Bharat Rakshak

NightWatch-For the night of 8 November 2012 wrote: China: President and outgoing Secretary-General if the Communist Party Hu Jintao told the opening session of the 18th National Party Congress, "If we fail to handle the corruption issue well, it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state."

The reform of the political structure," he said, "is an important part of China's overall reform." "However," he added, "we will never copy a Western political system."

On this issue, Cai Mingzhao, a spokesperson for the party congress, emphasized to reporters the limits of political reform that the Party is willing to consider, stressing that any measures would maintain its firm leadership. Reforms, he said, would combine "centralism and democracy, discipline and freedom, and unity of will and peace of mind".

Comment: Hu's suggestion that corruption could cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state is extraordinary for several reasons. In Communist lore, the corruption of the Kuomintang - the nationalists-was responsible in large measure for the Communist takeover of China. Secondly, Hu implies that the expulsion of regional party leader Bo Xilai involved a much more serious threat to the Communist system than just the removal of a corrupt regional head. Hu's statement suggests China survived a near-existential threat.

Finally Hu implied that the Chinese Communist leaders are aware that they have been skirting the limits of political reform within the Communist system and revolutionary change to a more Western style of democracy. The leadership sees one or more scenarios in which Communist China could collapse.

NightWatch judges that there are so many contradictions and fault lines in the jerry-rigged communist system that violent, revolutionary upheaval could begin with little additional warning at almost any time. China might even fragment into Muslim and non-Muslim states. Hu's speech indicates the leaders are aware of some of the threats.

The Party leaders have decided that China's political system will remain Communist, centralized, disciplined from the top-down and un-Western. Experts who expected China could not resist the pull of increasingly greater political openness in a semi-capitalist economy have misread badly the Communist leadership.

By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

09 Nov 2012

Six months ago, Chen Xiaodong’s uncle came to him with an idea. For £15,000 up front, the 28-year-old could leave his office job and become a policeman in Inner Mongolia.

He would only earn £170 a month for the first three years, rising to £330 with more experience. But his parents and his in-laws clubbed together to raise the money – they thought it was a good investment.

“The job is stable and there is profit in it,” explained Mr Chen. “The other cops in my bureau all have houses and possessions that do not match their salaries. Some of them have several houses in expensive areas and the deputy chief drives a Toyota Prado, which is worth £50,000”.

Two months into his new job, Mr Chen still has a desk job, but is hoping to get his share of the police station’s wealth shortly.

“The bureau manages a few areas which are full of entertainment joints like karaoke parlours and massage houses, so they get protection money,” he said.

The other policemen have also all coughed up in one way or another, he added. “What you pay depends on how good your connections are. There is another policeman under 30 whose parents run a major Party department in the province and he has already become a fully-fledged officer.”

He still has to pass an exam, but the bribes he paid for the job are all openly acknowledged. “I was promised if I did not end up working here the money would be returned. I have receipts for everything,” he said.

Nor is Mr Chen’s case unusual. The corruption in the Communist party runs from the billions allegedly amassed by the families of top leaders all the way down to the lowliest state employees.

One source who used to work at the Ministry of Railways now runs a recruitment company providing low-level employees, such as pillbox hatted train attendants.

Recently he charged eight new recruits £3,000 each for their jobs, dividing his kickbacks with his contacts in the ministry. The price for a train supervisor’s job is £10,000.

For the applicants, the jobs come with a salary of around £300 a month but plenty of benefits, including a three-day week and a pension.

But even here, China is increasingly becoming divided into those who have connections and those who do not.

“You need to know someone just to hear about these purchase opportunities,” said the source.

“It is impossible to get a proper office job at a state-owned company without solid connections,” said an investment banker whose parents work in two of China’s large state firms.

“One popular approach is for the parents of two families who both work in state firms to arrange jobs for each other’s kids,” he added.

The average income for government jobs in 2011 was more than four times what workers could earn in private firms, according to a survey by 163.com, one of China’s major internet portals.

And with thousands of applicants vying for every state job, the phrase “Mai Guan”, or “Buying a Job”, has even entered the official dictionary.

He Guoqiang, the current head of the Party’s internal investigations department, has also named the practise as one of the 10 most popular forms of corruption.

