Lest We Forget June 4

In the social, economic, and cultural miasma that is the state of the world, we might let tomorrow slip by without notice.

A couple of old comments –

What Chinese cannot not talk about …

How to End June 4, et al.

 

Soft power? We don’t need no stinking soft power.

Update at August 28 – the affronts to human dignity, scholarship, free speech, trade fairness and personal expression now seem to come on a daily basis.  China under Mr. Xi is really carving a new international image, and it is neither “peaceful rise” nor “responsible stakeholder in the community of nations.” 

You’ve read some of the Hong Kong stories, in the media and below, and the disruptions and violence and threats coming from Chinese students in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US  when confronted with others speaking their minds.  You’ve read about the billionaires, activists, lawyers and missionaries who have been disappeared in the mainland.  As described in the Guardian“China feels emboldened to place literally anyone under arbitrary and secret detention, regardless of citizenship. It is now long overdue for the world to stand up.”  Family members of those the CCP wants, for whatever purposes, are at significant risk, both inside China and outside. I had some fears for my wife and son when they were in China a few weeks ago.  I am unsure of my own potential for detention when I return to China.  In July, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled against extradition to China of a sought-after former official, based on threat of human rights violations if he were to be returned.

These are all on top of the old stories, from the last ten years or more, of American businessmen being kidnapped in China over real or imagined disputes with Chinese businesses.

The government has long pressured western businesses to conform to CCP political thought, at the risk of losing access to the Chinese market.  You remember the demands that hotels and airlines stop referring to Taiwan as a country. Then luxury brands like Versace and Coach faced the same demands, and folded immediately.  Now, we have the government demanding resignation of a Hong Kong airline CEO  – and getting it – over participation by Cathay Pacific employees in the Hong Kong protests.  Cathay Pacific is Hong Kong’s best known local business in international markets.  You can expect more pressure from the government over actions of foreign businesses, and you can expect more compliance. The government has said it will enforce a “social credit score” on foreign companies in China.  Expect the blacklisting to be used when a companies employees or related entities fail to conform – not to government, but to CCP – requirements.  This is despicable behavior by the government, and potentially dangerous to companies and their employees.

About a week ago, in Shenzhen, the government seized a Hong Konger who works for the British consulate in Hong Kong, thus confirming the worst fears of Hong Kongers about the extradition treaty that was the original proximate cause for the protests.  Simon Cheng was returning to Hong Kong when he apparently was seized on the train late at night. 

In the last couple of months, a Hong Kong 2014 umbrella protest leader, Nathan Law, has been singled out by Chinese student groups at Yale, and targeted with death threats. From ChinaFile on the messages sent to Nathan Law –  “I will wait for you at school and you have no escape. Gun shooting will start—American style.

Let there be no mistake – there is no peaceful rise, CCP expects to dominate international relations as well as business and markets, free speech and rights of assembly are under attack throughout the world, and capitalism is no friend to democracy when profits are at stake.  We tend to ignore the AmericansCanadiansAustralians being held in China under any form of false charges, to be used as warnings or bargaining chips. More stories are here and warnings to Americans from the US State Department are here.  The 2017 book The Peoples Republic of the Disappeared documents some of the stories of Chinese and foreigners held for no good reason. 

There seems no good outcome in the current Hong Kong protests.  About the best the world can expect is an updated version of the rallying cry from the War of Texas Independence – Remember Hong Kong.   May it be remembered as a rallying cry for free speech and a free press and free assembly and rule of law in Australia, and New Zealand, and Greece, and all of Africa, and South America, and southeast Asia. 

The old post from August 1 –

 You remember the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre – the bandit horde, pretending to be Federales, descending on Humphrey Bogart and fellow prospectors.  “Badges?  We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges.  I don’t have to show you no stinking badges.” The famous lines were uttered by Gold Hat, head of the bandits, when Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) asked for their badges.   Hong Kong was the soft power model, the badge of Chinese “peaceful rise.”  Mainland students and Confucius Institutes were supposed to be the badge of Chinese soft power in the world.  But no more, as we see in Hong Kong, in Australian and New Zealand universities, and indeed, universities throughout the world.

