whatsoever, for a period of about six months. The same computer, taken to Wuhan, still had no access; but another computer of mine did work in Wuhan.  The blocking was targeted at me – or at least, at the computer I always used.

I was more than a little incensed about the blocking at my school.  Student contacts were completely disrupted, even more than usual.  In class, I began telling students when I had sent an email, and asked the foreign students to tell each other about my emails, so that they might be able to send to each other. Sometimes, that worked.

Communication with students outside of the classroom was nearly impossible.  This was made more ridiculous by the selectivity of the blocking – students living on campus had worse internet service than those living off campus. Sometimes. And vice versa.

The 2014 internet massacre was actually the second major interruption since 2009.  In late 2012, there were similar problems – emails that never got through – without any notice, emails that took many hours to send.  That was the time of the Bloomberg and the New York Times exposing the billions of dollars in family wealth accumulated by sons and family of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao, and CCP thought those exposès a bit … unseemly.   It was at this time that google was completely blocked from China – search, email to and from.

In my case, it was not only being unable to communicate with students.  I had business to conduct in Chicago, which was made impossible.  Checks could not get written.  Blocking was not just google, but any search, any email.

Not to sugarcoat it, but I voiced my discontent.  I complained.  Like voting – early and often.

The international office of our university was the natural place to go.  One of my Chinese government students from Chicago was the deputy leader (second only to the party leader) and she was generally sympathetic to my occasional foreign demands.  After a couple of weeks of no service, I went to her office on a Tuesday morning. The excuses were pathetic – there were problems with the whole school internet server (the Chinese students had no problem).  Ok.  Then, just a problem for foreign internet servers in China.  So why was this not a problem all over China?  Then, the apologies – “I have been told it will be fixed by next Monday.”  This, of course, on a Tuesday.  There were five or six successive Tuesdays with this promise.

Since this was clearly a problem only at our university, I suggested some remedies.  My favorite was a big, gross remedy that indicated how stupid the whole business was. The Chinese students had no problems.  The school administration people had no problems.  Apparently, the rest of China had no problems.  A residential development about 500 meters away on the other side of some small hills had no internet access problems.

I volunteered.  Ok, if this is so difficult for you to solve internally, give me 500 meters of category 5 cable, and we can string a wire from the adjacent residential development with service to the foreign faculty building. Right over the hills, bushes and all. Lay cable on the ground.  Would take two guys a few hours.  Inelegant, but solved.

The blocking was a problem for all the foreign faculty and the foreign students.  But I was teaching major courses, not language courses, so I was more or less a leader of the foreign faculty.  Sometimes leadership demands bold action.

I demanded a meeting with the university president.  I pointed out that the school was really banking on a large increase in the foreign student population.  I was more or less the face of the foreign presence at the school, and if I could not get internet access, all those foreign students in Germany, Indonesia, the –stans, and Africa would hear about the problems someway when I finally could get access.  In any case, the blocking was a violation of my contract with the school, that internet access would be available.

After six weeks of promises about next Monday, mirabile dictu, after my meeting with the university president on a Friday, access was restored by next Monday morning.

Worked pretty well, too.  Guanxi and a credible threat works wonders. 

How to End June 4, et al.

A Country That Controls the Internet Should be Able to Control the Calendar

A few years ago, it was reported in the Australian Financial Review that senior party members in the Chinese Communist Party were reading deTocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution.  This was at the suggestion of Xi Jinping, who apparently wanted to call attention to the fate of leaders who ignore the people in favor of corruption and the easy life.  The end times of the French monarchy is a good model for what rulers should not do.

We now have the anti-corruption campaign and the tigers and flies and the framing of enemies by other Party members.   And we have the mandate to remove evil western influence from China (free speech, free press, democracy, and the western books and teachers who are unfortunately a product of those ideas).  This was the pronouncement from Yuan Guiren, the Chinese Education Minister.

An aside – Communism, you know, is a German import.  What CCP should do about that is overlooked.  No doubt this will be the subject of investigation.   Someone, somewhere, within the CCP, at a very senior level, is protecting Communism, this western import,  from being attacked.   Is this more corruption?

Anyway, the French Revolution has spawned lots of interesting ideas, in addition to “liberty, equality, fraternity.”    One of the more interesting was the French Revolutionary calendar.   Those of you who can get access to the internet outside China can look at French Republican Calendar.

The rationale for the calendar was to sweep away the ideas, the habits, the customs of the old system – the ancien régime, as it is called.   The concept was to erase the memories, the Four Olds of France as it were, and pave the way for a new France.

Sort of like a New China.  

On October 23, 1793, the Revolutionary Calendar was adopted by the National Convention, acting as the government in France.  The idea was to make the calendar rational, and modern.

In the spirit of the times the calendar was designed to do away with the old names of months, irrational numbers of days in the month and the week and hours in the day, and replace them with systematic, metric, and base-10 representations.    Very modern.  

The wiki article describes the months, days, and hours –

There were twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity….

Names of the days, names of the months, and number of days in the month and hours in the day were all changed.  Controlling the calendar was rational, and modern.

How the old New France can help the New China

There has been a lot of anxiety within China about the date of June 4.    Many people think that June 4 is part of the modern calendar, and should come after June 3 and before June 5.    But in New China, old ideas should be eliminated.

Others in China seem to fear the date of June 4, and would like to see it banned.   Certainly, the Chinese Communist Party has taken that position, in action if not in policy statement.   References to June 4, particularly if they include a year, such as 1989, are blocked by the Chinese government.   References to related terms, such as May 35, or characters or words that could be generally understood as meaning “June 4” are also blocked by the Chinese government.  Attempts to talk about June 4 can land people in jail

Now we know that the Chinese government supports modernization of everything in China.   Getting rid of the Four Olds is itself an old term, but still a useful idea.

In the spirit of modernization, and using modernist ideas from the French enlightenment to support the CCP, we recommend that June 4 just be eliminated from the calendar.  This should eliminate the anxiety felt within the government about June 4, and make it possible for millions of Chinese to get back to the business of making money, which, after all, is what a society is for.

How to do it

There are many ways to eliminate June 4.   Perhaps the easiest would be to simply print calendars that go directly from June 3 to June 5.   The extra day can be added somewhere else, like February, which really could use another day in any case.

If this program were implemented immediately, then the calendar revision could be accomplished in conjunction with the map revisions that show dotted lines in the South China Sea and Taiwan as part of traditional China.  Maybe include some proposed acquisitions, as well.   Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, and diaoyudao in the East China Sea.  Mongolia?  Surely some argument can be made for ports in Sri Lanka, or along the coast of Africa.   With all those dotted lines, it would be easy to draw a dotted line between June 3 and June 5 to February 29.

Another idea – print calendars that call the day between June 3 and June 5, June X.   There will be confusion with people thinking we are using Roman numerals, like the French Republican calendar.   But we already have a June 10, so the confusion should be small, even if unavoidable for some people.   We all have to pay a price for progress.

There are other ideas.   June 3.99 has a nice look to it. Chinese citizens can come up with variations.

And the beauty of that sort of choice is that there are an infinite number of variations.  If some people don’t like June 3.99, then they can try June 3.999.   Or June 3.1.   Lots of choices.

Some people – looking at you, CCP –  get so anxious about June 4 that they try to eliminate June entirely from the calendar, or at least eliminate internet use during June.   We can fix that, too, by eliminating the word “June” from the calendar.

Early June in the French Revolutionary calendar would be Prairial, from the French word for prairie, or pasture.

And senior Communist Party officials who are reading deTocqueville should really have no objection to naming a month after a French prairie.   So Prairial 3.99 could be just what is desired, for all Chinese people.    So the sequence could be, Prairial 3, Prairial 3.99, Prairial 5.   So much more modern feeling.  And the internet doesn’t  have to go down, again, for maintenance, every year during May and  June.  There is no June.

As a final solution, we could just replace June 4 with nothing.   We would write June   , 2019, or 2019 – Prairial –    .     That way, the people who want to eliminate June 4 will have done so.   Everyone else can just remember what goes in front of the comma or behind the dash.

And then, on Prairial    , Chinese web-users should show their solidarity, and go silent.   Post nothing on Prairial    , and show your support for June 3.99.   This might be the most effective way to deal with the June 4 problem.  Post nothing on that date.  

