Different Stans

"Private Economy Contributes More Than 60% of China's GDP"

The founder of this chic Chinese restaurant chain in China has fled to an undisclosed location. Photo by Foodnut.

I don't cover China much, but some of the springs and dynamics that are true of all the communist regimes apply here, too, of course.

One of the memes I constantly object to is the notion that China is organizing its economic reform from the top down, "perestroika-style," while avoiding the messiness of Gorbachev's other program, "glasnost," which only brought down the whole system. For one, I don't think you can have one without the other, and for two, there is nothing wrong with bringing down the system -- and then people in fact don't realize that you really haven't done that anyway in these cases (see Russia, Ukraine).

One thing to take a close look at is how communism, or "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists like to call it, really works.

And I think that one thing we conclude from "really-existing socialism" is that it is, well, corrupt. I submit that this is a natural outcome of not only the communist ideology, but the socialist ideology.

In any event, "Life itself shows us," as Gorbachev himself use to say, that the corruption that develops inevitably even under "reform communism" in fact is responsible for the seeming "successes" of that "perestroika model".

Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the whole Bo Xilai case and all its works.

But today there was a particularly stark admission of this: 60% of the Chinese economy comes from a relative handful of rich families who are starting to flee the country.

You've heard of countries where half the GDP is made up of remittances -- here's a country, nominally communist with a controlled economy, where in fact more than half of the GDP is made up of rich families behaving like capitalists -- well, capitalists with the special privileges that communist systems with their nomenklatura lists give them -- you know, oligarchs. Oligarchy is merely another phase of communism.

"The private economy contributes more than 60 percent of China's GDP and it absorbs a majority of employees. So if private business owners emigrate with their capital, it would mean less investment in the domestic market, so fewer jobs would be created," Wang Huiyao, director of the Center for China and Globalization, told the state-run China Daily today.

The fleeing millionaires mainly made their money in real estate, foreign currency and deposits and stocks, among other fields, according to the report. They are mainly leaving Beijing, Shanghai and coastal provinces such as Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangsu. (Read more: BRICs Outpace U.S. in Millionaires)

So when China natters on about socialist or communism or human development or whatever it natters about at the UN, it's helpful to recall all this about their actual GDP's actual source, and where it is headed.

 

State Gets a Bit More Starchy on Turkmenistan

Dragon Oil rig in Caspian. Photo by Turkmenistan Golden Age 2012.

State Department officials are usually very circumspect when it comes to Turkmenistan, a gas-rich and freedom-poor authoritarian Central Asian nation on the Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan is far more closed than Uzbekistan -- there are hardly any human rights activists or opposition figures there. Hence virtually no one for lonely foreign officials to visit, when they might get a few hours free from their minders, and have nothing to do but rattle around in the huge white marble city in the "dictator chic" genre, with broad avenues and desert-dry air.

So that's why it's news when all of a sudden, in testimony to the US Congress, Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, whose statements are generally as bland as canned pears, suddenly puts the phrases "pipeline" and "human rights" and "transparency" all into one paragraph:

The recent signing of gas sales and purchase agreements between Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India enables the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline to move to the commercial phase. This project is one example of the potential Turkmenistan has to be a leader in the economic prosperity of the region. We encourage Turkmenistan to build clear and transparent mechanisms for investment in its country.

In order to realize its potential, Turkmenistan must make significant steps to fulfill its international obligations on human rights. The United States consistently raises concerns about respect for human rights at every appropriate opportunity and we have offered assistance to help advance space for civil society and building democratic systems.

That's exceptional, because in recent years, the US has been so eager to court the hard-to-get President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and line up some business with him, especially for American oil companies, that they have tended to keep any comments about human rights to carefully-choreographed private discussions. To be sure, this was a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, where officials can expect a little more questioning than usual, but still, the rhetoric seems more edgy than in the past.

So, why is this happening now?

Well, for one, the US has been persisting in trying to work with the Turkmens now for the more than six years Berdymukhamedov has been in power, and has precious little to show for it. If anything, despite finally installing a new ambassador after a five-year hiatus, holding special business exhibitions and promotions, offering help and training and educational opportunities, the Americans have at times been kicked in the teeth. Peace Corps members with visas and air tickets in hand have been suddenly delayed and gradually their numbers whittled down to little or nothing. Students ready to leave at the airport for exchange programs are pulled off programs.  Chevron and others are seemingly promised an offshore drilling permit, then never get any -- and they'd rather be onshore anyway. US officials work overtime trying to fix these situations up, and it's all kind of mysterious. Now why do the Turkmens do that? After all, we are paying them top dollar to use their country as a re-fueling station for planes bound to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal equipment.

What's up? Perhaps the "multi-vector policy" that rotates so widely from China to Iran to Qatar to Austria to Belarus to England and seems so affable with so many other countries with so many high-level meetings has its saw-toothed edge? Nothing shows you're independent like bashing America! The pudgy dictator has had 249 meetings with foreign dignitaries in the last year! Ok, 317. Alright, I don't know how many exactly but -- a lot, and somewhere in the miles of turgid Turkmen wire copy you can find this exact number.

So because they aren't getting anywhere despite being silent on human rights for all this time, perhaps US officials have decided that they should be a little more forward-leaning. It's a shame that human rights could be seen as a club in that respect, but that is how it's done.

There could be another reason -- Blake and others may be expecting increased NGO protests as the Asian Bank for Development takes the Turkmen-Afghanistan-Pakistan-Indian (TAPI) pipeline out for its road show this fall to various world capitals, in search of oil majors to help build the project and take on the financing and security headaches that will abound. So pre-emptively, so to speak, State has indicated that they realize there are human rights and "transparency" problems. That's for sure -- no one can really be sure just how much money Berdymukhamedov has his hands on -- and it all seems to come through his hands -- and how much he parts with to try to better his fellow citizens' lot -- as distinct from building lots of white palaces.

