Rising Persecution in China

“God Is With Us”

The Chinese government is ratcheting up its persecution of Christians and churches.  Yet, the church continues to grow.  While estimates are only that–estimates–the generally accepted figure is that Christians number more than 100 million in China.

The sad thing is that Christians are not a threat to the government or civil rulers.  But it troubles an insecure government to realise that a substantial group of people have a higher loyalty to a Ruler that they regard as above and beyond the Communist regime.  Christians, of course, believe that Christ is the ultimate Lord and Ruler of not just China, but of all the heavens and the earth.

But it has always been the way: Unbelief must persecute and attack Christians, or it must itself become Christian. There can be be no middle ground.  Unbelief proclaims the absolute sovereignty of Man; Christians proclaim the absolute sovereignty of one Man, risen from the dead and living eternally–the Lord Jesus Christ.

The very Name of Christ, then, is a threat to the sovereignty of man over the world.  In the ancient Roman Empire this conflict was not settled until the Emperor’s themselves became Christians, and the organs of state ceased to persecute the Church.  We expect that it will be the same in China.  Meanwhile the power and claims of the Lord Jesus Christ are extending over the Middle Kingdom and millions of people are responding to God’s irresistible grace.  “Everyone whom the Father has given me will come to me, and I will never cast out anyone who comes to me,” said the Lord. (John 6:37)

The ultimate sanction of Unbelief is to kill the body.  Man cannot kill the soul.  Christians fear God above man, because God can destroy both body and soul in Hell.  And thus the Gospel spreads in  China and people are converted, despite the earnest endeavours of the pagans.
 Christians Now Outnumber Communists in China

By Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. 
29 Dec 2014
BreitbartNews

Though the Chinese Communist Party is the largest explicitly atheist organization in the world, with 85 million official members, it is now overshadowed by an estimated 100 million Christians in China. It is no wonder Beijing is nervous and authorities are cracking down on Christian groups.

Christianity is growing so fast in China that some predict that it will be the most Christian nation in the world in only another 15 years. By far, the greatest growth is coming outside the official state-sanctioned churches, which are rightly considered subservient to the Communist Party. Numbers are increasing, rather, in unofficial Protestant “house churches” and in the underground Catholic church.

“By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon,” said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.

Although at least on paper the People’s Republic of China recognizes freedom of religion since 1978, party members are explicitly forbidden to believe in any religion. In 2011, Zhu Weiqun, executive vice minister of the United Front Work Department, wrote, “Party members shall not believe in religion, which is a principle to be unswervingly adhered to.”

According to the annual report of the human rights group China Aid, persecution of Christians worsened dramatically in 2013, in line with a constant trend of deteriorating religious freedom over the past eight years. Most recently, the oppression of Christians has especially targeted Protestant groups, leaving most Catholics alone, which many feel reflects Beijing’s strategic goal of reestablishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

According to reports, hundreds of Protestant churches in the eastern province of Zhejiang have been targeted for demolition in the past year.  Unrecognized Christian groups have been subject to crackdowns for years, but observers say the atmosphere is getting worse as their numbers increase and the governing Communist Party takes a more nationalist tone under President Xi Jinping.

Particularly hard hit has been a Beijing Christian group called Shouwang. “Things have got worse this year because the police started to detain us. I was detained for a week,” said Zhao Sheng, 54, musical organizer for the group’s Christmas service.  “But Christmas is still a happy time. No matter what happens, God is with us,” he added with a smile.

Beware the Yellow Peril

Baser Instincts

In New Zealand we have had our share of muck racking, venal, xenophobic politicians who pander to the worst instincts of the bitter and twisted.  Immigration seems to hit all the right buttons for these closet racists and the populist politicians who exploit them.

Racism is a strong word–sadly overdone in many quarters.  It is not an epithet to be used lightly.  We struggle to avoid its use here.  It’s hard to come to any other conclusion, but we will try.  David Cunliffe, erstwhile leader of the motley crowd of divisives, temporarily coalesced under the Labour party banner, has come out opposing the sale of a large North Island high country farm to a Chinese company.  This is normally the political territory of the one or two populist politicians who can find electoral traction few other ways.  Anti-Chinese sentiment–which is racist insofar as it appears to apply to no other immigrant ethnic group or nation–is the final bolt hole of a desperate, cynical politician or one who is a genuine racist.  Now it has become the resort of the Labour leader. 

We prefer to believe the evidence points to a cynical, desperate politician, rather than a genuine racist.  Surely Cunliffe cannot be that degenerate.  Its his desperation that is leading him to play the race card, and the xenophobe card, and any other card, for that matter.

It turns out that China, the Chinese, and New Zealand have a long history.
  There is evidence that New Zealand was visited by Chinese explorers in 1421, long before Abel Tasman and James Cook.  Chinese gold miners flocked to Otago during the great gold rush in that province in the 1850’s and 60’s.  Few made it rich; many others settled here and have become valued citizens.  More recently, Chinese investment in New Zealand has been making significant contributions to our well-being and economic development.  For example, Haier bought the iconic Fisher and Paykel appliance company and have helped transform it into a greater commercial power than it was.  F&P, as it is widely known, has expanded some of its business operations  in this country under Chinese stewardship, taking on more staff.

Another recent example has been provided by a Chinese company buying up one of our largest waste disposal companies, Waste Management.  Ironically, Waste Management was a premiere listed New Zealand company bought out firstly by an Australian conglomerate, Trans Pacific Industries.  Recently, the Australian group sought to downsize due to overcommitments.  It sold to a Chinese company, Beijing Capital.  So one of our largest waste management companies is now owned by a Chinese company.    Not a peep of concern or scintilla of objection from one David Cunliffe.

But the Lochinvar Station–a large North Island high country farm–is apparently in a completely different category.  Cunliffe has stupidly come out to say that if elected to govern he would squash the sale by fiat.  We cannot have such iconic New Zealand assets transferring into foreign ownership.  Maybe land is in a different category from highly successful New Zealand businesses, such as Waste Management, or iconic New Zealand companies, such as F&P.  Well, maybe not.

When Canadian film director, James Cameron bought a significant farm in the Wairarapa, David Cunliffe and his raggle taggle Labour Party said nary a word.  When Cameron acted like a rapacious capitalist and bought more farms in the area, Cunliffe’s silence was deafening.  And then there is  the “small matter” of Shania Twain–who, of course, along with James Cameron, just happens to be Caucasian, and, along with Cameron, one of the glitterati–buys up a large South Island high country farm, it’s nothing at all.  Not a peep from the principled Mr Cunliffe, except, no doubt a behind-the-scenes request for a photo-op.

