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There are a lot of things people don’t realize about Taiwan. I’ll mention three. First, it is the United States’ 11th largest trading partner worldwide, despite the island’s small population of just under 24 million. Second (and surprisingly given that China maintains iron-fisted control over its strategic industries), Taiwan “owned’ (both figuratively and in the sense of being the equity owner) most of the factories producing semiconductors, advanced information technologies and even some of the key communications equipment in China throughout the 1990s and, diminishingly but still decidedly, into the new millenium. (These Information and Communications Technologies make up the so-called ICT industry. Just think of Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T and Verizon and all of their various competitors as comprising one vast and strategically vital sector). Third and still somewhat under-appreciated in the U.S. is the story of the growth of Taiwan’s vibrant democracy, which started taking root with reforms under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, in the mid-1980s and flowered under President Lee Teng-hui who was in power from 1988-2000 (and who passed away last month, on July 30th). The significance of this last point is that Taiwan’s experience has repudiated, with underlining, bolding and an exclamation mark, the self-serving claim voiced by generations of authoritarian-leaning leaders in Greater China and Asia – namely, that the Chinese (ethnic Han) people, heirs to a long tradition of imperial rule, are simply not suited to Western-style democracy.
Today’s post is a scene-setter for the “Global TECHtonics: U.S./China Faultline” series of technology-related posts which will be forthcoming on a weekly basis, usually on Mondays, starting next week. This scene-setter will draw mostly on my personal experience. It will also tug mostly on the economic and technological threads mentioned above and will only touch lightly on the political one. (In two weeks’ time, we’ll pick up the political thread more directly and weave it more visibly as the background to an examination of the current, very acute semiconductor supply chain tensions involving Taiwan, China and the United States in the run-up to the U.S. elections as well as what China’s recent imposition of a new security law in Hong Kong portends for Taiwan.)
Personally, I’ve had the good fortune to live in Taiwan for three separate periods in my life: for six months in early 1977 (trying to consolidate, in an entirely ad hoc and ultimately ineffective way, the Mandarin language I had studied for three years in college), for a full year in 1979-80 (finally succeeding at consolidating my Mandarin through the rigorous Stanford Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Taiwan National University in Taipei, the springboard I did succeed in identifying in 1977 as a way of achieving, on a deferred basis, my goal of nailing down the language ) and finally for three years 1999-2002 when I served as head of the Commercial Section of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT operates as the de facto U.S. Embassy in Taiwan. Along with the AIT Washington Headquarters – the de facto counterpart to the U.S. Department of State for all things Taiwan – AIT was created in 1979 as part of the Taiwan Relations Act, whereby the U.S Congress spelled out the terms of continued U.S. involvement with Taiwan (the Republic of China) following President Carter’s decision earlier that year to de-recognize the Republic of China as “China” and to our recognize the Peoples Republic of China as “China” instead.
It was my three years of experience as the Senior Commercial Officer at A.I.T. which gave me a front-row seat – and sometimes got me inside the ring – of the complicated, three-way tag-team match involving the U.S., Taiwan and China in the global ICT arena. I’m going to give a few glimpses of what that entailed. Not that any of this reveals anything particular about me (except for revealing my questionable golfing skills). The experiences were all simply part and parcel of the position I was lucky enough to fill. My point in sharing these experiences is to set-up to the main point which this post is aiming for – a glimpse into how timing matters, particularly in Washington.
So, what did that three years at AIT make possible for me? For starters, I was able to forge close relationships with the trail-blazers of Taiwan’s global IT preeminence – Morris Chang, the founder and then Chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC); Stan Shih, the founder and then Chairman of Acer Computer and later of the Acer Group (Stan and I were equally erratic on the golf course which made for a strong bonding experience); and, to a lesser extent with the more aloof Terry Gou, founder and Chairman of Hon Hai Precision Industries (better known by its tradename Foxconn, the electronics contract manufacturer which assembles iPhones throughout China). This level of diplomatic access is somewhat rarefied even for Ambassadors around the world but in Taiwan – like in Berlin, the post I served in prior to Taiwan – the U.S. was viewed as the guarantor of the country’s existence (for Taiwan as a current and on-going reality and for Berlin as a Cold War period reality) and important doors, even in the Presidential Office Building, were open for me.
Along the way, I was called on by American companies to help prepare for Y2K and then to clear up the debris of their local operations following the ‘Tech Wreck,’ the fallout of the sudden collapse of the dot.com bubble following its a valuation peak in March 2000. Months later, I was involved in the delicate minuet whereby China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, followed by Taiwan’s accession minutes later.
Along the way, I was honored to be the local host in Taiwan when then-Taipei Mayor (and later President of Taiwan) Ma Ying-jeou invited Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina and Michael Dell, along with scores of other U.S. IT industry leaders, to the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) in June 2000. And, again in 2006, I was asked to be the “WCIT Ambassador” responsible for organizing and bringing to Austin, TX for WCIT XV the official delegation from Taiwan, the second largest international delegation among the more than 2,000 official delegates at that event.
So, as China’s economy continued to grow by double-digits over these years and as China began to close the technology gap between Taiwan-owned ICT manufacturers operating in China and its own home-boosted technology companies, the stakes started rising for the developed economies and particularly for the U.S. The crux of the high-stakes gambit involved the global supply-chains linking U.S. brands and Taiwan OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) producing the hardware for top U.S. brand-name companies, such as Foxconn’s manufacturing of Apple iPhones, previously mentioned here, or TSMC’s backstopping of production and supply of Intel’s chips. The questions in the early 2000s were many: did relocation of so many Taiwan-owned production facilities to the mainland, where labor costs were cheaper, pose risk to the integrity and sustainability of these vital supply chains? Would the increasing economic integration taking place between Taiwan and China tend to stabilize the political situation in East Asia or would it add a new dimension of instability? In the simplest formulation, could – and would — economics trump politics? Could global supply chains function as the cords to tie together the Asian region – historically fragmented and politically divided – into a more integrated polity more closely resembling stable Europe or could they get ripped out on the whim of a political leader?
With these questions in the headlines – at least in the business sections – of major newspapers and business periodicals, I was invited on three occasions to give expert testimony about these global ICT supply chain issues to a Congressional Commission, then called the China Economic Security Review Commission, during the 107th ,108th, and 109th Sessions of the U.S. Congress.
On a parallel track over this same period, I was able to get peer-reviewed articles giving my answers to these questions in several academic journals and books. In 2006, my article The Politics of Greater China’s Integration into the Global Info Tech Supply Chain was published in The Journal of Contemporary China (Vol. 13, No. 40) and in 2007 my paper Taiwan’s FTA Prospects from the Global IT Supply Chain Perspective was published in the book Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia, edited by Peter C.Y. Chow (Edward Elgar Publishing).
