And five percent of us are liars ...

??? Thought that Shanghai also had a FCCC lodge?

The opinion piece copied below is an interesting and informative overview of
the problems in China. It conveys the impression (though it doesn't explicitly
state it) that China is descending into a fascist-form of anarchy and could
soon (a few years) suffer a major economic collapse, if it doesn't drag the
rest of the world into something worse.

China is a troubling question to me. Are we seeing the rise of the next Nazi
Germany, but one with enormously greater danger attached to it because of
greater population, modern economic power, and potentially great military
power? Greater yet, because Republicans and the Democrats alike seem bent on
reducing the U.S. to second-rate status?

Or will the Chinese people, emerging from decades of communist rule, be
unwilling to give up new freedoms and prosperity and resist imperialistic
ambitions of their government?

I honestly don't know for sure. I've talked to a Chinese ex-patriot at work
about this (I think his father was somehow in the Party apparatus, cause he was
protected as a child during Mao's cultural revolution), and also an
ex-Taiwanese (also at work), who both have given me fascinating perspectives I
haven't found in any Western sources. Both are surprisingly (to me) well read
and informed of the geopolitics even if they don't have the big philosophic
perspective. I've also had third-hand knowledge from others who know people
from China, or have visited China. Mixed, uncertain opinions from all with an
undercurrent of worry.

I'm tempted to say the opinion piece below tells a story with an inexorable
logic that flows along with that undercurrent, and frightens me.

Is China a major threat to the world? I don't feel qualified enough to pass
that judgment -- I'm simply not knowledgable enough. From an Objectivist
perspective, I haven't identified the philosophic fundamentals well enough --
but anyone who's read Atlas Shrugged can see frightening, though imperfect
parallels. Unlike the world of John Galt, which explodes in anarchy because
the motor of economic power stops when the men of ability go on strike, China
sounds like a country about to explode because of a motor running out of
control and far into the red (forgive the pun, and it has three entendres
here), fueled by the ambitions of a quasi-fascist communist government that is
pumping in an explosive mixture of influence peddlng, stock market
manipulation, currency inflation, intellectual property theft and a host of
other ills too numerous to list at this time of night.

I disagree with one implied contention of the op-ed. The problem is not
insufficient regulation of Chinese businesses. I think the Chinese government,
while nominally communist (much as the Nazis were nominally Socialist) has
simply morphed into a fascist super-state (like the Nazis did, as explained so
well in Peikoff's book, "Ominous Parallels"). The power of the government has
extended itself to rampant corruption by pull-peddlers of the kind Cuffy Meigs
and Orren Boyle and Jim Taggart would feel right at home with. That's the
primary cause of the trumpeted problems of poisoned food and defective products
and the cover-ups and murders surrounding them. In the long run, and in the
big picture, these are symptoms of a greater disease, but in the short run,
just a red herring (last pun); companies that want to do business with China
will simply strengthen quality control standards or risk fatal litigation.

The pro and con of what's unwrapping in China seems almost too dynamic to
analyze and reduce to a clear principle, but my inclination is to reduce the
problem to its simplest essentials: The desire for a people to be free and
prosperous is not a fundamental; the ideas they hold are. The people in China
do not yet hold the right ideas. They want to be free, but they don't know
why. This makes them terribly vulnerable to the power-lusters of any statist
government.

Likewise, the government of China, however much it has loosened the reigns,
does not yet have the right ideas. It doesn't know its proper function. The
Chinese people may have been granted greater freedom of action and freedom to
prosper, and superficially some official respect for property rights has
appeared, but any "rights" their government seems to have granted seem to be
only for the purpose of buttering up the milch cow.

The operative word is "granted". A cow that has a "granted" right to exist,
rather than an actual right to exist, could just as easily be slaughtered as it
could be milked.

Under a genuinely free, non-threatening government, rights are not "granted",
they are inalienable. In the absence of that idea -- inalienability of
natural rights -- a government that appears to have an overweening desire for
power concerns me.

More succinctly, my simple inclination is to say: in principle a fascist
government with a philosophically unschooled populace (at least, unschooled in
a philosophy of reason and rights) has to be a threat. We shall see.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2007/s7_27.asp
Friday, July 27, 2007
Sol Sanders, "China in crisis: Export disaster, eco-mess threaten Party's
economic gameplan"

Perhaps it tells us something about contemporary America that food and
medicine adulteration in products the Chinese use themselves and increasing
sell the world should come to light because American pets suffered. It was no
secret that the nominally Communist Chinese regime had for decades looked the
other way when scandals involving Party members or government officials came to
light concerning lapses in health and safety standards.