“We must crack down on cases where codes and regulations are violated in the recruitment of personnel for state-owned companies and government institutions,” he said, in a speech reprinted by Qiushi, one of the Party’s journals.

“As a major source of discontent, [corruption] has become one of the major factors undermining relations between Party and government cadres and the public,” he added.

In his speech on the opening day of the 18th Party Congress, Hu Jintao, China’s president, was even more blunt. Corruption, he said, “could prove fatal” to the Party.

For young Chinese graduates, the network of connections and payments required to advance in China can be daunting.

One professor at an elite university in Beijing said one of his ablest students had been quoted a £100,000 fee for a top job with the government company.

“He was determined to come back to China [after graduate studies abroad] to do good but simply could not afford it,” he said.

“The problem with the payments is that it forces you to be corrupt whether you want to be or not.

“He said it was possible to get jobs at state firms through the exams alone, but that those people would not get promoted. And he said it in a matter of fact way. He did not think I would be surprised,” he said.

Additional reporting by Valentina Luo

China reveals massive security operation to stop Tibetans setting fire to themselves
On Friday thousands of students marched in protest in Rebkhong county, Qinghai province Photo: AP
Malcolm Moore

By Malcolm Moore, and Tom Phillips in Beijing
09 Nov 2012

Officials at the 18th party Congress claimed yesterday that the 'Skynet’ network has divided the region into a closely monitored grid and that teams of security personnel can be mobilised within two minutes to put an end to the suicide attempts.

Six Tibetans have doused themselves with petrol and set themselves alight since the eve of China’s once-in-a-decade leadership change on Wednesday bringing to 69 the number who are reported to have died in the past year.

Yesterday (FRI), thousands of students marched in protest in Rebkhong county, Qinghai province, according to Free Tibet, an activist group, and armed police stepped up their presence.

Speaking at the Congress in Beijing Losang Gyaltsen, the vice chairman of the local government in Tibet, said: “We do not want to see such incidents,” he said. “We do not want anyone to spoil Tibet as a happy region. For locals, we are checking IDs and for visitors we have checkpoints and security checks on travel.

“We also have a grid management system, so if any immolation happens in a certain block, we can launch an emergency rescue within two minutes,” he added.

Skynet is a highly secretive network and it is not known how many people work for it or how far is its reach. It has hardly been mentioned in official state media communications and is supposed to have a camera on every road in Tibet and in the Tibetan areas of Gansu and Sichuan.

Beijing has been steadily expanding its use and in June, in a rare mention, it was praised as a way of combating crime in the region.

Lately there has also been a heavy security presence in Tibet’s temples. “There has been no immolation in the past year at any of the 1,700 temples and among the 46,000 monks in Tibet,” said Mr Gyaltsen.

He blamed the self-immolations on activists and “some monks outside the country”.

“Some overseas Tibetans are trying to achieve their ugly targets at the cost of others’ lives. It is immoral,” he said. So far, the Dalai Lama has yet to instruct his followers not to self-immolate.

Despite the tensions between Tibetans and Han Chinese, the party secretary of Lhasa, Che Dalha, said the city had been voted one of China’s happiest cities for five years in a row.

“For four of those years, it was number one,” he said. “It needs to be felt and experienced, so only the Tibetans can tell how happy they are. Lhasa has the bluest sky, the whitest clouds, cleanest water and air and happiest people,” he added.

Elsewhere at the Congress, corruption continued to preoccupy Communist party officials.

Wang Jingqing, the vice minister of China’s powerful and mysterious Organisation Department, which is responsible for internal HR, vowed senior leaders would battle corruption to preserve the “pure nature of the Chinese Communist Party”.

“Detachment from the people is the biggest danger to the Party’s governance,” he said, claiming that 668,000 party members had been punished for corruption in the last five years.

Without “strict party discipline” the Communist Party would “only be a pool of loose sand and will not achieve anything,” Mr Wang added.

But asked if he would support a policy under which leaders would have to publish their assets, he simply ignored the question.

Wang Ying, the head of the prosperous southern province of Guangdong, and a man who is often described as one of the Party’s reformers, also demurred over whether officials should make their wealth public.