But a Chinese company buying up New Zealand farmland–that’s got to be stopped.  It’s wrong.  It’s unjust.  It’s evil.  It’s going to be declared illegal.  

What on earth are we to make of Cunliffe deploying this populist xenophobic bovine scatology?  Either the man is a racist at heart with an abiding dislike of the “yellow-peril” or he is an unprincipled, desperate, base politician.  We believe the latter to be the case–otherwise Cunliffe would have protested long and hard against F&P and Waste Management being sold to the dreaded Chinese.  No, he is just manipulating the baser instincts of some of our residual xenophobes in a venal attempt to get more votes.

Any wonder why politicians are held in such low regard?  Helen Clark at her worst was never so base.  Cunliffe is a sad poster-boy of the degeneracy the Labour Party now represents and seeks to exploit.

China, Abortion, and the Christian Church

China beachhead

China | Pro-life efforts are growing in the nation with the most abortions. But saving lives in the womb is an enormous challenge—even within the church

By June Cheng

Issue: “China’s abortion regime,” July 26, 2014
Posted July 11, 2014, 01:00 a.m.

 

This is a sobering, yet very encouraging piece from China.  Let us continue to pray for our brethren and sisters in that vast land.

 

JT 

Letter From America (About China)

China Persecuting Christians, But . . .

By Jillian Kay Melchior

February 19, 2014 1:39 PM 

National Review Online

  
Persecution of Chinese Christians continued to increase in 2013, according to a new annual report from ChinaAid, a Texas-based organization that monitors religious freedom.  The report documents 134 cases of persecution involving 7,424 Christians in China.  “It should be noted that the information collected by ChinaAid about persecution cases in China is but the tip of the iceberg,” adds ChinaAid. Overall, documented instances of persecution increased by nearly 39 percent over the past year, the report says.

Critics of ChinaAid have noted in the past that its dataset is very limited, and that it fails to take into account the great strides Christians have made in China. Nevertheless, ChinaAid president Bob Fu offers the most comprehensive documentation available of Christian persecution in China. Fu personally endured persecution in China and now reports from Texas.

Chinese Christians still do not enjoy full religious freedom, though their circumstances have improved significantly since the Cultural Revolution. While most Chinese Christians do not experience intense persecution, some do. . . .

Christianity has grown explosively in China.
The Chinese government, which low-balls its numbers, has conceded that Protestantism grew by more than 60 percent in less than two decades, Catholicism by more than 25 percent. Beijing’s official count, which includes only those who worship in the state-sanctioned churches — estimates China has 23 million Protestants and 5.7 million Catholics. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts the number at 58 million Protestants and 9 million Catholics, and other plausible counts estimate more than 100 million Chinese Christians.

It is possible that while the number of instances of persecution continues to increase, overall persecution of Christians is at its lowest since the People’s Republic of China was founded.  In 2012 this reporter spent a year in China and visited Catholic and Protestant churches, both state-sanctioned and “underground” or “house.” At that time persecution seemed to be a waning concern for Christians. Many believers made the deliberate choice to avoid politics altogether. While their faith affected every aspect of their lives, including family and professional relationships, Chinese Christianity appeared to be more cultural than political.

Christianity’s soft power still causes some unease for the communist government. ChinaAid’s report notes a new effort by authorities to “destroy Christianity’s accumulated social-cultural capital.” That’s primarily evidenced, the report says, by a crackdown on Christian bookstores and college-campus ministries.  But the Chinese government engages in a risky game by attacking Christianity’s soft capital. Maoist communism destroyed Chinese civil society, creating widespread distrust and isolation while undermining the nation’s moral foundation. Today’s China is plagued by widespread mistrust and loneliness, as well as pervasive corruption and greed.

Christians’ counter-cultural influence actually furthers Beijing’s putative goal of increasing social harmony. In recent years, churches have made special efforts to strengthen marriages and families in a country where urban migration has left many citizens cut off from family and regional roots. In the workplace, Christians are called on to set high ethical standards. Christians charitable efforts also help make up for the government’s social-policy shortcomings. Christians are often first on the scene in natural disasters, and their ministries often ensure the poor and elderly aren’t totally neglected.

— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center. She is also a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum.

The Annals of Hard Despotism

Withering on the Vine

We use the term “soft-despotism” to refer to the smothering embrace of the Western nanny state, driven by the demands of perverted consciences, riven by pseudo-guilt and self-righteous pity.  The alternative to soft-despotism is hard-despotism.  China is a nation with a hard-despotic system.  China is attempting to change, we are told, and we are sure there is truth in it.  But the social consequences of decades of hard despotism will take generations to work through and out.

Many of those consequences arise out of China’s hard despotic attempt to control its population growth–something which the current leaders are now starting deeply to regret we suspect.  It is a startling lesson in what happens when a culture institutionalises and enforces atheistic rebellion against the Living God.  The curses of God’s covenant fall–and they are exacting, hard, and remorseless.  Deep remorse, turning away from Unbelief, returning to the Creator and Redeemer and walking along a new road, His road, are the only ways of genuine escape.  Traditional Chinese pragmatism will not suffice.  The societal damage is too severe.

A recent article in the Telegraph succinctly presents just some aspects of the burgeoning social dislocation and economic disruption facing China as a result of the One-Child Policy.

Some economists fear the double-digit growth China has enjoyed for the past decade may rapidly unwind – and the one child policy is to blame. The 1979 policy was introduced to curb China’s booming population, with families heavily fined for breaching strict birth control limits.

The policy has left China short of 50m women…

A preference for boys – not least because they can earn more to support their parents – means endemic illegal sex-selective abortions and the abandonment of baby girls. The sex ratio is estimated at 120 boys for every 100 girls, far above the global average and leaving the country with 50m fewer women than men.

…a generation of ‘little emperors’…

The one-child cohort became known as the ‘spoilt generation’. Scientists claim it has fundamentally changed the psychology of a generation, leaving them less altruistic, trusting and competitive. And all that pampering has left China with one of the fastest growing rates of childhood obesity.

…and a booming lonely hearts industry. 

Competition for brides is fierce, particularly in the countryside. Love hunters – agents who find brides for China’s army of wealthy but lonely young bachelors – are big business, as is internet dating.