If enough people comply, government will be flustered.  What does it mean to protest when no one shows up?  What if they blocked the internet and no one complied by being blocked?  And how about all those millions of Chinese who failed to post anything on June 4?  Which side are they on?

Think of  Tenzin Gyatso. the Dalai Lama, suggesting that if CCP demands that there be a new Dalai Lama to succeed him at death, then perhaps there should not be a new Dalai Lama.  Atheistic CCP is insistent that there be a new leader, so CCP can control; the religious faithful are not so sure.   What is the sound of one internet not buzzing?

Now I know it will be difficult to get hundreds of millions of people to adopt a system like this.   Sometimes when something is very difficult to do, we say it would be like murder to accomplish.   But that is what we suggest.   Not posting would to be thinking of murder.

Even if it is like murder to not think about June 4, take up the banner for June X or, if you wish, for June    , or Prairial 3.99.   Your choice.  Then we can completely forget June 4, and maybe that day, the internet can go silent, while millions remember. 

What Chinese cannot not talk about …

In a previous post, I mentioned the heavy hand of CCP coming down on internet access each year in the weeks leading up to date of the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989.

What CCP sincerely wants is for Chinese netizens to model the three monkeys – see, hear, speak no evil – evil, of course, being in the eye of the CCP beholder and specifically any sight, sound, voice or thought related to the events leading up to and during June 4, 1989. 


But netizens are tenacious.  They are inventive in devising terms to get around blocking of all sorts, but particularly the blocking of 6-4 remembrance.

China Digital Times maintains a list of terms, indicating the extraordinary lengths to which Chinese netizens go to communicate about 6-4, or May 35, or any of dozens of other made up ways to refer to the date.  My current favorite is 82 = 64.

In spite of netizen tenacity, the government crackdown on public knowledge about Tian’anmen has worked very well.  While the “tank man” photo is recognized worldwide, it is nearly unknown in China.  My undergraduate students did not know what it was – or would not admit to knowing.  In 2014, the Onion had a headline – Chinese Citizens Observe 25-year Moment of Silence for Tian’anmen Square Massacre.  In 2013, Louisa Lim, author of Republic of Amnesia, found that 85% of Beijing  college students could not identify the picture.

And in truth, 1989 was a long time ago for young Chinese.  That was then, this is now.  In June, 2014 Robert Hariman noted how complete the erasure of history has been for most Chinese – a public act of protest against the authoritarian state has been replaced with political quiescence on behalf of commercial consumption. 


Michela Buttignol/New York Times

Also in 2014, China Law & Policy published a moving short biography of Wang Nan, originally published in People’s Republic of Amnesia.  (Video at Louisa Lim at Google).  In 2014, Wang Nan was a 45 year old photojournalist with a wife and family – except that he never made it to 45.  He was killed at Tian’anmen as a 19 year old student. 

China Law and Policy

His mother remembers her son.  Along with others, she is monitored heavily around this time each year.  She is one of the Tian’anmen mothers.

http://api.pictures.reuters.com/archive/CHINA-TIANANMEN-MOTHER-GM1EA640E8X01

Helen Gao, writing Tian’anmen, Forgotten in the New York Times in 2014 –

I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”

One of my minor subversive acts teaching in China was to accommodate Chinese undergrads who talked with me after class – “We want to know what happened.”   I gave them a three hour video documentary in Chinese about the events of the days.  The Gate of Heavenly Peace – part 1 and Part 2 was produced in 1995 with compiled videos and interviews with students, teachers, and observers of the events.  This is an extraordinary documentary.  There are some English subtitles.

No doubt that video has been shared.  I felt a bit like Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, retrieving truth from the west.

Outside the mainland, remembrance persists – in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in the Chinese diaspora. The date is remembered each year in Hong Kong, to the worry and dismay of mainland officials.  The commemoration is one way that young people in Hong Kong express themselves as HongKongers, not Chinese. Typical of the response in Hong Kong is this from China Digital Times – Hong Kong Marks June 4 Anniversary.  Some of my mainland Chinese undergraduates expressed some anger at students in Hong Kong, deriding them as bad Chinese – disloyal and “stirring up trouble” – a common arrest charge on the mainland.

CCP likes to use Confucian chapter and verse to support its policies.  There is a paragraph in the Analects that would seem to recommend the stance of the three monkeys to all Chinese –  “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety” (Analects Book 12 (Yan Yuan) para 1)

But this is not a recommendation to self censorship. Confucius is speaking of a man in control of his emotions, assured of his correctness, the Junzi– without anxiety or fear, as is pointed out in the same book, paragraph 4.  Censorship is the action of a man anxious or afraid, suppressing citizens’ lack of confidence in rule. In paragraph 7, the Master said that military equipment and even food sufficiency may be given up in extremis, if the people have confidence in their rulers.  Otherwise, the Master said, there is no standing for the state.

Censorship betrays the anxiety and fear in CCP.  In a far different context, Bill Clinton reminded us that a strong grip is the sign of a weak hand.  Netizens constantly remind CCP that the Chinese people are as Sun Yat-sen said in 1924 – a handful of sand, without a strong commitment to the CCP variety of nationalism and unmoldable to the model of a good communist soldier – willing to sacrifice all, even memory and moral freedom, for the benefit of the state.

CCP must walk a fine line – Xi Jinping just got through extolling the actions of student protesters of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a foundational time for CCP. For CCP, also, that was then, this is now.  Student protesters in 1989, and since, are subject to arrest, jail, or murder.  See The Ideology of Occupation on arrest and disappearance of Peking U students trying to be good Marxists. 

This year, 30 years later, the heavier than usual blocking should be starting about now.  CCP must be always on guard against thinking that will pollute minds of Chinese.  Otherwise, as the Master said, there may be no standing for the state.

My First Protest

February, 2015 

We are in Jingzhou, Qing’s home town in Hubei Province. 

We went out with Ben for a walk, and the Jingzhou district government compound is less than a block away.  The district is an urban subdivision, akin to a ward in Chicago, though much bigger than a ward.

The district compound is a series of small buildings, like a small university campus, some offices, some residences.  Leafy, low key, surrounded by the usual wall with three entrances, or gates.  Buildings look old, a bit decrepit, although probably built in the early 1980s. Qing says this area was pretty and clean and orderly when she was growing up.

Now, it is different. 

Everything in Jingzhou is dirty, bad construction site dirty, all the time, everywhere.  Leaves on trees and bushes are covered with a film of greasy dirt.  You can see the green under the dirt, but it is not leafy green.  Some unfamiliar green.  What was built in 1985 has suffered from 40 years of no maintenance, at all. All of Jingzhou suffers from the tragedy of the commons problem – no one is the owner of public space, including buildings, so no one  takes care. But the district is the hub of local government.

Never let it be said that everything in China is better now than it was before.

At the district main entrance about 30 or 40 men and a few women were protesting. I asked Qing to get some details, and we talked to the leaders for a few minutes. They were protesting not being paid – for a year – on a construction project that has been taken over by the government.   The original developers of a wholesale shopping mall fled, the government took the project over, and promised to pay workers.   They are apparently owed several million yuan –  maybe ten million yuan – for themselves, their employees, and suppliers.  It was now close to New Year’s, workers were going home, and they needed their promised wages. They had a cloth sign that blocked the exit for district government employees to leave in their cars.   They had been there for several days, they told us.

Main entrance, Jingzhou District headquarters, after clearance

About 4:30 in the afternoon, the police showed up, two personnel vans, a few cars, some police in riot helmets with the pull down plastic visors and heavy vests with heavy guns, some not.   About thirty policemen to match the protesters.   Police stood around their cars, waited for a few minutes.

The leader walked up separately.  Chengguan is the term for the non-uniformed thugs employed – or let us say, arranged – by the government to break up protests, beat up old women and men, and occasionally murder protesters.   The leader was a thug in anybody’s book.  Big, fleshy, jowly. Scowl. No uniform, just a pullover shirt and a light jacket.  Right out of casting, but this was not rehearsal.  Qing and Ben and I were standing right around the protesters and the police – this entire event was unfolding in the driveway in the picture, between the building entrance and the street, about 30 feet of sidewalk and parkway.  We were taking pictures. The thug threatened Qing, didn’t know what to do with me. 

