Author: Justin Li, ICE
On the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, Premier Wen Jiabao’s much publicised speech on the significance of political reform in China sparked a wave of debate across China. ‘We must not only encourage institutional reform in economic life but also institutional reform in political life. Without the safeguard of political reform,’ he said, ‘the fruits of economic reform would be lost and the goal of modernisation would not materialise.’
Wen’s audacious championing of the imperative of political reform didn’t feature prominently on the official Xinhua news or main party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily. Read more…
Author: Jonathan Fox
July 7 marked 90 days since Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in Thailand. Even though Thai security forces quelled the Red Shirt protests in late May, the Abhisit administration recently extended the emergency decree over nearly a third of the kingdom for an additional three months. While much has been said about the political, economic and social impacts of the kingdom’s recent unrest, little attention has been given to the dangerous erosion of freedom of expression in Thailand.
The recent cycle of deadly violence began on March 12, when tens of thousands of Red Shirt protesters rallied against the Abhisit government. Read more…
Author: Nick Nostitz
In 25 October 2009 I went to northeast Thailand, this time to the village of Nong Wua So, about 40 kilometres outside the city of Udon Thani, to observe a red shirt rally: village-style. When I arrived in the early afternoon the action had not yet begun. Soon after, many people began arriving from surrounding villages. Around the rim of the rally area were food stalls, and several large trampolines where children jumped around for a few baht each. Kwanchai Paipanna, the charismatic leader of the Udon Lovers, a local red shirt group, and organiser of the rally, was already there, sitting in a tent close to the stage. He talked with red shirts and police officers.
A high-ranking officer asked Kwanchai to accompany him to visit the abbot at a famous local temple. Read more…
Author: Jonathan Fox, independent researcher
Southeast Asian governments continuously seek to restrict basic human rights and political freedoms, and have utilised increasingly sophisticated technology to do so. Thai authorities have even called upon academics to lend their support to State censorship.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva recently met with a governmental advisory committee, headed by the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Kittipong Kittayarak, regarding the enforcement of the Kingdom’s lèse majesté laws. Read more…
Author: Edward Kus
China is obviously a nation grappling with the contradictions embodied by its desire for development and its recent (and more ancient) past. The recent school stabbings highlight some acute social issues in China, but reactions among my acquaintances demonstrate how China increasingly seems to be looking in on itself for answers rather than to the rest of the world.
Two historically important aspects of Chinese thought are finding new footing in contemporary Chinese society. The first concept is Sino-centralism and the second is known as the Sino-‘barbarian’ dichotomy. Read more…
Author: Tim Southphommasane, Monash University
It is a cliché, but one of the great rituals of growing up in a multicultural society is to sit alongside other children in school to compare lunches.
For much of my schooling I never got too much of a chance to make interesting comparisons. I never thought twice about tucking into the stir fried pork or chicken on rice that my mother or father would prepare for my lunch. After all, most of my classmates had something similar. Even at the school canteen, it was possible to order some fried rice—a choice that quickly became more popular than sausage rolls and meat pies. Read more…
Author: Long S. Le, University of Houston
Since the doi moi (‘renovation’) reforms, the Vietnamese Government surprisingly is able to confront the fact that corruption can have detrimental effect on many aspects of economic development, such as reducing GDP growth rates and greater income inequality.
In fact, the government recently had to respond to foreign aid donors’ concern over calculation return on investment, when Japan in December 2008 briefly suspended low-interests loans of about $1.1 billion annually to Vietnam, amid a corruption investigation. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
Ozawa Ichiro has escaped indictment by the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office again. Once again, his former secretaries were not quite so lucky, with three, including sitting Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, being indicted for political funds violations.