If you’re reading this sentence, it means you’ve stayed patiently with me through a lengthy set-up for an ending tag-line which holds irony and hopefully some insight into how things work (sic) in Washington and what pot is close to boiling over at the moment on the world’s front burner. I’ll be able to wrap this up now. Just keep in mind the title of that last article – “Taiwan’s FTA Prospects …” which refers to the Taiwan’s prospects for finalizing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the U.S. (The knot identified in that article was that a U.S.-Taiwan FTA would shore up for U.S. firms the strength and resilience of supply chains to the most advanced ICT products from Taiwan’s top tech firms but come at the risk of provoking a rageful reaction from China for throwing shade on its “One China” shibboleth.)
So what’s the finale to this set piece? In 2005, Ambassador Jim Lilley took it upon himself to introduce me to the American Enterprise Institute for a possible appointment as a fellow or scholar there. AEI trends a little to the right of my own political perspective but Jim Lilley was already established there as a Senior Fellow and, having gone through Tiananmen with him at the helm of the U.S. Mission, I had utmost respect for him and was flattered by his effort to get me on board. Also, my boarding school classmate, Nick Eberstadt, was well-established there as a demographic diviner of the harsh realities underlying North Korea’s inscrutable surface as was Arthur Waldron, another China expert I knew well from UPenn. Jim arranged for me to have a series of conversations with various experts during the course of the day and, in each conversation, we grappled with the various questions outlined above. At the end of the day, I was invited into the President’s office and was informed by senior management that, although they found the day-long discussion intellectually invigorating, they didn’t see my expertise as particularly relevant to government policy or to AEI’s mission. The essence of the message was that the free market would take care of all these questions and that government policymakers didn’t need to, and actually shouldn’t try, to think about them too much.
So that was 2005. Now in 2020, the jury is in and those questions are not only recognized as highly relevant to policy makers, they are at the incandescent center of U.S.-China relations. The global supply chain question is now at the beating heart of the Trump Administration’s moves to “decouple” the U.S. and Chinese technology universes. Just Tuesday, Apple was on the line with the White House along with a dozen other top U.S multinational companies, explaining the massive hit they project their iPhone sales in China will take if the President’s banning of WeChat takes effect.
Another example: Throughout the year, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) has found itself ever-closer to a “impossible choice,” one forcing it to abandon its long-established strategy of serving both the U.S. (including Intel) and PRC (including Huawei) markets and instead to choose one at the expense of the other. Some military strategists fret that Xi Jinping, after having brought Hong Kong to heel with imposition of a new security law, will be tempted to take advantage of the pandemic and make its next move in the near-term on Taiwan. The rationale? Fulfillment of a “Chinese Dream” ambition for reunifying an imagined China from the past, of course, but for much more practical aims as well. Ninety-miles across the Strait of Taiwan, in the Hsinchu Science-based Technology Park (and other locations nearby) lies perhaps the world’s greatest single concentration of advanced microelectronic engineering talent and production facilities. This prowess has eluded China’s attempts, over decades, to home-grow. A quick power grab by China — while the world is distracted with COVID and the U.S. is internally riven by partisanship – may be highly unlikely but it is not at all inconceivable. We need to be anticipating, and guarding against, worst-case scenarios if we hope to effectively forestall them.
For me, the most satisfying single example of how my set of questions and provisional answers from fifteen years ago is finally getting serious traction in DC happened on Wednesday. Earlier in the week, President Tsai Ing-wen had hosted Health & Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on an official, multi-day visit to Taiwan for discussions about Taiwan’s exemplary response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for Taiwan to be allowed full participation, over Beijing’s objections, in the World Health Organization. The visit by Azar was the highest-level visit to Taiwan by a U.S. official, and the only Cabinet-level visit, since Taiwan’s de-recognition in 1979. Immediately after the “wheels-up” departure of Secretary Azar, President Tsai held a news conference in which she set out a single priority for U.S.-Taiwan relations in the upcoming year: to begin negotiations with the U.S. Government for a U.S.-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to strengthen trade flows and to safeguard supply chains.
Sweet.
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change, and almost as many say the problem is already affecting their community in some way” according to a Pew Research Center survey released on June 23rd this year.
While Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply over the question of whether human activity is contributing “a great deal” (72% Democrats vs 22% Republicans) or only “some” (22% Democrat vs 43% Republicans) to climate change, strong majorities of both parties recognize the human contribution and want the government to do more about it.
The story of this post goes back some twelve years. It’s a story of how bipartisanship and cooperative outreach can lead change. It shows what can be achieved when we focus, with a grounding in science, on the common good. We’re not doing that successfully now with COVID-19. We’re not doing it successfully now with climate change either But it’s within reach to do better.
As the second term of the George W. Bush Administration was winding down, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson sensed drift in the U.S.-China relationship. An avid birder and a passionate outdoorsman, Paulson found himself drawn to the environment as a possible new basis for cooperative engagement with China. If sufficient trust could be generated between the U.S. and China – especially among the career administrators responsible for climate policy in both countries – the quarter-century logjam that had impeded global action on climate change might free up.
What was that logjam? Ever since the mid-1970s, when the United Nations had first identified climate change as a long-term economic and political threat to the community of nations, the United States and China had never seen the issue eye-to-eye. The U.S., acting as the de facto leader of the developed nations, wanted joint action with the developing nations but didn’t want the developed nations to be forced to shoulder most costs. China, as de facto leader of the developing nations, wanted joint action but insisted the developing nations should foot most of the bill. Their argument, somewhat disingenuous but appealing in its simplicity, used a restaurant tab as an analogy. Why should developing nations, who had come late to the industrial revolution party, be splitting the bill for all the courses when they had only participated in the post-WWII dessert course? (The ploy buried in this argument is, of course, that the rates of consumption and carbon output of the post-WWII phase of industrial development outstripped significantly the previous century on a cumulative basis and the developing nations were on course to grow their consumption and carbon output in coming decades while developing nations were moderating theirs). In any case, this divergence of approach led directly to the breakdown of the Kyoto Protocol in 1999 (and also to the less consequential but unseemly debacle between President Obama and the Chinese delegation at the COP20 (20th UN Conference of Parties) meeting in Copenhagen in 2009).