Qing told the thug that if he wanted trouble, that was ok.  She said she was American.  She was not in a mood for cooperating.  Police wanted us to go away, but we were slow.  Qing said that my presence might have calmed the police a bit in their later action against the workers.   The thug shook his head first, as if telling his subordinates he had decided not to proceed as planned.  He then nodded, the police moved in, tore down the sign, pushed the protesters out of the way, to either side of the driveway.   They broke the protesters up into small groups, and surrounded them against the walls of the entrance. Pretty well organized, like they had done this before.  Very clear that any resistance would be met with overwhelming violence.

The protesters did not react much, at least not much compared with being physically shoved out of the way. The concept was to separate the protesters, and then the police formed a line on both sides of the driveway, so the government officials in their cars could leave on time at 4:30.  

Some people standing around, watching, but most passers-by just kept passing by.  Either not news or not news they want to be a part of.

About half a dozen cars left the compound, moved into traffic.  The police hung around for about 20 minutes, gathered, got back in the vans, left.  No arrests this time, no bloodshed.  The protest was finished for the day. Qing said that the thug was not chengguan, but a representative of the central government security force, a somewhat secretive unit that exists in each city.   I did not know about them.   But the central government has a security presence even in the cities.   I have a couple of pictures, nothing juicy.   I will go back tomorrow, see if the protesters are there again.

My first protest in China.  Things you can learn by going out for a walk.  I knew that it was common for migrant workers to work for six months or a year and then not get paid, and there is little recourse. The blue roof shacks you see on all construction sites are the housing for the farmers who do the work, on projects big and small, and they live on the site, and usually get a little money for food, but they agree to get paid when the contractor or the developer gets paid, and so they work and exist on scraps for a year, waiting for the big payout at the end.  Often, the big payout never comes.  If the workers get half, or 25%, of what they are owed, that will be a good outcome. 

The CCP says that China is in the beginning stages of socialism.  I guess that is true. The worker’s paradise is not here, just yet.

Huawei – Taking a Fall, Hoping for a Call

Pardon the soccer reference.  But to my mind, that is the Huawei move.  But Huawei has the support of the fans, at least in China, and they are vocal.

Don Clarke, professor of law at George Washington University, has penned this response to the declaration of the Zhong Lun law firm in Beijing, in support of Huawei as an innocent private company caught in a nasty trade spat.  According to the declaration, no company in China is ever required to comply with demands from the central government to install spyware or backdoors in any communication equipment.   Clarke points out that this is misleading and inaccurate.  Chinese law says nothing about what provincial and local governments might demand from a company, and in any case, law is not a constraint. 

“There’s a whole variety of pressures that the government can bring to bear on a company or individual, and they are not at all limited to criminal prosecution Clarke says.  “China is a Leninist state that does not recognize any limits to government power.”

From Clarke’s China Collection  blog –

Last May, two attorneys from the Zhong Lun law firm submitted a declaration to the FCC in support of Huawei’s position that it could not be compelled by the Chinese authorities to install backdoors, eavesdropping facilities, or other spyware in telecommunications equipment it manufactured or sold. I finally had the time to look at the declaration in detail. I don’t find it convincing. I have written up a pretty full analysis (over 10 single-spaced pages) and posted it here on SSRN. Enjoy.

Incidentally, my colleague Jacques deLisle of the University of Pennsylvania Law School also submitted a statement of his views, which largely support Huawei’s position. (I hope I have not characterized his statement unfairly.) Needless to say, I don’t agree, but the paper here is an analysis of the arguments of the Zhong Lun submission, not Jacques’. Those who are interested can read Jacques’ statement for themselves.

 Even we non-lawyers can read.  I wrote about this previously in Lie Down with Dogs, Get Up with Fleas

 Don Clarke’s analysis –

The Zhong Lun Declaration on the Obligations of Huawei and Other Chinese Companies Under Chinese Law (March 17, 2019)

Added March 22:  Steve Dickinson at China Law Blog on the new foreign investment law, which has been touted as an improvement in business conditions and a response to forced technology transfer – https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/03/chinas-new-foreign-investment-law-and-forced-technology-transfer-same-as-it-ever-was.html      Steve’s conclusion – 

Article 22 of China’s new Foreign Investment Law is not relevant to the issue of forced technology transfer. On that front absolutely nothing has changed and nobody should expect it to either.

Added May 25: Christopher Balding and Donald Clarke on Who Owns Huawei?  Huawei claims to be employee-owned.  But their shares are not ownership, but contract rights in a profit-sharing plan.  To the extent ownership is vested in a trade union, Chinese law does not grant ownership rights to employees if the company or trade union go bust.  It appears that ultimately Huawei could be state-owned, since all trade unions are part of the state.

Huawei responds

Don Clarke’s rebuttal.  Huawei makes no case for employee-ownership and does not refute any facts in the Balding-Clarke paper. 

Negotiating Harmony – Conflict and Governance in the New Age

This paper was published in the Journal of the Zhejiang Province School of Administration (otherwise known as Party School) in 2015. 

So far as I know, it is the only original contribution by a foreign author to this Journal.  Since the Journal is from CCP in Zhejiang, one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated provinces in China, it is as well respected as a CCP journal can be.

The paper is way too long for a blog read.  I outline a way for CCP to provide meaningful voice to populations angry over land thefts, pollution problems, and corruption.  Among other suggestions, a ready-in-waiting conflict resolution organization, structured at the provincial level, could be brought to bear on incidents of mass protest.  A stand-still agreement is necessary to force parties to negotiate.  This is one way to provide voice to Chinese people in the absence of democracy. 

This is a theoretical paper, although no one in China would describe it that way.  A bit too clear and direct.  The paper was presented at a conference at Zhejiang Business and Financial University in 2015, although my presentation was kept apart from those of other presenters.  I gave a more or less private briefing to about 30 faculty and students – either to inoculate others from dangerous ideas or provide me with a rapt audience.  Probably both are true.  The presentation was in the school’s Party conference room.  

Negotiating Harmony – Conflict and Governance in the New Age

William D. Markle, Ph.D.

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology

Hangzhou             

March, 2014

Version 2 – May 15, 2014

Contact:

wdmarkle@aol.com

15988832937

Abstract

A fundamental question of the times is whether the economic and political reform necessary to continued growth in the Chinese economy can be accomplished within the existing political system.    This article briefly reviews the literature on complex systems, as applied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the demands for a new method of addressing fundamental conflict – mass protest – over land rights changes and environmental problems.   The author suggests that use of conflict resolution skills and a defined public participation program, conducted at the provincial level, can be of use to the CCP in adapting to the new society. 

Introduction

Stability and harmony 和谐  hé xié  are key words for public administration in China, as they have been for more than a thousand years.   Nevertheless, for more than sixty years, the concepts of stability and harmony could be trumped by economic development, in whatever form that took – land reclaiming, expressway construction, development zone clearing, or apartment and factory construction. 

That era is over.   For many reasons, including overinvestment, bank balance sheet problems, a rising middle class that demands attention, and social media that make communication instant and definitive, it is no longer possible for government at any level in China to ignore stability and harmony as important principles of governance.

As is well-known to readers of this journal, both environmental problems and land conversions are a significant source of instability.  One has to only consult China Daily, or most any western newspaper or magazine, to get weekly examples.  Most recently, last October, Xiage township in Zhejiang provides an embarrassing example, or Gangnan County in Wenzhou, in 2012. 

This article is not directed at providing advice for policy makers on compensation, or removal procedures.  This article argues for a more sophisticated approach to public involvement in public decision-making that can reduce the potential for, and severity of, mass protest.   Specifically, public participation training, in schools and training institutes, should include courses in conflict resolution and negotiation.  The public officials for whom this training is critical are those working in urban planning, environmental analysis, civil engineering, and public administration. 

In addition to conflict resolution training, it is important to develop a structured dispute resolution system within government, for use in local land conversion, land use, and pollution conflicts.  

There are five suggestions for consideration as part of greater use of rule of law, openness, and the reform agenda of the Xi Jinping era.

