Since 2005, China’s central government has set a growth target of 8 percent, a reflection of a long-standing policy of “bao ba,” or, “protect the eight.” Eight, besides being a lucky number in China, is the government’s assumed minimum rate necessary to create adequate jobs and maintain social stability. This has been an easy target, with growth rates (according to the World Bank) easily exceeding 8 percent since 2000 (peaking at 14.2 percent in 2007). 

However, this year, at the opening of the National People’s Congress on March 5, Premier Wen Jiabao’s annual work report deviated from this long-standing target with a new growth target of 7.5 percent. He called on China to focus on more sustainable development, including encouraging domestic consumption and managing inflation.

Stock markets in Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia and Shanghai fell on the news.  International news outlets covered the announcement extensively, speculating on the meaning of the new growth figure. In mid-March, Wen defended the new target, commenting to the press that the 7.5 growth target was “not low.”

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This month, supporters of Tibet, and the merely curious, have seen information warfare up close. On Twitter, several hundred bots (automated programs that generate content) flooded discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam. If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject. This is cyber as a weapon of mass distraction. Twitter eventually began to filter out the bots, and the spam was cut off to a trickle.

More malevolently, Tibetan activists have been threatened on Twitter. The poet and blogger Woeser was repeatedly reminded that Ai Weiwei was arrested by one Twitter user, suggesting that she should meet the same fate. In addition, the Central Tibet Administration, International Campaign for Tibet, and others were targeted by malicious emails. Visitors to Tibetan websites could also be infected by malware.

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Breaking North American box office records and winning over audiences and critics alike last weekend was the movie adaptation of the first part of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling teen science fiction trilogy The Hunger Games. The movie has inevitably been compared with the 2000 Japanese hit movie Battle Royale, where a former high school teacher, at the behest of the Japanese government, kidnaps his former ninth grade class and forces them to kill each other on a remote island until only one is left standing. 

In the dystopian The Hunger Games, after a holocaust has wiped out most of North America, the prosperous metropolis Capitol enslaves and starves 12 surrounding districts. Each year, for 75 years now, as a way to both entertain the masses as well as remind them of their failed rebellion and subjugation, the Capitol organizes the Hunger Games circus, where two teenagers from each district must compete in a “Battle Royale” last-man-standing scenario.

Some adults have observed that the Hunger Games’ immense popularity among adults and teenagers is linked in part to its publication date: 2008, when the sub-prime crisis hit and Lehman Brothers collapsed, ultimately leading to the birth of the Occupy movement. But while that helps explain its enduring appeal among adults, it doesn’t explain its appeal among teenagers.

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Some have suggested, including in The Diplomat, that China could pressure Iran over its nuclear program and so help prevent a military strike by Israel. The Global Times, for its part, caused quite a stir with a recent article on this very issue. According to the writers, there’s increasing concern among policy makers in Beijing over the potential consequences of Israeli air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, including the likelihood that there would be a spike in crude oil prices if the region were engulfed in conflict. As such, the article suggests, China can be expected to exert diplomatic pressure to prevent such a scenario unfolding.

However, the people I’ve spoken with who are familiar with the issue say that as much as China wants to avoid a war, there’s very little it can actually do.

For a start, China doesn’t have nearly as much influence over Israel and Iran as some people suggest. The country with the greatest influence over Iran is actually Russia, which has also helped Iran build the Bushehr nuclear plant. And, of course, the country with the greatest influence over Israel is the United States.

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The thaw in cross-Strait relations during Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s first term was unprecedented – but the honeymoon period may soon be over.
 
The rapid expansion of ties between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governments were established through seven rounds of bilateral talks, 16 agreements, and one “consensus” on cross-Strait investments. Concomitantly, people-to-people exchanges have increased exponentially as the two sides negotiate terms of engagement. But while the KMT and CCP agree upon the need to institutionalize cross-Strait ties on the basis of the so-called “1992 Consensus,” other sensitive political issues were shelved in the interim. Now, despite the bilateral public displays of camaraderie by political leaders, who tout the positive-positive gains of engagement, the deeply rooted political distrust that Presidents Ma and Hu Jintao brushed aside during the past four years is quickly coming to the fore.

Only months after Ma’s re-election, and as a heated power struggle plays out in Zhongnanhai prior to the 18th Party Congress, the emergence of divergent expectations for cross-Strait engagement may prove challenging to manage. Beijing deliberately toned down calls for political dialogue during the Taiwan election season, but now appears to be increasing pressure on the Ma administration to enter into political negotiations. This issue was thrown into sharp relief by the Ma administration’s rebuke of Beijing’s latest call for the establishment of a Pingtan Cross-Strait Experimental Region project.

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There are signs the Year of the Dragon is already stirring up trouble in China.

