Barbara Demick
Kim Chaek Ironworks in the industrial city of Chongjin, the largest ironworks in North Korea
When I first met Song Hee-Suk, in 2004, she had been out of North Korea for two years. I was interviewing people from Chongjin—an industrial city in the far northeast of North Korea, near the Chinese border—for the Los Angeles Times. We arranged to meet at the paper’s office in Seoul. I opened the door to an immaculately dressed, tiny woman who exuded confidence. She wore a large jade ring and a pink polo shirt tucked into neatly pressed beige trousers. Everything from her cheery pastels to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life. At first glance, it was impossible to tell what kind of past she carried with her.
Mrs Song defected from North to South Korea in August 2002. In the first—and least hazardous—part of her escape she was driven the 50 miles from Chongjin to the border. There, clinging to the back of a guide, she forded the Tumen river and arrived in China. Some time after, using a forged passport and a false name, she took a flight from the city of Dalian in northeast China to Incheon in South Korea.
She knew only one other person on the plane—a young man sitting a few rows away, who had come to her hotel room at 6am to give her the passport. It had been stolen from a South Korean woman of about the same age, the original photos extracted with a razor blade. If questioned, Mrs Song would pretend to be a tourist who had spent a long weekend in Dalian, a popular seaside resort. To support her story, she was dressed in clothes that would have looked outlandish in North Korea—capri-style jeans and white sneakers. She carried a sporty backpack. Her handlers had pierced her ears (something women in North Korea didn’t do) and her hair had been done in a style favoured by South Korean women of a certain age. Mrs Song had spent two weeks being fattened up and groomed so that she wouldn’t look like a refugee. The one thing that might give her away was her guttural North Korean accent. She was advised not to make small talk.
Mrs Song sat perfectly still in the plane, her hands folded on her lap. She wasn’t particularly nervous. Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing by defecting. Her eldest daughter, Oak-hee, had fled North Korea three years earlier, and she was going to join her. She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television.
The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her mother to South Korea were astounded that this sweet little grandmother could board an international flight carrying a doctored passport without breaking into a sweat. Had the Chinese immigration authorities detected her forged documents, she would have been arrested and sent back to North Korea to face prison camp. But her mind was made up.
Read more »
Mark Kitto
There are men with guns on the streets. It is the hunting season. The men work in pairs. One holds the gun while the other acts as spotter, and smokes cigarettes. When the shooter wants a cigarette, they swap over. The prey is bamboo partridge, of which there are plenty, or (more rarely) pheasant. They don’t shoot songbirds—other men catch and sell those.
The village’s top shot is Lao Xu. He is a wily hunter—even if he once shot one of his dogs by mistake. Following a heavy snowfall, he goes after wild boar with his surviving dogs. The scent is easy to find, and the dogs chase the boar into a snowdrift where Lao Xu can walk up to it and pop it in the head. “Then I have to call up my mates to help me carry the carcass out of the hills. That’s the hard part,” he says.
Last season Lao Xu invited me to go with him. I think he actually wanted my dog Charlie, who has a real talent for finding partridge. Just to be on the safe side, Lao Xu mentioned to the police chief that he would be taking me hunting. I got a call immediately. “No foreigner is allowed a gun in China,” the chief said. “Forget it.”
Read more »
Tomas Hirst
The Kremlin has decided to take a strong stance against Iran’s enrichment programme
China’s unwillingness to support sanctions against Iran may preoccupy the international community, but the discussion ignores a key development: the lack of a Russian obstacle.
To put the situation in perspective, Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, estimated to be in the region of 16,000 (although the Start II Treaty limits the number of operational warheads to 4250). It also has a traditional hostility towards America’s aggressive foreign policy and a vested interest in keeping US/Iranian relations frosty in order to knock out a major competitor in oil production.
Along with China, it has forced a watering down of three previous attempts at sanctions against Ahmadinejad’s regime. Their combined resistance to tough international measures has left many feeling that, to date, sanctions have been largely toothless.
Read more »
Mark Kitto
Chinese urban society is reaching a turning point. City dwellers are beginning to think about returning to the countryside. Not to live and work—who’d want to be a peasant again?—but just for the weekend.
It is a gradual process (unusually for China) and it would have been unthinkable a few years ago. As often predicted, the country’s emerging middle class has embraced consumer culture, acquiring first a television, next a washing machine, then a fridge, and more recently a satellite dish, car and iPhone. And now, in a more surprising and less noticed shift, they want to return to the place their poor forebears spent centuries struggling to escape from, or where their parents “learned from the peasants” during the cultural revolution.