Nothing gets NGOs agitated like "the extractive industry" -- it easily exemplifies everything they hate about capitalism and commerce, and even if they are not anti-business, they can get behind concern for the environment which is never misplaced when it comes to drilling and pipelines.

Berdy also seems aware of this protest wave that may crest on his country, and talks up a good story about how pipelines under the sea are less dangerous than those above ground. I don't know how much people want to test those theories in a region that is prone to earthquakes, spills, sabotage (remember the April 2009 explosion?), terrorism and even wars -- and of course those vague "shortcomings in performance of work" for which hundreds of officials have been dismissed in the Era of Revival and now the Era of Happiness and Stability.

Of course, as I'm pointing out, the wrath of NGOs is somewhat misplaced on Turkmenistan, when the American companies which they love best to hate aren't even able to drill an inch into the karakum. China has already spent more than $8 billion building a pipeline out of Turkmenistan to China, and not a single demonstration, newsletter, poster, or even email appeared from the usual Western environmental groups. We have no idea what that very rapidly-build pipeline did to the environment or areas or people in Turkmenistan, and that's not only because it's a closed society, but because nobody cared to chase the Chinese National Petroleum Company -- it just doesn't get the juices flowing like US petroleum corporations. In fact, the major Western environmental organizations tend to ignore Central Asia because it's hard to get information.

The exception is a small adovcacy and research organization called Crude Accountability which has Russian-speakers and a network of colleagues in the region and who have persisted in getting the story of environmental damage and oppression in Central Asian countries. You seldom hear of Greenpeace trying any of its "direct action" protests on ships around Russian and its allies -- maybe that's because when local chapters of Greenpeace simply try to hold a rally to protest against Arctic drilling, 23 people are arrested.

So snarkiness of the predictable adversarial culture really seems misplaced, when a company like Chevron -- which in fact has been there all along and isn't "stealing in like a thief" -- hasn't even got a deal.  And then there's this -- what I always ask people spouting the usual hysteria on forums: what do you cook your breakfast with every morning, firewood? Pipelines exists in a lot of places of the world where protests no longer appear (Alaska) although it might if something goes wrong again (Alaska). We'd all like to live in a world of outdoor solar-powered offices and computers and Burning Man camp-outs like Philip Rosedale, but we're not there yet.

So it's good to start early and often to hammer on the problem of "lack of transparency," but realistically, it's not going to go anywhere in Turkmenistan until the society experiences much greater changes than have been in the offing since 2006 when past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov died. The Turkmens have figured out (from paying attention to NGOs but not allowing them in their own country) to play the transparency game, and have turned the tables on Chevron and others as I've written, sulking about their supposed lack of transparency for not parting with proprietary technological secrets that no company would part with (say, how about more from the Turkmen side regarding those Gaffney, Clines Associates estimates of the reserves, eh?)

Turkmenistan is a very hard nut to crack -- and nut-cracking in general hasn't gone so well for the US in Central Asia. The US ambassador has actually accomplished a fair amount on his watch, quietly getting some political prisoners freed or getting them family visits and trying to solve the students' cases and keep a positive momentum for both educational exchange and business. There's a theory that trade is a tide that raises all boats. I've never seen that happen in any country in the world. It's claimed for China and Kazakhstan, but we only see continued problems with everything from media suppression to environmental hazards to murders -- business doesn't auto-magically install democracy any more than a USAID project does.

I really don't have a recipe for Turkmenistan other than that more people need to try to go there and report what they see, and more efforts have to be made to get the word out about what happens there, and to pay more attention to those who already get many stories out, such as Chronicles of Turkmenistan. To the extent possible, NGOs should try to follow the TAPI story to see if their interest and efforts to get more information might be some deterrence on the usual bribes and slush funds that abound around things like this.

Yet I'm skeptical that TAPI will start getting built any time soon, or that Western companies will even be involved in it, and the X marked on the map where the backhoes are going to appear may be right at the Turkmen border, not inside Turkmenistan, as Ashgabat continually repeats the refrain that they will "sell their gas at the border," and Europeans and others are taking them more at their word since the collapse of the ambitious Nabucco project.

In any event, the gas-hungry rapidly-developing countries of China and India aren't going to care a whole lot about what Westerners tell them about how they should avoid all the things that Westerners take for granted like gas-guzzling personal cars and invest instead on environmental protection and mass transport. What any environmental campaign has to start with, however, is a newsletter -- a newsletter that nobody is yet able to publish in Ashgabat.

 

 

The Moral Quagmire Around Chen Only Seems to Be About Getting Obama Re-Elected

These five disability rights activists in China tried to visit Chen last year on the International Day for the Blind and were pushed back by government loyalists. They show 100 more times courage and solidarity under enormous pressures than some American commentators on the subject. Photo by Ted Lipien, 2011.

I don't follow China that closely, as I'm more focused on Russia and Central Asia and the US and Europe, but I have to say, I was very much disturbed by the discourse from our public intellectuals, such as they are, on the case of Chen Guangchen, the blind lawyer, caught up in a superpower drama now during an American-Chinese summit.

I found it appalling to see people appearing in The New York Review of Books or The Atlantic or Foreign Policy without some sort of basic sympathy or solidarity for this brave man, and with even a kind of sneer (that quintessential bad actor from Registan, "Don Bacon," shows up repeatedly at the Atlantic to harangue on "realism".)

What's wrong with them? Has the American dependence on China so corroded the notion of human solidarity that intellectuals can only greet this story with snark or brutal RealPolitik? Why? What does it cost them? They aren't waiting for business deals or visas to China, are they?

The case seemed pretty straightforward, despite all the second-guessing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking around it. This activist who had fought for the rights of women against coerced abortions or sterilization, who was held for months under house arrest and tormented along with his wife, decided to make a break for it when he thought the US-Chinese meeting might give him some political cover to press his cause, and he got to the Embassy.