But the current continuous foreign – and even domestic — media reporting
of poisoned products for pet food, adulterated tooth paste, deadly cough syrup,
fish products containing cryogenics, defective pharmaceuticals, dumplings which
may or may not have been stuffed with cardboard, etc., etc., are all part of a
pattern of the virtually complete failure of Chinese regulatory agencies.

It is not as new story. When the 72-year-old Dr. Jiang Yanyong in 2003 exposed
the outbreak of China's SARS, a deadly respiratory virus which could have
turned into an international pandemic, he and his wife were arrested and the
government attempted to continue to cover up the whole outbreak. –

A half million people suffered from the negligence of the responsible
authorities and the greed of the underground "blood heads" organizing the sale
of blood for plasma in the villages in eastern and southern Henan Province.
This led directly to the eruption and spread of AIDS to whole villages. Again
the authorities tried to hush it up.

Although the death toll in Chinese coal mines was officially put 661 in the
first three months of this year, less than the official figures last year, the
official State Administration for Coal Mine Safety Supervision reported a
succession of “cover ups” of fatal accidents in March. China, with vast
reserves and a desperate need for energy, accounts for around one-third of the
world's coal output, but accounts for four-fifths of industry deaths — 50
times higher than in the United States, the world's second largest producer,
but also even ten times higher per ton of coal than in India where accidents
are also far too prevalent.

These are only a few examples of a failure of a rapidly growing economy to
cope with the demands for health and safety required of any modernizing
society. True, China’s rapid growth rates make it difficult to institute new
safety and health requirements. An impoverished society is trying to catch up
and environmental concerns, as one Chinese spokesman has said bluntly recently,
will have to take lower priority to economic development.

But just as environmental concerns now threaten the water supply for some of
China’s largest cities and industrial water resources may curtail that very
development, the bad publicity for China’s exports has taken on economic
consequences. The China brand is increasingly becoming suspect in foreign
markets.

Toward the end of July, faced with potential boycotts of Chinese products
abroad and a massive array of reports of inferior products, the government has
set up a team of top officials to steer efforts at repairing the stained
reputation of the country's food and products at home and abroad. The
government gave no details of how the new agency would operate – especially
important given the already existing proliferation of half a dozen regulatory
agencies with conflicting jurisdictions.

The execution of the head of China’s food and drug regulatory agency for
taking bribes to validate pharmaceuticals and the sentencing of a second
official of the agency also to death was intended to tell the world Beijing
means business. It also dramatized the acceptance by Beijing authorities that
the problem has now become a critical politico-economic issue, perhaps at home,
but certainly abroad..

The reason is clear: China’s economic development program is overwhelmingly
dependent on its export-led product manufacturing and sale of intermediates and
components overseas. The avalanche of reports of faulty manufacturing and
adulteration threatens that whole economic program. A government media report
in July claimed that 19.1 per cent of goods for domestic consumption checked in
the first half of this year failed quality standards. Among smaller
manufacturers, the failure rate was 27.1 percent. The statistics are probably
not less bogus than other statistics that take on imaginative and creative
aspects in the China environment.

But having virtually abandoned any ideological or national goals except
economic growth – however unequal and limited to elite in the major port
cities – the very raison d’etre of the regime is now jeopardized by this
sudden explosion of revelations about the seriousness of the problem of
inadequate standards and Party greed gone berserk.

Nor is it clear that despite Herculean efforts to remake Beijing, it would be
able to provide a healthy environment for next year’s Olympic games. The
regime has stake a great deal on the Games as an international accolade which
crowns “a rising China’s” ambitions and progress. The Chinese capital
suffers a perennial water shortage – the government has a massive canal
underway to bring water from the south to the north across much of China and
with many barriers. Its frequent dust storms — the loess blowing in from the
increasing march of desertification now extending only a few miles west of the
capital — leads to an almost permanent haze now worsened by the exhaust of a
growing automobile traffic and unrestricted belching of fumes and particles
from new industry..

It is far from certain, then, that the central government will be able to
bring the whole chaotic mess under control because of the fissures opening in a
one-party regime which is now functioning on pure opportunism.