Condominiums are appearing in the foothills of Moganshan. They are ugly and badly sited but are selling fast, regarded as investments as much as weekend retreats.
Five years ago, a friend brought his young Shanghainese staff here for a corporate retreat. They asked three questions: what television channels were there, was there any seafood, and why the hell would anyone want to live in such a backwater?
Read more »
Jonathon Porritt
The fallout from the Copenhagen summit is still reverberating around the world. It isn’t just NGOs and academics who are up in arms—many governments, including Britain’s, have expressed dismay at the results. And most people agree that China is the principal bad guy.
It wasn’t meant to be like that. China’s leaders had made encouraging noises before the summit. In November 2009, China made a commitment to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by at least 40 per cent by 2020 (on 2005 levels). Though falling short of actual cuts in emissions, the move was welcomed since it still represents a huge challenge for the country. And it was expected that Premier Wen Jiabao would have more to offer at the climate change summit itself.
That turned out to be wrong. China only briefly referred to its carbon dioxide intensity commitment. Instead it fought furiously to block any global agreement on transparency in carbon reporting. It manipulated its role as a would-be champion of poor countries, and joined in the procedural chicanery and bullying with enthusiasm. It caused the accord—signed by China, India, the US, Brazil and South Africa—to be so watered down that the final conference plenary was only prepared to “note” its existence rather than endorse it. (In the idiosyncratic lexicon of the UN, “noting” comes at the bottom of the consensus hierarchy, with only “rejecting” below it.)
Perhaps most worrying was China’s refusal to allow mention of long-term targets in the accord—even those already agreed by the US and the EU. China, it was said, was moving to protect its future status as the world’s largest economy.
Read more »
Adrian Bannon
Is this the end? Google has threatened to pull out of China
In China, the release of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1984 hit song, “Two Tribes Go To War,” was greeted in a similar vein to the arrival of the internet search giant Google: both were immediate smash hits.
The Google tribe is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable organisations of our time. Through the creative utilisation of cutting-edge technology and innovative business deals, Google’s mathematicians-turned-mogul founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have taken their tribe from academic slipstream to the global mainstream. Every tribe, however, needs a battleground—and for Google that must include the world’s fastest growing and relatively untapped economy: China.
The country is set become the biggest internet market in the world. In attempting to gain a strong foothold in this Midas market (Google still trails local Chinese competitor Baidu by a considerable margin), Google has nevertheless achieved the double bonus of keeping Microsoft at bay as well as having access to China’s perennial army of computer scientist graduates.
But getting so heavily involved in China has presented Google with its own set of problems, and the recent sophisticated attacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists and the 20 plus other companies, highlights this. The Google philosophy of “youth + freedom + transparency + new model + the general public’s benefit + belief in trust = The Miracle of Google”—as famously enunciated by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a high profile Chinese Microsoft employee who crossed the binary war lines by seeking to join Google—sits very uneasily with the Chinese political equation of “Communist bureaucracy + active monitoring + restriction + censored internet.”
Read more »
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
Few people will have missed the outcry over China’s decision to execute British national Akmal Shaikh, despite evidence that he had been duped into unknowingly transporting 4kg of heroin into the country. It was argued that Shaikh had bipolar disorder and a delusional personality; he thought he was going to China to record a song about a Little Rabbit which would inspire world peace. On the basis of his mental illness, Britain made 27 ministerial pleas for clemency; Gordon Brown discussed his case with China’s president Hu Jintao several months ago and then with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao when they met in Copenhagen; the British charity Reprieve compiled an Application for Special Pardon including a psychiatric assessment. Witness statements and appeals were being sent to China right up until the final hour. But the pleas were ignored and Akmal Shaikh was executed on schedule on 29th December 2009.
Why did Britain’s appeals fail? “Diminished responsibility” on the grounds of mental illness is a legal concept in China, but the authorities argued that there was no evidence of mental illness at Shaikh’s first trial in December 2007. They did not, however, respond to the documentation provided by Britain, nor would they carry out a medical assessment of Shaikh.
According to a Chinese human rights lawyer who had been eager to assist Shaikh’s defence: “The government didn’t act according to the rule of law on Akmal’s case. China wants to throw its weight around and show it’s a powerful country. They wouldn’t have dared do this before they hosted the Olympics.” Shaikh’s trial, which lasted less 30 minutes, took place in December 2007, three months after his arrest, but the judgement was not announced until October 2008, after the Beijing Games were over.