Once there, he seems to have been hustled somewhat to get closure on his plans and leave before Hillary Clinton arrived for talks -- and I remain with a lot of questions about what happened there. Somehow, US officials got him to leave and go to the hospital for treatment of his broken foot, injured during his escape. The US State Department spokesperson said it wasn't true the ambassador and other officials conveyed any Chinese threat to him, but in fact they did, by simply pointing out what was likely to happen if he didn't rejoin his wife -- she'd be sent back to their home province and likely put in danger. Then, officials somehow lost control of the situation, they didn't keep contact with him, he became worried about his family's safety, and he began to demand to leave on Hillary's plane.

In fact, that was quite a normal demand because nothing short of leaving on Hillary's plane would work to get him and his family out of China and out of harm's way quickly. Someone like him, a dissident and not someone approved and connected, can't simply order a ticket, take his passport, and leave of his own free will. THAT is the problem -- and it isn't a problem we should accept as normal even given the "realities" of China, and we should keep calling it out.

These all seemed obvious issues, yet there was so much second-guessing around it. In the end, a very unsatisfactory deal was reached with the Chinese, whereby they will let Chen apply through the normal channels "like anyone else" and go and study in a US law school.

But if you believe in this, you believe in the tooth fairy. The Chinese don't keep their word; why would anyone trust them to follow through on this after the spotlight of the summit is over? They'll have no motivation. It will be like pulling teeth, not leaving teeth under your pillow for the tooth fairy, to get him out of there. The notion that the Chinese will "look bad" if they don't let him out is ridiculous -- there is nowhere for them to be appearing as there will be little attention on them in fact now that the show is over.

Why don't people nowadays understand the nature of authoritarian communists regimes better?!

What we're getting instead is a series of awful articles and bad-faith discussions that I find really troubling -- I can't imagine such pieces appearing during the Soviet era, for example, even from leftists, about the Soviet dissidents.

So we get Max Fisher, associate editor of The Atlantic, and editor of the international channel, writing The Geopolitics of Helping a Confused, Frightened Blind Man in Beijing

Already the headline shows you massive condescention and belittling of this brave man.

Then there's this narrow-minded literalism about Chen's supposed flip-flop on the US Embassy's behaviour. Chen indeed told several reporters and supporters that he felt he was hustled by the US Embassy -- and clearly they did feel a deadline of resolving his case before the talks with Hillary Clinton began. He then felt bad for the fuss and attention called, which is obviously why he made the face-saving (for all concerned) gesture of saying he had "misunderstood". That seems an obvious and clear reading from this unfortunate situation, yet Max merely takes it for character failure on Chen's part.

For some awful reason, taking Beijing's side in this drama (and not merely reporting both sides), Max Fisher writes that Chen's stay is a "slap in Beijing's face" -- when in fact it's a necessity because, um, China isn't a free country you can come and go from -- although so many students and engineers do come and go from our country to China that you might be forgiven for thinking it is!

He then calls this crappy deal -- without any guarantees whatsoever -- made by the weak and dissembling Foreign Ministry a "humble but important breakthrough" (!), then chastises Chen for yet another "slap in the face" by demanding to leave China. Well, why can't he?

Why is Max so irritated at Chen?! Is it because he takes up the politically-incorrect Christian-right sort of issue of protesting forced abortions?

That may be part of it, but his next paragraph lets us know what's really getting his goat -- the fear -- the sweating fear -- that this might harm Obama's re-election chances. So that's why he has to take a swipe at Chen again, chastising him for not being more worldly on this most public of world stages:

Chen, who grew up in rural Shandong province when rural China was still one of the poorest places on Earth, is a courageous activist and a self-made man; he is not particularly worldly. Yet he's on the world stage now, whether he wants to be or not, and as more than just an activist. Having elevated his mistreatment to the U.S. embassy, he is, for this brief moment, a major player in the great power politics of the Pacific. His declarations, demands, and denouncements are now a subject of the U.S. presidential race and a major issue (if largely unspoken, in public anyway) of the high-level U.S.-China talks for which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both in Beijing.

Ugh. I hadn't realized the Atlantic's moral compass had gotten this broken.

EurasiaNet's Tilt Toward the Kremlin and the Misleading Theory of Diminishing Russian Power

President Dmitry Medvedev reviews CSTO exercises. Photo by Presidential Press and Information Service, Sept. 27, 2011. Russia is looking ahead to a greater role in Central Asia after the withdrawal of US troops.

It's long been my sense that EurasiaNet tilts too far towards the Kremlin in its coverage of Russia.

This tilt is a problem in Soros programs in general all across the board, and is a function of the felt need to push the "progressive" agenda without debate, which I've criticized. But EurasiaNet, as the top Soros-funded news service, has a particular case of this bias and I think it needs open debate -- something it never gets in the pages of EurasiaNet itself, where real criticism of Russia as a threat is almost never heard. (In fact, when I once put in a quote from a Western diplomat regarding the increased Russian threat in a story published on EurasiaNet about diplomatic rapid response, it was removed.)

Washington Post neo-conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin once did a column on this problem of pro-Russian bias at EurasiaNet, specifically in a blog by Joshua Kucera, which evoked a lot of indignation from EurasiaNet fanboyz. They felt it self-discredited because she was one of the identifiable ideological foes of the Soros-funded crowd. Unfortunately, she didn't really pursue the theme by examining other stories, even though she did do a second column on the tendentious rendering of a quote from Condoleeza Rice.

At one point she exclaimed, "Eurasianet? What is that?" which about summed up how much influence it had in her foreign and domestic policy circles -- it's main fan base is among the Foreign Policy and Atlantic editors and Central Asian scholars and think tank senior fellows -- it's a beat decidedly overshadowed by the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab Spring now.