Before the Congress opened, the New York Times revealed that the family of Wen Jiabao, the outgoing premier, had at least £1.67 billion of assets. The family of Xi Jinping, the incoming president, is worth some £235 million, according to a Bloomberg investigation.

“The Party central has clearly specified rules on the property ownership of government officials,” he said. “Guangdong has been exploring ways of publishing assets and will keep exploring in this direction. We will gradually do this according to policy from Beijing,”

Additional reporting by Valentina Luo

THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book “Tombstone” could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and expression has tightened during the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.

Those who deny that the famine happened, as an executive at the state-run newspaper People’s Daily recently did, enjoy freedom of speech, despite their fatuous claims about “three years of natural disasters.” But no plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. One might wonder why the Chinese government won’t allow the true tale to be told, since Mao’s economic policies were abandoned in the late 1970s in favor of liberalization, and food has been plentiful ever since.

The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine.

In an article on the vast wealth enjoyed by China’s top elites, the Financial Times included the following striking passage:

"Some western diplomats estimate that as much as 40 per cent of China’s military budget is siphoned off through corruption.
As a phalanx of senior PLA officers ascended the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square this week, many of them sported generous pot bellies, leading one party member to comment wryly to the Financial Times that nothing displays structural weakness like overweight generals."

Forty percent is no small number! If things are really this bad, it could suggest that moral and social decay among China’s ruling elite is undermining the country’s strength faster than growth can make it powerful.

Japanese nationalists study China very closely. It’s possible that a belief that China’s elite is weak and corrupt, and that the country is much less formidable than it looks, explains why they are pushing back so hard against China’s regional assertiveness. Are we looking at the world’s biggest and most imposing paper tiger?

"Some western diplomats estimate that as much as 40 per cent of China’s military budget is siphoned off through corruption.

Japanese nationalists study China very closely. It’s possible that a belief that China’s elite is weak and corrupt, and that the country is much less formidable than it looks, explains why they are pushing back so hard against China’s regional assertiveness. Are we looking at the world’s biggest and most imposing paper tiger?

As the world marks Universal Children's Day on Tuesday, the Chinese are mourning five street children who were found dead in a roadside dumpster last week.

Police said the boys had burnt charcoal for warmth in their humble shelter, but were poisoned by carbon monoxide.

While many web users accused the local government of negligence, others said the parents of the children were also to blame.

Bijie, a land-locked, resource-rich city with 7 million people, is perched on craggy mountains. Many local peasants fled home in search of city jobs, leaving their children under the custody of grandparents or distant relatives.

The five kids who died were cousins and their fathers were three brothers. Two of the fathers worked as trash collectors in Shenzhen, a boom city near Hong Kong.

jamwal wrote:

If corruption is allowed to run wild in China then the ruling Communist Party risks major unrest and the collapse of its rule, state media on Monday quoted Communist Party chief Xi Jinping as saying at one of his first major meetings since taking the role.

Beijing: A Chinese supplier to popular US fast food chain KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken - reportedly world's largest fried chicken chain) has been accused of lacing chicken feed with huge amounts of toxic additives to make chicken grow faster, media reports have said.

The reports emerged last week alleging that the Suhai Group adds toxic industrial chemicals to chicken feed to make the chicken grow faster --45 days for a chicken to grow big enough for slaughter.

Reports said that the chicken feed Suhai prepared was so toxic that it could even kill flies.

Indian reluctance to rile China understandable, but too much understanding of "their perspective" downplays focus on who changed status quo.

Through his critically-acclaimed film Life of Pi , Taiwan-born director Ang Lee has appeared to have succeeded in doing what the Indian government has failed to achieve over more than a decade of tourism campaigns and promotion drives in China: rekindling Chinese interest in travelling to India and in Indian culture.

The film, which has scenes set in Puducherry in South India, has triggered huge interest in China since its opening last week, breaking box office records and raking in $16 million in its opening weekend — more than four times the amount in India.

Beyond the box office too, the film has sparked wide debate — and thousands of comments — in the vibrant online community, with Chinese writers and microbloggers seeing the film as a long-overdue introduction to Indian culture for a Chinese public often ignorant about India.