Economic growth seems to be faltering, and many analysts believe that the property bubble that has been inflating for the past decade may burst. But even more worrisome are recent signs of political tumult in Beijing.

Earlier this week, the Chinese blogosphere erupted in speculation about a possible coup attempt. There were reports of gunshots in Beijing, of unusual paramilitary activity near party leadership compounds. Internet censors removed such posts, only adding to the sense of confusion. Although these rumors were almost certainly only that, it seems possible that a factional war has broken out within the Communist Party leadership itself. If so, the ramifications are huge. At stake is nothing less than the future of China itself.

China’s history over the past three decades has been relatively smooth when judged by the standards of the previous century and a half. From 1839 to 1978, China was wracked by major rebellions, wars with Western powers and Japan, civil war, a massive famine, and the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, however, a new group of officials came to power within the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. They repudiated the excesses of Maoism and adopted the reforms that have led to three decades of unprecedented peace and prosperity. To be sure, there have been bloody events, most notably the Tiananmen Massacre and violent crackdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet. But the late 20^th century and the early 21^st century represent the first sustained period of stability for China in generations.

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As details leak out, it appears that corruption will play a central role in the saga of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. Bo, who was summarily ousted from his position on March 15, apparently attempted to derail the investigation of his police chief, Wang Lijun, into corrupt practices by Bo’s family members.

Yet corruption is hardly enough of a reason to scrap one of the country’s most senior and well-known leaders. Scratch the surface of almost any senior official in China and a family member or two will likely have crossed a law or two. Bo’s sins ran much deeper. The dramatic and charismatic Bo was simply too big a personality in a leadership that prides itself on facelessness and colorlessness. And his politics were too disruptive and, in the end, corrosive for a political system that prizes least common denominator consensus.

Between Vice President Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leadership signaled Bo’s demise well before his formal ouster. Xi attacked Bo’s political character in a March 1 speech before the Communist Party School, and then in an essay published two weeks later. In his speech, Xi noted that leading officials should “fairly use their power, keep incorrupt [sic] in their work, and resolutely oppose the tendencies of …hedonism, and extreme individualism.” The article made things even more explicit, raising the dangers of self-promotion and seeking personal fame through the Party.

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There’s a famous Chinese aphorism often used to describe the dynamics of central-local relations in China: “The mountains are high, and the emperor far away.” Though the center’s information gap is narrowing – they are able to monitor local governments much more effectively than ever before – there’s still substantial freedom for local governments, which often leads to implementation gaps.

For example, in the past 10 years, local governments in China have ignored central policies on mine safety, environmental protection, and food/consumer product safety, to name only a few. The central government in many ways allowed and even created these implementation gaps through counterincentives such as a singular priority being placed on raising growth figures.

Since 2006 until now, the central government has certainly targeted rising property prices. However, until now, their policies have been less than ironclad – the policies were often reversed or loosened, and local governments had plenty of leeway to continue on their paths of rapid property development.

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Western observers often describe China as “inscrutable,” but perhaps a lot of the mystery surrounding the Chinese condition comes from the fact that Western eyes are so focused on China’s culture and history that they are blind to China’s geography and demographics, which are ultimately the roots of the culture and history. 

To explain China, we need to understand three basic principles about China:

1) China is so vast in terms of land and people that it sees itself as an enclosed universe onto itself.

2) China’s overpopulation and its limited natural resources mean that the Chinese economy and political system are both based on a national zero sum game of exploiting the peasantry. 

3) This exploitation of the peasantry is so convenient and lucrative it becomes the elite’s raison d’etre, which in turn leads to a stagnant inward-looking authoritarian political order and philosophy that fears progressive ideas as much as peasant rebellions. 

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The scandal-plagued end of Bo Xilai’s career started long before Wang Lijun’s dramatic flight to the American Consulate in Chengdu last month. The incident may have triggered the resolution of a simmering conflict, or it may have been the first move of a checkmate in two, but it’s a safe bet that there were serious political reasons behind the highest-reaching political scandal since the Chen Liangyu case at the beginning of President Hu Jintao’s term. 

Bo’s unorthodox approach to politics has made him an increasingly controversial figure within the Communist Party. The very public campaigns and policy freelancing that have made him a center of attention in the past year have struck Western analysts as a threat to the consensus-driven leadership of the modern Chinese Party – and it now seems that China’s top leaders agree. The dismissal represents a final verdict on Bo’s populist style – and perhaps also on his leftist policy agenda.

A move on the level of dismissing a member of the Politburo couldn’t have been made lightly, or quickly – in the closest analogue we have for this case, the dismissal of Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu over corruption charges in 2006, Hu spent months negotiating Chen’s removal with the Politburo Standing Committee, after years spent laying the ground and accumulating evidence for the charges, as Richard McGregor documents in “The Party.”  That case also began with the arrest of Chen’s subordinates and worked up the chain.

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