In the comments to Rubin's piece, Ariel Cohen said that yes, many of the commentators (well, really almost all, Ariel!) are "leftist and progressive". I was the only "liberal, not progressive" writer for years until February 2012 when I left.  As proof of the alleged pluralism of EurasiaNet, he cites the fact that he himself published on it. To be sure, he has had dozens of pieces on EurasiaNet, but it is in past years; it hasn't been so much in recent years.

One article seems to have been removed by some glitch. It looks like it was one of those articles that in fact cast Russia as a diminishing power -- and that may have been how it "fit" and was welcome. EurasiaNet has grown decidedly more pro-Russian in the last two years, mainly in Kucera's blog The Bug Pit; he likes to brag that he has been recruited by both the CIA and FSB (and let us know that he finds the concept of the US eavesdropping on a journalist worse than a Russian spy trying to buy a journalist) and styles himself as independent, but he nearly always snarks about Georgia and sticks up for Russia and minimizes its dangers -- which is the litmus test for this position.

An article by Molly Corso is generally just covering the various news accounts and perspectives on the Russian-Georgian conflict, but does include some bashing of Georgia, quoting from the Russian press. Then she quotes Ariel Cohen, and in fact he does what EurasiaNet usually needs to have done on Georgia -- call it to an account as if it is a miscreant:

Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation, agreed with Tbilisi that Russia is using “the full tool box of state power against Georgia.” But Russia’s alleged actions do not relieve Georgian leaders of an obligation to meet high standards of proof in cases involving espionage or terrorism, Cohen added.

'PUTIN WILL NO LONGER BE IN POWER'

Back in 2002, Cohen set the tone himself for the "dwindling power" approach to covering Russia in Central Asia. It was Russia's failure to reform (and not, say, overriding American intererest following 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan!) that "let" American forces come into Central Asia, he says. He does the usual tour through the poor Russian conscripts with their low pay and their rag-wrapped feet, but then tells us Russian military procurements increased 25 percent in a year. So how to square this booming military might with this theory of the diminished Russia with its crappy army? Oh, by saying that Russia "lacks a vision".

(BTW, this 2002 article includes this humorous -- in hindsight -- paragraph:

Boris Nemtsov, a reformist leader of the Union of Right Forces, a center-right party, who participated in consultations with Putin on the future of the military, says that the Russian generals deceived the president. "They peddled a scheme that will not be finalized until the year 2004, and not be implemented in full until the year 2010, a year when Putin will no longer be in power," Nemtsov says.)

MINIMIZING THE RUSSIAN THREAT

The pro-Kremlin slant takes a sophisticated form and isn't always easy to see and then articulate. In the world of Internet polemics and Twitter parsings, I'm well aware that this position simply will be rejected by EurasiaNet, Registan and all their circles because they are absolutely steeped in it. But I hope by steady explication that eventually it will be clear and others will step up to debate the Soros establishment.

Counterintuitively, the form that the pro-Russian blogging takes is actually in minimizing the Russian threat, downgrading Russia as a power in the region and the world, and dismissing it as unserious, bumbling, corrupt, inept, etc. It's always about the lumbering bear, now greatly diminished in power. This is a kind of backward argument, looking over the shoulder at imaginary neo-cons or hawks in Washington who exaggerate Russia's power -- although in fact, in the Obama era, they're nowhere to be found. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressive alike all downgrade the Russian threat and view Russia as a second-class power that we should be nicer to and sell more to and not criticize for its human rights wrongs.

But that's a mistake, as Russia is in fact still the opposite superpower to the US, and in fact America's greatest enemy -- precisely because the Kremlin has itself designated the US as an enemy and acted accordingly, and because Russia allies with Sudan, Iran, Syria and other conflict-ridden countries. More to the point, it still causes an enormous amount of harm to its own people, especially minorities, and to the near abroad. Most people in the region still have fates largely determined by how cold the wind blows from the Kremlin, as the Czech colleague of Dubcek and one-time room mate of Gorbachev, Zdenek Mlynarz once described it.

RUSSIAN THREAT TO NATO GETS BURIED, IGNORED

Today, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces threatens a strike against NATO if it installs anti-missile defense in Europe -- and EurasiaNet's The Bug Pit or any other blog just has nothing to say.Nothing. "Not a story." "It's just bluff," says Peter Sadovnik on Twitter, a Russian expert, who exemplifies this sort of view. Don't take it seriously, or you are merely engaging in Cold War escalation.

Cananada's cbc.ca ran the threat against NATO as a front-page story. Canada, which has many emigres from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and forces in Afghanistan, has an instinctive sense when they see this kind of bluster that it does go on the front page nonetheless.

The Times buries it in the back section WAY under the fold. You had to be really persistent even to find it.

So EurasiaNet ignores it, and instead, there's a story about Georgia's preparation for the NATO summit.

GEORGIA'S ASPIRATIONS TO NATO MOCKED

I myself don't advocate NATO enlargement because I think it's needless provocation for no demonstrable purpose and we can't back up our mouths on this because we have no intention of really having a firefight with Russia over one of their smaller neighbours.  As NATO has become involved in the Libya and Afghanistan wars, it becomes even more dubious a proposition to expect it to be a stabilizer and not an inciter of instability in the region.

I suppose the NATO Partnership for Peace and doing things like cleaning up radioactive stuff in Turkmenistan are all good, and maybe there should be more of that. I don't think it makes sense to have an "aspirants' group". Even so, Georgia is entitled to aspire, and some politicians are entitled to encourage them in that and I don't think it means they are "Russophobes" -- a label I completely reject, not only for its connotations around the infamous debate with Alexander Solzhenitsyn but for its overbroad application to people who just rightly want to criticize Russia -- and who rightly want to protect Georgia from obvious Russian provocations.