But if China’s treatment of Akmal Shaikh was a show, it seems less likely that it was put on for Britain; it was probably a performance of prowess for a domestic audience. Once his sentence became a “hot topic” on the Chinese internet, it was supported with so much enthusiasm that one Chinese journalist I spoke to felt that no amount of evidence or international pressure could change the verdict. The vast majority of public opinion in China is expressed via the internet—comments at the bottom of news stories, on blogs and in online discussion forums. And China may be a one-party state, but the party listens to public opinion—particularly the opinion that it helps to shape.
From the perspective of the Chinese media, at issue in Akram Shaikh’s case was that Britain, true to its 19th-century form, seemed to be claiming special treatment and interfering in China’s judicial sovereignty. The Chinese reporting downplayed the claims of Shaikh’s mental illness. He didn’t have one, it was decided. Britain didn’t prove it, said the China Daily; “China has its own definition of mental illness and by that he is deemed to be mentally sound,” wrote China’s Global Times. Editorials said that Britain was appealing because it no longer has the death penalty. “How could a criminal be exempted from the death penalty only because he is British?” asked Xinhua, China’s national wire service. Shaikh’s case became a story of the British trying to get away with inflicting drugs on the Chinese, a story that reminded people in China of the opium wars.
These views were echoed by the vast majority of China’s “netizens,” who commented in support of the execution, many making explicit reference to the opium wars. One blogger on the SINA web portal wrote: “China today is not the China of 1840, the British drugs smuggler should be killed.” On the Tianya forum someone wrote: “Better than shouting about it, let’s start the 3rd opium war!” Another went: “Just kill him immediately, that’s equality!!!!!!!!!” By the eve of Akmal Shaikh’s execution, the story was the most read and commented on topic on SINA.
Underlying all of this is the desire among many educated, online, middle-class Chinese professionals to a feel a sense of equality with other people globally. They are desperate for the Chinese not to be seen as the world’s coolies. Each time I meet someone with a strong and active nationalist approach to politics in China, I ask them about how they feel about their lack of rights within China. Most respond by saying that of course they would like to have more rights at home, but it is not possible for them to speak out for this now. Their only outlet as political beings is to rally for higher status internationally. In this case—as with so many others—it was nationalist voices that shouted the loudest, and in unison, on the web. Shaikh was cast as a baddie in China’s nationalist pantomime, to be hissed and booed off stage. Alternative or dissenting voices, like that of the unnamed human rights lawyer quoted above, were inaudible amid the nationalist sway.
The unelected Communist party feels it has to constantly prove its legitimacy, and in these economically precarious times, showing that the party can now stand up to its old oppressors demonstrates to the nation that they are being led in the right direction. It is a bizarre cycle. The government is responsible for stoking up nationalist sentiment, then must respond to it, even when it puts them in embarrassing diplomatic situations, as the Shaikh case surely has. Gordon Brown stated that he was “appalled and disappointed” and the Chinese ambassador was called into the British foreign office.
But the blip in relations will be temporary. Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics legitimised China as a country. Soon the execution of Akmal Shaikh will be forgotten—perhaps listed on reports of China’s bad behaviour, its imperviousness to western practice, along with its actions in Copenhagen and its imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo. Ivan Lewis, minister for foreign and commonwealth affairs, has argued that engagement with China is “non-negotiable and any alternative strategy is simply not credible.” But, he has added: “By being so clear in our public criticism of China’s handling of this case we are demonstrating that it is not business as usual.” Yet business continues, quite as usual.
After what we have seen with Shaikh’s case, will we be able to see through our own mythologies about the story of modern China? Will we continue to imagine that political reform and an independent judiciary will emerge as, if by nature, in the wake of China’s economic development? It’s an idea that we cling to; capitalism rests upon it. In life, as in economic development, we are convinced that once wealth arrives, all else good will fall into place—despite the fact that history tells us no such thing.
Perhaps we need this myth when we want to buy something cheap that has been made in China, or to make an incentivised trade deal there. If images of sweatshops and detention centres shuffle through our minds as we consider what a great deal we are getting, the myth kicks in and we are comforted by our delusions that we are helping make things better, because once people in China are rich, all will be resolved.