So against this background, Secretary Paulson traveled to Beijing for discussions with his Chinese government counterparts about a new framework for coordination on global economic issues, resolution of trade disputes and strategic cooperation to mitigate climate change. While on that trip, Paulson traveled with his China-hand Deputy Chief of Staff, Taiya Smith, to Lake Qinghai to see first-hand the condition of that world-heritage lake and its wetland bird habitat. At the water’s edge, Paulson picked up some beverage cans and plastic bottles discarded there by fishermen and tourists. The Chinese officials traveling with him were surprised and impressed to see a Cabinet-level U.S. official stoop, literally, to help clear a Chinese lake of trash. In that moment, a ten-year run of strategic cooperation on clean energy and the environment between the U.S. and China was launched.
Over the past two academic years, I taught a masters level course for the University of Pennsylvania’s International Masters of Public Administration with the official Ten Year Framework (TYF) for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Environment as the focal case-study. I could say a lot about it but, for the purpose of this post, I have only a single point to make.
The TYF is a case-study in the hard work of cooperation. Launched in late 2008 by a Republican administration, handed off post-inauguration to the Obama Administration in early 2009, and then officially signed by President Obama and President Hu Jintao in November 2019, the first four years of the TYF created a “safe place” – beyond the prying eyes of the press and partisan grandstanders — where officials from the U.S. and China could educate each other about what might be possible and what would be perilous to undertake in their respective administrative and political systems. In short, they learned to trust one another to move in a common direction. The result of this four years of hard work was another official public act by President Obama and the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in November 11, 2014. The two presidents announced with fanfare that, for the first time in over forty years, the U.S. and China were ready to work together to lead the world towards a climate change agreement. Once that announcement was made between the U.S. and China, all it took was thirteen more months for over 190 other nations to join with the U.S. and China in agreeing to the Paris Accord at the COP21 meeting.
The TYF is a lesson in leadership or, more precisely, co-leadership. But it’s over. What relevance does it have in August 2020? Less than six months into his Presidency, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Accord. Now, in the lead-up to the November elections, each day brings a new low in U.S.-China relations. As someone who was serving at the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai before, during and after Tiananmen, I feel able to make the assessment that we are now at a lower point in the U.S.-China relationship than we were even then. The question is where to do we go from here?
That question is valid and complicated where our relationship is deeply fraught – advanced technology and global supply chains, minority rights in Xinjiang, political space for Hong Kong and Taiwan, military build-ups in the East and South China Seas – but the question is much simpler where our national interests are clearly aligned – in leading the world’s transition to lower-carbon energy in order to build resilience and mitigate climate change for the planet. Either the U.S. cedes a mega-industry of the future to China along with leadership of the Paris Accord community of nations or the U.S. steps forward again on the global stage with its unparalleled technology leadership and with renewed political vision. What will this look like? It will look like working with allies and not against them. It will involve not just supporting the planting of a billion trees globally and helping Big Coal capture and sequester carbon emissions underground but marshaling across-the-board governmental support to spur innovation across the entire spectrum of low-carbon solutions. It will require us to re-enter the Paris Accord and re-learn how to work productively with China in that particular arena while holding China to account in the many other arenas where our interests are at loggerheads.
Trump’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord was on June 1, 2017. The framers of the Paris Accord, mindful of political cross-winds that can blow in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, included an Article 28 requirement that a four-year waiting period pass before any country’s withdrawal could be formalized. The date kicking off that waiting period for the U.S. is November 4, 2016, the day on which the Obama Administration secured ratification by Congress of U.S. entry into the Paris Accord. So, U.S. withdrawal cannot under any circumstance become official until the day after the upcoming November 3rd election in the U.S.
So there’s the Sixty-Seven Percent solution. With nearly two-thirds of Americans believing the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change and with the Paris Accord signatories able to be flexible and eager to welcome a Biden-led America back into the Accord, it’s time for a majority to stand up again in unison. For each of our poor souls, for our country, for the community of nations and for the planet.
E pluribus (67%) unum.
As the U.S. and China continue to face off daily over technology and other issues, I have been listening, as my dog Max and I walk each day, to the brilliant History of Rome podcast series by Mike Duncan (2007-12). One thing is clear from the endless wars which Rome undertook over the course of a millennium against the Latins, the Etruscans, the Samnians and the Carthaginians during the Republic; against each other during the Civil Wars; and against the Greeks, the Syrians, the Parthians and others during the early Empire (which is as far as I’ve gotten so far) – wars were started as often as a result of misreading – or cynically exploiting– an opponents’ real intentions as they were from any meeting of minds over the actual need for conflict. (Mind you – we’re talking here about the miscalculations that get conflicts started, not the logic which takes over once military actions have been initiated).
With that in mind, I am reminded of a March 2019 article by Katherine Epstein, a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. This article gives a clear overview of the attitudinal and behavioral parallels marking America’s 18th c. rise in a British-led world order and China’s emergence in the U.S.-led post-WWII global system. A common structural dynamic is at play in both instances.
To Understand China, Look to America’s History
In challenging Britain’s hegemony a century ago, U.S. tactics look similar to Beijing’s today.
By Katherine C. Epstein
March 19, 2019 7:15 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal
There’s been a good deal of hand-wringing in the U.S. over efforts by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to replace U.S. suppliers of advanced equipment and wire the world with its 5G network. Most analysis of China’s strategy turns on the conviction that the Chinese are trying to challenge U.S. commercial and geopolitical hegemony—they steal U.S. technology and then sell their plagiarized equipment at a lower price. Worse, they seek to build an alternative, China-led global telecom infrastructure, positioning Beijing to spy on the users and capture yet more U.S. commerce.
As a historian, I’m struck by the incompleteness of this analysis. Two crucial pieces are missing.
The first is any sense that the threat posed by Chinese control of a global telecom infrastructure might not be limited to espionage or (that other favorite metaphor) a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” The potential danger may be wider and deeper—and the World War I era shows why.
Before that war, like today, the global economy was highly integrated. This was the first era of globalization. Advanced industrial, urbanized societies depended on international trade, requiring uninterrupted access to the infrastructure that girded the global economic commons. Interruptions to that access had the potential to cause economic derangement, rapidly leading to social and political instability. In other words, control of the infrastructure conferred commercial advantage and it could also be weaponized.
A century ago, Britain acted on this insight. In addition to eavesdropping on enemy and neutral communications, the government acted to regulate the British firms that dominated the services necessary to conduct global trade: the global communications network, the financial-services industry (including commercial credit and marine insurance) and oceanic transportation. Britain used its control over the infrastructure of global trade not simply to spy on its enemy, nor to strike enemy military assets, but to mount a systematic assault on the whole of an enemy’s economy—in 21st-century parlance, a massive denial-of-service attack against enemy society.