The five suggestions are –

1.Training in conflict resolution for undergraduates in urban planning and environmental programs 

2. Similar training for graduate programs in public administration and at institutes

3. Empower professional staff in decision-making, and publish environmental evaluation reports and demand conformance to a time frame

4. Create a defined provincial level procedure for conflict resolution, triggered without excessive delay or petition

5. Process and professionals in conflict resolution to report to provincial authorities

Public Participation, Conflict, and Demand for Change

Public participation techniques are well understood in China, at least at some levels.   Design of public participation in environmental assessment in China has been discussed by Wang and Chen (2006), Horsley (2009), Wang (2006), Zhang (2012), and Tang (2007), among others. 

As long ago as 2006, Pan Yue, the vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA),  linked environmental changes to increased public participation –

In China, environmental protection is an increasingly pressing issue. Not only are pollution and ecological degradation becoming ever more serious, but also people are more and more unsatisfied about the situation. The speed with which we are polluting the environment far outstrips our efforts to clean it up. Why is this? China has a large population but few resources, and our production and consumption methods are too out of date. But at the root of the problem lies a more significant cause — the lack of public participation in China.  (Yue, 2006)

Wen Jiabao made protection of land use rights in land conversion a theme of the later years of his premiership.  In an article in Qiushi –

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has called for farmers’ land rights to be protected and criticized a widespread policy of moving villagers into apartment blocks so their land can be merged into larger blocs or developed.

State-backed land grabs are a cause of deep tension across China. Ten days of protests over confiscated farmland and the death of a protest organizer in Wukan in booming Guangdong province in December drew widespread attention as a rebuff to the stability-obsessed government.

In an essay for influential magazine Qiushi, or Seeking Truth, Wen said “rural residents enjoy the legal rights of land contracts, land use and collective income distribution,” whether they stayed in the countryside or migrated to cities for work, according to a summary published by the Xinhua news agency on Sunday.   (Reuters, January 15, 2012)

 

And as recently as last October, Xi Jinping urged officials to resolve conflicts according to the rule of law, reminding officials of the “Fengqiao experience”  in 1963, in Zhuji.   The Fengqiao experience suggests that people should be enabled to resolve conflicts among themselves without having to refer disputes to higher level authorities. 

Improvements to process and participation in decision making about the built environment are laudable.  But too often, such public participation fails because it is done at the wrong time or at the wrong level of analysis, or with wrong intentions.    Seven years after Hu Jintao promised

To ensure scientific and democratic decision- making, we will improve the information and intellectual support for it, increase its transparency and expand public participation. In principle, public hearings must be held for the formulation of laws, regulations and policies that bear closely on the interests of the public…. We will improve the open administrative system in various areas and increase transparency in government work, thus enhancing the people’s trust in the government  (Hu, 2007)  

we know that the environmental protection process and land conversion process in China fail to protect.  In a short piece in Global Times, quoted in Qiushi, Yan reports that the draft changes to the environmental protection process were unlikely to protect Chinese or the environment.  (Yan, 2012).    And at times, the environmental protection bureau itself displays the problem with both regulating and collecting fines for violations of regulations – the economic moral hazard problem in Haimen City, in Nantong, in Jiangsu.  (WSJ, February 1, 2013)

And even though environmental protection is moving closer to the top of the national agenda, there is still reluctance on the part of powerful departments to consider environmental projection when proposed by the environmental protection bureau –

Strong and influential government agencies such as the planning commissions (jiwei), economic commissions (jingwei), and the construction commissions (jianwei) and industrial and commercial authorities are known to be reluctant to endorse and enforce stringent environmental measures for fear that they might slow down economic growth.  (Wing Hung Lo and Leung, 2007)

We are concerned here not with administrative rule making, or mediation in Chinese village life, or strike resolution, but with the use of public participation ideas in resolving conflicts in land transfers and the built environment.   These are the areas of most significant individual and group conflict in China, which according to research by Sun Liping at Tsinghua, reached 180,000 per year in 2010  (Fung, 2012).   

The topic is not new to the CCP.   At Fujian School of Administration, Wang Liping has held a class that points not to improvements in governance, administration, or communication techniques, but to violence –

To help illustrate his point that forceful demolition can lead to violence, Wang shows a slide of a farmer in Hubei Province who used a home-made cannon to drive away a demolition team in order to protect his land. The class falls quiet.   (Fung, 2012)

 

In what follows, I want to describe the CCP as a system of organization, and make the point that the CCP has demonstrated in the past, and must continue to demonstrate, that is an adaptive system, that can use flexibility to respond to challenge.    Then, discuss governance and public administration in China, and note that conflict resolution has not been part of professional training. 

CCP as a Complex Adaptive System

The unique political and governance structure in China has facilitated economic growth for 30 years.   During that time, the CCP has shown itself to have remarkable flexibility in adapting to new conditions – restructuring SOE in the mid-1990s,  banks in the late 1990s, opening to the world in trade and gradually expanding the scope of the private sector.    All accomplished within a single party state system, with hierarchical but still extremely decentralized control.   How is decentralized control possible?

Despite the decentralized nature of government in China, we can characterize government and political organizations as part of a single complex system.    A definition of relationships and interactions that are complex –

They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions, and their relationships are not aggregations of the individual static entities. They are adaptive; in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events    (Mitelton-Kelly, 2003)

There are an uncountable number of parts, interacting both closely and at a distance, with varying levels of force and reaction over time.   It is really impossible to describe any policy change, any administrative change in such a system, as a linked set of linear commands, coming from a central authority to subordinate groups, which understand and obey.  The rational and hierarchical models of Max Weber or Henri Fayol certainly do not apply.   

 

Within this hierarchy, we can characterize the CCP as a relatively adaptive system, in the terms of Boisot and Child (1999) –

systems that have to match in a nontrivial way the complexity of their environment (Ross Ashby 1954, Wiener 1961), either to achieve an appropriate measure of fit with it or to secure for themselves a degree of autonomy with respect to whatever constraints it might impose (Varela et al. 1991).

Within the system, there are feedback loops, and non-constant levels of action and reaction between agents.  And a system that remains in existence for a significant period of time, responding to change from outside, must be minimally adaptive to the environment.    The adaptation requires the system to interpret, or understand, pressures being applied from outside.   How can a complex system adapt?   We can think of the hedgehog and fox essay, by Isaiah Berlin – “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”   (Berlin, 1953).   An adaptive, interpretive system can be a hedgehog or a fox.

Adaptive, interpretative systems have two quite distinct ways of handling the complexity that underlies the variety:

(a) They can either reduce it through getting to understand it and acting on it directly. That is, they elicit the most appropriate single representation of that variety and summon up an adapted response to match it.  Such a strategy leads to specialization informed by relevant codification and abstraction of the phenomenon.

(b) Or they can absorb it through the creation of options and risk-hedging strategies. That is, they can hold multiple and sometimes conflicting representations of environmental variety, retaining in their behavioural repertoire a range of responses, each of which operates at a lower level of specialization. This approach develops behavioural plasticity. There may be less goodness of fit between any given response and the state of nature to which it needs to be matched, but the range of environmental contingencies that an organism can deal with in this way is greater than in a regime of specialization.  It may endeavor to enhance its capability to deal with a wider range of environmental contingencies …

In plainer English, an adaptive interpretive system can develop a single response, informed by judgment, and specialize;  or, the system can become more sophisticated, and develop a variety of responses that are then more suitable for individual conditions.      There can be a single system response to the same challenge – always do This, or That;   or, be adaptive in the individual circumstance.

A key characteristic of adaptive systems is the ability to undergo substantial  change, without collapse or failure. 

The decentralized complex system can survive because it can adapt.

That CCP absorptive adaptive model now needs to be called upon again, as China addresses the problems of corruption and

environmental pollution and land reclaiming.   This is a public administration problem of the first order.   Existing public administration theories allow for more effective solutions to conflict than have been used in China in the past. 

 

New Public Management – Models and Practice

The term New Public Management (NPM) refers to a view of governance that tries to incorporate consideration of “markets, managers, and measurement”  as a way of improving performance and accountability  (Ferlie, 1996).   Although NPM was a popular emerging paradigm in public administration in the US, and then in China, the number of published articles on NPM has certainly faded in recent years.  And there is no particular reason to force Chinese public administration practice into a western theoretical construct.  But the lessons – treating citizens as customers, providing information, and lessening the gap between citizens and administrators – do continue in China. 

