穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

This smog alert, closing Beijing schools and businesses, is pretty major, no?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/beijing-smog-red-alert-issued-schools-and-businesses-to-completely-shut-down-as-chinese-capital-a6763286.html

dont' think the smog is the worst that beijing has ever seen but mayeb the response is the first time they've done something like this?

Kind of a crazy story, although I think the idea that this is some kind of commentary on the "national character" is the wrong way to look at it:

http://chublicopinion.com/2015/12/06/the-unbearable-coldness-of-being-chinese/

good read

twitter is all: pu zhiqiang trial w smiley face hired thugs slapping reporters / "worse than the cultural revolution" repression of uighur communities / choking air pollution / and a good amount of fake island/territorial dispute stuff.
leaving tomorrow to go job hunting in gz.

Pu Zhiqiang trial is bleak AF, as is Uighur situation. Friend's article on her travels in Xinjiang made it into the best NZ essays 2015 book.

G'luck with the job hunt. If you're at a loose end tomorrow evening, I'm v.vaguely doing a thing w/some local music friends at Loft345:
http://www.douban.com/event/25948581/

thank you! looking forward to getting back to guangzhou. are you there for the next little while?

i should be permanently relocating in mid to late-january. my girlfriend is going to be studying at south china normal university.

Leaving on the 27th, sadly. Finish up at 广外 on Christmas day ... would have liked a month to travel/kick back, but my partner's been having a rough time in NZ and wanted me back ASAP after a year away.

SCNU, sweet! As much as I've loved being up by the leafy green vistas of Baiyun shan, 25min walk to the closest metro through random caryard alleys then 20-stop journeys has meant I haven't always gotten out as much as I meant.

NK orders workers in China back home http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=13647

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/18/north-korean-moranbong-anti-american-lyrics

The source said that Chinese censors had not approved of references to the United States an “ambitious wolf”, and lyrics which glorified the 1950-53 Korean War.

(but it was a chinese korean war song) https://adamcathcart.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/japanese-devils-and-american-wolves.pdf

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35144579 industrial explosions, accidents/craziness in shenzhen

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/world/asia/journalist-says-china-may-expel-her-for-article-on-uighurs.html

curious if the uighur problem is much worse than even the western media has portrayed it but china has done a good job keeping a lid on it. (i wonder the same thing about iran's often restive ethnic minorities.)

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/travel-12222015110252.html

i would say it's not MUCH worse because it's been portrayed as a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing. the western media probably hasn't come close to describing the full extent of the violence and oppression of non-han ethnic groups in xinjiang, just the day to day disruption of normal life, the number of people in detention, travel bans, whatever. most of it is happening in rural southern xinjiang, far away from the prying eyes of foreign journalists, or any journalists. maybe the western media focuses too much on the easiest issues to report, which are those connected to the anti-terror strike hard campaign.

Also, the west has a tendency to think that it's only bad for the Tibetans, so it can't be that bad for anyone else. Otherwise, why would Beastie Boys not say so?

i guess with the tibetan situation you do have a relatively chilled out leader-in-exile, no terrorism as we think of it in the west, some violent riots and self-immolations confined to tibet itself. and it might be fair to say that tibetan leaders are often not calling for national liberation but human rights, religious freedoms.

but with the uighur situation, you have terrorism inside xinjiang and attacks outside of xinjiang. it's hard to separate the various forces at play, the various overseas uighur groups, the groups inside xinjiang agitating for national liberation, radical islamist groups, local groups not connected to any particular ideology but motivated by local oppression. you have the world uyghur congress being funded by the u.s. government, but east turkestan islamic movement sending fighters to syria, and both groups with basically the same aim of national liberation. it's hard to sort out who deserves our sympathy. it's not possible to put it all on chinese state oppression and economic disparity in the region, as some western journalists are quick to do. it's a great big mess.

I think it mostly has to do with western hippies thinking of Tibet as Xanadu, and Buddhism being much more chic than Islam.

the story of bookstore / publishing company employees disappearing is frightening.

the latest, went missing from hong kong, called his wife from a shenzhen number: http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jan/02/fifth-man-working-for-publishers-critical-of-chinese-government-goes-missing and the others include a hong kong-based swedish national, the owner of a publishing house, who went missing while in thailand + two that disappeared while in shenzhen + one in hk (i believe that's the total in 2015).