Returning to the present, both the espionage model, which refers to targeted state spying, and the cyber-Pearl Harbor analogy, which refers to an essentially conventional military attack, fail to capture the systemic and social qualities of a certain type of attack. In this context, reflect on Russia’s efforts to interfere with U.S. elections. Partisanship aside, Moscow has managed, at relatively low cost, to reduce the confidence that Americans have in each other and the electoral process. It waged a successful psy-op, compromising not material resources but social confidence. Its campaign showed that foreign countries can manipulate information within global networks to sow distrust within American society.
What would a scaled-up version of this attack look like? What if it were carried out over a China-dominated information network?
The second missing piece is awareness that if China is trying to challenge (or escape) U.S. hegemony by stealing American technology and building an alternative global telecommunications infrastructure, this would be analogous to what the U.S. tried to do vis-à-vis Britain, then the global hegemon, and the other great powers in the World War I era. Americans tend to forget how powerful Britain was and how weak the U.S. remained before World War I.
In its drive for world status, America routinely pilfered foreign technology well into the 20th century, and it gained considerable strategic advantage from its theft. The 1912 Supreme Court case Crozier v. Krupp, which formally extended the power of eminent domain to intellectual property, concerned a German gun-carriage design the U.S. Army had plagiarized. That same year, a U.S. naval officer walked off with the plan for the British navy’s super-secret long-range torpedo. During World War I, Washington expropriated German chemical intellectual property held in the U.S., providing an enormous boon to America’s chemical industry.
In World War II, the U.S. received huge inflows of scientific and technological knowledge from Britain, then slapped secrecy restrictions on subsequent developments to prevent any flow back to Britain. Many more examples could be adduced. Historically, it might be said, Americans are an imitative people.
The U.S. came to appreciate the significance of controlling global economic infrastructure when Britain’s campaign of economic warfare against Germany in World War I caused huge collateral damage to the American economy. Companies like RCA worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. Navy to build a global telecommunications grid—perhaps similar to the way Huawei, run by a former Chinese army officer, may be working hand-in-hand with the Chinese army.
Wall Street cooperated with the U.S. government to develop a modern financial-services industry deliberately intended to help New York displace London as the world’s financial capital—perhaps similar to the way China has developed its own Swift payment-clearing system. Woodrow Wilson’s administration attempted to build an oceangoing merchant marine so the U.S. wouldn’t have to rely on Britain’s—perhaps similar to the way China is attempting to increase its control over the global oceangoing merchant marine.
In short, a century ago, the U.S. was the China of the age: an up-and-coming revisionist nation chafing against the established powers, importing and pirating what it could, free-riding on the security provided by the existing hegemon, and legitimizing its behavior with the pious conviction that it was on the right side of history. Could it be that the Chinese understand U.S. history better than Americans do?
It’s easy to be moralistic about China, but in the quest to find a sound U.S. strategy, we need less pearl-clutching and more imagination. Rising powers have compelling strategic incentives to control the sinews of global economic activity as well as to acquire foreign technology. Americans and their allies should ask themselves whether they would rather live in a world under U.S. or Chinese hegemony—and what they can do about it.
Ms. Epstein is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, and a director of the Naval Historical Foundation.
So, what’s the point? As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, would be quick to point out, the British themselves had established their naval-led Empire by upending Spain’s Armada, which had earlier navigated its way to world power status by stealing from the Portuguese the same “rudders” (mariner’s handbook of written sailing directions) which the Portuguese had stolen from the then-ascendant Arab empire.
Well, the point is that, as the U.S. and China edge ever-closer to an actual or pretextual spark of open conflict, we need to stay sharp-eyed. Given the incalculable costs which outright conflict between the U.S. and China would exact from both countries and the world, it is a political necessity and a moral imperative to keep an accurate picture of the structural situation in our field of vision. This is where Katherine Epstein’s article is useful. A picture with gray-tones is always more accurate and revealing than a simple black-and-white picture. Harder to argue in a sound-bite perhaps, but more consistent with the leadership we need.
By Anum Yoon
Reposted from the Triple Pundit website post on May 2015
This year’s Sustainable Cities Index reported the top 10 sustainable cities of 2015. The Index provided an overview of 50 of the world’s cities and what their performance rankings were in relation to the factors of people, planet and profit – the three pillars of the triple bottom line. Europe dominated the top 10 overall rankings, holding seven of the 10 places. And with good reason: Europe has developed an impressive environmental legislation over the past 40 years. They have continuously demonstrated how improving the environment could drive innovation and job creation, while improving the quality of life for everyone.
But seeing those European cities on the list isn’t what impressed me. I was more fascinated by the fact that the remaining three rankings were held by Asian cities. While no American city made the top 10 list (with Boston holding 15th place), three cities proved that global sustainability is becoming increasingly dependent on the implementation of effective environmental policies in the developed cities of Asia.
Here are the sustainable cities in Asia that were successful in finding a better equilibrium in terms of development and progress:
Seoul: Ranked No. 7
Over the past 60 years, South Korea has grown from a war-torn nation to a major world power, becoming the 13th largest economy in terms GDP. This is quite impressive for a nation with a population of only 50 million. The capital and largest city, Seoul, is the product of this rapid economic growth. With over 25.6 million people living in the metropolitan area, Seoul shares the same problems as other large cities, including detrimental impact on the environment. It seemed the citizens of Seoul faced the choice between an improved quality of life and helping the environment… Or did they?
Forward-thinkers look to the idealized notion of the “ubiquitous city” in order to strive toward becoming a more sustainable city. The key to the ubiquitous city concept is technology. Seoul is a world leader in terms of digital governance and open data. This includes an extensive high-speed Internet network. In a ubiquitous city, the free flow of data allows citizens to understand their impact on the environment, as well as the best steps to take in order to reduce their negative effect. The idea is that, by improving technology infrastructure, urban residents can shape their lifestyles in an eco-friendly manner. An example of this in action is the Personal Travel Assistant system. This system delivers real-time information of the public transportation network. It allows the user to access information on carbon emissions and other green transportation options.
South Korea has taken this idea a step further by initiating a project on a huge scale, with the purpose of building the “smart city” Songdo. This city lies near the Seoul airport and has a future projected population of 2 million. This “city on a hill” has the technology and green space to live up to this moniker. It will successfully sustain an underground system of tubes for disposing of waste, universal broadband, integrated sensor networks, and green buildings to truly make it the “city of the future.”
Songdo may soon become the benchmark that the rest of Seoul will work toward, for achieving both a high quality of living and a sustainable city.