Lost chance

“A beautiful film; India is now the most beautiful travel destination in my heart,” wrote a blogger named Beautiful Carpenter who writes on travel and fashion.

Au Xin, a DJ at Radio Guangdong, said in a message to his 45,000 followers on the Chinese Twitter equivalent Sina Weibo that what he liked about the film was director “Ang Lee’s respect and belief in Indian culture.”

Miss Ruby, a Beijing-based microblogger, added on Weibo in a message that echoed most of the online reactions that the film, which also dwells on India’s religious and cultural traditions, would “correct the prejudice and ignorance about Indian culture [in China],” while Xu Xiaohuang, an executive at an insurance company in Zhejiang, said the film was “meaningful and beautiful, and makes me want to travel to India.”

Another microblogger in Shanghai, who professes an interest in films and travel, said in a post on Weibo that he had taken his daughter to see Life of Pi . “India’s Minister of Travel should award Ang Lee with a medal!”, he wrote. “He presents the beauty of India to the world.”

The Indian government has not, however, followed his suggestion of using the film’s hugely anticipated release here last week to promote tourism in India – a popular practice followed by other countries looking to tap the China market.

China’s booming tourism market has, over the past few years, largely ignored India. Of the around 50 million Chinese who travel overseas every year spending some $40 billion, less than 1,00,000 travel to India on business and tourism, according to tourism figures from two years ago.

This year’s tourism figures, excluding business travel, paint an even bleaker picture. In the past six months, India only issued 25,000 tourist visas in its Embassy in Beijing and three Consulates in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, suggesting that tourism figures are only in the range of 50,000 annually — 0.001 per cent of the total outbound tourism.

Chinese tour operators say demand for travel in India is low because of inadequate promotion efforts in recent years — particularly involving tour operators — and dissatisfaction with the service offered by current operators, from a lack of Chinese-speaking guides and the availability of Chinese cuisine. Hence, tourists were choosing to travel to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and even Sri Lanka and Nepal instead.

Up until March, India did not even have a director at its Tourism Office in Beijing, with the position remaining vacant for many months because of delays in appointing a new director. Officials in New Delhi acknowledge that the China market is low on the Tourism Ministry’s priorities, reflected in the small budget accorded to tourism promotion in China which has, in recent years, not been expanded despite the multibillion dollar tourism boom.

When asked why the Indian government did not, for instance, look to use the success of Life of Pi or the hugely successful 3 Idiots by flying in actors such as Irrfan Khan or Aamir Khan who have since become popular in China — a practice followed by other countries — one official said: “The budget for tourism isn't even enough for campaigns such as external advertising, so where is the money for flying in film stars?”

Bharath.Subramanyam wrote: Dr Luttwak is saying that China has made mistake in its 'peaceful raise' .

But the company’s most important client was always the CIA. From its founding until the late 1970s, Deak’s firm was a key financial arm of the U.S. intelligence complex. Because it carried out the foreign-currency transactions of private entities, Deak and Co. could keep track of who was spiriting money into and out of which countries.

In 1962, for example, Deak warned the CIA that China was planning to invade India after his company’s Hong Kong branch was swamped with Chinese orders for Indian rupees intended for advance soldiers. Deak’s offices were more than observation posts.

“Continuity” is a word that National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon is likely to hear often from his Chinese interlocutors during his visit to Beijing, which begins today.

Among Chinese strategic scholars, there is little expectation that the boundary talks, of which 15 rounds have been held, will yield any major concrete outcomes in the near future.Since 2005, when the two countries completed the first of three stages of negotiations by signing an agreement on political parameters and guiding principles, perceptions in Beijing are that the crucial second stage of framework negotiations has been deadlocked.

He {Hu Shisheng, a South Asia scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR)} agreed that India fared far below issues such as relations with the United States, current territorial disputes with Japan and the situation in the South China Sea in terms of China’s pressing priorities.