Now it’s inflating China’s housing market

Many mothers will only accept a son-in-law who can provide a spacious home. Economists reckon competition for large homes is driving China’s rampant property boom. A small two-bedroom Beijing flat now costs the average of 32-years’ salary, or $330,000 dollars. China’s property moguls are uneasy – and fear the boom has become a bubble at risk of bursting.  

Researchers Zhang and Wei reckon between 30 and 48 per cent in the rise in house prices between 2003 and 2009 was down to gender imbalances, with strong correlations between sex ratios in different towns and house price increases.

Meanwhile, the army of grandparents is growing… 

The Mao generation of big families is hitting retirement, and the birth rate has been below replacement level since the mid-1990s. China is rapidly ageing, and by 2050 a third of the population will be over 60. By then there will be just two workers to support every elderly person.

 The result: the world’s biggest care homes, and the rise of 4-2-1 families: four frail grandparents, two parents and one grandchild to support them all.

China’s stonking growth has been built on cheap exports and plentiful industrial labour, as tens of millions of people were willing to move to the cities and work long hours for low wages.  But the country is approaching what is known as the Lewis Turning Point – where the glut of cheap labour dries up, and businesses have to invest in expensive technology to keep expanding.

…and that will hit everyone.

Policy makers are alarmed. The one child policy is leaving the economy short of 140m workers. That will drive up wages, hit profits and push away investment. Citigroup economists warn it could cut 3 per cent off China’s GDP – a slowdown that would be felt around the world.

And many countries in Africa and Latin America have got stuck at a relatively low level of development after a spate of rapid growth after failing to make it over the Turning Point. That fate could befall China – dashing its hopes of becoming a superpower.

What is the Lewis turning point?
It is based on a development model created by Nobel prize winning economist Arthur Lewis, who looked at the dual aspect of a developing economy.

The first is represented by its agricultural sector, which engages a major part of the labour force, and the second by the modern market-oriented sector, which is primarily engaged in industrial production.  The growth of the economy is driven by the modern sector with the support of unlimited supplies of labour, which is mainly drawn from the agricultural sector. This migrant labour force accepts low wages corresponding to the living standards prevalent in farming.

The modern sector (also called the capitalist sector) is able to reap profits and—helped by low labour costs—generate savings. The growing savings finance the capital formation for expansion.  However, a point is reached when no more labour is forthcoming from the underdeveloped, or agricultural, sector and wages begin to rise. This is known as the Lewis turning point. [http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-07-30/news/32942096_1_labour-agricultural-sector-china]

 
 

Not so Fast

Tweaks to China’s One-Child Monstrosity

The Chinese government announced some changes to their one-child policy and to labour camps.  Everyone in the West was excited–well, sort of.  Things might be looking up.  Firstly, the changes to the one-child policy.

Far from sweeping away all family planning rules, the party is now providing a new, limited exemption: It said families in which at least one parent was an only child would be allowed to have a second child. Previously, both parents had to be an only child to qualify for this exemption. Rural couples also are allowed two children if their first-born child is a girl, an exemption allowed in 1984 as part of the last substantive changes to the policy. [NZ Herald]

The Herald article is right on the nose.  This represents just a minor tweak to an horrendous policy.  Wendy Wright reports how the Chinese government itself quickly rushed to qualify and downplay the change.

Today – one day after the announcement – Chinese officials quickly downplayed the tweak, saying changing the one-child policy would be too disruptive.  “The basic policy of family planning will need to be upheld over the long term and we cannot rest up on this,” Wang Peian posted on China’s health ministry website.

So, the policy change is a technical tweak, leaving in place the harsh penalties for those who breach the rules.

Population Research Institute has conducted illuminating investigations in China. Note this report that the second-child restriction is more broad than the new policy change addresses:

2. Those who meet the requirements for having a second child, but fail to meet the required waiting period (between births) and where the woman has not yet reached the age of 28 years of age when giving birth, both parties involved will be individually assessed a “social compensation fee” based on an unit calculated from a year’s salary for urban dwellers and based on a year’s income after expenses for rural dwellers. For each year early (that they have given birth) they will be assessed a CSRC Fee equal to 25% of their annual salary or income. A partial year shall be calculated as if it is a full year.

In the ancient Roman Empire, tax gatherers were hated by local populations because they were allowed to cream off all sorts of financial benefits for themselves, as long as the Roman levies were paid to the state.  But, behind these corrupt tax officials stood the full weight of imperial oppression.  In other words, the tax collectors could steal and the Imperial authorities would support them.  In a similar way, the local Chinese “birth officials” benefit from levying the state’s penalty taxes.

Wang would not say when the new policy would begin, and each province will decide. Since the enforcers in each province benefit from the one-child policy, financially and with the ability to exert brute power over others, there is little hope that this change is not mere words to ease international embarrassment.

We’ll know China makes a serious change when the government abolishes all fines for any pregnancies/births and harshly punishes kidnapping/baby selling. This would dry up billions of dollars in incentives for the enforcers. (In just 19 provinces, some in the poorest parts of the country, an estimated $2.7 billion was collected in fines.)  Along with that, eliminating all punishments/penalties for any child, and discarding the family planning regime, which is so rife with corruption and abuse it cannot be redeemed.

The abolition of labour camps might be more promising, insofar as it will limit the oppressive activities of local government officials, who, hitherto could toss anyone they liked into a labour camp for up to four years without trial.  

The party also announced it would abolish a labour camp system that allowed police to lock up government critics and other defendants for up to four years without trial. It confirmed a development that had been reportedly announced by the country’s top law enforcement official earlier this year but was later retracted.  Also known as “re-education through labour,” the system was established to punish early critics of the Communist Party but has been used by local officials to deal with people challenging their authority on issues including land rights and corruption.

Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent Beijing lawyer who has represented several former labour camp detainees in seeking compensation, welcomed the abolition of the extra-legal system.

“There have been many methods used recently by this government that are against the rule of law, and do not respect human rights, or freedom of speech,” Pu said. “But by abolishing the labour camps … it makes it much harder for the police to put these people they clamp down on into labour camps.”

We will see how that goes.  

Impeccable Ignorance

Population Control Goes Out With a Whimper

Posted on September 6, 2013
by Stefano Gennarini, J.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

 Here are three articles from the past week that address the slow hard fall from grace of population control…

1. Jonathan Last’s Review of a book that exposes Paul Ehrlich for the fraud he was. Ehrlich, an entomologist, not a demographer or economist, wrote the all-famous “Population Bomb” in the 1960s and became a world celebrity by prophesying that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices causing humanitarian disasters of biblical proportions. Needless to say, his poor science helped the world turn a blind eye to brutal population control programs for the past five decades. He was exposed repeatedly by Julian Simon, an economist, who rightly predicted that with population increases, production would also increase and commodity prices would go down. Simon believed human ingenuity could resolve resource scarcity, and he was right. He also insisted that what populations need are robust civil and political rights regimes to enable individuals and enterprises to flourish.
Simon perhaps never gained popularity among conservatives because his science led him to be in favor of a liberal U.S. immigration regime.