But the fact remains that China has given a lethal injection to a vulnerable man. This is what happens in a place where political instability undermines the rule of law. China’s courts are routinely used as a political tool; at times it wears down the innocent or incarcerates the brave; each year for millions of China’s “petitioners,” justice is a mirage; it disappears as soon as they approach it. While Chinese people continue to be let down daily by their judiciary, Akmal Shaikh’s will not be the last prick of injustice in China that is felt by the outside world.
China has indeed performed an economic miracle, but we cannot ignore the fact that it is also a place with a judiciary that is subservient to its problem-laden political system. These two phenomena co-exist in China, and contrary to what we might expect, the success of the former is doing nothing to fix the latter. Rather, China’s “economic miracle” makes a gloss over its political stagnation, and enables its fallout to remain unaddressed.
Damian Kahya
China's leader arrived in Copenhagen less ready to wreck than we now think
With Christmas upon us, the dust has settled on Copenhagen. And as Prospect editor David Goodhart posted yesterday, the settled view is becoming: blame China. Mark Lynas wrote an especially coruscating piece about it in the Guardian yesterday—a piece with which their editor agreed so strongly that he used his twitter guise of @alanrushbridger to say yesterday “if you read one piece on Copenhagen, read this.”
But in all this we are losing track of what actually happened, in which impact of the Chinese was more muddled and complex than the deliberate attack now gaining popularity. So Lets go back to Copenhagen to try and get it right.
With the talks about to veer into complete breakdown the US president hurried towards Air Force One. Like a sulky husband rushing to leave his awkward in-laws he explained he would love to stay but couldn’t – the weather demanded he go now. The deal he left behind was a conjuring trick of such audacity that it threw the slow thinking delegates and their press counterparts into a state of befuddled confusion.
Read more »
David Goodhart
The misguided conventional copenhagen wisdom
Copenhagen is being called a failure, with various candidates blamed. Naomi Klein says it was Obama’s fault. Mark Lynas today is blaming the Chinese. But the conference wasn’t a failure. Or it was only so when measured against unrealistic expectations.
As Tony Brenton pointed out in the FT (letters, December 22nd, registration required), what matters here is power politics not consensus among all the world’s nations. There are about 20 nations that matter in climate change politics, and the core of the deal that was agreed came from five of them—the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. (And in what previous global deal could you have seen those five names lined up together?) The US and China have both committed themselves to a deal, indeed all the countries that matter have agreed, in public, that the rise in global temperature must be kept to under 2C. That in itself is a huge advance on just a couple of years ago.
Read more »
Andro Linklater
I live in an ancient farmhouse in Kent that boasts a cat slide roof, a chimney stack leaning like the tower of Pisa, and a living room whose ceiling is supported by an immense wooden beam low enough to stun anyone taller than a jockey. In other words, it looks like a quintessential English country cottage.
But quaint though the roof, chimney and beam now seem, these three elements are evidence of a revolution in human affairs. Looking at them, I can recreate the events of almost 500 years ago, like a detective surveying a murder scene.
For sometime in the early 16th century, my predecessor in the house was infected by a radical new idea, one that changed him so profoundly that he altered the shape of the building to reflect the new way he thought about himself and his neighbours. And like a mental epidemic, this idea then spread from southeast England and gradually extended across the country. Two generations later colonists carried it to North America. From there the contagion spread to the Pacific, and around the globe from Nova Scotia to New Zealand. It is now so deeply embedded in our psyches that it is hard to recognise the pervasiveness of its influence.
The new idea was easily described—that land itself could be an individually owned, tradeable commodity—but its origins were old and complex. Land ownership rights began to be recognised under the common law as early as the 12th century; a market for land existed in the 14th century, and in some exchanges cash payments were involved; and the practice of fencing off individual parcels of ground, the enclosure movement, began in the 1480s. During the course of the 16th century, however, one crucial element was created that linked all these elements together in a single financial nexus. An almost imperceptible change in mortgage law introduced the principle of fairness, or equity, to deals that involved lending money against the collateral value of a chunk of earth. Today, anyone who has a mortgage is aware of the concept, if only through the small-print warning on the agreement that begins: “Your property may be at risk…” But that phrase encapsulates a near 500-year-old principle of momentous significance. It not only underpins the modern mortgage market, it shapes societies around the world—from the abandoned sub-prime mansions of Arizona at the heart of our current economic crisis, to the aspirant property owners of Shanghai who may yet bring us out of it.
***
Read more »
Post a comment »
