This week, the China-watching twitterverse was surprised to discover that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, was now tweeting. That the editor of the Global Times, an “angry government mouthpiece”  that supports China’s policy of Internet censorship, was accessing a site blocked in China raised a few eyebrows and provoked several people to ask what VPN (a Virtual Private Network) he was using to evade the controls. Somewhat defensively, Hu responded to a characterization of him by The Wall Street Journal’s ChinaRealTime blog as a “staunch defender of China’s need to censor” by tweeting that he supported the gradual lifting of controls and believed “speech freedom is inevitable in China.”

A very long discussion in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs Review, the journal of the Foreign Affairs University, provides some context for what Hu’s tweeting might be about. The article, entitled “Global Politics in the Web 2.0 Era,” is a discussion about how communication technologies are changing politics. The cases cited are the usual ones – the protests after the Iranian elections, the Arab Spring, SMS being used to organize protests against Philippine President Joseph Estrada, the Obama campaign’s use of Facebook and other social media – and political dynamics described are also now well known – web 2.0 empowers the individual to spread information, flattens hierarchies, and lowers the cost of mobilizing groups. Democratization and the growth of civil society are trends difficult to control, and as a result China must have a strategy for bringing about gradual change.

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The Atlantic correspondent Robert Kaplan is one of America’s most influential geo-political thinkers, if not the most influential.  He’s the author of numerous books and policy articles informed by his extensive travels to the most chaotic parts of the world, and even more extensive reading of philosophers and poets of the human condition. He sits on the Defense Policy Board , which advises the Pentagon, and has worked as a consultant to the U.S. military. 

In other words, what he thinks has geo-political implications. So what does Kaplan think of China?

It’s clear from his reporting that the U.S. military considers China the number one threat in the Pacific Ocean, which Kaplan calls “America’s private lake.” In his book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, Kaplan embeds on a destroyer, inside a nuclear submarine, and on a bomber, and what impresses him most is neither the technology nor the power of the military, but the passion and dedication of the soldiers, seaman, and pilots, and the experience and authority of the sergeants and corporals, who are the heart and soul of the U.S. military. While never made explicit, America’s fighting men and women are always learning, collaborating, and preparing themselves for their new enemy: China. 

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Chinese leaders have always identified international politics with struggle – the struggle for sovereignty, status and prosperity. In recent years, offering lucrative business opportunities to other countries and investing in scores of official dialogues allowed Beijing to claim a course of peaceful development. And many countries gave it the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while.

But China now faces growing resistance as even some Chinese begin to question how peaceful the country’s rise can really be. Either way, the Year of the Dragon looks set to be a strategic watershed for Chinese diplomacy.

Centrality invariably means trouble in geopolitics, and certainly for China. I remember strolling underneath the weeping willows of Beijing’s Ritan Park with a retired ambassador who neatly summed up the problem China faces: “If we do well, our neighbors see that as a threat. If we are in trouble, that is perceived as a threat as well. We are a challenge just by being here.”

In the run-up to this autumn’s leadership transition in China, the guessing game is in full swing. Who will be the new leaders? What are their policy priorities? What can we expect?

Li Keqiang is poised to become China’s number 2, taking over Premier Wen Jiabao’s spot. But we are relatively in the dark about what we might expect from Li when he takes over for Wen for two reasons: 1) his rise to prominence (at least among Western observers) is relatively recent, and 2) rising leaders in China don’t usually succeed by making their political beliefs loudly known (two exceptions may prove to be Wang Yang and Bo Xilai, depending on if they are promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee).

As Li, currently executive vice premier, prepares to take office, he has been promoting a number of social welfare issues. According to leadership expert Cheng Li, in this recent article in the Washington Quarterly, Li has shown interest in “affordable housing, food safety, public health care, climate change, and clean and renewable energy.”

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Sina Weibo microblog, China’s equivalent of Twitter, has seen its reputation take a hit with news that a number of leading academics and public intellectuals have declared that they no longer use the site because they believe new registration rules are too strict and that it is stifling freedom of expression.

Sina is one of China’s leading websites, and with more than 250 million registered users it is not only one of China’s largest online forums, but one of the most popular sites in the world.

Earlier this month, Prof. Zhang Ming, a well-known scholar of modern history at Renmin University (also known as the People’s University of China) announced on his Sina account that he was leaving the microblog.