As part of the New Public Management focus, there is increasing attention to what is referred to as “governance.”   Governance refers, in part, to the set of traditions and practices by which laws are implemented.  In essence, governance refers to both quality of governing and reasonableness of policy.   Are rules for society reasonable, and understandable by those to whom the rules are applied, and is there a sense of fairness in the application?   New public management, and governance techniques, are applied to daily effectiveness of organizations in cities in China.  But the implementation process in built environment projects remains a public administration problem in the world, but particularly in China. 

Practice

The Chinese government has learned to respond to the wishes of the people, in some cases better than in others.   In general, one expects that the higher the level of government, the more sophisticated the leadership, the less tied for promotion to enhanced local GDP, the more willing leaders will be to listen to the local view.  

Zhejiang Province is a key example.   Rich, experienced, open to the world, and innovative, Zhejiang has long been in the forefront of administrative reform in China.   The Zhejiang model of land reform, allowing for transfers of development rights (TDR) within and between local governments, is well known (Wang, Tao, and Tong, 2009).  And more recently, Haining has been selected as a pilot for land reform, allowing mortgages of village property and sales of farmer land to those outside the village; and Wenzhou has established a “rural property rights service center, that in theory allows sales of village land to citizens from within the county.    

As far back as 1995, the Yantai Service Promise System, in Shandong Province “drawing on the New Public Management approach to administration,”  represented a serious attempt to make the bureaucracy more customer oriented and professional (Foster, 2006).   Fifteen government departments were required to provide service delivery promises to citizens, and the local government leaders appeared to consider citizen complaints and survey results quite seriously in individual leader evaluations.

A version of the Yantai system was begun in Jinhua in 1996, 

and in Wenzhou, in 2003.   Other cities – Beijing, Guangzhou, and others –  have implemented more open communications with citizens, and provided a survey mechanism to review the performance of government departments. 

In addition to openness in administrative matters,  there are public officials willing to experiment.   In Shaoxing, a communications model has been used to defuse conflict between a real estate developer and neighborhood residents.   This model used intervention by the urban planning authorities to pro-actively address concerns, rather than ignoring them or waiting for conflict to reach a higher level of intensity (Zhou, 2008, unpublished).       

But these laudable experiments in communication are still focused on administrative actions and service delivery.   We are concerned here with projects, not programs, that constitute once-in-a-lifetime events for most citizens and farmers.

More commonly, however, we have seen examples of local mass protests, real conflict, being resolved by provincial or higher government leaders, stepping in at the critical moment to undo the Gordian knot of development and its externalities.   Witness environmental and land transfer conflicts in Wuhan (Provincial Party leader steps in to resolve); Dalian (City leaders vow to close paraxylene plant, and move it); Ningbo (city officials decide to cancel paraxylene plant);  Shiyang (Deputy Director of local Development and Reform Commission and former City Party leader meet with protesters);  and many other places. 

There are problems with this high tension, high conflict model, however.

Governance has two components – leadership and administration.   Both exercise power,  and both need to demonstrate legitimacy for a sense of fairness.   China, with its focus on relationship and Party loyalty, has tended to solve public conflicts in governance through application of leadership, rather than administrative techniques.    At the last moment, or too often, after the last moment (someone is killed, or worldwide media attention is obtained) a top leader, from the city or province – possibly from a central organization – steps in to mediate or construct a solution. 

But solution to conflict through application of leadership should be the least attractive option for the CCP and the government.   For reasons that are as apparent in the west as they are in China, using leadership as a solution mechanism puts leaders in uncomfortable positions, often between parties with equally good claims to authority and justice, and forces a solution that could be more sophisticated in form if left to negotiation at a lower level of authority.   Moreover, governance by leadership almost necessarily takes place after local dissatisfaction has risen to the level of local mass protest, once positions have hardened, interests are damaged, and trust in government is weakened. Governance by leadership is a high-cost strategy.  It is responding, rather than anticipating, and tends to put the government in a negative position. 

Leadership, moreover, takes on new dimensions as the demands of the economy and the culture change.   Leadership that once meant making command decisions now must be collaborative, and collaborative not only with a few subordinates and leaders, but collaborative with the general public, who demand more and better from leaders.

What to do, now?   The customary answer is training, for both leaders and for administrative staff.   Government leadership, management, and administrative technical skills can be, and are, taught.   But skills in implementation, particularly as regards dealing with the public –how to do what is desired –  remain generally untaught.   For most environmental and land decisions, “decide, announce, defend” remains the dominant implementation model.   The government decides on policy or program, announces a decision, and then is forced to defend that decision before an angry and aroused public.   But a changing environment demands changing nature of training that can utilize a different, more sophisticated model.   And the new era of development in China requires an implementation model that takes public participation into account, and in a manner more respectful of public wishes. 

 

Public Communications and Public Participation

The term public participation gongzhong canyu, 公众参与 can have many meanings, and many ways of implementing. 

There are many ideas in the “toolkit” of public participation –

Obtaining information from the government

Complaints or petitions to the government

Deliberative democracy experiments

Public meetings or hearings

“Field investigations”

Expert analysis

Online activism

Street protests and demonstrations

 

Public participation refers to the public’s involvement in government decision making, whether regulation or rule-making (zhiding tiaoli, guizhang, 制定条例,规章or administrative  xingzheng juece, 行政决策  (Horsley, 2009).   This is the definition most of interest in discussing ways of lessening public protest and improving citizens’ lives.   But this list of public participation techniques is too limited.   It does not address the response to conflict in the streets, moving to destruction of property and prestige.

A local government can provide information, and take complaints, and have public meetings, and conduct expert analysis of a project well in advance of construction, and still face mass protest at perceive injustice.  One can make the argument that with “correct” dissemination of information to the public, and properly scheduled public meetings, and serious attempts at obtaining expert opinion, there should be no need for additional public participation techniques.    The facts on the ground, however, suggest that the “correct” processes are seldom followed, and the result is the demand for public participation tools that help to resolve conflict.   The suggestion here is that skills in conflict resolution, including negotiation, should be part of the public participation toolkit.   

To be effective, and considered just by all participants, public

participation must be timely – that is, it must take place before spending commitments are made, certainly before construction begins;  information with which to analyze proposals must be provided; and it must be understood as being useful – public participation that is “public relations” rather  than public involvement is designed to result in loss of respect for, and trust in, government.

Above all, public participation must demonstrate respect for the views of the public, whether informed or not, and allow a “seat at the table” in decision making.   This is where the conflict resolution skills are necessary.

Rather than the decide-announce-defend model noted above, a

more sophisticated model for public participation is discuss-decide-announce, in which community concerns are made part of the decision-making process, rather than trying to address them at the end of a process when commitments may already be made and it is too late to develop anything but anger and resentment and protest.  Public participation needs to be more than press agentry, or one way dissemination of information, or even two-way communication that is widely asymmetric in power relations. 

 

A government that can only communicate in these ways is not a government that is confident of its role, and not a government that inspires trust.

Trust can only come from communication, and that in an honest manner.   Otherwise, communication is one-way and is public relations, not public participation. 

In design of a public participation system, there are three dimensions to keep in mind.   What is the scope of participation – will the public be permitted to protest, or petition, but without meaningful response, or will the public be considered as a partner in decision-making?    What is the method of communication – press releases and announcements, or face-to-face discussion, with decision-making to come later?   What is the extent of authority of the government participants?  Are they both responsible for decisions and authorized to make changes?  If not, then the public is going to be at a significant disadvantage in any discussion.   Why talk with people who cannot do anything?  (Feng, 2006).

It is important to keep these three dimensions in mind when considering public participation models for China.

–  Scope of participation  – must include all parties affected; 

– Mode of communication – must be timely, and useful;  special  

  efforts to communicate, and provide technical advisors for the

  public, as needed;

–  Extent of authority – participation must respect the public,

acknowledging that not all interests – even government interests-   can be equally satisfied.

Public participation in physical project review is different from administrative reviews.   Administrative actions generally do not involve threats, or perceived threats, to life, health, or livelihood;  construction projects and land takings often do.    So we are faced with conflict, rather than simple evaluation;  and public participation in conflict resolution is a far different skill than participation in surveys of prior performance. 

