World-China Forum

Thoroughly Modern Marx

2009-06-06T13:37:28-04:00

The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin. Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise...

China after Tiananmen

2009-06-04T23:13:10-04:00

Spring always brings new blossoms, but 20 years ago, spring brought to China an unprecedented flowering. In hundreds of cities, citizens took to the streets in peaceful protests to demand freedom, government accountability and an end to corruption -- and the government, once among the most repressive on Earth, stood by and let them. It was an intoxicating moment that didn't last. By the morning of June 4, the government had reversed course, sending the army to crush the long-running student demonstration in the capital's Tiananmen Square, leaving hundreds dead, and the Beijing spring was over. Since that day, China...

Europe, China and the US---three contrasting models; liberal democracy in need of renewal

2009-06-04T22:58:15-04:00

Someone should institute an annual 4 June review of the Chinese, European and American models. Why 4 June? Because on that day in 1989, the European and Chinese paths out of communism definitively diverged. I will never forget standing in a newspaper office in Warsaw, amid the exhilaration of Poland's first semi-free election since the imposition of communist rule, and feeling my stomach turn as I watched the pictures of dead or wounded protesters being carried out of Tiananmen Square. Twenty years on, we have two sharply contrasting, imperial-scale models, Chinese and European. Both are unprecedented, complex and evolving; both...

It is China that holds the key to North Korea

2009-06-04T22:37:49-04:00

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is taking advantage of Beijing’s desire for stability on the Korean peninsula by engaging in provocative actions that could permanently alter the north-east Asian security situation. Mr Kim’s moves are calculated – they are designed to help secure a dynastic succession and North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapons power. Fearful of a flood of refugees should Mr Kim’s regime implode, China has responded cautiously. Beijing apparently still believes that its national interests are best served by a weak North Korean regime that is dependent on China. The new nuclear and missile tests are...

China’s success outstrips democracy for now

2009-06-04T22:28:02-04:00

Those who imagined in 1989 that the suppression of students marked the death throes of authoritarianism have been bitterly disappointed. Today, the Communist party’s knife is sharper and the hemp less knotty: it rules largely through the consent of a population grateful for its management of a breakneck economy and its restoration of China’s long-lost prestige. If there were elections tomorrow – What a way to mark the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen! – the Communist party would probably win by a landslide. Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, argues that China’s deep-seated Confucianism is incompatible with western-style...

How is the Chinese leadership divided?

2009-06-04T22:16:55-04:00

Winberg Chai says: Cheng Li (China’s Team of Rivals) has oversimplified reality in his analysis of China’s future leadership by dividing it into two camps: the “populists” and the “elitists.” In fact, there are six equally important rival factions competing for the top two positions in the Chinese government. These six factions developed within the six separate and equal political institutions that exist under the overall guidance of the Chinese Communist Party. They are: the Central Committee, the Discipline Commission, the People’s Government, the People’s Congress, the Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission. All of them recruit and...

Climate Progress in China

2009-06-04T15:19:41-04:00

It is time to retire the tired cliché that the United States cannot move forward on meaningful domestic legislation to protect our planet from the ravages of climate change unless China commits to do the same. Though they are not there yet, China today is beginning the transition to a clean-energy economy through a wide range of actions. These efforts should be encouraged and expanded upon. The Center for American Progress argues that Congress must assess China’s efforts to pull its own weight on climate change—steps that will result in significant reductions in carbon emissions from the business-as-usual scenarios even...

North Korea and the Chinese Giant

2009-06-04T15:13:35-04:00

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions clearly have high stakes for China, and the question now is not whether China will actively seek to rein in the North’s behavior, but rather, how it will do so. China has demonstrated over the past few weeks its growing impatience with the North’s behavior and its readiness to take punitive measures against its communist ally. Reports from the United Nations indicate that China is receptive to U.S. calls for sanctions to punish the DPRK for its recent behavior. Beijing played a crucial role in bringing Pyongyang back to the negotiating table following the October 2006...

Cooperating With China in Latin America

2009-06-04T15:04:19-04:00

Alicia Barcena, the U. N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s executive secretary, made note of China’s growing investments in Latin America and the Caribbean during a recent press conference in Santiago, Chile, suggesting “[t]here are promising hopes for Chinese investment in the near future.” Indeed, China increasingly looks to the region as a primary source for raw materials to match its blistering pace of development. These growing ties between China and Latin America and the Caribbean raise a question for U.S. policymakers: How should the United States view China’s emerging presence in a region that was once...

The Uprising China Would Have Us Forget

2009-06-04T14:54:09-04:00

It's habitual to think of Zhao as China's almost-Gorbachev: the man who might have disestablished the Communist Party, and introduced political pluralism, if only the party hardliners hadn't got him first. Yet the painful sequence of events recorded in Zhao's testament suggests another, nicer comparison. For, as Zhao goes to enormous lengths to establish, what happened in Beijing in 1989 had no legal basis whatever. It was, in point of fact, an invasion of the capital by several hundred thousand troops of the Chinese army at the behest of a private group of individuals within the communist leadership, because of...