Hong Kong: Ranked No. 8
Hong Kong rose to international prominence in the late 1970s, acting as a trading hub between China and the rest of the world. This led Hong Kong to become one of the world’s financial centers that boasts a high GDP and quality of living. This rapid growth, however, also brought about the age-old problems that go hand in hand with urbanization: pollution and environmental degradation. Hong Kong has thus taken steps to curb these negative effects.
Hong Kong has a Council for Sustainable Development, which operates the Sustainable Development Fund. This fund of $100 million is provided to act as financial support for initiatives that will promote awareness for sustainable development, as well as initiatives that encourage sustainable practices. This promotes the active involvement of the citizenry through nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Leadership in Hong Kong seems to take the view that individual efforts and policy changes will lead to sustainable growth.
Technology has also played an important role in Hong Kong’s sustainability. Citizens of Hong Kong extensively utilize non-motorized and public transit. The Octopus Smart Card makes it easy for users to pay for public transit as well as parking. The smart card can also be used for grocery stores and vending machines. This convenience and usability makes public transit a more desirable option. There are also laws preventing certain types of personal behavior, such as spitting in public, littering, and consuming food or drinks on any public transportation.
Singapore: Ranked No. 10
Singapore has made tremendous progress since its independence in 1965. Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first prime minister, wanted Singapore to outshine other developed countries in areas of cleanliness and efficient transport systems. Singapore’s famouschewing gum ban is one of the many successful environmentally-friendly initiatives that are enforced through the legal system. You’re even legally required to flush public toilets in Singapore. It’s interesting to note that Hong Kong is one of Singapore’s biggest admirers in terms of imposing bans and penalties on certain types of “rude” behavior.
Singapore also has something called the Sustainable Singapore Blueprint, which outlines a cohesive plan of action for all citizens to follow in order to create a more sustainable city. It targets green and blue spaces, transportation, resource sustainability, air quality, drainage, and community stewardship. Much like Hong Kong and Seoul, Singapore relies on advanced technology and a robust public transportation network.
However, Singapore was able to take on a problem unique to its city — the need to import potable water from Malaysia — and turned it into an economic strength. Singaporean policies supporting innovation to solve this problem lead to over 100 companies developing a profitable niche industry in collecting rainwater and recycling water. Their technologies have spread around the globe.
Singapore not only relies on technology, but also on its own citizens. The Sustainable Singapore Blueprint emphasizes community involvement in conserving resources and preserving green spaces.
The future of urbanization
It seems that these three cities have some significant similarities:
- Robust and convenient public transportation
- Relatively recent economic growth
- Utilization of advanced technology
- High GDP per capita ($30,000+ GDP per capita)
- Space limitations
Space limitations may be the driving force for these advanced Asian cities and their environmentally friendly innovations. Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul are all small areas that have space restrictions, and thus high population densities. Where in other places, people can simply spread out (see Los Angeles), these cities cannot. Singapore is a city-state; Hong Kong was historically bordered by not-so-friendly China; and the Seoul metro area is slowly taking over South Korea, with half of the country’s population, 25 million people, living in the Seoul metro. Everyone feels the need to live in these cities, even when there is a severe lack of space.
With space constraints, pollution gets worse; there is less green space, more litter and a higher demand for resources. This led these three cities to deal with the sustainability issue in similar ways, which all boil down to infrastructure. Since each city has the wealth to deal with the problem, they do, using technology to improve infrastructure. Infrastructure means more communication between citizens, better recycling efforts, better public transit, better waste disposal and better emissions management.
Image credits: 1) Songdo IBD All others via Flickr – M.Bob & Kenny Teo
Anum Yoon is a writer who is passionate about personal finance and sustainability. As a regular contributor to the Presidio Graduate School’s blog, she often looks for ways she can incorporate money management with environmental awareness. You can read her updates on Current on Currency.
The motto of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is ‘knowledge in the public service.’ This publication of mine from September 2012 is made available to the public free of charge here by downloadable PDF.
INTRODUCTION
At the time of my initial appointment to the Wilson Center, it struck me that something was missing from the general discussion in the United States concerning China’s embrace of clean energy and its implications for the United States. Much of what had been written embraced one of two polar positions. It seemed that the U.S.-China relationship in clean energy was either the best avenue for our cooperation or the measuring stick for our final competition. To a casual but concerned reader, the message was confusing. Newspaper “word-bites,” rather than informing discussion, lent anxiety to the existing confusion. The Woodrow Wilson Center provided me time and resources to examine the facts about clean technology (“cleantech”) and China. This was timely. Government agencies, think tanks and trade associations hoping to influence the policy debate began in February 2009 to release a spate of lengthy and in-depth policy reports, many of them technical in nature. We will learn in Chapter One how and why that gusher of information—which has thrown up literally shelf-feet of reports over the past year and a half— suddenly arose. However, for the purposes of this Introduction, it is simply worth noting that these policy tomes, for all that they did serve to provide data-based context to what had previously been “context-free” highly combustible reporting, did not offer much help to an interested non-specialist in making better sense of the main issues. At this “informed” end of the information spectrum, there was now almost too much information spread across too many specialized viewpoints. For a busy entrepreneur, investment manager, business professional, state or local government official, regional economic development analyst, scientific researcher, or engaged student—in fact, for any concerned “global citizen” wanting to understand the issues in a straightforward and streamlined way— it was famine or feast. A super-abundance of highly-specialized information provides not much more help in gaining an efficient grasp of the core issues than scattershot newspaper and media reporting had offered. Sustaining U.S.-China Clean Energy Cooperation 3 This book aims squarely at the “middle ground” of curiosity and interest in this broad topic. At the outset, I would like to be clear about three “operating assumptions” I have built in: Timeframe The three main chapters are concerned with the three-year period from mid-2008 to mid-2011. Except for one digression involving Five Year Plans which covers a 30-year period, this limitation on perspective actually helps bring the main subject matter into better focus. The bulk of the U.S. political effort to engage with China in the clean energy arena took shape during the 2008 Presidential Campaign and was further framed through policy initiatives of the Obama administration. For a new industrial ecosystem like “cleantech” or clean energy, what is relevant is defined by what has most recently happened. It is only in the Conclusion that the time-frame is pulled back to show that some of the dynamics described in preceding chapters are, in fact, related to deeper and more long-standing trends in the overall U.S.