One of the teachers within the Chinese Academy of Governance system, Zhong Kaibin, has echoed the demand for better results from leaders, in practice of public management –

The fourth area is related to China’s transformation from a public administration system based on personal will and charisma to one that is increasingly based on rule of law, which has been recognized as necessary for a modern state government. This transformation, however, requires an independent judicial system and genuine public participation process.   (Xue and Zhong, 2012)

The existence of government schools of administration, as well as public administration programs within universities, speak to the need for professional education and continuous learning.    There are now more than 100 MPA programs in universities and Party schools across China (Wu and He, 2009).

Notably, there seems to be increasing attention in Chinese MPA programs on public communications;  negotiation, however, is a topic reserved to business (MBA) programs.   Public communications seems to be focused on public speaking and putting one’s best foot forward, as it were, rather than addressing conflict. 

A review of public administration programs at Zhejiang University, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiaotong confirms that there do not seem to be required or elective courses in conflict resolution or negotiation within public administration programs, at either the undergraduate or graduate level.   There does appear to be a negotiation course and a conflict resolution course within the Tsinghua Master’s in Public Administration Program, but both are 1 credit courses, not required and apparently not considered important topics for education. 

But the “first line” responders to community or village conflict are usually administrative staff,  in urban planning, environmental analysis, or civil engineering.   This is reasonable.   But these professionals receive no training in conflict resolution, or in negotiation.   The question remains as to how much authority such professionals have, in the face of serious conflict.   But they are the first contacts the public sees.   To reduce the spread of conflict, it is important that these “first responders”  have some training in reducing conflict.   This is recommendation No. 1.

1.Training in conflict resolution for undergraduates in urban planning and environmental programs

These are officials with the most direct understanding of issues on all sides of a conflict, and the most technical ability to address problems. 

A review of university catalogs in urban planning, civil engineering, and environmental planning suggest that there are no required courses in conflict resolution or negotiation.

The content of such courses can vary.   International undergraduate business programs already incorporate negotiation courses – examples are Fudan University and Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST).    These courses will tend to focus on business disputes rather than government-citizen conflicts, but negotiation skills can be similar in both cases. 

But the public management programs – the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiaotong University is an example – do not have a required negotiation or conflict resolution course.   Within public administration programs in China, negotiation or dispute resolution does not appear on course listings.   The Chinese Academy of Governance does not seem to offer such courses, either.

In any case, the current negotiation courses taught in China tend to focus on business negotiation, in which both sides are fundamentally hoping to achieve the same goal – a profitable outcome.   But most disputes with village people in China are of conflictual nature, in which power distribution is clearly unequal, one side is reluctant to acknowledge the legitimate interests of the other side, and on one side there are often people willing to take to violence

to protect perceived threats to their lives, livelihood, and health.

Public administration programs, both within universities and within the schools of administration, should have a required course.   There is not a more important piece of training that leads to hé xié than conflict resolution skills.    And current public officials in districts, townships, counties, and cities need such assistance as the first line responders to conflict. 

Where should such training take place?    My suggestion is that the natural location is within the undergraduate or graduate urban planning programs at universities, and within environmental planning programs, and in the CCP schools of administration.  So, suggestion number 2:

2. Similar conflict resolution and negotiation training in graduate programs in public administration and at institutes

 

Community Empowerment – Exit and Voice

Citizens have two active potential responses to undesired local conditions – they can choose to leave, moving somewhere else where conditions might be better; or express their unhappiness.   We refer to these as exit and voice.  Among the two responses to conflict – voice, and exit –  Chinese generally do not have the choice to exit – to leave the village or the neighborhood.    Voice is their means of resolving conflict.    Voice can be discussion, at one end of a communications spectrum, or it can be violent disruption, at the other.   Violence appears when trust is lost.   Discussion, on the other hand, requires trust.   The classic description of exit and voice is by Albert Hirschman (1970).   Voice and exit both work in both the marketplace and in governance. 

The classical work of Tiebout suggests that individuals and businesses make a location decision partly on the mix of public resources available in different locations, and the prices (taxes) at which they are offered.   If the cost benefit analysis of public services and taxes paid changes for the worse, as defined by the individual, the individual or business is inclined to move, to a location with a preferable mix.   This is obviously the “exit”  choice.

The “voice” choice in provision of government services includes complaint, letters, media attention, and street protest.  

But more significant than street protest, more than complaint and media attention, is the work of community organizing and community empowerment in the US. 

Community organizing involves creation of a stronger sense of community in poor and under-served communities, through meetings and public information and creation of a sense of ownership and power, with which to confront the government.  The goal is to win attention, resources, and a “seat at the bargaining table” –  forcing government to pay attention to an organized community that is difficult or impossible to ignore, when individuals could safely be ignored. 

It is fair to say that the seat at the table – the ability to negotiate – is the desire of community organizing everywhere.  In the US, the organizing work of Saul Alinsky and his followers became so powerful that the Chicago local government created a Department of Neighborhoods in 1981, to specifically hear the “voice of the neighborhoods.”   The concept of listening to the people, in a way not provided by representative government (aldermen, mayors) or by individual media, constituted a huge change in the way neighborhoods were understood in American government.   In some cases, local governments now provide annual funds to community organizations that may oppose projects of the same local government.   This can create organized opposition.   But it does provide a way for information to flow up to the decision makers. 

Why would local government do this?   The short answer is that governments in the US do not want to see mass protests or significant organizing against what might otherwise be government policies or projects.  Smart governments want to be ahead of public opinion, not always responding to conflict.   If a “seat at the table”  is the goal of community organizing, after protest and resulting media attention, then it may be possible to provide the seat without the prior conflict.   Making community part of the decision-making process makes for good politics and, in the American sense, good governing. 

It is probably a bridge too far to suggest that governments in China provide funding for a citizen movement.    But conflict that is not addressed, except in the extreme, does not foster trust in government, and people who perceive themselves to be wronged do not forget.   At the same time, there is no negative response more

feared in harmony-seeking China  than the organized mass public protest.   Where should voice be expressed?

These are critical issues for China now, and in the next ten years.   It is no longer sufficient to promise a better world at some undetermined time in the future, when the socialist state is fully achieved.  And, it is no longer sufficient for government to take action without responsible acknowledgement of the interests of the people.   

In negotiations of all kinds, we talk about having to address two different kinds of needs – those that are tangible, and those that are intangible.  In business, we suggest that one party not agree too quickly to an otherwise acceptable offer, or make a concession too fast.  We want the other side to feel that offers and counteroffers are taken seriously.  It is understood that the intangible interests – in being treated seriously, in having positions considered fairly – are as important as tangible results.   In neighborhood and village conflicts, people have interests in a clean environment, and in fair land transfers.  These are tangible.   The intangible is being treated with respect, before, during, and after conflict.    It is no longer sufficient to offer the solution, without the expressed, and intentional, voice of the people being heard.   People have interests in clean air;  but they also have interests in being respected, which requires being heard, and is a form of justice – respect for the individual.

Barriers to Public Participation and a Solution

 

Public participation in environmental impact assessment is required by law in China (Zhang, et.al., 2012).   But despite ten years of required public involvement, the number of protests over land seizures and environmental problems, violent and otherwise, continues to grow.   The list of weaknesses in environmental assessment in China is well known.   Zhang et al., quoting Zhao, 2010 –

there are some limitations in current EIA public participation mechanism. First of all, the extent of public participation is limited. Relatively small percentage of projects is subject to the compulsory public participation requirement. On the other hand, the timing and duration of engaging the public is rather short. The way in which the public is defined and selected also brings bias to the true public participation. Secondly, the access to information is limited. Although progress has been made to increase public access to environmental information, there are still uncertainties regarding what to disclose and how much to disclose, and concerns of potential social unrest if too much information is disclosed. Thirdly, the public has limited impacts on the final decision-making. The power of all the parties is out of balance among project proponents, EIA institutions and the public. In addition, the voice of environmental NGOs in China is still relatively weak (Zhao, 2010).

Despite the widespread dissemination of policies regarding public input, implementation remains generally poor, as evidenced by the size and number of mass protests. 

Why is implementation poor?   There are several reasons.   One is political, or, shall we say, reflects a public choice perspective – leaders who see an advantage from not serving the public interest. 

There is no doubt that political obstacles can easily prevent useful implementation of the participation process.    Low level officials can easily circumvent regulations from above, and to the extent bad information does not flow up the chain of communications, upper level executives may not know about problems until the problems are well advanced in severity and complexity.