I kept thinking of that scene as I watched Hong Kongers resist the violence of the banditos, this time in the form of white-shirted thugs from Triad gangs, and the local police.   And then, watching mainland Chinese students attack Hong Kong sympathizers at Queenland University in Australia and Auckland University in New Zealand.

Watch the videos from Hong Kong –

Please stop beating us!

Hong Kong police use violence on protesters, not on thugs

In Australia and New Zealand …

In Australia, a Chinese diplomat applauded patriotic behavior from mainland students in disrupting a peaceful protest at University of Queensland.  As reported, the attack was coordinated, quite possibly by the local CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association).  You can hear the beginning of the Chinese national anthem playing in the background of the Queensland attack.  Watch the video at twitter.

The New York Times reports– The Chinese nationalists disrupting pro-Hong Kong democracy rallies at the University of Queensland arrived 300 strong, with a speaker to blast China’s national anthem. They deferred to a leader in a pink shirt. And their tactics included violence.

Threats to Australian students via social media have continued, including death threats.  Similar violence took place last week at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Bill Bishop at Sinocism suggests that expulsion might be beneficial to PRC students who can’t abide exercise of free speech – In the case of PRC students (expulsion) could be quite beneficial, as there are pressures from within the PRC student community, and its CCP minders, to be aggressive in the face of any perceived slights, and if you are not then you run the risk of being seen as insufficiently loyal and patriotic.  

Western universities have though that mainland Chinese students will see freedom at work, and have their lives transformed.  For some that is true.  But now, some mainland Chinese are out to transform their hosts.  The Confucius Institutes were supposed to be the vanguard of Chinese soft power in the world.  Now, they are suspected – in at least some cases, legitimately – of being a conduit for United Front activities.

In 2016, Xi Jinping issued what now seem to be orders to Chinese students abroad to serve their country, and the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive calling for a “contact network” connecting “the motherland, embassies and consulates, overseas student groups, and the broad number of students abroad” and ensuring that they will “always follow the Party.”

In Canada and the US …

You remember the death threats earlier this year to the Tibetan-Canadian student elected as student union president at the University of Toronto University of Toronto.   She now has a safety plan with the university police, letting them know where she is, hour by hour.  You remember the uproar  at McMaster University in Canada when a Uighur activist was scheduled to speak.  Mainland Chinese students sought advice from the Chinese consulate about how to proceed in their protests.  You remember the large protests in 2017 at the University of California at San Diego. Mainland students reportedly sought advice from the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles before condemning the university for naming as commencement speaker the Dalai Lama.  There are many such stories, including demands from the Chinese government that Uighur students return to China immediately, using their parents as potential hostages.

Hong Kong as the new model of Chinese power …

The “peaceful rise” touted by Deng Xiaoping, and the soft power projection from the Confucius Institutes worldwide is no more.  In Tibet, in Xinjiang, on the mainland in prisons where human rights lawyers and activists rot, in Canada, now in Hong Kong, and Australia, and New Zealand, the gloves have come off on soft power.  In Hong Kong, the protests have not yet turned deadly.  But Christy Leung, Hong Kong student at Queensland, made the point –

“People in Hong Kong are risking their lives. The threats we faced last week are nothing compared to them. We have to stand up. With them.”  

For Hong Kongers, it is more than a movie.  They are risking their lives.  They all know about June 4, even if mainland students do not.  

For western students, and teachers, and universities generally, lives are not likely at risk.  But the very concept of the university – let us say, seeking truth from facts, and speaking truth to power- is at risk.  The soft power glove is revealing the clenched fist beneath.

What Chinese are Talking About (3) – Love Mr. Xi, Love Mr. Trump

Update at August 13 – 

I wrote a bit about Epoch Times in the post below, mostly about Chinese getting their news from China news sources like public wechat.  Epoch Times is most decidedly anti-CCP, and published by organizations related to Falun Gong, the same people who bring you Shen Yun, the extraordinary dance and performance troup that has been wow-ing Americans for a decade.

In the last two weeks, Epoch Times has been bombarding YouTube with two minute (two minute!) video advertising in advance of a video one is watching.  The ads offer subscriptions to the newspaper, promising to expose the lies of the mainstream media in vilifying Donald Trump.  Here is a screen shot from one subscription ad.  “Honest news” is what they tout.