Michael Cucek rightly points to the gross misconduct of the PPO in its Ahab-like pursuit of Ozawa — and perhaps the more egregious campaign by the media to paint Ozawa as the conniving, monstrous puppet master of the Hatoyama government. Read more…
Author: Richard Rigby, ANU
Challenge is a word that carries a heavy burden of nuance: it can convey a sense of threat, it can be an inspiration, it poses questions – often difficult ones – and it can also be double-edged, in that the challenge frequently applies as much to the alleged challenger as it does to those on the receiving end. Where China is concerned, the word is appropriate in every sense; but an important part of the challenge is precisely to decide which aspect is of the greatest importance. Only having done this can we attempt to frame policies, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policymakers, which will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s — and tomorrow’s — China poses to us, and to itself.
If there is a single word that should be applied to China, whether speaking of its international impact or its domestic situation, it should be ‘complexity’. Read more…
Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU
The Hollywood blockbuster Avatar is breaking box-office records in China and cinemagoers have been treated to a visual feast from the Shangrila-like moon of Pandora. At the same time, the savagery depicted in the film about the demolition of the natives’ home has also resonated with the Chinese. A young literary commentator wrote that ‘For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine – it is the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.’
Much like the Na’vi people from Pandora, forcibly evicted Chinese residents have fought back literally, with bows and arrows and Molotov cocktails against camouflaged hired thugs from real estate developers. Read more…
Author: Geremie R. Barmé, ANU
As the contretemps involving Google’s conflicted presence in the People’s Republic of China unfolds, it is timely to recall one anniversary that passed by all but unnoticed in 2009: that of a covert Cold War-era clash between John Foster Dulles and Mao Zedong in 1959. This overlooked anniversary is worth recalling now, since it is of particular relevance to contextualising the remarks—and the Chinese response to those remarks—that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently made regarding Internet freedom and U.S. policy in Washington on 21 January 2010 (see here for full text of Clinton’s speech).
In the speech, Clinton reminds her audience of comments that President Barack Obama made on Internet freedom during the webcast section of his November ‘town hall meeting’ in Shanghai. Read more…
Author: Jerome A. Cohen and Yu-Jie Chen, NYU
The Chinese government’s continuing attacks on human rights lawyers rarely make foreign headlines these days. Monitoring, intimidating, disbarring and prosecuting activist lawyers have become routine in China. Even the tragic ‘disappearance’, while in police custody, of defence lawyer/political reformer Gao Zhishen, now feared to be dead, has hardly attracted attention. It is also unremarkable for even non-political Chinese defence lawyers to suffer sanctions. The recent conviction of Beijing lawyer Li Zhuang for allegedly counselling his client to lie and bribe witnesses would not have been noted abroad if the case had not involved Chongqing’s extraordinary campaign to suppress organised crime.
By contrast, the Taiwan government’s new interest in curbing vigorous defence lawyers does constitute ‘news’. Read more…
Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU
Early last year, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post reported that Beijing is allegedly amassing a war chest of 45 billion yuan to fight a battle over China’s image in the international arena. This has not yet been confirmed by any official sources in China, but the signals from Beijing are lending credence to this report.
Major state-owned media giants such as China Central Television (CCTV), the People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency are all expanding their services and international presence. The People’s Daily-owned Global Times launched its English edition in December last year. Read more…
Author: Amrita Malhi, ANU
Since Friday 8 January, arsonists and vandals have attacked ten churches around Malaysia. Four arson attempts took place on the same morning, following the conclusion of a two-year case before Malaysian courts, over whether non-Muslims can be prevented from using the term ‘Allah’ to describe God in the Malay language.
In 2007, the Home Ministry banned the term in the Catholic Herald newspaper, arguing it could confuse Muslims and cause offence, threatening national security. Read more…
Author: James Fallows
I have not yet been able to reach my friends in China to discuss the story of Google’s threatened withdrawal from China, so for now I am judging the Google response strictly by what the company has posted on its ‘Official Blog,’ here, and my observations from dealing with Google-China officials while overseas. Therefore this will epitomise the Web-age reaction to a breaking news story, in that it will be a first imperfect assessment, subject to revision as new facts come in.
This development is significant for Google, and while it is only marginally significant for developments inside China, it is potentially very significant for China’s relations with the rest of the world. Read more…