2. The Daily Beast has a piece about Obama’s “science diplomat”, John Holdren, people say he is a genius, but they find it hard to explain why he espouses Ehrlich’s bad science, even after it has been repeatedly disproven. So much for making decisions based on scientific evidence. The U.S. is still funding population control programs, and is still advocating that other countries do it. We are currently involved in re-educating women in the developing world, and especially Africa, to have fewer children. Apparently, they have been living for millennia with the false belief that having many children will ensure a comfortable retirement for their future. We are informing them instead that having fewer children (2 children max) will ensure a better future for them because the few children they have will love them all the more when in their old age they have to support them by themselves without the help of other siblings.

3. In this week’s Friday Fax, Susan Yoshihara looks at the profound instability created in China by the one-child policy. According to Yoshihara the changes to the one child policy that are in the works are too little too late. Not only is an economic and humanitarian disaster already unfolding, the one-child policy has actually become a cultural norm so engrained in the chinese way of life, that few chinese couples are even interested in having more than one child, preferably male. This is the kind of social engineering that U.S. family planning policies want to achieve in Africa. It is also the kind of norm that European countries are actively trying to fight, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, with little success.

After decades of population control programs to avert a seemingly inevitable population Armageddon, the people and institutions that are primarily responsible for the false alarmism are on their way out. While some at the United Nations, UNFPA, USAID and the Obama administration still cling to their condoms and bad science under the pseudonym “family planning program” or the oxymoron “reproductive rights” ( it never has to do with women choosing how many children to have and always with USAID telling women not to have any more children), economists and demographers are all agreed that the problem the world is facing is population aging and population decline – caused by human beings. Unfortunately, it will takes  decades, and maybe centuries to re-trace the trail of misery and ignorance they have left.

The Future of China

 Long, Slow, Lingering Decline

China’s one-child policy is going to devastate that country more than any other ill-conceived utopian folly.  The grim harvest has just commenced.  The Middle Kingdom has condemned itself to a long, slow lingering decline, as its social fabric rots away.  

Some of the poisonous fruits include:

• A growing hatred of the government for its stupidity and folly and the damage, pain, and suffering it has inflicted upon its people.
• A sense of being betrayed by the government.
• Gender imbalance, leaving men without any prospect of marriage and children.
• Labour shortages looming.
• Depression amongst the aged.
• Financial hardship.
• Ever more intrusive state bureaucracy.

The piece below was originally published in the Washington Post, and republished in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Why one child is simply not enough

Xu Min, 53, and his wife lost their 23-year-old son in a car accident last September. Many such bereaved parents are physically too old to conceive again, and most experience depression and struggle financially to support themselves in old age. Photo: Washington Post/William Wan

Panjin: It’s been 11 months, and Xu Min still rarely leaves the house.  He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old last September.  But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Mr Xu, 53, blames the Chinese government.

Painful memories: Baby picture of Xu Zijie. Photo: Washington Post

China told the couple they could only have one child and threatened to take away everything if they did not listen. They were good citizens, he said, ”so for 20 years, we put our whole future and hope into our son”.  Now, they have no one to support them in old age. But even more crushing, Mr Xu said, is they have nothing to live for.

Since the death of his son, the only comfort Xu Min has found has been online forums where other bereaved parents of only children connect with one another. Photo: Washington Post/William Wan

For more than three decades, debate has raged over China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in population growth.  It has reshaped Chinese society – with birth rates plunging from 4.77 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.64 in 2011, according to United Nations estimates – and created the world’s most imbalanced gender ratio, with baby boys far outnumbering girls.

Human rights groups have exposed forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilisations, practices banned in theory by the government. Officials are increasingly deliberating whether the long-term economic costs of the policy – including a looming labour shortage – now outweigh the benefits. The government announced last weekend that it is studying possible ways to relax the one-child policy in coming years, state media report.

Largely ignored, however, is a quiet devastation left in the policy’s wake: childless parents.

A parent’s worst nightmare in any country, the deaths of children in China are even more painful because of the cultural importance of descendents, increasing financial pressures on the elderly and the legal limits on bearing additional offspring.  Few reliable numbers exist on such grieving parents. But one study at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that there are already more than one million parents who have lost their only child, a number expected to rise rapidly.

Many such parents are too old to conceive again, and some say they regret not pushing for a second child when they could have, even if it would have meant losing their jobs and getting hit with overwhelming fines.  Parents who have lost children describe lives of emptiness and a depression so deep that some thought about suicide.  Almost all characterise their child’s death as a crippling financial blow because of how strongly China’s elderly tend to depend on their children to supplement modest government pensions.

Many note bitterly the enormous resources the government has plowed into one-child enforcement, creating an entire new wing of bureaucracy down to the township level.  The government collects steep fines from offenders, each year estimated to be in the billions, although the precise amount is kept secret. Yet, the parents complain, it wasn’t until 2007 that China began to disburse small sums as compensation to families whose only child had died.

Mr Xu and his wife rarely leave their cramped apartment for fear strangers will bring up the topic of children.  They have tapered off contact with family and friends, finding their pity just as painful. Some friends  suggested they pretend their son, Xu Zijie, had moved abroad or was too busy to visit. Others seemed to avoid them.  ”They view us as bad fortune and worry our bad luck will transfer to them. I can’t say I blame them,” Mr Xu said.
Washington Post

Hot Potatoes

NYU Drops Chinese Human Rights Defender for Pro-life Stance

Posted on | July 10, 2013 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

The Daily Beast reports that supporters of the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng are accusing New York University (NYU) of booting the activist unfairly due to his pro-life and pro-family views. Those views along with criticism of the Chinese regime’s one-child per family policy and the US State Department, which only begrudgingly allowed him to escape China and work at NYU, may complicate the opening NYU’s new Shanghai campus.

The school thwarted his receiving a Congressional Gold Medal and even blocked his testimony before a Congressional hearing, they charge, through ever-present minders which the school has assigned to Chen since he escaped China.
 NYU denies it all and says that pro-life and pro-family supporters like Rep. Chris Smith are leading Chen astray, dragging him into anti-China, anti-State Department politics. They say this will make it harder for him to return to China and secure the release of his family, including a nephew who is being tortured after his arrest subsequent to Chen’s departure.

