In the essay, which is also posted on an accompanying site hosted on China File, describes his first trip to Maoist-dominated China in 1973. Nathan writes:
A three-week program of visits to production brigades, factories, industrial exhibitions, neighborhood committees, department stores, schools, universities, and the occasional classic tourist site, moving from Guangzhou to Beijing, then to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and back to Guangzhou. At each unit we sat in an arc of chairs or around a table, received a jiandan jieshao (simple introduction) from a “leading cadre,” took detailed notes, asked earnest questions, and walked through the facility trying to peer behind the façade of Maoist correctness for signs of real life.
Among other things Nathan, who traveled with other professors and young U.S. scholar, came under suspicion from Chinese academics for a reference he made in his book as well as Chinese officials who thought he was taking taking photographs of propaganda posters.
In the interview Kara explains how people become trapped and exploited in the system of bonded labor in a desperate attempt to get credit:
Bonded labour, or what’s often called debt-bondage, is a form of feudal servitude, where credit is exchanged for pledged labour. The class in power will often coercively extract and extort far more labour out of the debtor than the fair value of the credit they received. Sometimes an entire family can endlessly work off a meagre loan taken years before. More than half of the world’s slaves are bonded labourers and the products made by them permeate the global economy.
Bonded labor is a particular problem in South Asia where there are high rates of poverty and a caste system which allows the unfair system to persist. In addition to the caste system and poverty, bonded labor also continues to exist and grow because of corruption, social apathy, and the fact that it has become part of the global economy. In the following excerpt from the interview, Kara explains how bonded labor has become part of the global economy, though it is often hidden within its complex processes:
Q: Are there any sectors that seem particularly prone to use the products of bonded labour?
A: Well, yeah. Often times the supply chains for these products can be very complex, so sometimes a company that’s importing goods may not realise exactly what’s going on on the far side of their supply chain. The industries that have the highest prevalence included products like rice, tea, coffee, but also things like frozen shrimp and fish, granite for your counter tops, cubic zirconia, hand woven carpets, sporting goods, apparel, the list goes on and on. Construction is another one, including office buildings for international companies, or major road construction and infrastructure projects.
Q: To what extent does bonded labour a problem of globalisation?
A: The global economy is a powerful force [that creates] demand. A company can scour the globe for under-regulated labour markets in order to benefit from cheap wages. Labour is almost always the highest cost component in a business, so if you can minimise or virtually eliminate labour costs you are saving a lot of money. The global economy does look for and demand and feed on these systems, which stimulates their persistence.
The following video is an interview with Andrew Nathan coauthor (with Andrew Scobell) of China’s Search for Security. The interview was done with China File, a project of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. (Apologies for the glitch with the formatting; it should be corrected soon):
Question: What is historical memory? Why did you use “never forgot national humiliation” as the title of this book?
Zheng Wang: Let me give you an example, while only some Americans actually witnessed the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, future generations of Americans are undoubtedly becoming connected to this national trauma through its retelling in the news, family stories, and classroom lessons. Historical memory is recollections and representations of past historical events shared by a particular group. For a group of people, their collective historical memory can be linked to both a single event as well as their national experience. It is collective memory of the past that binds a group of people together. For example, the National Mall in Washington D.C. reminds Americans of the glories and traumas of the United States. Each year millions of students visit their nation’s capitol to see these grand symbols and hear the stories that define what it means to be an American.
For the Chinese, their historical consciousness has been powerfully influenced by the so-called “century of humiliation” from the First Opium War (1839–1842) through the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945. Chinese remember this period as a time when their nation was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists. “Never forget national humiliation” is the English translation of a Chinese phrase Wuwang Guochi. In this book, I refer to it as the “national phrase” of China. The Chinese characters associated with this motto were engraved on monuments and painted on walls all over China. In general, this book examines how the discourse of national humiliation became an integral part of the construction of national identity and nation building in the different periods of China. It also explains how today’s Chinese youth engage with the phrase and how this informs their understanding of who they are and their perception of the rest of the world.
Yesterday, CNN.com published “Afghan War Is Not Over Yet,” by Stephen Tankel, an assistant professor at American University, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In this article, Tankel takes a detailed look at the unsettled political situation in Central Asia after President Obama’s announcement of the “irreversible” plan to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Tankel sees a great deal of uncertainty that must be resolved and a wide variety of challenges that must be be met before any successful withdrawal can be effected.
He first questions the efficacy of the Afghan National Army in maintaining stability:
The Afghan National Army is already taking the lead in regions with roughly 75% of the population, with U.S. and other NATO troops acting as support. However, this does not include the most contested areas in the south and east, where Afghan forces are slated to assume responsibility by next summer. Serious doubts persist about their readiness to do so.