So one reason for poor quality of implementation can be found in corruption – local officials trying to collect economic rents for themselves, and deceiving the public in the practice.   This is a serious problem, and must be addressed at the highest levels of the Party.

On the government administration side, another issue is low levels of information made available to the public, or information made available in inconvenient form or at inconvenient times.      In China as in the US, a conflict resolution system will only work as well as the commitment to honest voice and openness 信息公开 xìnxīgōngkāi

There are also citizen reasons for not engaging with government in conflicts.  Low willingness to engage can come from four causes.  

–  a traditional reluctance in China to engage in public affairs;

–  lack of awareness of proposals, and a means of response (no

non-government data or information sources are available, petitions have no value)

–  fear of reprisals

–  costs to protest, including ineffectiveness of past efforts

Frustration with the process is cited by Ma, Webber, and Finlayson (2008), from Eastern Horizon.   Respondents to a survey on the failed sealing of a waste storage facility were asked what they thought of public hearings generally.   While about 40% of the respondents thought that public hearings were useful,

nearly 59% of respondents chose the answer that public hearings were ‘not useful, public opinions are rarely adopted’. In other words, most people thought that hearings were not useful and/or that public opinion was rarely heeded.

Tradition

There may be a more traditional reluctance to engage with government in China than in the west.   That is possible.  But the intense use of forms of communication – petitions, lawsuits, complaints, trips to Beijing as part of xinfang techniques – suggests that even if there is a tradition of acceptance, that tradition does not impede Chinese from attempting to make their grievances known.   This does not appear to be a reasonable argument for lack of public participation, particularly in this new era. 

Data and Means

There are many ways in which public information can be obtained prior to land takings or construction projects are begun, and all of those are in use now in China, in different places in different times.   As with many regulations and programs in China, problems lie not in the form but in the substance of the work.   The laws exist, the desire to enforce does not.

There are already systems in place to prevent illegal or undesirable conversions of land  (Heurlin, 2007).

There remains a problem of evaluation of data.   Emissions data, or controls on pollution, are beyond the ability of most citizens to evaluate.   How to provide adequate representation for citizens in conflict?  

In politics, we sometimes argue that a government needs a loyal opposition to provide better policy, better monitoring of results, and better outcomes for the society.    This article does not argue for an opposition; but it does argue for a government ombudsman, or review process, or voice in consideration of the public interest, largely construed.   No such voice exists now. 

There are many ways in which a public voice can be provided.   In China, given recent history, it is important that any system of providing additional voice be located away from local officials, and that the system clearly provide for – perhaps, require – additional delay in construction and land transfer.   Delay is always to the benefit of voice.   Delay is always detrimental to those who want to avoid the law. 

An honest search for harmony in “built environment” disputes requires that first-line responders in conflict be empowered to provide data, including any environmental reports.   But before environmental reports are completed, front line officials should be able to provide data and help citizens and peasants understand what has been provided.   So, suggestion number 3 –

3. Empower professional staff in decision-making, and publish environmental evaluation reports and demand conformance to a time frame

Fears

To address public fears regarding public participation, including threats of reprisal from government leaders, it is necessary to locate a conflict resolution or negotiation program at a level of government sufficiently removed from the local level to allow for some public trust in the process.   As noted in an village aphorism,

 

“the Center is our benefactor, the province is our relative, the county is a good person, the township is an evil person and the village is our enemy”  (Michelson, 2008)

At the same time, the way to reduce corruption at the local level – village, township, county – is to empower the public to communicate with leaders above that level.    I suggest a conflict resolution or negotiation process as that method of communication, once past the petition stage.

So, recommendation number 4 –

4. Process and professionals in conflict resolution to report to provincial authorities

Costs

Another reason for lack of participation is the understanding that protest has costs, short term and long, in several forms.   Heurlin calls this the “Peasant’s Dilemma.”   There are costs in lost time, from productive activities in farming or factories, as well as real dangers in being detained, beaten, or murdered.  See Huerlin (2005), Lichbach (1994), Javeline (2003), Whyte (2010), and many others. 

It is important for the government to encourage additional use of public participation measures by the public, as a way of deflecting anger and conflict that rises to the level of collective protest.    The costs, real and perceived, of public participation to the individual peasant are high – costs in lost time, lost wages, potential reprisals.   As a result, anger and resentment fester, and instead of being defused over time, rises to the level of organized protest as a last resort, when the costs of non-protest become too high to bear.   

There are systems in place that have been designed to address conflict that cannot be ameliorated at the local level – specifically, the petition system.   But even with recent proposed changes to the petition system, it is unlikely that this system will work to  the advantage of citizens and peasants, unless there are additional procedural delays and steps required in the development process.

So, suggestion number 5 –

5. Create a defined procedure for conflict resolution, triggered without excessive delay or petition, coming from provincial authority.

 

It is necessary to construct a dispute resolution system that is administered at the provincial level or above, with a funding source that does not depend on city or lower revenues, with trained conflict resolution experts, or trained mediators, who have power to bring about solution.    Robert Emerson made a similar suggestion in Disputes in Public Bureaucracies (1999),   cited in Michelson (2008). 

The benefit of such a system is that it provides the voice demanded by villagers and citizens.   This, per Whyte and others, is a demand for procedural justice, not distributive justice, and can substantially enhance the position of the Party.   Other measures to enhance distributive justice – greater democracy, independent courts, even hukou reform – are far more difficult for the CCP to accept.   Corruption policies are good;  but  it is doubtful whether even the most rigorous corruption regimes can reach to the lowest levels of governance, where most mass protests arise. 

If administrative officials in urban planning or another technical department are to have authority to resolve conflict, they must report to leaders sufficiently high in the CCP ranks to overrule or counteract actions by local officials.   And, of course, the technical staff should be relatively protected from the lure of corruption.    The suggestion is that each province have an urban planning staff, perhaps from the Development and Reform Commission, whose job it is to assist local technical staff in resolving conflict.   Such an official should have the ability to call a standstill to development in the face of conflict – much as the banking regulators were able to call a halt to actions regarding Zhongdan Investment Credit Guarantee Co. Ltd.,  in Beijing in 2012.   Standstill will put a halt to pressured response from villagers, force scrutiny onto local officials, and do much to restore some element of trust in government.  (Chovanec, 2012)

An argument can be made that active use of conflict resolution skills – particularly negotiation skills – is contrary to Party polices and goals, of remaining as the leader of the people.   And government plans and expertise are far beyond anything that is reasonable for the public to obtain – technical skills in planning, real estate, evaluation, budgeting, and mitigation of damages.    Consulting – in an honest, open fashion – could be viewed as government weakness.   Leaders should lead.

The contrary is true.    Leaders who are secure in their power are unafraid to ask for assistance.   There are different sources of power and types of power.   Coercion, threats, and force are ways of exercising power.   But Antonio Gramsci, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks,  used the centaur – half man, half beast – image from Machiavelli to describe the different characteristics of power.    More traditional power, violence and threats, are the beast half;  but capitalist relations demand the more human side of domination, the thinking, consensual source of power.   That is certainly where China is now, and will be.   Use of consensual means of power does not take away from leadership or authority;  it expands it.

Additions to Required Process

In addition to training for government officials, it is necessary to provide a structured public participation program for units of government.   Such a program has several elements –

  1. Requirement for submission of the public record of public hearings and public participation meeting to relevant city and provincial bureaus before a land conversion and transfer can take place
  2. Additional procedural requirements for existing public participation in environmental reviews.
  3. Any public hearing or meeting record regarding land conversion or construction of “significant public projects” must be signed by a provincial or city representative, who was in attendance at the meetings.   This should help remove principal-agent problems among village or other local leaders.
  1. Triggering of a required conflict resolution program –  when protests submitted reach a particular level – and publicized – then a conflict resolution system must be employed. 
  2. Publishing of environmental reviews in time for public consideration
  3. provide technical assistance to the public to help in understanding of technical details of proposals

 

Benefits to CCP of a defined negotiation process

 

What are the benefits to the CCP of better conflict resolution skills in the development of projects and transfer of land?   Here is a list, not in any particular order of importance.