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1507002/shenzhen-court-gives-hong-kong-publisher-yiu-man-tin-10-year-prison more than a year ago... yao wentian was going to publish a book critical of xi jinping and got 10 years in prison for carrying paint across the border.

from what i've seen these books are ridiculous gossip rag material, churned out by the dozen every year, full of basic factual errors. they're of interest to older people that aren't accessing twitter by vpn or reading taiwan or overseas news sites. these people, i have to guess, basically support the party line but like reading about xi jinping fucking random folk singers in the 70s.

http://i.imgur.com/wgGXsjq.jpg

http://news.ifeng.com/a/20160104/46936566_0.shtml

these people, i have to guess, basically support the party line

Interesting. The whole thing seems kind of scary to me. So you're saying they're down with the party based on your reading the books, or...?

It's kind of odd to me that XI would take gossip so seriously. I have to wonder, from a perspective of game theory or whatever, which is actually the more effective way to quash dissent -- by Xi/Putin-style takedowns of critical journalists, or by GWB/Blair-style wall of bullshit to cover the dissent?

this is anecdotal or mostly conjecture, i guess but the people buying the books are
-- from the mainland
-- born before the start of reform and opening
-- follow party politics to some extent
very likely to agree with the overall aims of the party and be shy to criticize the people that ended the hundred years of humiliation, etc.

these books are mostly run of the mill gossip rather than critiques of the system, say, one of the more common counter-party viewpoints in china, whether far left or mild liberal or the fliers you get in long distance bus terminal lots from fringe religious groups. the readers of these books are not interested in overthrowing the party as much as they're interested in reading about, like, jiang zemin's mistresses. (from what i've seen!) like, the books are not criticizing xi's foreign policy or heavyhanded censorship of the internet but basically saying: he's a sleaze and the party's leadership especially at the local level is a bunch of whoring, boozing scumbags with a taste for quattroportes, 19 year old ktv girls and louis xiii.

i mean, everybody knows the party's leadership is a bunch of thugs and perverts. but they still support them! the party is extremely sensitive about their secrets. more than any other story, reporting on party leader finances received the most backlash directly from the top: bloomberg/nytimes were slapped with a great firewall block and had visas for reporters blocked (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/world/asia/reporter-for-reuters-wont-receive-china-visa.html / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/asia/times-reporter-in-china-is-forced-to-leave-over-visa-issue.html and For journalists working in China, there is no more sensitive subject than the wealth of the top leadership; it poses more potential problems than anything one could write about Tibet or Taiwan or human rights.: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-not-to-get-kicked-out-of-china).

Thanks. I'd heard that about the sensitivity to those issues and I guess it makes sense that most of the top party members are most concerned about protecting their own little fiefdoms. I don't want to sound like a China-hatin expat but it does seem like people here have a remarkable propensity for denial regarding the deeper issues in Chinese government etc.

Meters/bonwe shares have been suspended from trading after the CEO (China's 65th richest billionaire) disappeared. There's speculation that he might have been picked up in a corruption investigation but it's strange to see rich / influential people just plucked out of the air without explanation. Seems part of a wider trend though:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/12079283/Chinese-companies-warned-to-tell-investors-when-executives-go-missing.html

china is fucked up.

they even tore down that gold mao statue in henan.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35338484 --- Gui Minhai said he turned himself in after being on the run for 12 years over a drink-driving conviction. Mr Gui, a Swedish national, is one of five Hong Kong booksellers to go missing recently. --- glad this was resolved.

one of the remaining four has contacted his wife, who requested the police cease involvement. the other three, who knows?

Interesting article about Chinese foreign students in the US converting to Christianity:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/11/leave-china-study-in-america-find-jesus-chinese-christian-converts-at-american-universities/

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-mao-mango-cult-of-1968/

I guess this will come as a surprise to nobody, but an interesting tale nonetheless:

Hong Kong Bookseller Says He Was Detained by China
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/hong-kong-bookseller-lam-wing-kee.html

@dick_nixon
I asked Chou En-lai what he thought of the French Revolution. "Too soon to tell," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98RNh7rwyf8

what is it with chinese govt visions and shithouse videos

attempt :failed

it's informative!

i'm waiting for the han sanping-directed epic featuring huang xiaoming as li keqiang.