Chen must vacate his NYU dorm by 15 July and apparently has a book deal and some funding from a “wealthy democratic donor,” according to the Daily Beast. 

The case is a vivid depiction of the disarray and deepening divisiveness in human rights over just the last 20 years. Once a cause celebre of both right and left, political human rights dissidents, and civil and political human rights in general, are now viewed as competitors to ever-new and more controversial social “rights” such as abortion.

Regardless of what NYU or the US State Department think of pro-life and pro-family advocates who support Chen, his contention that forced abortions are human rights violations remains and remains uncontroverted

Riddled with Corruption

 China Inc.

China is a corrupt country.  The ordinary Chinese citizen knows it.  Over the past five years the internet has been used as a vehicle to expose the corruption of Chinese government officials and functionaries.  The word is out.  The response of the Chinese government has been to attempt more stringent censorship of its own citizens.  A government that will not allow its citizens to speak freely is a government riddled with fear.  It fears the truth. 

To be fair, the Chinese government has attempted to crack down on the corrupt activities of government functionaries and officials.  But one suspects that the crackdown is more driven out of political opportunism: it presents an easy way to get rid of a political opponent, rather than a consistent fundamental drive for universal ethical standards.  China is a country where virtually everyone can be considered a lawbreaker at the whim of the state.
  It is only the state turning a blind eye which allows individuals to go into business to make profits and increase their wealth.  Should the individual fall foul of the state, there is a raft of laws, rules, and regulations which can be quoted from the statute books to indict the individual.  Permits to be in business can be revoked.  Property can be confiscated whimsically.  Consequently, prosecutions and indictments can be politically motivated.  

Therefore, anyone going into China to conduct business needs to be careful and wary.  When the melamine scandal eructated Fonterra found out that Chinese business partners and employees can be corrupt.  But Fonterra was in favour at court, so it was able to work through the problems and escape prosecution.  But smaller businesses cannot.  There are accounts out of Australia that Australian companies doing business in China have had staff indicted for corruption and subsequently imprisoned.  The charges and indictments had all the hallmarks of vindictive action from local officials and competitors, who were demanding bribes and commercial secrets and protection money. 

We have a recent account of a New Zealander who was involved in business in China, where businesses in that country were manufacturing components for his products in New Zealand.  On a business trip he got into a scuffle in a restaurant which turned into a nasty fight.  One of his assailants died and he was put into prison for five years for manslaughter.  This, from Stuff:

A Kapiti businessman locked up for four years in a Chinese jail has told of the “cruel” conditions he endured, including torture, beatings and forced labour.  Danny Cancian, now 46, was sentenced to five years’ jail for manslaughter after fatally kicking a man during a restaurant fight in 2008. He served four years of that sentence, most of it in Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China. 

The conditions he endured in jail tell us a great deal about China.  The way a country treats its prisoners and its criminals tells you a good deal about its culture and predominant philosophies and its dominant religion.
For all that time, he says he was unable to exercise, was kept in a cell with at least 18 other prisoners and subjected to violent discipline and solitary confinement.

He learnt quickly the horrors of isolation after a scuffle with a guard early in his sentence. “All the police came running in. They Tasered me and they beat me. Then I was put in isolation for two weeks.” Isolation was a three-by-one-metre cell with a hole in the floor for a toilet. From seven in the morning, he would sit there, arms and legs folded, unable to move.

“At nine o’clock they let you sleep, but then they wake you every 20 minutes.” When not in solitary confinement, he spent his days forced to work in a factory, making earphones for airlines.”Every morning at 5am they would march us all to the factory and at 7pm we would come back. If you don’t work you’ll get beaten, Tasered and pepper-sprayed and put in isolation. It gives me a lot of nightmares just thinking about what I went through.”. . . .

He has since told his story on YouTube, using handwritten placards that tell a tale of what he calls the real China. The placards include the words forced labour, long hours, beatings, Tasering, hunger, torture, sleep deprivation, pepper spray, no religion, little contact with family, chemical testing on prisoners, no human rights, suicide and death.

 The real China.  Not so, according to the Chinese Embassy, which issued this anodyne statement in response:

A spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in Wellington said: “The issue of basic rights for inmates is an important component of overall human rights in China. China has joined international human rights conventions that require signatory nations to fulfil relevant obligations that include the protection of rights for inmates.”

In the light of those requirements to which China has officially bound itself, will the Chinese government be investigating  Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China?  Will heads roll?  Or will bribes be exchanged?  Or will putting signatures on human rights conventions be as meaningful as all Chinese official signatures on agreements and pieces of paper: compliance is discretionary?  Now if a senior Chinese government official were to have it it in for some petty officials in Guangdong and wanted to make a point, then we may see an investigation and compliance.  But until then, not so much.

It’s the difference between a government above the law, or subject to the law.  It’s the difference between implicit totalitarianism and limited government.  It’s the difference between a people believing that the law is king versus the king above the law.  It’s the difference between a nation believing itself to be under the Living God versus a nation believing the nation itself is a god.  That, above all else, is why the Chinese government and Chinese governance is riddled with corruption.  That is why, increasingly, the same patterns are emerging in the West. 

Losing Face

Chinese Intimidation Brings Shame

In recent days the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other media companies claim to have been subject to cyber-attacks originating from China.  The theory is that the Chinese government takes an aggressive approach to Western media articles that are critical of the Chinese government. 

The hacking is directed to the e-mail accounts of journalists in an attempt to find their sources and those to whom they have been talking.  If so–the cyber-world is murky secretive, murky place–the attempt amounts to a deliberate attempt to silence critics of the regime in China and cut off negative news stories about the government. 

The Chinese government officially rejects such allegations as ridiculous, claiming that Chinas too has been subject to cyber-attacks.  However, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and now Twitter have all reported coming under overt cyber-attacks.   This from the NZ Herald:

Earlier, the New York Times said it had faced repeated hacking attacks as it prepared a story tracing the hidden riches of the family of Wen Jiabao, the country’s Premier.  The revelations came just weeks after Chinese authorities forced a New York Times reporter to leave the country. Two months after the paper’s Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, authored the account of the billions amassed by Wen’s relatives, Beijing refused to renew a visa for his colleague Chris Buckley.