From sometime this year, Taiwanese citizens as “natural persons or families” will be able to register certain types of small businesses in a number of Chinese cities and provinces as “individual industrial and commercial households,” China's Taiwan Affairs Office, the organ responsible for Taiwan-related policies, recently announced. As the move is most likely meant as a pilot project that will eventually be extended – to many Taiwanese facing negative growth in real wages and relatively high unemployment at home – it's an offer that could sooner rather than later become attractive enough to be considered.

Estimates on the number of taishang, as Taiwanese living on the other side of the Taiwan Strait are called, already range from 1 to 3 million. Official Taiwanese government statistics on them don't exist, but what political scientists agree on is that the taishang tend to favor the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), which envisions eventual unification, over the opposition anti-unification Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), mainly because the KMT's Beijing-friendly policy has been making their lives a lot easier. One major reason for the recent re-election of the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou, commentators say, was the hundreds of thousands taishang who returned to the island in a timely manner to cast their votes. The calculation is simple: the more Taiwanese that are living in China, the better for Beijing's quest to achieve unification.

Kong Qingdong has gone viral. The Peking University professor of literature and descendant of Confucius has become an overnight celebrity with his televised rant against Hong Kong. In an interview on CCTV, Kong rails against non-Mandarin speaking Hong Kongers, denounces their rule of law system, and calls them “running dogs,” a Maoist-era epithet that typified the class warfare of the 1950s and 60s. What induced this attack was a momentary interchange on a Hong Kong subway between a Hong Kong resident and a mainland woman, in which the Hong Konger told the woman that her child should not be eating on the subway.

While these two events may pass quickly into the Internet ether, what they signify will not – namely how will Hong Kong, China, and even Taiwan come to terms? By all reports, Hong Kong is being flooded by mainland tourists – a good thing if you want to keep your economy buoyant in these difficult times, not such a good thing if these “tourists” are overwhelming your public transportation, schools, hospitals, and more because those things don’t work as well where they come from. So resentment, for obvious reasons, is rising. At the same time, many in Hong Kong are concerned about their freedoms. Despite “one country, two systems,” the right to vote, freedom of expression, and the rule of law all seem perpetually at risk as a result of Beijing’s own political insecurities.

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After an exceedingly close fought election, Taiwan’s incumbent president Ma Ying-jeou this month defeated his opponent to secure a second term in office. Besides the recurring theme of relations with China, the election was characterized by socio-economic issues and the re-emergence of the traditionally contentious nuclear energy issue. Not only was the outcome a vote in favor of cross-strait stability and economic prosperity, but it also partially decided the future of the island’s energy infrastructure.

For decades, activist-, local- and religious groups have supported the removal of nuclear power – generated by six reactors – from Taiwan’s energy mix. However, last year’s Fukushima crisis in Japan catapulted the negative consequences of atomic energy into the pre-election spotlight. As polls were so closely contested, both the environmentally-conscious opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP), and the ruling pro-business Kuomintang  (KMT), were eager to jump onto the anti-nuclear bandwagon in response to rising public opposition. Many analysts had predicted the election would be won on the margins and indeed all parties were keen in keeping activist issues at the forefront. DDP candidate Tsai Ing-wen was the first to champion anti-nuclear policies, reviving her party’s commitment to a “nuclear-free homeland” by 2025. As the campaign unfolded, both the DPP and the KMT pledged to do away with nuclear energy at some point in the future, initially by separately proposing to scrap advanced plans to extend the operational life of the Chinshan, Kuosheng and Maanshan nuclear plants. Moreover Tsai promised not to take the fourth Longmen power plant into operation if elected.

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In their article “How the rise of the megacity is changing the way we live,” the Guardian correspondents Paul Webster and Jason Burke profile Chengdu, a once lush and lethargic city of 500,000 back in 1950 that today is now a bustling and bursting metropolis of 14 million.  Chengdu is just one of many cities found throughout the developing word that are acquiring “mega-city” status.

The Guardian reporters mention the building of two monuments aimed at shining the global spotlight on Chengdu, a city most famous for its teahouses where the young and the old laugh the day away playing cards: 

“The New Century Global Centre is a leisure complex that will house two 1,000-room five-star hotels, an ice rink, a luxury Imax cinema, vast shopping malls and a 20,000-capacity indoor swimming pool with 400 meters of “coastline” and a fake beach the size of 10 football pitches complete with its own seaside village. Alongside will be another massive and futuristic structure, a contemporary arts centerdesigned by the award-winning Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid.”

China’s annual session of the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference will both be held in March. But, as is usual, there will be general meetings held in various Chinese provinces before more than 2,000 officials gather in Beijing.

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