I wish they'd cover "want you back" but tie it into wanting the silk road back

REMEMBER ALL THE GOODS THAT WE TRADED PRIEST"

this is crazy if true

11 million+ Muslims in China will have their DNA & iris scans collected. If you’re a Muslim who lives outside of this region, you will need to report to the govt & provide your DNA. https://t.co/9xqhIR1c7p

— Yasmin Yonis (@YasminYonis) December 13, 2017

i'm reading from people who follow chinese politics that this has been going on for a very long time so interested to see how this plays out now that they're finally admitting to it

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Chinese-local-governments-rush-to-admit-fake-data

In Liaoning Province tax receipts and income from various fees were padded by 20-30% according to counties and cities during the period of 2011-2014. Inner Mongolia has said that a quarter of the fiscal revenue stated for 2016 were actually fake.

Fiscal revenue does not include proceedings from land sales. Therefore, it is considered a key indicator of the local government's true financial health.

"Chinese bureaucrats were promoted based on two figures -- GDP and tax revenue," according to Nie Huihua, a professor at Renmin University of China. Making fiscal revenue look better than they actually are, have always were important for aspiring bureaucrats looking to move up the ladder.

Recently, there has been a spike in similar cases. In December 2017 the National Audit Office announced that 10 cities and districts in Hunan, Yunnan and Jilin provinces and the direct-controlled city of Chongqing had overstated their fiscal revenues by a total of 1.5 billion yuan ($238 million).

...

Overall local government revenue growth slowed sharply to 5% in 2017 from 29% in 2011. Meanwhile, local government spending has continued growing at fast paces due to swelling social security spending.

The growth rates of regional government outlays surpassed those of revenue growth for the three straight years through 2017. Most local governments are struggling with serious fiscal strains.

In its desperate efforts to make up for revenue shortfalls, Liaoning went so far as to take such measures as collecting taxes for the following year and delaying tax refunds due to special tax breaks.

Local governments have piled on debt to fill budget gaps. Total local government debt reached 15 trillion yuan at the end of 2016, according to official statistics. But the International Monetary Fund has estimated the actual amount including off-the-book debts at 32 trillion yuan.

Most local governments cannot finance their spending without cash from Beijing. In many provinces, state subsidies provided to local governments exceed the taxes and fees they pay to the central government.

...

So much so that many internet commentators offered the same advice: "Admit inflating fiscal revenue and receive more subsidies from the central government."

it was admitted in 2015 too, faking data over the previous two years. i'll respond out of a sense of obligation to the thread.

i guess it's probably about taking more in conditional grants from the central government. also a response to a central government crackdown on inflated data and local governments going into debt. from my limited knowledge of the chinese taxation system, there are not really subsidies but some grants to equalize the provinces and shit. basically the provinces collect tax revenue and send it up and get it back in a system of transfer payments, like provincial governments collect most of the tax revenue (but can't really make tax policy or keep much of it, which is why there's a drive to develop or grab land because they make money doing that, one of the nontax revenues provincial governments bring in), send it to the central government and it's sent back down based on the central budget + revenue brought in by the province + cash to keep up with equality between the provinces. i dunno. there's definitely a pressure i think to send smooth lines up to the central government, because the promotion of local government leaders is tied to performance (see also falsified crime statistics?). maybe they want to make sure they take more conditional grants from the central government, too.

ya, the more i read about china's falsified and doctored numbers, the more it seems widespread -- from the agricultural period during mao to police reporting to pollution (apparently the're just moving factories around?)

it's kind of surreal

also this is an article from 2016 but pocket just recommended it right now:

https://www.economist.com/news/china/21712173-golf-footballyou-name-it-what-china-claims-have-invented

lol

well fuck

China plans to remove presidential term limits from its constitution, potentially allowing President Xi Jinping to stay on beyond his second term, which ends in 2023.

i didn't really expect this although the signs were there and... i recall saying as recently as like a week ago that it was improbable and the party needed a smooth post-xi transition to maintain legitimacy.