Ultimately, such behaviour by the Chinese government results in a significant loss of face.  It degrades the Chinese government in the eyes of other peoples.  Such actions only serve to offer proof of the graft, corruption and simony of Chinese leaders.

The attacks on the New York Times first came to light when the story on the Wen family’s finances, which used public records to estimate that the Premier’s relatives “have controlled assets worth at least US$2.7 billion [$3.2 billion]”, was published on October 25. Warned of “consequences” for its investigation, the paper asked AT&T, the telecoms firm which monitors its computer network, to keep an eye out for unusual activity. AT&T detected hacking activity the day the article went up on the New York Times website.

A nation built upon “fragrant grease” will always end up sliding back into the swamp.  

Old Friends

Living With the Dragon

New Zealand’s relationship to China provides an interesting case study with lots of fascinating permutations. 

Here are some of the issues and  paradoxes which drive the permutations:

• China is in our geographical region which means it is a logical trading partner for New Zealand (given our geographical isolation from the rest of the world.  Last time we checked there was not much trade going on with Antarctica.)
• China is the most populous nation upon the globe, with a rapidly emerging, higher spending middle class which is developing tastes for Western foods and high protein product.  It is also a dirty food producer.  New Zealand’s industrial and productive strength is clean food production.  But it will be small and insignificant in the longer time frame, only ever capable of meeting an infinitesimal portion of China’s growing food demand.  
• China is an authoritarian country, with an abysmal record of human rights.  It is run by oppressive, xenophobic, plutocratic, and corrupt governments–at all levels (national, regional, and local).  Commerce is conducted only by means of oleaginous fragrant grease.  Chinese leaders hate dissent.  The culture as a whole hates to lose face and be subject to public shame or ridicule.  All trade and business contacts with China risk contamination by Chinese oppressive and corrupt tactics. 
• Chinese culture remains strong and deeply rooted.  New Zealand’s cultural tradition is fragmented and thin: its people philosophically and culturally rootless.  For decades it has denied and derided its Western cultural heritage.  Its schools pride themselves on teaching nothing–so wedded have the prevailing philosophies of education become to neo-Marxism and post-modernism.  New Zealand exists in a cultural vacuum.  It stands for very little and falls for just about anything.  
• Chinese military power will only grow to where it will become the dominant military power on the globe.  There is simply no way New Zealand could ever defend itself successfully against Chinese attack.  Moreover, the Chinese government already has pressured New Zealand to triangulate with China in foreign affairs (over such issues as Tibet and the Dalai Lama) where China has attempted to pressure New Zealand to adopt the Chinese government position on issues.  

The only way forward for New Zealand is to make itself three things to China:

Politically neutral.  We need progressively to shed our alliances with other nations so that we can genuinely front China as a neutral, independent nation which refuses to be drawn into geo-political alliances.

High integrity trader.  Our trade with China must be scrupulously driven by the rules of commercial law with zero tolerance for breach of our own trade standards.  The New Zealand trade marks (e.g. quality certifications) need to be maintained rigorously with substantial penalties for any New Zealand business which violates or breaches standards. 

Long term focused, with clearly espoused, unbendable principles and integrity.  Culturally, the Chinese appreciate “old friends” and longer term relationships.  Unfortunately, these tend to operate within the Chinese culture as a means of control.  All too readily the “old friends” category operates more as a patronage system akin to the Mafiosi modus operandi.

Of these three necessary pre-requisites, the only one which has both skeleton and muscle at present is the second: we are a high integrity trader.  New Zealand quality assurance has meaning and substance and it is generally well-supported in New Zealand.

When it comes to political neutrality and the necessary moral integrity to avoid being captured and corrupted by the “old friends” category, however, we are hopelessly at sea.  New Zealand is too riven by party politics to have stable principles and consistent integrity to maintain a consistent longer term relationship.  Culturally New Zealand is too insecure, to thin, too rootless, we fear.  Our political neutrality is already compromised due to our military alliances with the United States and Nato.

Yet the window of opportunity remains open–at least for the present.  We have an excellent free trade agreement with China, which sets the frame for high-integrity trading.  We clearly produce what China increasingly demands and requires.  Chinese manufactures are increasingly penetrating our economy.  The Chinese are allowing our dairy industry to invest in China, even as they are investing in our dairy industry in New Zealand.  All of this bodes well–as far as it goes.

But what of the Chinese government’s latent hostility towards the Christian faith?  Tactically, the best thing is to persuade the Chinese authorities that Chinese Christians represent no threat to China, any more than they represent a threat to the United States, to Brazil, or to South Korea.  Such things can probably best be communicated within the bounds of a mutually respectful, high integrity relationship, rather than through one government hectoring another. 

Letter From China

 When Humour is Forbidden Strange Things Happen

We are all aware that The Onion plays it straight–at least as far as its face is concerned.  It recently awarded the new Korean Dictator the appellation “Sexist Man Alive”.  Read the spread here.

The kicker is at the end of the article, where we read: “UPDATE: For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.”

True.  The People’s Daily, which can never play it straight, illustrates how a steady diet of propaganda will eventually tie the bowels up in knots.  It assumed The Onion was playing right back down the wicket and decided to produce a stunning cover drive to the boundary.   It produced its own extensive spread of Kim Jong-Un cultish adoration, with not a funny bone in sight.

Stalin and His Chinese Disciple

Rivers of Blood

The twentieth century delivered five case studies in the politics of militant atheism: the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, Communist China, Cuba, North Korea, and Cambodia.  All were remarkably similar in their totalitarian attempts to stamp out the Christian faith.

Stalin’s record of what happens when militant atheism gains control is notorious and well-known.  These days Communist China and the tyranny of Mao Tse Tung is generally given a free pass.  Yet the evidential record shows that Mao was every bit as vicious and hateful to Christians and the Christian Church as Stalin.

A recent biography has traced Mao through the eyes of Stalin and the Soviet Union.  Documentary materials of the Soviet state are now accessible to scholars in Russia.  The truths can be unveiled.
  A sobering  picture of Mao emerges in the book, Mao: the Real Story.  [Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (London: Simon & Schuster,  2012)]  which reveals Mao through his relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. A book review written by Frank Kikotter made the following observations.

Firstly, from the beginning Mao faithfully followed the example of Stalin in the Soviet Union and sought to model China upon Stalin’s policies and ideology.

. . .  once the red flag fluttered over Beijing in 1949, Mao wasted no time in imposing a harsh communist order modeled on the USSR. As the authors point out, “he looked upon Stalin as his teacher and the Soviet Union, which inspired fear throughout the world, as a model to imitate.” Mao was a Stalinist attracted to the elimination of private property, all-pervasive controls on the lives of ordinary people, an unlimited cult of the leader, and huge expenditures on the military.