Donald Trump reads it every day.  ‘Nuff said.  Chinese can get their “honest news” from Beijing or Falun Gong.  Truly, only no news here is good news.

What Chinese are Talking About (3) – Love Mr. Xi, Love Mr. Trump

We know that mainlanders, particularly those in CCP, have a fondness for Mr. Trump.  There are several reasons – Chinese historically have been willing to defer to strong leaders, and Trump projects arrogance, if not wisdom.  It was clear before the 2016 election that if Trump won, Mr. Putin would win and Mr. Xi would also win.  Events bear this out.  There is no adversary so easy to fool as one convinced of his own superiority, particularly one with such poor justification.  Flattery and artifice will get you … everywhere.  For Chinese interested in foreign policy, all they need do is sit back and wait.  Trump’s unforced errors – TPP, belittling allies, cozying up to dictators, removing US from environmental treaties, threatening friends and foes alike – make Chinese arrogance and Mr. Xi’s own unforced errors look positively innocuous.  What’s not to love about someone willing to play the fool for you?

There is reason to think that Chinese in the US, whether citizens, long-time residents or new green card recipients, might hold more nuanced views about Mr. Trump.  And, in fact, they do.

But often not in the direction you might think.  Case in point – the Chinese American news, sent around the US on wechat.

You know wechat is the ubiquitous and multifaceted phone app from Tencent that has become indispensable to Chinese lives.  For communication purposes, there are two broad categories – private wechat, which functions like a group email, and public wechat, in which wechat operates as a news disseminator.

The news disseminator is well established in the US.  There is Chicago American Chinese news, New York American Chinese news, and probably a dozen or twenty more channels.  The channels have some local news, and share word for word some national stories.

All the channels function only in Chinese.  Anyone can read the news, if they can read Chinese.  For many Chinese in America, these channels function as a principal news source.  Every Chinese student who is harmed in America gets featured, along with positive stories about inventions and developments in China. The wechat channels function as modern versions of the Polish or German language newspapers our parents or grandparents read. 

But in our new era, the politics are different.  Rather than a pro-worker or socialist bent, the wechat channels exhibit a distinct pro-Trump, pro-Republican bias. 

Some bias among Chinese is understandable – they tend to be opposed to attempts to change university admissions standards, which tends to undercut hard-working and high-achieving Asians.  And they tend to be suspicious of Democratic relaxation of immigrant controls, when so many Chinese sacrificed so much to get here themselves.

One should remember that the wechat stories for consumption in America are mostly unsourced, identical across wechat platforms nationally in the US, and written in China or by Chinese working directly for wechat. Five or six national stories are reported each day, in addition to local news.

The wechat groups can be a useful and positive organizing technique.  Last year, a Chinese immigrant used WeChat to win a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.  Lily Qi raised nearly $150,000 for her candidacy, and did so by contacting non-registered voters directly, with an appeal to change their non-voting behavior.

On the other hand, Australians are worried about fake news stories planted in the wechat groups to steer political views.  The Sydney Morning Herald documents fake news and doctored stories on local wechat groups, and comments  – With less than two weeks until the May 18 election, Chinese social media has become an increasingly powerful tool for all political parties, especially in seats with large numbers of Chinese-Australian voters…

Given its dependence on Chinese trade, and its traditional alliance with the other “five eyes” nations (US, Canada, Britain, New Zealand) Australia has become a prime target for Propaganda Ministry or United Front organizations to influence public opinion. 

Bill Bishop comments at Sinocism – any government should be very concerned over the growing role of Wechat as the primary communications and media consumption tool of the Diaspora. It is after all still controllable and censorable from Beijing.

Wechat is not the only social media platform operating in Chinese, of course.  The political newsletter Popular Information reports on wildly pro-Trump stories in Epoch Times, a media conglomerate with strong ties to Falun Gong, the secretive organization banned in China. A publication with Falun Gong ties is going to be virulently anti-CCP, but they do love Trump.

Epoch Times publishes in Chinese and in English, as well as in other languages. Popular Information reports that Epoch Times “was one of the top three political spenders on Facebook in the last week in April,” outspending every political candidate in the country except Biden and Trump, according to third party research. The money was spent “to promote stories that Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has championed.”  Epoch Times spent almost as much on Facebook ads ($148,937) as did the Trump campaign ($149,610) in early May.  Epoch Times is now featuring hysterical Youtube advertising, debunking the Mueller investigation and directly promoting Trump. 