In the end of this piece, as there often is, there's a swipe at Georgia -- "But now there is at least a relatively concrete standard by which to judge Georgia's reward, whatever it will be, at the summit."  And that followed the gloating from this blog post taking delight in Georgia not really being on the list for NATO membership after all, according to the State Department. As I said, I don't think NATO expansion is warranted. But what's wrong with making Georgia an ally, working closely with it, and "offering an award for "compromising with the Kremlin on Russia's bid for the World Trade Organization"? I'm not getting this. It did compromise, and it should get something. That's how politics work. And...the State Department may not decide everything about this.

But it's the snark here -- and the nastiness and clear pro-Kremlin posturing -- that really bites. Says Kucera in a previous linked piece:

There are of course still many other problems with Georgia's membership aspirations -- mainly that it has shown a proclivity for picking fights with nuclear powers -- but it's interesting that Georgia has made that move. We'll see if it gets them anything in Chicago.

Picking fights?! Good Lord,  Joshua. Are you completely unaware of how Russia provoked and harried and harassed Georgia for years?! Handing out Russian passports provocatively (and unlawfully) to people in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, despite constant warnings from the UN and the OSCE about what this would lead to? Most importantly, there's Russia's refusal to accept the UN and OSCE observers, observers they were obliged to take. The EU report on this conflict in fact doesn't blame Georgia alone, as some like to claim, but apportions blame fairly equally.

It's a little known fact that Georgia came to the UN Security Council when Russia was buzzing airplanes over Georgian territory and provoking days before the Georgian invasion of Southern Ossetia.  Elected UNSC members tried to raise the Georgian case as well and failed. The UNSC refused to put Georgia on the agenda due to Russia's objection (the region is basically off limits due to the Russian veto). The Georgians begged the UN to do something. They refused. Then it was left to the EU and notably France to deal with the crisis after the invasion.

Georgia likely imagines that if it were a member of NATO, Russia wouldn't dare to pull the kind of shit it has pulled on it, with constant provocations and its faux "peace-keepers". But that is not to be.

And...Nuclear powers plural. What other nuclear powers has Georgia provoked? Um...the US? Really? How?

Georgia says it will leave Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia's "independence" issue off the table in terms of joining NATO, but what they should do is try to put more pressure not on NATO to join, but on the EU and OSCE to settle the conflict. But of course, they've done such a good job settling Nagorno-Karabakh, Trans-Dniester and other frozen conflicts that are largely a function of Russian meddling and failing to be the peace-keepers they claim. Even so, the US is right to make non-negotiable the idea that Russia has to accept the observers in Georgia that it pledged to allow in with the last peace agreement, which it never has done.

KREMLIN'S SOFT POWER?

So what other story do we see on EurasiaNet on the day that the chief of staff has threatened a strike on NATO (!)?  This one, Can the Kremlin Develop a Warm & Fuzzy Side? by Igor Torbakov is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Of course, this story had to have been conceived and submitted some time ago. But it's a perfect exemplar of my point about the pro-Russian pieces that tilt to the Kremlin precisely by minimizing it and thereby making it seems like it's not really a problem at all and therefore we should never overreact or even react.

What Should Be Done About Chen

I'm not getting our government's handling of this story, and I sense there's a lot of double talk. I don't believe you have to be an expert on China or briefed on the intricacies of the diplomatic affairs now to say what the right thing to have done was: keep Chen in the Embassy until his family could be reunited with them, mercilessly shining a spotlight on any Chinese government cruelty to his family with the help of the media.

Why is this so hard to understand?

I actually see experts saying on Twitter that Chen shouldn't have come to the Embassy without his family. Well, geez,  you can forgive a blind dissident who has been under house arrest and beaten and tormented for years, who had to seize a moment of escape with a daring friend, falling numerous times and breaking his foot trying to jump over a fence, for not doing it exactly the strategic way you think he should have done it.

Seriously, you think a family with a small child are going to have a greater chance of getting inside the US compound than one man? Have you tried this lately?

So once he was there, the first objective was to announce that he was given temporary refuge, without this distractive talk about third-country processing requirements under US refugee or US asylum law requiring the applicant be inside the US. The Embassy can be provided as a safe have on  humanitarian grounds.

The second objective was to give him medical care. A broken foot doesn't necessarily require a hospital visit, and surely there are excellent US Embassy physicians or some could be brought in to treat his foot and dehydration or whatever his conditions were.

Then the announcement should have been made firmly to the China that he was staying in the Embassy to recouperate, and that his family had to be untouched and allowed to join him.

Once the officials decided to use the wife as a hostage and beat and threaten her, the way should have been clear instead of confused: keep publicizing this, and keep telling the Chinese they look really, really bad that they can't let the family of a blind man with a broken foot have temporary refuge, with the decision to leave for abroad if they wish. They could say he needs medical treatment abroad or merely say it's a humanitarian case of compassion, and the Chinese have to concede it.

After all, they let tens of thousands of students and workers go to the US every year and do allow all kinds of families to go all the time. So if their point is that they don't let political critics go, they need to be called on that. Why? What's wrong with you?

I'm not understanding why the State Department holds private phone calls with the leading human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First (even though they provide some of the content later). Let's all have this be a public conference. The State Department press briefing was also strangely uninformed. They are just reading what they read in the press like reporters? They can't second guess people on the scene? They don't know? Why? Use the Internet and get some emails or use your smart phone.

Why did the US officials abandon Chen at the hospital? If it is true that they were just downstairs and he didn't know it, how is it that they couldn't immediately let him know that? We get it that doctors can shoo visitors out in the name of the patient's interest, and the Chinese were quick to do this. But they couldn't stand outside the door? They couldn't keep trying to get upstairs? Did they do that?

Chen says he kept calling the Embassy and didn't get an answer. Why didn't an official give him an emergency phone number to contact that they made sure was manned 24/7?