Secondly, Mao’s break with the Soviet Union was provoked by Khrushchev’s rejection of Stalin after the latter’s death.

While the Soviets took down their portraits and statues of Stalin, in China he remained officially in favor for decades after his death in 1953. Until a few years ago the tyrant’s face could still be seen on the walls of bookshops and classrooms, painted in warm tones. He is revered in China to this day, his reputation defended by an army of fierce censors.

Thirdly, Mao imitated Stalin’s reign of terror and death.

Overall, by the authors’ estimate, Mao was responsible for the deaths of some 40 million of his countrymen. During the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1962, they reckon that 30 to 45 million people died, “many along the roads, famished and emaciated.” Over a million perished during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, and here too the authors have no doubt who was responsible: “He was the chief culprit of the senseless and merciless mass terror.”

To this day most Chinese revere Mao but only because the truth is systematically hidden from them.  A good place to start would be to teach them the truth about Stalin.  Then, upon realising that Mao was Stalin’s faithful disciple, they may be able to open their hearts and minds to the truth.

In the meantime, the object lesson for us in the West is clear.  Whenever atheists have gained power, blood has flown down the gutters in an unceasing flood. 

Letter From America (About China)

Shock Move: China Calls for End to Forced Abortions After International Outcry

Horrific stories about forced abortion are common in China. The nation’s controversial one-child policy has traditionally been upheld by savagely forcing women to abort their babies if, indeed, they become pregnant after already having a child.

With the rest of the world learning more about the horror, international pressure has mounted for the country’s leaders to abandon the controversial policy. Now, in a surprising move, Chinese officials are finally calling for an end to the practice.

The Christian Post is reporting that China’s Population and Family Planning Commission has ordered that all forced abortions related to the nation’s one-child policy be ceased — a move that is being heralded as a step in the right direction when it comes to human rights. The move comes after one story, in particular, went viral in June.

Earlier this summer, Feng Jianmei, a Chinese woman who was forced to abort her child, made international headlines. Her story may very well be the catalyst that led the nation to re-consider its stance. As TheBlaze’s Tiffany Gabbay reported, Jianmei was savagely beaten by family planning officials, dragged into a vehicle, and taken to an undisclosed location where she was forced to undergo an abortion. The woman was seven months pregnant at the time. . . .

The government’s new pledge to stop the practice of forced abortion is being met by human rights advocates as a positive development. Chai Ling, founder of the group All Girls Allowed, an organization fighting gendercide in China, called the move “awesome progress.” . . .

All Girls Allowed confirmed with the family planning office in Chongqing that the order to end forced abortions, particularly late-term abortions, and sterilization was issued on Aug. 30. The order came from the Population and Family Planning Commission in Beijing.

In July, during the commission’s semiannual meeting, Minister Wang Xia had called upon policy enforcers to “absolutely stop performing late-stage abortions,“ saying they should only ”guide people to do family planning voluntarily,” according to All Girls Allowed.
“This contrasts starkly with earlier family planning statements in China, which have called for mandatory abortion as a ‘remedial measure’ and encouraged enforcers to ‘spare no effort’ in terminating the pregnancies of women who lacked birth permits,” said the human rights group.

Despite the advance, abortions will likely continue in China, a nation that terminates 13 million pregnancies each year. The government still has other mechanisms to keep families from growing. Huge fines for additional children is one of the methods that is used to control the population, The Christian Post reports.

In one example, Xiao Zheng and Xiao Guo fined $11,000 — several times the couple’s annual income — after they had their second child. Considering these constraints and the recent move to end forced abortions, which were previously on the books in 18 of the nation’s 31 provinces, it will be interesting to see what China does next.

Hat Tip: The Blaze

Behold Our Future

Rampant Infanticide in China

The following piece has been posted on The Blaze:

Accuracy in Media‘s investigative video team put together a fascinating video discussion with Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF). The non-partisan, international coalition works to prevent forced abortion and human trafficking in China.

During her sit-down interview, Littlejohn discussed China’s infamous one-child policy, sterilizations, forced abortion and infanticide. While these elements are troubling, they are a part of daily life for Chinese men and women forced to live under sometimes brutal circumstances. . . .
Read the complete article, here.

When human beings turn away from the Living God, ceasing to believe He is the author and sustainer of every human life, and that He has created every human being in His image, belief in something fills the vacuum.  Nine times out to ten that “something” is the state.  See where it has led in China–to brutish, ignorant, barbaric tyranny.  Remember, however, the West is separated from China by degree, not kind.

Charity Begins At Home

China’s War Against Families

China’s One Child policy has been hailed by an effete liberal West as an intelligent and progressive response to population control.  In reality it represents a brutal destruction of individual and family life.  It also is beginning to tear the fabric of Chinese society apart.  Genuine Chinese patriots understand that an ancient demon that has been loosed upon the Middle Kingdom. 

One such patriot, Jing Zhang comments upon the case of blind Chen Guangcheng, who has been actively protesting the One Child regime, and upon the tyrannical policy in general.

China’s War on Baby Girls

Jing Zhang
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 
May 2, 2012 4:00

The blind Chinese human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from house arrest on April 22 and may be under the protection of the U.S. Embassy, was initially detained for exposing the massive abuse of Chinese women under China’s one-child policy. His documentation of forced sterilizations and abortions landed him in jail for four years, followed by a year and a half of house arrest.

His daring escape has now triggered renewed attacks on organizations engaged in helping Chinese women keep and feed their infants. Since April 28, the Family Planning Commission of Susong County in China’s Anhui province has been harassing families of pregnant women and infants who have received aid from a charity that helps rural families raise infant girls. Often the girl is a second child, in violation of China’s one-child policy.

PRC government agents have issued heavy fines to families for over-quota births and have threatened forced abortion for mothers with “illegal” pregnancies. Li Bin, the former chairman of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, is the current governor of Anhui province.

The offending charity is the Rural Chinese Infant Assistance Program, which has grown in response to the severe gender imbalance among newborns. Allowed only one child, many parents abort their female children or stop trying to conceive after the birth of a boy. The Infant Assistance Program aims to elevate the cultural value of infant girls through direct aid, without any conditions, to their families. Several hundred families have benefited in Susong County alone. Rural families have welcomed the program enthusiastically.