Several factors lead to this speculation:

The Chinese Communist Party leaders appear to have lost control over local
cadre, particularly in the rural areas. With no substantial investment in
agriculture there are falling living standards in the countryside by all
estimates of international organizations – and, indeed, by the Chinese
economists themselves where they have been allowed to publish. Legitimate tax
collection has given way to extortion by the local Party cadre. They have
become the principal entrepreneurs as well in most instances since they have
the only access to capital and the use of government fiat for appropriation of
land and other resources. Increasingly they thumb their nose at the central
government which is, nevertheless, given the nature of the state dependent on
them for cohesion and order. Again, a situation pertains as the old saying
about Chinese imperial governments, “The emperor’s writ stops at the
village gate”.

In the major provinces and the larger cities, Party officials also blackmail
the government with the proposition – which has validity – that unless they
are given a free hand to pursue development, the government’s principal
virtually only goal of rapid economic development will not be met. With the
residue of a formerly failed centrally planned economy including giant moribund
state enterprises, the country is dependent on these new relatively progressive
enterprises for economic progress. Therefore, in instance after instance
reported in the official media, when the government has intervened to impose
higher standards of environmental controls or to curtail questionable
infrastructure projects or to enforce intellectual property rights for foreign
owners, Beijing has had to back down in the face of local Party “economic
warlords”.

Mining is the perfect case study of central-government relations with local
government in China," says Arthur Kroeber, editor of the China Economic
Quarterly. "The clash is between the central government's desires and the local
government's pressing economic needs, and in 99 cases out of 100, local
government wins out."

So Beijing resorts to the kind of band-aid announcements of new regulatory
devices that would make it appear that it takes the problems seriously and is
solving it: it embargoes cargoes of food and raw materials from the U.S.,
damning them as inferior merchandise, in a tit-for-tat operation and to prove
the problem is universal and no better in the West and Japan than in China. It
issues public relations statement after statement that the whole problem is
being addressed. But these moves are only propaganda which does not address
fundamental problems.

It is not racist [nor “culturally intolerant” or any of those other PC
charges] to point out that cleanliness has never had a very high priority in
China’s incredibly rich and varied cultural history and inheritance. The
Chinese Communists and their intellectual fellow travelers who came to power in
1949 recognized – as had earlier reformers –that the issue was one that had
to be addressed if traditional Chinese custom was to be overcome. And so you
had the incredible things such as the “no flies in China” campaign, or at
least what was sold to starry-eyed foreign visitors as a new beginning for
Chinese sanitary and health standards. But like so many of the projects of the
Maoist era – not excluding the so-called “barefoot doctors” in rural
areas – the reports of success were largely the imagination of the visitors
and government propaganda than they concrete reforms. [The continued insistence
that a health care infrastructure and other social emoluments under the Maoist
regime had been allowed to lapse are observations of those who did not know the
era and depend on official propaganda of that time.]

With a Party Congress looming on the horizon, President Hu Jintao and his
fellow apparatchik Prime Minister When Jiabao are now exerting all their
efforts to maintain their always precarious hold on power. The sacking of the
Shanghai Party chairman in late July was one more evidence of the backroom
games being played out among leaders in a Party which once had a grip on the
country through terror and charismatic leadership but now is dissolving into
irrelevance on every major issue, not excluding environmental concerns.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25
years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News &
World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World
Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
----- End forwarded message -----

nanheyangrouchuan

Let's all hold our breath for the moment the Chinese government cares what a bunch of foreign journos think.

And what's all this 'us'? Since when did you guys qualify as 'journalists'?! Sharing your thoughts on a blog about a cool place to get a sandwich does not make you a journalist, people!

i think any semi-intelligent person reading this story would assume the "us" in the headline was referring to the journalists who participated in the survey.

yeah, they would. the only part of the story in which percentages are discussed deals with the journalists who were surveyed. and the number quoted in the story was 95 percent, thus the 5 percent reference in the headline obviously corresponds with that. so, there is no reason for you to make the illogical jump to "5 percent of shanghaiist writers". hope there is enough clarity there for you. but you don't come here for clarity anyway, do you? (seeing how no real journalists have anything to do with the site).

#10

The reporters have to rely on their chinese cameramen/translators as defacto reporters because the foreign reporters (with foreign faces) can't exactly slide in as locals to cover stories that might embarrass local or national officials. Chinese staff can slide in as students or whatever and casually ask questions.

nanheyangrouchuan