China’s concerns on the United States “pivot” or “rebalancing”, which has emerged as Beijing’s primary foreign policy focus in recent months, is likely to cast a shadow on ties with India. “Obama’s “pivot” offers a lens through which many Chinese analysts see India’s strategic intention toward China,” said Han Hua, a leading South Asia scholar at Peking University. “The two have to talk to each other on “core interests” and how to avoid challenging those interests,” she said. “Small frictions will be still there, but in general, stable relations are the main theme in China’s India policy.” {PRC's strategy clearly is to keep India on a lower priority to avoid another major country joining hands with the likes of the US, Japan, Korea etc. It can lull India into complacency for the time being until the other issues are resolved somehow and the US is unmounted from its back. It can then tackle India one-on-one}

The message from China’s new leadership to India was that both countries should “not let differences and problems stand in the way” of taking the relationship forward, Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo told the visiting National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, here on Monday.{Now, Dai Bingguo is not exactly 'new' leadership}

Amid persisting political mistrust over the long-running border dispute and more recent spats over passports and visas, Mr. Dai said both countries needed “to prevent noise from diverting friendly cooperation and common development.”

The State Councillor, who is Mr. Menon’s counterpart as the Special Representative on the boundary talks, called on both countries “to have a clear idea about some parties’ intentions of undermining bilateral ties,” without specifying who those parties were.{Now, that is the Chinese ploy. As it faces the wrath of all littoral countries of South & East China Seas, and the 'rebalancing' of the US and the general economic slowdown, it wants to wean India away from that informal alliance that is taking shape.}

“Mr. Menon’s visit is not about the boundary issue [alone]. It is about the whole relationship,” Qin Gang, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, told reporters.

Mr. Menon held two sessions of talks with Mr. Dai, which officials said covered a broad range of issues from the impact of the leadership transition and bilateral ties to wider strategic issues and the boundary question. He also met with Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

“We have seen a lot of convergence of views and shared interests, shared aspirations, shared goals,” Mr. Qin said. “This meeting will send out a strong message that as two neighbours China and India will continue to work for good neighbourly relationship. {These are Panchsheel-like back-stabbing words from PRC} This meeting is not an occasion where both sides expressed differences on the boundary issue.”

“The passport issue did not come up,” Mr. Qin said. “We have expressed ourselves very clearly, and Mr. Menon and other senior Indian officials have talked about it… We have fully explained to other parties, including India, and both sides need to work for the smooth travelling of citizens.” {The Chinese are sticking to their guns and are giving an impression that the Indians understood the Chinese position.}

India has declared itself ready to deploy naval vessels to the South China Sea to protect its oil-exploration interests there, a potential new escalation of tensions in a disputed area where fears of armed conflict have been growing steadily.

India's naval chief made the statement on Monday just as Vietnam's state oil and gas company, Petrovietnam, accused Chinese boats of sabotaging an exploration operation by cutting a seismic cable being towed behind a Vietnamese vessel.

Indian Navy Chief Admiral D.K Joshi said that, while India was not a territorial claimant in the South China Sea, it was prepared to act, if necessary, to protect its maritime and economic interests in the region.

"When the requirement is there, for example, in situations where our country's interests are involved, for example ONGC ... we will be required to go there and we are prepared for that," Joshi told a news conference.

"Now, are we preparing for it? Are we having exercises of that nature? The short answer is yes," he said.

This expansion of the Han presence both inside and outside the current borders of the People's Republic was not just a coincidence. It was linked to China's mix of political weakness and demographic strength. The Qing bequeathed an empire which had rarely been bigger and certainly had never been so Han.

Political and military strength is now China's guardian against humiliation, but a stagnating population is a danger, as Russia found when ethnic Russians either failed to procreate as fast as their Kazakh and other neighbours, or simply found life on the fringes of the empire too harsh. China's neighbours are now in awe of its power. But on the fringes of China, non-Han are breeding faster, and neighbours such as Vietnam and Korea have become fierce defenders of their own cultures and borders. The more China focuses on avenging past humiliations, the more it will raise awareness among neighbours of the previous 200 years of mostly Qing-era expansion of the Han state and its global presence.

What happens in China when an old couple refuse to move out of their house for a highway to be built in its place? They just build the road anyway around the house. An elderly couple in Wenling, Zhejiang province refused to sign an agreement to allow their house to be demolished. They said that compensation offered was not enough to cover rebuilding costs, according to local media. Their house is the only building left standing on a road which is paved through their village.