The State Department claims that once the threat was made against Chen's wife, they couldn't take him back. They claim they weren't the ones to pass that threat on to him on behalf of the Chinese secret police. That story needs going over. But once they learned of the threat, their objective should have been -- just as it was with Fang Lizhi 23 years ago -- to go get him and bring him back.

That's what George Bush did -- he ordered Embassy officials who had let Fang Lizhi, a dissident scientist who had led protests in Tiananmen Square, leave the Embassy with a reporter after asking for asylum, and they brought him back. Eventually, he was brought to the US (sadly, Fang LiZhi died last month, or he could be reminding everyone about what the right thing is to do here.)

Say what you will about George Bush; he knew what to do when a Chinese dissident asked for help.

Yes, it might be hard to get to the wife in a Chinese province and then get her to the Embassy. But you demonstratively try. If you are literally physically thwarted by the Chinese authorities, you keep loudly denouncing this. You get reporters on it.  Another possible angle is to have an international NGO come and accompany the family and serve as a witness.

The big point here is that the Chinese government looks bad harassing a blind man with a broken foot and beating his wife. They look REALLY bad. And that's what Chen was desperately counting on to work to shine light on his country's awful human rights situation. And yes, it's awful -- this incident highlights all the reasons it is! -- and we don't have to grovel and talk about the war in Iraq or drones in Afghanistan, which are also awful, in order to talk about this intelligently and effectively.

The Chinese look bad. That's what has to be leveraged in this case because they do. That's why we need to call their bluff.

And if people are whining that we don't have leverage with the Chinese, I'm sorry, I'm not buying it.

We have imports and we have educational and work exchange. These are privileges, not rights in the international system. The US is not required to allow droves of Chinese students and workers into the US. They can remind the Chinese of this.

Is this unacceptable thuggery in international affairs? That's what the Russians do when the Tajiks try to demonstrate against their interference in their security -- they had  nabbed two Russian pilots, and jailed them for contraband (we were never sure if they really had committed any crime) because they were unhappy at Russian demands for troop deployment and non-payment for a military base. The Russians instantly threatened to deport tens of thousands of Tajik guest workers. The pilot were then released.

I'm not suggesting to become thuggish in this way like Russia. God forbid. They could have done this more subtly and they are at fault in Tajikistan in the first place in ways we are not in China. But it highlights the reciprocity that in fact the US used handily in the Soviet era all the time. Each time a visa was denied, they denied one back. If there were lists of people the Soviets blacklists like critical writers or human rights activists, then the US also made a list of people they wouldn't let in (and the State Department still does this). Russia continues to have a complex and discretionary visa system that in fact still can cause problems like the Soviet era, i.e. when they expelled the journalist Luke Harding. So yes, the US visa process is no picnic, but it's a response to the Russian arbitrariness (like procedures that allow only NGOs with registration with the Foreign Ministry to invite their counterparts, and only with another layer of discretionary approval from the Foreign Ministry and further hard-copy paperwork with the consulate.)

All the US has to do -- as much as we are in debt to the Chinese, as much as we are trying to get their cooperation -- is say that exchange is a privilege and not a right. And they will see the numbers go down in direct proportion to how they handle this case.

Why am I suggesting the Chinese be reminded that visas are a privilege not a right? Because they've come to take for granted that droves of them can study or work here, and yet that massive interchange of people is not leading to a more liberal regime. It is not changing these people in any way, for the most part, and they themselves generally don't feel any obligation to try at all even subtly to pressure their own government.

Example. Once I was working with a group of activists and students on the Darfur issue. They were expressing their frustration after years of not getting any progress. There were campaigns around the Chinese Olympics that were very weak and frail because the international human rights establishment ducked the challenge of supporting a boycott. People in the Darfur movement endlessly made appeals to first the Bush then the Obama administration, but they "had little leverage" and did what they can, sometimes badly, but they weren't the point.

The point was that there were other veto-wielding countries in this situation -- Russia and China -- and nobody ever lobbied them. Russia, which had ample supplies, refused to provide helicopters to the UN mission simply because the Sudan government didn't want them to be there. They refused to put any pressure on the Sudanese because they never do on their fellow authoritarians. The Chinese have enormous oil interests in Sudan and refused to do anything to upset the applecart. India, a democracy, also did not get involved. The conversation was about what Silicon Valley, which had tremendous dependency on China as their factory, might do (and wasn't doing).

So I said that every student and IT worker should sit up, look around, and see the Indian, Russian, or Chinese person sitting right next to them at the library table or the cubicle. They should ask every Indian, Russian, and Chinese person in our country on a student or work visa: do you know about this situation? Why don't you care? Why aren't you doing anything about?

That people find this an "unacceptable" approach due to the interpersonal dynamics of it is exactly why I push it. Why? Of course we don't hold individual people responsible for their governments' actions. But every one of these representatives of a BRICS developing nation usually harbours anti-American sentiment and beliefs, indoctrinated in their home school systems and elaborated by the kinds of professors they meet once in the US. Why? Their countries all have massive human rights problems of the sort that either don't occur in the US, under the rule of law, or which have remedy in an independent judiciary. Why don't they call people on their lack of activism?

Most of them will either say they don't think their country is the problem (but it is, indeed), or that they can't do anything because their country is too oppressive, and they would get in trouble if they protested. Well, let's publicize that fact more than we do.

But in a few cases, the student or worker will say, "Yes, I'll sign your petition." Or even "yes, I will come to your teach-in or even your demonstration." The reason why we see waves and waves of passivity on this question is because nobody ever asks. They let the Chinese students on their campus hold themselves aloof and never engage with them under the theory that it is hopeless. Every other group is constantly confronted about every politically correct thing. Why not human rights in these countries? The Russian engineers professional groups and associations never feel any reason to put human rights posititions on their agenda, even though there are Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility and Business for Social Responsibility and every other thing like that when it comes to America's ills. Why not challenge them? Start now, today, with that person next to you.