From the Popular Information story.  Epoch Times is number 4 –

 Also from the Popular Information story, about Epoch Times reporting on the FBI spying on Trump –

if you could read English only moderately well, wouldn’t you migrate to the news in your own native language?  Makes sense to me.  And makes sense to the wechat writers in Beijing, and to the Chinese and English language writers at Epoch Times.  Truly, for Chinese readers in America, no news is good news. 

Chinese Officials Threaten Mainland Parents of Student Attending Australian Protest

It is important to remember what we are dealing with.  Let’s review –

From the Sydney Morning Herald, August 7 – Chinese authorities approached the family of an international student who participated in high-profile protests at an Australian university and warned his parents of the potential consequences of political dissent.

It has been clear for years that the Chinese government monitors words and actions of mainland students overseas.  There are various means.  Most prominent is the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) which operates as a student-run organization on most university campuses throughout the world.  It is now common for students to record other Chinese students expressing negative feelings toward the mainland government or CCP.  Chinese government officials in the foreign country support such efforts.

A mainland student who attended one of the pro-Hong Kong protest rallies at the University of Queensland in Australia later received a call from his mother.  From the Herald –

But within days of the rally the student received a call from his mother in China to say the family had been approached by “a guest”.  His mother told him the authorities had issued a warning about engaging in “anti-China rhetoric” in Brisbane and warned him not to “join any events where people are gathered together”.  “As long as you do that, we can make sure you’re safe and we’re safe,” his mother told him.  

Chinese officials in Australia praised actions by mainland students to disrupt the protests –

China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, subsequently issued a statement praising “the spontaneous patriotic behaviour of Chinese students” at the university in response to “people with ulterior motives [who] conducted anti-Chinese separatist activities”.

Government threats to families in China, or threats to Chinese abroad, are a despicable practice.  But it has become standard operating practice in the last decade. 

Put this down alongside threats to Yang Shuping the 2017 University of Maryland valedictorian, who praised fresh air and freedom in the US compared with her experiences in Yunnan.  The  former president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) at the University of Maryland, told the CCP sponsored Global Times  – “Insulting the motherland to grab attention is intolerable. The university’s support to such critical speech is not only ill-considered, but also raises suspicion about other motives.”  The CSSA called on students from China to make videos promoting their hometowns with the scripted words “I have different views from Shuping Yang. I am proud of China.”  Yang received hundreds of negative or threatening social media posts. 

Or the action by the Chinese Education Ministry in 2010 to remove the University of Calgary from its list of approved universities, after Calgary awarded an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama.  That action threatened the ability of Chinese students at Calgary to have recognition of their degree in China.

And the experience of Chemi Lhamo, who by the nature of being Tibetan, and then earlier this year elected as student president at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, was so threatened by Chinese vitriol, including death threats, that she needed university support;

And threats to Rukiye Turdush, Uighur activist, whose speech earlier this year at McMaster University in Ontario was disrupted in what some claim was activity promoted by the Chinese government.  University students clearly sought Chinese consulate advice on how to proceed with disruption.  Chinese officials in Canada applauded the threats from mainland Chinese students against Turdush;  

And Uighur university students throughout the world asked by the Chinese government to return home immediately, under hostage and harm threats to their parents and relatives in Xinjiang;

And physical destruction of the Lennon Wall at the University of Queensland on August 6.  From the Guardian – The University of Queensland has promised to take action after a pro-Hong Kong Lennon wall on its campus was torn down on Monday night by four masked men. The colourful protest wall – similar to those around Hong Kong and the rest of the world – had attracted hundreds of notes calling for democracy and solidarity with Hong Kong, and opposing the totalitarianism of the Chinese government. Two weeks ago pro-Beijing government protesters clashed violently with Hong Kong international students on the university’s Brisbane campus, punching and shoving.

Four masked men were seen destroying the wall.  Students have since put it up again. 

And, of course, the old standby –

Chinese rights lawyer Chen Jiangang-flees to US to escape persecution

In terms of (legal) human traffic, China still exports far more to the US than we export to China.  No sign of that changing anytime soon.  I reported on that at Let’s remember what we are dealing with.  