-China relationship. Structure As author, I have insisted on an organizational principle for presenting information which puts me at odds with the conventional approach of “Beltway” experts. In Washington, the tendency is to run all relevant information through what I will call the “policy blender” and to present the resulting product as a mix of policy recommendation, policy analysis, and policy refutation. I take a different approach. I believe that the policy process is best served when the three main aspects of business-relevant policy are broken down and viewed separately in their own right. These are: (a) the politics underlying the policy process; (b) the technology innovations which policy initiatives aim to support; and (c) the investment ultimately required to take any technology innovation to scale in the marketplace, thereby driving policy on a long-term and sustainable basis. Rather than jumble these perspectives, I treat them in Merritt t. Cooke 4 separate chapters and try to adopt the relevant “mind-set” of each in presenting material in the respective chapter. This may be nothing more than a reflection of my former training as a cultural anthropologist, but I believe it is useful—within the complex arena of China, the United States, and energy—in revealing underlying dynamics. For this reason, in the U.S. section of the opening chapter on Politics, I will rely heavily on the words of key political actors. Ours is a system where the president needs to persuade the electorate and what is said matters. In the section on Chinese Politics, the approach is different, relying instead on “structural analysis” of the ruling party and its interests. In each case, the attempt is to adopt a perspective particularly suited to its subject matter. Purpose The Woodrow Wilson Center’s motto is “knowledge in the public service.” Woodrow Wilson epitomized the ideal of the “practitioner scholar”—the part-time scholar who devotes some of his or her career to bringing scholarly research into the practical, socially-relevant domains of government or business or non-profit work. This is the spirit with which I have written this book. I am neither a career academic nor a professional policymaker. I have tried to make this book clear and concise, although it involves a complex, and fast-changing topic. Especially for technically inclined readers, I want to acknowledge that no sector domain in the U.S.-China clean energy field can be adequately reduced to a couple of pages. I believe this topic is an important one. If the United States and China find a way to realistically base and sustain their cooperation in clean energy, they will be addressing directly 40 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. And if together they manage to create a replicable model of cooperation, they can indirectly help the world address the remaining 60 percent. At its core, this topic touches everyone—those who care deeply about America’s place in the world, those who are moved by China’s epochal reemergence, those who are environmentally-engaged, and those who are responsible global citizens. Students are a particularly important audience because the tectonic issue described in this book will ultimately be the felt experience of their generation. In short, I hope that this book may be found to present important issues in a balanced way and to offer something useful and readily comprehensible to anyone with enough interest to pick it up.
View the Wilson Center’s Book Launch Event here
The following post comes courtesy of Sinosphere, the China blog for The New York Times. Like a flower poking out of the cracked pavement of a concrete jungle, this is another hopeful sign that ‘The Greening of Asia” is starting to blossom.
Q & A with Author Mark Clifford on “The Greening of Asia”
By Ian Johnson from Sinosphere, May 5, 2015 3:21am
A technician at Yingli Solar checks a solar panel on a production line at the company’s headquarters in Baoding, Hebei Province. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
After 20 years in Asia as a journalist, Mark Clifford took over as executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council in 2007. His new book, “The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency,” explores how Asian companies are making strides in providing environmental solutions. China is a special focus because of the country’s huge emissions of carbon, but also because of its potential for innovation.
Mark Clifford.Credit Courtesy of Mark Clifford
In an interview, Mr. Clifford discussed the need to link businesses, governments and nongovernmental organizations to fight climate change:
Q.: How did you get interested in this topic?
A: I joined the Council in 2007 and inherited an almost-finished study on green buildings. That was pretty exotic in Asia back then, and we published a book on it. It got me thinking about the topic.
Q: Your angle is a bit more hopeful than some. Tell us how that came to be.
A: Originally, I thought I’d do a book along the lines of “The East Is Black.” And we do have an emergency here. In China, 1.2 million a year are dying prematurely. People need to know how bad it is, but then I got to thinking that this was pretty obvious. Instead, I thought that there are these much more positive responses underway, and people should know about them. The business community, which takes challenges and solves problems, was involved. So it is unabashedly a glass-half-full book, but that’s because it’s important to know there’s a way out. We can despair, we can do nothing, or we can work to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Q; Do you see business being the main player in solving the issue?
A: No, it’s part of the solution. There has to be a three-legged stool of government, civil society and business, and each has to bring its strengths to the table. Only governments have the power to set rules — the laws and regulations, of course, but also the prices in the forms of taxes and subsidies as well as facilitating infrastructure developments. Media and NGOs make sure that business and government are doing what they promise.
Q: What was most surprising is how many companies are doing this in one form or another.
A: Yes, in the book I profile more than a dozen companies at length but also have an appendix of more than 50 companies that are involved with a variety of environmental initiatives. It was surprising to me what’s going on at the corporate level, but they’re doing things for good business reasons. Some are for the P.R. effect, but most look at it as necessary for survival.
Q: You focused one chapter on Hong Kong’s CLP Holdings, the electric power company.
A: Their work really sparked this project. In 2007, the then-chief executive, Andrew Brandler, announced that by mid-century, they would cut the carbon intensity of their electricity production by 75 percent. This pledge by one of Asia’s biggest private utilities — mostly coal-fired power plants — to effectively decarbonize by mid-century is unparalleled globally. I think this stems from the Kadoorie family, which owns a major stake in CLP. Michael Kadoorie challenges his top management to look at 50-year horizons. They do this for good reasons. They’re traditionally a coal-burning utility, but they think that this isn’t a good business model in 50 years.
Other companies think that water is underpriced, and in the future, it will be more realistically priced. Carbon also is underpriced, and other companies want to be ready for when it’s changed. But not all companies have long-term visions.To reach them, you need the other two legs of the stool. You need good, strong government policy, and you need NGOs to hold people accountable.
Q: What countries have had good policies?
A: Singapore has done an exemplary job. They decided very early on that water is of existential threat to the nation. So they have taken very firm policies, and it gives companies a form of certainty about costs.Not every country has the capacity that Singapore’s administration has, and it’s a small place with a forward-thinking government. It’s much harder in big countries like China and India, which are more fragmented.
Q: You have a lot on China.
A: The good news is we have good policies coming down from the top levels of the Chinese government. Where China continues to struggle is the implementation at the ground level. There’s not always enforcement, and there’s no civil society to act as a check. The time when China decides that the environment and energy issues are as much of a threat as the color revolutions were, or the Hong Kong protests were last year, that’s when we’ll know we have serious progress. We’ve seen with Chai Jing [whose popular documentary film on the environment, “Under the Dome,” was banned] that civil society is muted.
Q: We read a lot about air pollution, but you also think that water is crucial.
