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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

The most contentious issue today in China, as has been true for the past decade, is land appropriation.  What we just witnessed in Wukan, with peasants organizing to defend their land and livelihood, has occurred frequently over the past decade, and will continue unabated, but with little effect, in the next. 

Wukan was powerful because it provided a neat “Good Earth” narrative to understand the otherwise messy reality of China’s land grab.  Already, we are using Wukan as a frame of reference to understand struggles over land:  Here’s the Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between Wukan and a new struggle:

“Guangdong party chief Wang Yang may have won praise for his light-handed approach in dealing with Wukan, but has he actually opened the floodgates for a wave of land grab protests? Yesterday, 1,000 villagers rallied at the Guangzhou city government headquarters as the provincial people's congress met elsewhere in the city for the closing ceremony of its annual session.”    

Read more...

Chinese state media bid 2011 adieu with a steady drumbeat for name registration on Weibo, the most popular micro-blogging site. Countering false and harmful speech was put forward as a justification. Are Chinese netizens buying it, and what does such a policy mean for the growth of new media?

Netizens already appear hesitant to let their identities accompany their every post. Weibo’s stock price has dipped, possibly reflecting market trepidation over any restrictions. Beijing has responded by highlighting the glamor of joining the system, with newspapers publishing large photos of carefree celebrities at the front of the supposedly hip new name-registration wave. Editorial boards, meanwhile, have made it a daily priority, indicating the government knows it has a challenge before it.  

Without a knock-down case of social disarray caused by rumors, Beijing has been forced to play up the rather nebulous dangers of anonymous micro-blogging. Even this Global Times editorial opposing the real-name system grants that argument of rumors out of hand. Another Global Times op-ed, perhaps with a litigious Anglo-Saxon audience in mind, noted how tracking down and suing one’s libeler would be easier under the new system. After giving due space to the free speech argument, it delivers the abrupt conclusion “what the opponents of the real name system want is unrestricted and irresponsible speech.”

Read more...

At the end of December, the Jiefangjun Bao, the official paper of the People's Liberation, carried a brief article on page three of the print edition – with a small revelation about a key principle of China’s foreign policy. The article described a speech delivered by Gen. Ma Xiaotian, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the PLA, to the China Institute for International Strategic Studies, a PLA-affiliated think tank in Beijing.

As reported, Ma’s remarks contained standard boilerplate for a year-end review: “China’s overall security environment was favorable,” but “will continue to undergo complicated and profound changes.” What came next, however, was unexpected. Ma used a revised version of the last eight characters of Deng Xiaoping’s famous “24 character” guideline for China’s foreign policy from the early 1990s: “keep a low profile and achieve something” (taoguang yanghui, yousuo zuowei). The reformulated version states that China should “uphold (jianchi) keeping a low profile and actively (jiji) achieve something.”

Ma’s use of Deng’s revised guideline in an official Chinese newspaper is important for several reasons.

Read more...

Incumbent Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has been reelected, taking a comfortable but reduced margin of 51 percent of the vote, compared to 45 percent for the Democratic People's Party, while his Nationalist Party took a majority of 64 of the 113 seats in the island's parliament. The defeat of the pro-independence opposition paty appears to be an endorsement of the island's increasingly close ties to the mainland, and will be counted as a victory by Beijing, which has strongly supported Ma's Nationalist Party.

Ma is claiming a mandate to pursue closer ties with the mainland after an election campaign that focussed heavily on cross-strait relations, warning that electing the DPP could threaten a crisis in relations with Beijing.

But Taiwan Think Tank director I-Chung Lai told me in an interview that Taiwan's relationship with the mainland is unlikely to change much in the next four years.  Ma's margin of victory was reduced from 58 perecent in previous elections, while his party lost 13 seats in parliament. Lai pointed to fears that economic integration will eventually undermine Taiwan's political autonomy.

Read more...

It was easy to get swept up in the Wukan moment. A committed band of protestors stands up to corrupt officials and seizes control of the village. They demand that the officials return ill-gotten land, call for free and fair elections, and seek the body of one of their leaders they believe has been beaten to death while in official custody. After a several-day standoff, senior provincial officials swoop in and hand the villagers an unequivocal victory: Land, elections, and their leader’s body.

Only not quite. Now that the world’s attention has moved elsewhere, so too, apparently, has the need for Chinese officials to do the right thing. According to a recent report from the Straits Times (pay wall), the body of the protest leader, Xue Jinbo, has yet to be returned to his family; authorities reportedly want to send the body directly to a cemetery. No elections have been scheduled, and the discussions over the land issues have stalled. Perhaps of greater concern, one villager has committed suicide, reportedly after having been harassed relentlessly by authorities who believed he had been part of the protests.

More bad news comes from outside Wukan. Zheng Yanxiong, the uncompromising top party official in Shanwei county (which oversees Wukan) who said pigs would fly before the foreign media could be trusted, has amassed more power after being named the head of the local legislature.

Read more...