Despite significant training efforts, the army’s level of competence remains in question. It lacks many of the support functions needed for war fighting. The army will remain dependent on international forces for these capabilities and on the international community for financial assistance, expected to cost at least $4 billion a year.
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
China’s Path to Sustainable Development
Bryan Tilt
“Sustainability” is both an interesting analytical concept and a current buzzword whose precise meaning is difficult to pin down. Without getting too bogged down in the particulars of defining sustainability, it seems clear that the concept hinges on balancing economic and social growth with the limits of the biophysical environment. Nowhere is the need for sustainable thinking and action more acute than in contemporary China, where a population of more than 1.3 billion grapples with rapid industrial growth, urbanization, species extirpation, serious pollution, and a growing middle class of energy-hungry consumers. (more…)
“China’s escalating popular violence against local authorities and humble petition to the central government in the last two decades should be understood in light of [a] longstanding Confucianist conception of authority. This conception persists despite all the ideological and political revolutions of the twentieth century….”—Ho-fung Hung
The recent protests against land grab in Wukan and a polluting power plant in Haimen in South China have captured the world’s attention and lead many to ask whether something significantly different from China’s many other local protests is happening., The Wukan villagers’ orderly exercise of self-governance after the CCP authorities fled the village, as well as their political demand for local democracy, is rare if not unprecedented. So is the Haimen protesters’ occupation of the local government building.
The Wukan protest, in particular, resonates with many great uprisings in China’s history such as the Leiyang rebellion of 1844. In the early 1840s, local intellectuals in Hunan’s Leiyang County adamantly petitioned higher authorities against local tax abuses. The arrest and torture of a leading petitioner unleashed an armed revolt in which villagers seized the county seat and set up their own local government, which was short-lived and was crushed by imperial government forces. After the crackdown, the grievances against the Qing state continued to brew in the area and prepared many locals to embrace the Taiping Rebellion that shook the very foundation of Qing rule in the 1850s.
Despite their democratic demand and parallel with uprisings in Chinese history, we should also notice the Wukan protesters’ emphasis of their loyalty to the central government and their begging for mercy and aid from the highest authorities. In the Haimen protest, we likewise see protesters kneel during their action to beg for intervention from higher authorities to stop the construction of a second power plant. In this regard, these protests are not much different from most other recent local protests that are militant against local authorities but submissive toward the central government. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, China watchers rested much hope on such confrontational local protests and cast them as precursors to larger-scale movements that could radically change the status quo. But these waves of unrest came and went and the party-state remained in control.
A variety of Columbia University Press authors have been asked to comment on recent events in North Korea, including Victor Cha coauthor of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, who appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the death of Kim Jong-il and its possible impact on North Korea and the United States.
Meanwhile, Cha’s coauthor David Kang spoke about the legacy of Kim Jong-il on NPR. In the interview, Kang addressed the possibility of a kind of “Arab Spring” happening in North Korea:
We tend to focus in America on the repressive side because there is certainly – it’s a police state. And there are 100, 200,000 people in prison camps. There’s a massive military and police presence. At the same time, as Sandra pointed out, this is the only game in town and so it’s very hard – if you imagine people who maybe unhappy down in a village somewhere, for them to organize and get together and actually engage in an Arab Spring is extremely difficult in North Korea.
So, in many ways I think the idea that there’ll be a popular uprising is really unlikely and what most of us think about is it would be some kind of palace coup or some top-down kind of problems that would eventually lead to an overthrow in North Korea. Not necessarily bottom-up with people taking to the streets.
Recently David Kang, author of East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute, has written about relations between Asian both as it developed from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and the current situation between China and North Korea.
In a recent piece written for Rorotoko, Kang discusses the aims and arguments of East Asia Before the West. He describes the book as setting out to examine the seemingly simple question of how international relations functioned in East Asia before the arrival of Western imperial powers. He argues that assessments of East Asia are seen through a lens of European relations which distorts the distinct nature of relations between China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, etc. While there was violence in the region it was mostly between nations and nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes and not among each other. Kang writes:
Emphasizing formal hierarchy and yet allowing considerable informal autonomy, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and China had considerable peace and stability in their relations with each other. By contrast, the European “balance of power” system emphasized formal equality of nation-states, but entailed endemic conflict among states.
While obviously much has changed in East Asian relations—the dissolution of the tribute system, China’s loss as the dominant cultural power— and Western institutions and ideas have been integrated, Kang suggests that it “might be worth exploring how much and how deeply East Asian states have internalized these Western notions—and whether and to what extent any of East Asia’s past history may affect their beliefs and goals in the future.”
With Hu Jintao visiting the United States this week, Barack Obama will have to navigate a variety of both international and domestic issues. How does China’s rise as an economic and military power affect the American public? Conventional wisdom often suggests that Americans are wary of China.
However, Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie, authors of Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China, argue otherwise. Based on extensive polling and analysis of Americans’ attitudes, the authors conclude that Americans are by-and-large moderate in their views and favor cooperation with China but still have some concerns.