A: Increasingly, water is a hard-stop issue. Air pollution is horrible, but most people affected by it are still living. But no one can live without water. I don’t know what people will do when the water stops. In China, projects like the South-North Water Diversion Project just delay the day of reckoning. What concerns me is that even most otherwise far-sighted governments are not facing up to the challenges. For example, what do you do if you’re a municipal official, and you have an industry, say semi-conductors, which uses a lot of water? What do you do when you have to make a choice: water for the factory or the town? These are the kinds of choices that aren’t going to happen today or tomorrow, but governments will face this.
Q: And yet there are signs of hope in China.
A: China is about to overtake Germany as having the largest amount of installed solar power capability. It also has large wind turbine facilities. All of this is important because China burns half the world’s coal and accounts for 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. So to fix China, we need to cut coal use. Coal is supposed to peak in 2030, but it could happen a lot faster. So these are huge challenges, but China is potentially further ahead than many people realize.
Hard to believe? Here’s the data behind it. Three cheers for water!
Henry “Hank” Paulson — former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and creator of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue — was in Philadelphia last Wednesday. He came to publicize his new book Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower.
The media frame for the talk and Q&A which he gave to the World Affairs Council of Greater Philadelphia was: ‘Hank, you’re a real patriot. Why are you helping China?”
In response, Hank Paulson was very clear that his interest in promoting a better understanding of China is rooted in his desire to do what is best for America.
You can read the full article here but, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on one small, but important, piece of the big contemporary China puzzle: Is Xi’s ongoing crackdown (on corruption but also on foreign businesses, NGOs, press freedoms, social media, connectivity to the global knowledge-pool, etc) flashing green, yellow or red for China’s paramount challenge of rebooting its economy on a more sustainable basis?
China’s ‘old software version’ of infrastructure build-out, inbound investment and export of cheap stuff is clearly no longer operating smoothly on the new global hardware system. China’s future – and Xi Jinping’s for that matter – depends on a smooth updating to a ‘new software version’ of consumer-led spending, outbound investment and innovation up the product value-chain. Under any circumstances, that’s a tall-order to pull off in just a few years. For those of us who believe that helping China matters to America’s future, the key question is whether the crackdown on political thought in China is – or is not — inimical to the desperately needed surge of commercial innovation needed to upgrade China’s economy to version 2.0.
It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that, in the same week that Hank Paulson was wrestling with this question in Philadelphia, so were two other leading experts on the trajectory of China’s globalization elsewhere: Shaun Rein and Tom Friedman in respective articles. If Hank Paulson occupies the pivot point as a U.S. patriot committed to helping China, Shaun Rein is a self-acknowledged China booster and Tom Friedman a “color me dubious” observer of China’s steep road ahead to globalization.
Here’s what each of them has had to say over the past week on the ‘sword of Damocles’ question facing Xi and China: crackdown or start-up? (Click on the name below in order to source the original publication from which the following excerpts are taken):
“Paulson believes the Communist Party has reached a simple accord with the Chinese people: prosperity in return for continued state control. The question, of course, is whether China can have it both ways – economic freedom without cultural freedom, a subject I raised with Paulson at the World Affairs Council.
‘In today’s information economy, I don’t know how economies can innovate and do the sorts of things they do to stay on top without having a free flow of ideas and information,” Paulson replied. “I’ve run a global company, and, boy, you need to be connected. You can’t have an Internet that’s not connected. You need to know what’s going on politically, regulatory systems, economically, in terms of ideas all over the world.’
He added: ‘But understand what’s going on right now. Xi Jinping . . . is focusing on the things that the people care about the most. So, corruption. He recognizes the party won’t survive unless he curbs corruption. So he’s focused on corruption, the environment, dirty air, and water.’
“So . . . managing China, just think what it’s like because they have to deal with the kinds of issues that afflict developed countries at the same time they have to deal with issues that developing countries are dealing with because a big part of the country is still poor. It would be like, . . . looking at Europe, Germany and Slovenia. They are both European, vastly different stages of development, they need different economic policies. So think about managing both of those in a single country under one party, and I mean that’s sort of the challenge.’”
“China´s much needed anti-corruption drive has now put the country into a lock-down mode, and new projects have halted,” tells business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. “The cut in the reserve ratio ratio (RRR) this weekend is one way for a kickstart, although nobody know what will really work.”
China Herald: “What does the Chinese market need to stimulate the economy and if this growth continues to disappoint then would you expect an additional benchmark rate cut in the next couple of quarters, something that many experts are now talking about?”
Rein: “I think what we need to look at is not gross domestic product (GDP) growth but we need to take a look at unemployment and the second reason why I am more concerned about the economy is in the last month urban unemployment has been hovering around 5 percent – that’s really a problem. So the unemployment rate in areas of manufacturing are still fairly strong and you can easily stimulate that by forcing state owned enterprises to do heavy investment; train construction, airport construction and you can get jobs there but the issue is urban unemployment is weak and there aren’t a lot of easy remedies. The government is trying to switch from manufacturing oriented economy more towards one of technology and innovation as I outlined in my new book ‘The End of Copycat China’ but it is not easy to do that. You cannot get companies that are producing things all a sudden to become innovators, so there is definitely going to be some weakness, some problems in the economy over the next three-four months and frankly there are no easy answers on how they stimulate the economy.”
“Americans … are asking of President Xi: “What’s up with you?” Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is clearly aimed at stifling the biggest threat to any one-party system: losing its legitimacy because of rampant corruption. But he also seems to be taking out potential political rivals as well. Xi has assumed more control over the military, economic and political levers of power in China than any leader since Mao. But to what end — to reform or to stay the same?
“Xi is “amassing power to maintain the Communist Party’s supremacy,” argued Willy Wo-Lap Lam, author of “Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping: Renaissance, Reform or Retrogression?” Xi “believes one reason behind the Soviet Union’s collapse is that the party lost control of the army and the economy.” But Xi seems to be more focused on how the Soviet Union collapsed than how America succeeded, and that is not good. His crackdown has not only been on corruption, which is freezing a lot of officials from making any big decisions, but on even the mildest forms of dissent. Foreign textbooks used by universities are being censored, and blogging and searching on China’s main Internet sites have never been more controlled. Don’t even think about using Google there or reading Western newspapers online.
“But, at the same time, Xi has begun a huge push for “innovation,” for transforming China’s economy from manufacturing and assembly to more knowledge-intensive work, so this one-child generation will be able to afford to take care of two retiring parents in a country with an inadequate social-safety net.
“Alas, crackdowns don’t tend to produce start-ups.