Give Me Liberty! in Hangzhou

There is a saying – with guanxi, you can do anything.  Without guanxi, you can do nothing.  Sometimes, with guanxi, you can get Liberty! in China.  A story about ordering textbooks in China.

In 2009, I began teaching fulltime at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) in Hangzhou. I had a joint appointment with the business school and the engineering school.  For the business students, I was to teach micro and macro economics; for the engineers, courses in urban and environmental planning.  My students were a mix of Chinese and foreign students, mostly from Africa, a few from the middle east and Indonesia.

This was the era when Chinese schools were looking to form cooperative relationships with school in the US, England, Germany. In the fall of 2010, the president of San Francisco State University came to ZUST and delivered a promotional talk – in Chinese – to my engineering students.   The proposal that had been worked out was a 2+2 deal – two successful years of study at ZUST could lead to two, possibly three, years at SFSU and a joint bachelor’s degree in engineering.

This was an excellent opportunity for ZUST students, since a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in China was not worth much outside of China.  With the possible exception of one program at Tsinghua, no Chinese engineering bachelor’s degree programs were internationally accredited.  This meant that a graduate could not apply to take the professional engineering exam in most of the world without substantial additional study or years of practice.  There was no guarantee that the SFSU joint program would receive accreditation, but there was certainly a chance.  Basic courses in math and science would be taught in China. The more substantive courses would be in the US.  This was not unlike a junior college transfer program into a major American university.

SFSU wanted a couple of core courses taught at ZUST – an American history course and an American politics course. My background is in civil engineering, urban planning and policy, economics and organization.  But I spoke English and looked American, so I was tabbed at the instructor. As they say, what could possibly go wrong?

No other teacher at ZUST had ever taken, much less taught, American history.  It might be fair to say that this was the first time such a course had ever been taught in Zhejiang Province.  It was a historical first.

These were still heady days of openness in the second half of the Hu Jintao administration.  I was at ZUST because I had just finished six years of teaching midlevel CCP officials in a graduate program in public administration at IIT in Chicago.  I wanted to see what teaching in China would be like, so I went.  The director of the international program at ZUST was a student of mine in Chicago.  She was smart, open, and interested in making deals with foreign schools and foreign teachers.  It is fair to say that I was the face of the foreign program at ZUST at a time when such programs were much desired.

Textbook selection was going to be a challenge.  In the US, book ordering need not be more complicated than an instructor sending book details to the ordering department of the school, and a few days or weeks later the book shows up in the school bookstore.  Students buy the book, and the course is in business.

I knew that would not be the process at ZUST.  There was a book ordering department, but of course that was mostly for Chinese books.  There were a few American books used – most notably, the Greg Mankiw Fundamentals of Economics books, but those were published legally in China, so the Mankiw books had already been vetted for content.

The course was to be American history since 1865.  No other details provided to me.  There were many book from which to choose, and Eric Foner had written more than twenty of them.  His Give Me Liberty! is still the most used American history survey course text in the US.  For the instructor, the teacher’s edition provided powerpoints, which would save me dozens of hours of work (no one teaches in China without powerpoints). The book was also used at SFSU.  I chose the Foner book.

I emailed my book choice to my former IIT student, the head of the international program at ZUST, now my colleague.  If she had been drinking tea when she saw my email order, she probably would have done a spit-take.  Give Me What?

These were heady days of openness, but come on, there are limits.  Give Me History would have been ok. 

My former student was the head of the international program, but she was not the No. 1 – that was the Party leader, who was ultimately responsible for all my actions.  She could not speak much English, and could certainly not read the book, so vetting fell to my former student.

This is where the guanxi worked.  We were teacher and student in Chicago, and we had many chances to talk.  She saw me as at least reasonably trustworthy – I was not going to be running down China in the classroom.  Give Me Liberty! was the SFSU book.  The whole point of the course was to expose these Chinese students to American style courses and teaching so they had a chance to go to the US in their third year.

But still.  We had meetings.  My former student had to look up the book online, and read what she could from the W.W. Norton website. She had to convince herself that the book was ok, just an unfortunate title. I had to promise her that there were no passages suggesting that China or CCP were implicated in the bombing at Pearl Harbor or responsible for the Great Depression, and that destruction of CCP was not an integral part of American history since 1865.  She took me at my word.