Since Chen Guangcheng’s escape, the high-profile persecution initiated by the Susong Family Planning Commission has created panic among benefiting families and their communities. Many lives are directly threatened. Government agents have announced that any family with an “illegal” birth will face a fine of 50,000 yuan ($7,700, about ten times China’s annual per capita income). Any woman found to be pregnant “illegally” — without a birth permit — will face a forced abortion.

Family Planning agents have also threatened to take action against volunteers and employees of the Infant Assistance Program if they do not cooperate with the authorities by turning over all material related to the program.

In the 30 years of the brutal one-child policy, hundreds of millions of infants have been killed. This has led to serious social problems that are now obvious — not only the gender imbalance but also the aging of the general population. Regardless, the PRC government forges ahead with its notoriously inhumane policy.
The Susong Family Planning Commission’s persecution of the Infant Assistance Program should outrage observers in China and abroad.

The organization I head, Women’s Rights in China, demands that the Susong Family Planning Commission immediately stop all harassment of the Infant Assistance Program; cease threats and fines against volunteers and families who are beneficiaries; and treat “Harmonious Society and People First” as a principle and not just a Party slogan. We call on Family Planning agents to listen to their own consciences and to heed the outcry from the Chinese and international public.

As long as the Susong Family Planning Commission continues to persecute the Infant Assistance Program’s volunteers, pregnant women, and the families of baby girls, Women’s Rights in China will raise its voice to condemn it in the media and to take legal action against all responsible officials.

— Jing Zhang is president of Women’s Rights in China. She suffered five years in prison for her belief in freedom and democracy. After leaving China, she spent 20 years building a career as a newspaper editor in Hong Kong and the United States. She founded Women’s Rights in China in 2007. 

Letter From Australia (About China)

Raw Power and Brute Force

John Garnaut has written an insightful piece in the Sydney Morning Herald describing the power struggle taking place within the Communist Party in China.  The whole article is worth a careful reading.  We endeavour to summarise it below:

Seismic shift

March 31, 2012The battle between China’s Maoist past and a more democratic future is laid bare in the 30-year-old family feud that has reshaped the nation’s political landscape.

If Premier Wen Jiabao is ”China’s greatest actor”, as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final press conference at the National People’s Congress earlier this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the party’s history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now disgraced Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai. In doing so, Wen wreaked his revenge on a family that had opposed him . . .  countless times.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing – the municipality until this month headed by the charismatic Bo – Wen foreshadowed Bo’s political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China’s political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. . . . When Bo failed to show humility or contrition to his colleagues in Beijing, it seems, his legion enemies took the opportunity to strike him down.

But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen went on to define Bo as the man who wanted to repudiate China’s long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo’s legacy as a choice between urgent political reform and ”such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution”, bringing to a head a 30-year battle for two vastly different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs.

Bo Xilai has wanted to turn China back to the highly centralised command-and-control past.   Wen Jiabao has tried to move China into a decentralised, less state-controlled direction.  Both have spent their careers deep within the belly of the Communist party, plotting their schemes and building their support base.  Bo has now been politically banished; the Wen faction appears in control.  It may, however, not last. 

The problem is that Communist China has only the apparatus of raw power.  It has no ideology of the rule of law, no constitution which limits the rule of government.  Wen Jiabao has little to work with, apart from the hunger for development and economic progress amidst the people. 

Wen was speaking against a background where China is rising and challenging Western supremacy and yet beset by a crisis of identity, legitimacy and direction. The contest of ideas, politics and patronage is climaxing ahead of a wholesale leadership transition that will start to unfold at the party’s five-yearly Congress in October. This transition is as globally consequential as the US elections that will immediately follow. But for the first time it is taking place without the guiding hand of the republic’s founding fathers. And, unlike the world’s established democracies, China has no constitutional bottom line, no elections and no independent judiciary.

His rival, Bo Xilai has built his power base in the city of  Chongqing.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favour of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilise political and financial resources during his 4½-year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing.

He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia – together with unco-operative officials, lawyers and entrepreneurs – and rebuilding a state-centred city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing ”red songs” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

At the same time, China’s netizens were amazed to learn that Bo’s favourite son, Bo Guagua, drives a red Ferrari, and asked how the family could afford to educate him at Oxford and then Harvard.

It’s all about power and control.  Evoking Communist ideology is a means to consolidate a power base.  One’s personal wealth has nothing to do with it–or, so Communist elites always tell themselves.   Wen, in the meantime, has started publicly to raise criticism of the bloody and destructive Cultural Revolution:

By raising the spectre of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has opened a crack in the vault of Communist Party history: that great black box that conceals the struggles, brutality, partial truths and outright fabrications upon which China has built its economic and social transformation. Beneath his carefully layered comments is a profound challenge to the uncompromising manner in which the Chinese Communist Party has always gone about its business.

It remains to be seen whether Wen Jiabao will succeed.  The fundamental irony he faces is that the purging of his enemies and pushing China to a more free society has to occur in a vacuum of law, ideology, tradition, or a doctrine of a limited state and personal freedom.  His only resource is the use of raw state power.  Mao used to say that (state) power grew out of the barrel of a gun.  It’s hard to see how such raw power can destroy itself by withering away under the rule of law.  Modern China has never known any other way of operating apart from brute force.

Wen Jiabao sees Bo’s downfall as a pivotal opportunity to pin his reformist colours high while the party is too divided to rein him in. He is reaching out to the Chinese public because the party is losing its monopoly on truth and internal roads to reform have long been blocked. Ironically, he is doing so by leading the public purging of a victim who has no hope of transparent justice, because the party to which he has devoted his life has never known any other way.

John Garnaut is writing a book on the princelings who are shaping China’s future. A longer version of this story appears online in Foreign Policy magazine (foreignpolicy.com).

It’s a Girl, Part II

Gendercide

Ram Mashru

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women.
The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

Hat Tip: The Independent.

It’s a Girl!

The Three Most Deadly Words in the Language

Justin Taylor has posted the following:

A new documentary, It’s a Girl! The Three Deadliest Words in the World, explores the systematic gendercide taking place in India, China, and other areas of South Asia.

Ram Mushru, reviewing the film the Independent, writes:  “The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.” That line makes me think of Romans 1:32: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things [like heartless, ruthless murder—see vv. 29-31] deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

You can watch it here:

We are thankful for the expose, the disgust, and the opposition. May it grow to an unstoppable crescendo. But don’t expect much support from feminists and liberals. How can they oppose in India and China and South Asia what they promote in their own back yards as a human right?