Retain Government Authority

Conflict resolution skills, used proactively, puts the government in charge of change.    Mass protest by definition means that the public perceives that its interests are not being served, and is a failure of change management.   Asking questions at the beginning is far easier than offering concessions in a media charged atmosphere, later.

Keep Conflict Local

It is important for the CCP to keep protests local.   Negotiation and consultation before implementation is one of the best ways to do that.   Citizens in Dalian are unconcerned about negotiations on a paraxylene plant in Ningbo;  but they are concerned when the objections rise to the level of mass protest.     As an adaptive complex system, the CCP allows local solutions to local problems.   That is still true with use of better public participation techniques, but conflict resolution skills and negotiation skills add to the “toolkit” of local solutions.   China is not at the point in development or law in which national laws can be effectively enforced.   Local solutions to local problems are a satisfactory substitute.

Keep Leaders out of Local Processes

Use of planners in planning departments, or officials in environmental departments fits with a traditional Chinese approach – adaptive, not like western approaches, which are more complexity reducing (using law and regulations),  Chinese approaches would be more complexity absorbing (harmony and guanxi)).   In any case, leaders should be kept out of the process as much as possible.  

Reduce Costs of Governance

Mass protest is far more costly to the government and CCP than to villagers or citizens.    By the time conflict reaches the stage of mass protest, the cost to organizing at the village level is small, and the cost to leaders in terms of trust and image is very high.   In this era, information is relatively easy to obtain, voice, as expressed through social media, is cheap.    A small expense in time and money at the beginning of a project will seem very inexpensive when compared with the costs of dealing with protest later. 

Remove Threat of Reprisals

Consultation and negotiation at the beginning removes threats of reprisal from local officials to citizens; which enhances trust in government and creates working relationships.    There have also been cases of threats by the public of revealing confidential  information about leaders,  as a way of forcing upper level action against local leaders.   While providing information about corrupt leaders is good, extortion is not. 

Strengthen Party Discipline Process   

Use of a defined conflict resolution process provides additional evaluation information for both discipline inspection and the organization departments.   How well can leaders serve the public interest?

Increased Party Legitimacy and Flexibility

Allow local solutions for local problems   – including response to petitions, and reduce the use of “extra-legal” actions – chengguan – that stifle protest and decrease legitimacy

Novel idea – Strength Through Openness

Real power is shown in not having to use it.  See  sun tzu-  “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”   sun tzu    孙子   writing in The Art of War孙子兵法,  Sūnzǐ Bīngfǎ.

Provide Administrative Clarity

 As in Yantai – provide a defined system for protest, rather than the ad hoc system now in place.   This alone, if done in an open and honest way, should provide greater trust in government.

Rationalize Land Use Procedures

Even though several provinces, including Zhejiang, have announced plans to reform rural land use and sales, there remains the problem of how to plan for future uses below the county level.    If peasants are going to be provided with stronger land use rights, then a stronger system of adjudicating those rights must be in place.   A conflict resolution system provides a means of doing that, without having to resort to court actions which may be influenced by local officials in any case. 

Improve the Business Climate

Increased use of conflict resolution or negotiation skills, in advance of significant conflict, improves the business climate by bringing difficult issues – land conversion, pollution – to the leadership at the beginning, when solutions may be possible, rather than later when solutions may be impossible and government legitimacy is lessened. 

There may be additional costs to using better public participation skills.   Costs may be in simple delay, or significant costs in pollution equipment or additional compensation to farmers.   It seems difficult to argue against such spending, however. 

Allow Regional Solutions

At the same time as local solutions – within the township, or village – to local problems are enhanced, there may be a need to consider more regional solutions to larger problems.  The pollution impacts from a steel factory, or a coal burning power plant, are regional.   An honest public participation process allows for consideration of who should be “at the table” in discussion of regional issues, and a structured conflict resolution process is a way to do that.

Improve Evaluation of Cadres

The Organization Department zu zhi bu  already takes into account more than simple GDP growth in the evaluation of leaders for future positions.  The absence of conflict is another measure.   This can be enhanced by existence of a defined public participation program that reduces conflict.   Use of the techniques is not a negative for leaders;  it should be considered a positive development, demonstrating consideration of public needs in addition to business needs. 

Reduce Corruption –  An honest public participation program acts to reduce corruption, since it raises issues of conflict before a project is implemented, and allows the public to ask the question that all too often goes unanswered in China – “why?”

 

Removes Pressure from Leaders for Special Privilege

The honest leader can find himself in a difficult position when pressured by powerful business owners or other government officials to approve a project to which the leader has objections.   The ability to use a structured public participation program, required by law or local practice, allows the leader to “put more moving parts” into the machine of project approval.  Significant opposition by the public cannot be ignored.

Address Democratic Issues

At its most fundamental, democracy is a system for providing voice to the public.  Democracy with Chinese characteristics will certainly not look like American democracy.   But additional voice for the public in China, particularly on those projects in which they are most interested and have the most stake is a good step in the direction of Singapore, which certainly is not democratic but allows voice.

Serve the People

An honest public participation program serves the needs of the people, both locally and regionally.   The program will require additional data and analysis, which may not be available to the public in government channels;  but that is a small cost to pay for the benefits of providing more harmony.

There are many ways to provide additional voice to the Chinese people.   A China that wishes to lead, not only in economics but in public approbation, should do better on government effectiveness.   A dispute resolution system is necessary, feasible, and Chinese.   It is the manifestation of harmony with Chinese characteristics. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What Chinese are talking about … fake news

You know that China is increasing pressure on every state it can bully.  The bullying is easiest when the victim state has a substantial share of its GDP connected to China, whether as exports or as Chinese FDI coming in.  Now come fake news stories published in China, quoting New Zealand politicians approving of Chinese policies on the Belt and Road initiative.  New Zealand is in a tough spot. 
 
It is one of the “five eyes” countries, those English speaking countries that share some cultural backgrounds and concepts of law and government.  Others are the US, England, Canada, and Australia.  These five share intelligence efforts in some detail.  The US agencies involved include the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA).  Security issues – now, the Huawei 5G business, and related Chinese hacking and theft – are top priorities among the five eyes countries.  Even more than Australia, New Zealand is a western country in Asia. 
 
New Zealand is isolated.  It is more than 1300 miles from Sydney to Auckland and it cannot develop much stronger markets for agricultural goods elsewhere in the world.  China is its largest trading partner, followed by Australia.  Agricultural exports are about 27% of GDP, and food exports are about half of that. New Zealand signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008.
 
A good example of the position in which New Zealand finds itself is the relative lack of police response to the attacks on the home and office of Anne Marie Brady, a scholar at the University of Canterbury, who has written in detail about the means by which China is infecting media and politics and public opinion outside China.  I wrote about these attacks in two places in the last couple of months. It is suspected that the intruders, who have also left threatening phone messages, are some local version of chengguan, the Chinese hired thugs who terrorize street vendors, old ladies who don’t want to leave their homes in the way of demolition, and anyone in the way of growth and development.  A substantial contingent of chengguan were responsible for watching Chen Guangcheng for years before he escaped in 2012.   New Zealand police have found no evidence, it seems, and do not seem too alarmed by the attacks.  There seems no doubt that these despicable attacks are politically motivated.  Brady’s recent article is Magic Weapons: China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping. 
 
What is New Zealand to do? 
 
 
4. Chinese pressure on New Zealand increasing
Fake OpEd on People’s Daily English site by former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley – Foreign Minister Winston Peters slams former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley after China Daily article appears – NZ Herald:
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has launched a stinging attack on former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley after an article appeared in China’s “People’s Daily” under her byline complimenting China on its reforms and the Belt and Road Initiative.
But Shipley did not write the piece, which appears under the Online opinion section. It is headlined “We need to listen to China” and carries Dame Jenny’s byline and on Tuesday night was the fourth best read piece on the website.
She was interviewed by the state-run newspaper in December for a feature article which has run already and was surprised to learn a new piece had been published under her name.

Some economic development issues are similar around the world.   An American local government, faced with declining tax base, ageing population, loss of markets, and little ability to change the course of history is faced with  tough choices.  New Zealand is in a similar spot, with respect to China and the English-speaking west.   But American local governments usually don’t have to deal with fake news stories planted by enemies in the town next door.

Url for the New Zealand Herald article –

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12205347&ref=clavis