My point is that we have swarms of people in this country getting an education and earning a living, but it isn't a real exchange. It is not a real engagement. If anything, they are succored in their anti-Americanism in our system and everyone thinks that has to go on forever in the name of liberalism. Why?

Then there's this idea that we "need" China for its "help" on Iran and Syria and North Korea. But they never do help. They are always hindering. You can negotiate and negotiate and they always refuse to do anything. To be sure, they did concede not to return some hapless North Koreans who escaped to China and sought refuge. But that was only because they were tacitly showing their disapproval about the missile launch. They should do more of that.

The National Interest believes that the Administration's refusal to get involved in human rights summit politics shows strength from Obama, not weakness. That is, he grimly refuses to get involved in other countries' internal affairs because he doesn't think it's in his immediate interest (America's interest?). Except the heart of the international human rights system is indeed refusing to concede the "internal affairs" argument because of the right to remind other countries of their universal obligations. The Human Rights Council's Universal Periodical Review is indeed predicated on the notion of peer review and peer pressure.

I think the National Interest's hard-ball interpretation of Obama's action is too convoluted by half for most people, who will see abandoning Chen not as a pragmatic act that got something from the Chinese, but as a cruel and unnecessary act that in fact got nothing at all from Beijing in any area at all. What do we get for abandoning Chen? Nothing.

Don Bacon makes the usual unconscionable and disgraceful Registan intervention on the Atlantic, claiming that these measly NED grants of $75,000 to Chinese human rights activists are some kind of unacceptable interference in internal affairs. And the droves of Chinese students and business people who reap all the rewards of America's free society without ensuring that their fellow citizens like Chen have the same rights?

 

Worried Watch on China Situation As Obama's Foreign Policy Failures Piling Up

I'm embarrassed for my country and my government.

Here's it's taken a poor, blind provincial Chinese human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng, taking tremendous risks, to escape from house arrest and leave his family behind, and come to the US Embassy seeking refuge, to throw into stark relief the awful human rights situation in China. It's a situation we always seem to relegate to quiet diplomacy

Hillary Clinton was hoping to get through her talks there without any hub-bub and that usual delicate quiet diplomacy, and now this.

To underscore the seriousness of the reputational risks here for Obama, the top legal advisor of the State Department, Harold Koh, was brought in to personally escort Chen to the hospital.

The harrowing account of Chen's escape, his pick-up by the Embassy diplomats who decided to give him temporary refuge, and his leaving on terms that aren't clear into a situation that worsened are all detailed in the Times.

But I'm really worried about all this, watching it from afar -- as the State Department press spokesman today describes his own position, although he's got a briefing book and cables, and we don't.

What's really going on? Why couldn't Chen stay in the Embassy? He says officials "weren't proactive enough" and essentially asked him to leave, according to the Times. Why couldn't a US official stay with him until he's had adequate time to articulate his wishes and leave the country with his family if that is what he wishes?

There's a lot of confusion, but having been involved myself in these high-stress highly visible summit dramas between superpowers, such as with the exchange in the Soviet era of political prisoner Yuri Orlov and journalist Nick Daniloff for Soviet spies (I worked as a translator for Orlov), these things are never easy. There are always difficulties and last-minute hitches and people changing their minds about things.

I don't know if the memory of the five years with the Soviet Pentacostals in the basement of the US Embassy was still fresh in anybody's mind (it would be in the mind of Wayne Merry, the diplomat who had to live through it in Moscow!). But it's tremendously difficult. Obviously, Embassy staff want to avoid a situation where they are seen to create a magnet for asylum-seekers. In the Soviet era, there were droves of them usually arrested before they even got near the door, who were filling up the labour camps (we met them in Perm 36).

On the other hand, they can't in good conscience feed people to the wolves and if someone like Chen has made it this far, you have to stay the course. And the nature of Chen's state of mind, and his possible reversals, and his possible misunderstandings aren't the issue:  he's a man by whom the US must do right.

The US has to obtain more than diplomatic assurances here; they have to have the right to accompany Chen or perhaps, failing gaining agreement for that, try to deploy an NGO volunteer as a witness to accompany him and report back to the Embassy. They must try to get them all out of the country.

I feel as if Obama's foreign policy -- such as it is -- is really falling apart now in the last part of his term. It was never sterling, and caused my growing lack of support for him.

But it's almost as if he and his people said to themselves, "Let's make a series of quick wins or QIPs (quick-impact projects or whatever they call them) across the global chessboard on a variety of problem countries, and see if we can get them to stay put until I'm re-elected."

And it's that craven, utilitarian attitude toward foreign policy as merely an instrument of domestic power that is messing it up. Sure, all politicians play foreign issues for domestic audiences. Yet to turn foreign policy purely into a campaigning platform never seems to have been done so egregiously.

First, there was the stumble with the live mike with Medvedev. "I need space" -- no standing up to the Russians -- no offset when the reset hasn't worked -- and the humiliation of having that taken up by Romney who rightly said that Russia is our major enemy *because Russia has made us its enemy* and doesn't help on a whole host of problems from Syria to Afghanistan to Iran.

Next, there was the scandal where Obama Administration officials leaked a story that may not have been true, or was only partly true, that Israel was making some deal with Azerbaijan for refueling rights in some ostensible plan related to the bombing of Iran. Than Baku could hardly make anything that stark without retaliation against the Azeri minority in Iran and a host of other problems in the region didn't seem to matter. The main thing was to send a message to both Israel and Azerbaijan not to do anything funny on Iran until Obama got re-elected.

Then there was the trip to South Korea, to stand tall on North Korea and settle things there -- which backfired and led to the North Koreans firing a (failed) missile. Not good.

