The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct, and totally-and-utterly-inert. It could even be said to be resting in peace, save for the fact that Will Moss drove a silver stake through its heart before recording this podcast. “We single-handledly made the China blog obsolete,” he joked in our studio after further sawing off its head. But he has a point. Because who reads blogs these days?
China has experienced tremendous economic growth over the last three decades, with an annual average increase in gross domestic product of 9.8 percent during that period. This has led to an increasing demand for energy, spurring China to add an average of 53 gigawatts (GW) of electric capacity each year over the last ten years to its power generation capabilities. China recognizes that given the growing demand for energy at home, developing its domestic renewable energy industry and building manufacturing capacity can lead to advantages in future export markets. Energy efficiency and conservation are officially China’s top energy priority. These are considered the “low-hanging fruit” in the quest to reduce energy use and cut demand. In contrast, some argue that the United States does not have a comprehensive national policy in place for promotion of renewable energy technologies, with some observers saying that the higher costs of renewable electricity are not conducive to market adoption. However, the reasons for increasing the use of renewable energy are diverse, and include energy security, energy independence, cleaner air, and more recently anthropogenic climate change, sustainability concepts, and economic development. Such goals could reasonably be said to apply both to the United States and China.
Sad as it is to admit, the rare solar eclipse that incited such mayhem on Easter Island earlier this week has thrown our own Beijing community into a tizzy. Or perhaps the culprit is the stultifying heatwave which has descended on our city, turning Popup Towers into a beseiged fortress of air conditioning, and sending the rest of the expat community scurrying to their habitual vacation spots in Shunyi and Fengtai.
After the collapse of international climate change talks in Copenhagen in 2009, Mark Lynas’ devastating article, published in the Guardian, laid the blame squarely at China’s feet, accusing the Chinese government of deliberately scuttling American-led efforts to secure an international agreement on climate change.
The United States suspended military contacts with China and imposed sanctions on arms sales in response to the Tiananmen Crackdown in 1989. In 1993, the Clinton Administration re-engaged with the top PRC leadership, including China's military, the People's Liberation Army. Skeptics and proponents of military exchanges with the PRC have debated whether the contacts have significant value for achieving U.S. objectives and whether the contacts have contributed to the PLA's war-fighting capabilities that might harm U.S. security interests. Some have argued about whether the value that U.S. officials have placed on the contacts overly extends leverage to the PLA. This CRS report discusses policy issues regarding military-to-military contacts with the People's Republic of China and provides a record of major contacts and crises since 1993.
In a sudden move clearly intended to stave off criticism at the G20 meeting in Toronto, China loosened the yuan’s twenty-three-month-old peg to the American dollar earlier this month, allowing its currency to appreciate against the greenback. This week’s Sinica Podcast looks at the domestic drivers—both in China and in the U.S.—of the fracas over China’s currency move.
As Gady Epstein reports in this special dispatch, “some time ago, we reached the China Zone in the BP story.” The China Zone is—for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet—the point at which a reasonable observer will believe almost anything about a story simply because “this is China.” Which raises the question of what the Deeepwater Horizon story would look like if the accident actually did happen in the Middle Kingdom?
More than two years after protests—the largest and most sustained in decades—erupted across the Tibetan plateau in March 2008, the Chinese government has yet to explain the circumstances that led to dozens of clashes between protesters and police. It has not addressed how its security forces responded to the unrest—including allegedly using lethal force against Tibetan protesters, and abandoning Lhasa’s city-center to protesters and looters for several hours on March 14. Nor has it revealed the fate of hundreds of Tibetans arrested during the protests, or disclosed how many it has detained, sentenced, still holds pending trial, or has sentenced to extrajudicial forms of detention, such as Re-education Through Labor (RTL). This report, the first comprehensive examination of the crackdown, is based solely on official Chinese sources and eyewitness accounts that Human Rights Watch gathered in more than 200 interviews with Tibetans between March 2008 and April 2010. It finds that the scale of human rights violations related to suppressing the protests was far greater than previously believed, and that Chinese forces broke international law—including prohibitions against disproportionate use of force, torture and arbitrary detention, as well as the right to peaceful assembly—despite government claims to the contrary.
On July 5, 2009, thousands of Chinese of Uighur ethnicity demonstrated in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In the aftermath of the Urumqi protests, the authorities detained more than 1,400 people. In this report from 2010, Amnesty International documents a pattern of consistent allegations of human rights abuses by Chinese security forces. The report concludes that the protests in July 2009 in the XUAR took place against a backdrop of resentment built up over years of government repression and discrimination against Uighurs. Amnesty International calls for Chinese authorities to allow independent and impartial investigation into the events including full access to scenes of confrontation, eyewitnesses, and detainees.
This is the staff report for the 2010 Article IV consultation, prepared by a staff team of the IMF, following discussions that ended on July 1, 2010, with the officials of the People's Republic of China on economic developments and policies. The recovery has taken hold and growth should be in the double digits this year. The main risks facing the Chinese economy include a renewed weakening in the global recovery, a worsening of credit quality (notably from an expansion of lending to local governments), or a misstep in the government's response to rising property prices. A range of policies will be needed to ensure a sustained rebalancing of growth toward private consumption. These include measures to reform and liberalize the financial system, fiscal support for household consumption, an expansion of the social safety net, policies to capitalize on the ongoing process of urbanization, developing the service sector, structural changes to lower corporate savings, and an appreciation of the renminbi. There has been important progress in many of these areas but more remains to be done. The authorities broadly agree with the Fund's advice on the need to rebalance toward domestic sources of growth, but there have been different views on the appropriate pace of some reforms.