“As Antoine van Agtmael, the investor who coined the term “emerging markets,” said to me: China is making it harder to innovate in China precisely when rising labor costs in China and rising innovation in America are spurring more companies to build their next plant in the United States, not China. The combination of cheap energy in America and more flexible, open innovation — where universities and start-ups share brainpower with companies to spin off discoveries; where manufacturers use a new generation of robots and 3-D printers that allow more production to go local; and where new products integrate wirelessly connected sensors with new materials to become smarter, faster than ever — is making America, says van Agtmael, “the next great emerging market.”
“It’s a paradigm shift,” he added. “The last 25 years was all about who could make things cheapest, and the next 25 years will be about who can make things smartest.”
President Xi seems to be betting that China is big enough and smart enough to curb the Internet and political speech just enough to prevent dissent but not enough to choke off innovation. This is the biggest bet in the world today. And if he’s wrong (and color me dubious) we’re all going to feel it.”
President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive — known for its signature vow to target both ‘tigers’ (top-level officials) and ‘flies’ (low-level functionaries) — shows no sign of abating. It may even be gathering momentum with the early April announcement that former Politburo Standing Committee member (and security portfolio chief) Zhou Yongkang will be standing trial in Tianjin on charges of bribery, abusing power and disclosing state secrets, This announcement followed a slow-motion public ensnarement of Zhou as, for almost two years, a tightening noose methodically drew in business associates from Zhou’s time with China National Petroleum Corporation, provincial associates from his time as Party Secretary in Sichuan Province, associates from the security establishment and close family members.
As a member of the PSC for five years from 2007-2012, Zhou Yongkang was one of the seven most powerful people in China. Not since the 1976 arrest and subsequent trial of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four at the end of the Cultural Revolution has such a high-level Chinese official been brought to public trial by the Chinese Communist Party.
The beginning of Zhou Yongkang’s fall is associated with Chongqing, a provincial-level ‘city’ (see Direct Controlled Municipalities) in China’s far west immediately adjoining Sichuan Province and erstwhile power-base for Bo Xilai, Zhou’s protégé. Until the death of British citizen Neil Heywood followed by the failed attempt by Bo’s police chief to seek refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province) followed by the conviction of Bo’s wife on charges of ordering Heywood’s poisoning, it had appeared likely that Zhou would be able to get Bo onto the Standing Committee, thereby protecting his ‘retirement flank’ after stepping down. Bo’s candidacy faltered under the weight of these events just as Xi Jinping was consolidating power and his new Standing Committee taking final shape.
Now that formal charges against Zhou Yongkang have been announced, attention is swinging to Tianjin, another of China’s four Direct Controlled Municipalities (直辖市) and venue for Zhou’s upcoming trial. It is perhaps not surprising that, for months now, the mood in Tianjin — Philadelphia’s Sister City (since original establishment of “Friendship Cities” link in 1980) — has turned decidedly grim. As reported by my friend Tim Weckesser and his fine team of professionals at Sino-Consulting International (SCI):
(begin extract from SCI Report)
The city of Tianjin, our main base in China, recently became a focus in the news media as it fell under scrutiny by Beijing’s powerful anti-graft campaign. This happened not only because of the sudden downfall of Tianjin’s long time police chief, Wu Changshun, based on corruption charges, but also because Tianjin courts have been chosen for the trial Zhou Yongkang, the highest ranking official ever to be charged with corruption. China’s state prosecutors formally charged Zhou, the country’s former top security czar, with accepting large bribes over a long period of time. At the height of his power, Zhou controlled China’s police, spy agencies, court systems, and prosecution offices all across the country. And he wasn’t shy about using these powerful assets to crush dissent in the name of “preserving social stability.”
And now, to add to Tianjin’s notoriety, the city’s former mayor, Dai Xianglong, is “cooperating” in an “investigation”. From 1995 to 2002, before becoming Tianjin’s mayor, Dai was already well-known as the governor of China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). The investigation, so far, is focused on the vast wealth amassed by Dai’s relatives, not on Dai himself. But this may well be just a tactical move with Dai himself as the real target. This new investigation comes on the heels of the 15 year prison term meted out to Nanjing’s former mayor, Ji Jianye, for corruption. The court found Ji guilty of accepting 11.3m yuan ($1.9m) in bribes between 1999 and 2013, when he was dismissed.
President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign aims at trying to clean up China’s graft-riddled government at every level, with examples being set at the top. And so far, we have to say it is successful. In our experience, government officials as well as executives in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are all keeping their heads down. No big banquets, no gifts – given or received – and strictly limited international travel are basically the norm, at least for now. The question is – will this nationwide campaign eventually help China’s economic development? We hope so. Here is some very recent China market news taken from a variety of public sources.
(end extract from SCI Report)
These then are the dangerous riptides which have been tugging at our PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership‘s Chinese partner, TEDA, since the end of 2014. Given the fathoms-deep nature of Chinese political and legal process, many of these currents have been swirling in hidden depths while the surface continued to appear placid. The U.S. side of our PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership has unmistakably felt the power of these currents, though.
While Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive remains immensely popular with the general public, there is a growing concern among many close observers of Chinese politics inside and outside China that these hidden forces can as easily become uncontrollable and destructive as they can be purging and restorative. At the heart of all this is the crucial difference between ‘rule of law’ (with due process, standards of proof, checks and balances, etc) versus ‘rule by law’ (political power plays being managed under a thin veneer of legal process). As Liz Economy wrote in an earlier post on this blog (see “Time for Xi to Reform his Reforms” in Feb. 6, 2015 post):
“Certainly, (Xi’s) anti-corruption campaign has hit its target—hundreds of thousands of them to be exact—and shows little sign of slowing down. He has cast a wide net, leaving little doubt that no sector of society—party, military, business, or other—is completely safe. Still, Xi remains vulnerable to accusations that the campaign is at least partially politically motivated, given that almost half of the senior-most officials arrested are tied in some way to his political opponents, and none of his Fujian or Zhejiang associates have been detained. He might want to bring some transparency to the process: uncertainty and fear of running afoul of some regulation or another are driving many officials to avoid making decisions or taking action.”
Happy Year of the Sheep (Ram) … err ..or Goat?
All are basically conveyed by the Chinese character 羊
This leads to some confusion since, biologically and genetically, sheep and goats are quite distinct. Sheep (Ovis aries) have 54 chromosomes, while goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) have 60. While sheep and goats will occasionally mate, fertile sheep-goat hybrids are rare. Hybrids made in the laboratory are called chimeras. The easist way to tell the difference between a sheep and goat is to look at their tails.
So, 羊年快乐! Happy Year of the Chimera!
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 