Then on to Latin America, where we really looked like imperialist sexist pigs with the president's own security detail taking advantage of the local women. Everybody looks bad here, and it isn't helped by Obama joking at the White House correspondents' dinner that he had to leave soon and get the Secret Service home on their new curfew.

Then this eerie trip in the middle of the night to Afghanistan to give a press conference in a heavily guarded army compound, with little said about how the country is going to really fare or what we're going to do for it after troops are pulled out -- and then with a suicide bombing right after the presidential plane leaves.

And now this Chinese mess.

 I have to wonder if there was an adequate translator here -- it sounds as if there wasn't if they can't seem to tell the difference between him saying "kiss Hillary" or "see Hillary".

I can't help wondering if the reason why Chen now seems to be speaking more clearly isn't only because of a night in the hospital to treat his wounded leg, but because there's an independent reporter (i.e. not a Chinese or American diplomat) who speaks his language now covering his story, Melinda Liu at the Daily Beast.

He wants to leave with his family on Hillary Clinton's plane.

With New Defense Strategy, US Bull in China's Shop?

Man leads a bull in Kashi, Xinjiang, China, 2007. Photo by Colin Cookman

It seems predictable to me that almost as soon as China is declared an enemy by the Department of Defense's new defense strategy-- or at least, that's how the Asian press and analysis see it -- then we start to get the US liberal agitation that China is a model we should emulate, not an enemy. All of these factors are integrated -- our government's belligerence, the predictable Asian backlash, the liberal peace-making and emulation of "the other". We've seen it with the Soviet Union and Islam; now we will see more of it with China.

So first, there's Obama's shiny new Sustaining US Global Leadership:  Priorities for 21st Century: which sounds like sort of a "do more with less" after killing Osama bin Laden and and the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars after more than a decade and a switch to focus on China:

U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc
extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South
Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, while the U.S.
military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance
toward the Asia-Pacific region. Our relationships with Asian allies and key partners are
critical to the future stability and growth of the region. We will emphasize our existing
alliances, which provide a vital foundation for Asia-Pacific security. We will also expand
our networks of cooperation with emerging partners throughout the Asia-Pacific to ensure
collective capability and capacity for securing common interests. The United States is also
investing in a long-term strategic partnership with India to support its ability to serve as a
regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.
Furthermore, we will maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula by effectively working with
allies and other regional states to deter and defend against provocation from North Korea,
which is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

The maintenance of peace, stability, the free flow of commerce, and of U.S. influence in this dynamic region will depend in part on an underlying balance of military capability and presence. Over the long term, China’s emergence as a regional power will have the potential to affect the U.S. economy and our security in a variety of ways. Our two countries have a strong stake in peace and stability in East Asia and an interest in building a cooperative bilateral relationship. However, the growth of China’s military power must be accompanied by greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region. The United States will continue to make the necessary investments to ensure that we maintain regional access and the ability to operate freely in keeping with our treaty obligations and with international law. Working closely with our network of allies and partners, we will continue to promote a rules-based international order that ensures underlying stability and encourages the peaceful rise of new powers, economic dynamism, and constructive defense cooperation.

That all sounds like traditional goals -- Asian-Pacific stability, deterrence of North Korea, etc. I'm puzzled why China is being admonished to make its strategic plans more clear -- aren't they pretty clear already? Go to Africa and Central Asia, talk to the bosses, get the Thorium Widget, get the hydrocarbons, avoid the ogres, go home. Despite Ron Paul's wacky viral video of Chinese troops in Texas, China isn't going to be projecting military might anywhere.

But really, China became a threat because of a lot of other things -- mainly because it become our creditor, with our own massive debt; and because of the enormous amount of Chinese hacking that goes on that the tech press seems mum about, but about which Vanity Fair reported boldly:

Hackers have attacked America’s defense establishment, as well as companies from Google to Morgan Stanley to security giant RSA, and fingers point to China as the culprit.

Naturally, the focus on China is going to cause some backlash, even if artfully phrased as cooperation with partners like India (I wonder what they really think about this) and stability-building:

So there's the experts such as this one quoted by the Hindustan Times:

"The assertive moves by the US may cause potential military tensions between China and the US," said Yuan Peng, an expert of American studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Then there's this one from Xinhua quoted by Hindustan Times:

"While boosting its military presence in the Asia Pacific, the US should abstain from flexing its muscles... If the US indiscreetly applies militarism in the region, it will be like a bull in a china shop, and endanger peace instead of enhancing regional stability," state-run Xinhua news agency said in a comment piece.

So, to continue my thesis: then there's Daniel Bell to tell us in The New York Times, "What China Can Teach Europe" (and by extension, all of us).

Bell's article talks about various Chinese models for reducing income inequality and providing health care, some of which are coercive and others more mild (but, I would submit, still involve the state moving the population around possibly against its will.)

The Chinese housing registration system is still ineffect which is like the Soviet propiska. So they can offer farmers some registration in the city and some perks in exchange for giving up their one plot of land -- but it's not clear to me what they get then in these cities, i.e. whether there's a job waiting for them.

While Chongqing’s model is the most influential, there is an alternative. Chengdu, Sichuan’s largest municipality, with a population of 14 million — half of them rural residents — is less heavy-handed. It is the only city in China to enjoy high economic growth while also reducing the income gap between urban and rural residents over the past decade.

Chengdu has focused on improving the surrounding countryside, rather than encouraging large-scale migration to the city. The government has shifted 30 percent of its resources to its rural areas and encouraged development zones that allow rural residents to earn higher salaries and to reap the educational, cultural and medical benefits of urban life.

Chengdu, we dream of you!

But...why McDonalds?!

Chengdu Street. Photo by sanfamedia.com

Chengu Man. Photo by weirdream.