There was a more serious vetting process on the ZUST side than I know.  My former student was putting herself on the line, and her Party leader, in ordering such a book.  She could not order the book herself – that had to be done by someone in the civil engineering department, and that woman was putting her reputation and that of her dean on the line as well.  I had more than half a dozen meetings with various of the parties.  I sent long emails, with text of my discussions with the WW Norton rep in the US.  I don’t know if there were provincial education bureau discussions before the book order could be placed, but I would not be surprised. Liberty was not a censored word, but it wasn’t on everyone’s lips, either. If something went south with the book or me or the course, the jobs of several people could be on the line. 

Then there was the money.  Students are supposed to pay for books. In the US, the book sold for about $46 at the time, about 300 yuan.   Three hundred yuan was the book allowance for one ZUST student for an entire semester. We could not order CD copies – those would have been illegal to ship and WW Norton would not send them anyway- as the rep told me, they didn’t have good IP protection in China.  We could not order used copies – Chinese only wanted new, and could only order from the publisher in any case. Illegal copying was still common in China, but the school did not want to engage in that itself, so ordering one copy was out.  A real world example – the Mankiw Fundamentals book was about 790 pages.  The book printed legally in China was sold for 79 yuan (about $12).  In the US, the book cost over $100.  But photocopying in China cost 0.1 yuan per page.  You do the math.   The school was going to have to buy the books, about 9000 yuan, and eat the cost.  That was a couple of months salary for some teachers.

I could have put together notes, and taught without a book.  But Chinese teachers are expected to use a book (presumably so it can be vetted, and so the school has some assurance that the teacher is at minimum reading something to the students).  For my course, a book was most certainly going to be necessary.

There were time constraints.  Shipping on a boat would take about six weeks to get to ZUST, and this was after whatever approvals and vetting were needed outside of ZUST.  WW Norton did have a relationship with one of the required Chinese book importing companies, so paper copies of the book could be sent to China. But time was getting short. We had been having the meetings and email discussions all through the spring, the school closes down in the summer, and I needed the books by about August 1.

I thought perhaps I could just order the books myself from W.W. Norton in the US – thirty or so copies, wrap them up, put them on a boat, they would arrive in six weeks or so.  But that wouldn’t work. The Chinese government still controlled book ordering.  Books could only be ordered through one of the designated import agents.  If my thirty books had just shown up at Shanghai port, they would have been seized and tossed.

I gave the school a deadline – I needed the books ordered by July 10.  My guanxi with my former student worked.  Give Me Liberty! was ordered by ZUST.  The books got delivered, and we used them – or I should say, the books were in the bookstore.  Only a few students purchased the book.

ZUST did not repeat the course.  Very few – perhaps none – of the Chinese students wanted to pay the American tuition to SFSU, and they did not respond well to an “American-style” course, with quizzes and exams and papers to write.  The students got a taste of liberty, taught American style, and judged it wanting.

I ordered other books from America for other courses.  None of those were the existential crisis of ordering Give Me Liberty! in English, for use with Chinese students, with such a provocative title.  When the course was over, the unsold books were delivered to me in my apartment.  Perhaps they are still there. Anyone interested, contact me.  I’m at liberty to make a deal.

浙江科技学院教材预订表

院、部、(盖章)   建筑工程学院                院教学主管(签名):           教研所所长(签名):        联系电话:           填表日期:  2011    6     日  

序号

课程名称

Course name

教材名称

Textbook name

主编姓名

author

出版社

Press name

版次

version

书号

ISBN

价格

price

使用对象

预订数(册)

Order volume

库存

合计

征订人

签名

使用

时间

备注

 

学生

student

教师

teacher

1

American

History Since 1865

Give Me Liberty!

Foner

WW Norton

2nd Edition Volume 2 Paper

ISBN 978-0-393-93256-0

$37.00

William D. Markle

20

2

     

2

     “

Norton Media Library

WW Norton

WW Norton

CD-Rom

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

3

      “

Instructors Manual and Test Bank

Valerie Adams

WW Norton

CD-Rom

  

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

4

       “

Studentt Study Guide

WW Norton

WW Norton

       pdf

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

注:一份送教务处教材中心,,一份系部留存.                                                           

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. 

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.

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.