The authors write:
In the economic realm, we saw that most Americans now recognize that China’s economy is likely to grow to equal the size of the U.S. economy and is likely to do so rather quickly—perhaps within twenty or thirty years. Reactions to that prospect tend toward the negative. And many Americans—though happy to get inexpensive goods from China—worry about the quality and safety of those goods, about China’s trade practices (widely seen as “unfair”), and especially about the impact of trade and investment with China on the jobs and wages of American workers. Yet there is no evidence so far of an upsurge in protectionist sentiment, just support for measures like environmental and workplace safety provisions in trade agreements plus opposition to major investments in the United States by Chinese or other sovereign wealth funds.
The event coincides with the paperback edition of The Power of the Internet, which includes a new afterword describing new developments in online activism in China since the book’s original publication in June 2009. The following is an excerpt from “The Persistence of Online Activism,” a section from the afterword in which Yang looks at an incident in the Yunnan province that led to an online protest that revealed “that the Chinese ruling regime may be suffering a crisis of credibility.” Here is the excerpt:
“Eluding the cat” is a Chinese idiom for “hide-and-seek.” On February 12, 2009, police authorities in Yunnan province announced that Li Qiaoming, an inmate in a local detention center, died of fatal injuries from playing the game of “eluding the cat.” Doubtful of this bizarre explanation, netizens protested and demanded an investigation. In response, the Yunnan provincial authorities announced that an investigation committee would be set up, and in an unprecedented move, invited netizens to join. Ten out of 510 applicants were selected to form a committee with four government officials and three journalists. Subsequently, on the basis of the investigation, the provincial authorities announced that Li had died of beating by fellow inmates and that officers in charge of the detention center would be punished accordingly. (more…)
Amid the sometimes competitive world of academia and the frequently divisive world of contemporary politics, it would be unlikely to find a collaborative relationship among two people from different sides of the political spectrum. However, the influential scholars David Kang and Victor Cha have found a way to develop a productive relationship that has led to a book, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, the series Contemporary Asia and the World, and the Korea Project.
This remarkable relationship as well as Kang and Cha’s extraordinary individual accomplishments were recently profiled on KoreAm. Victor Cha, who is considered a hawk on North Korea and worked in the George W. Bush administration, had long been aware of David Kang, “who wants to open the isolated nation to capitalism and Western ideas.” Their parallel paths in academia came to fruition after each wrote op-eds for the New York Times on North Korea, which led to the writing of Nuclear North Korea.
As the article explains, despite their different approaches they have found room for agreement
Cha and Kang, considered moderates in their views, took opposite directions to the same conclusion—that, as reprehensible as the actions of the Kim Jong-il regime were, its behavior was comprehensible, even rational, and therefore, there was a path for diplomacy. They commonly urged Washington to pursue some form of engagement with the North. For Kang, it could pave a gradual path to regime change; for Cha, engagement could be used to test whether Kim Jong-il would truly disarm.
One of the next chapters in this collaboration will be the eagerly anticipated updated version of Nuclear North Korea.
As Lovell points out no Nobel Prize has been awarded to a Chinese person while they were living in China. It is something the nation has sought since it rejoined the international community in the 1980s. Thus, the fact that the prize went to a dissident is particularly difficult for the Chinese government to accept. Moreover, the Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel gives him far more recognition both internationally and within China itself. Lovell writes,
Responses to Liu (and his prize) have been vigorously censored in China. But the renowned “Great Firewall” of internet control is porous. Minutes after the announcement of Liu’s prize, well-informed Chinese microbloggers were buzzing with jubilation. The Nobel Prize is an award that enjoys unique global prestige: within China, it is often seen as an impartial, international source of recognition. That a dissident of Liu Xiaobo’s stature has been honoured is bound to alarm the Beijing government.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Peter Maguire, author of Facing Death in Cambodia, examines the upcoming war crimes trials of four former Khmer Rouge political leaders. Maguire argues that given that these figures only gave orders and did not carry them out it will be more difficult for the court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), to convict them.
Further muddying the issue is the role of Cambodia’s present and “all-powerful” ruler Hun Sen, who has openly stated that he hopes the ECCC fails. Fearing that the trials will jeopardize peace in Cambodia, Hun Sen and the Cambodian government have interfered with the administration of justice at the ECCC.
Maguire concludes his op-ed by speculating on what’s at stake in the trials and what it means for the Cambodian people:
The biggest problem facing the ECCC is living up to it’s own hype. Claims that such trials lead to healing, closure, truth and reconciliation are speculative at best. How does one measure “healing, closure and reconciliation”?
While most Cambodians would like to see the Khmer Rouge leaders punished, they’ve grown used to seeing common thieves and their government’s political opponents suffer far worse punishment than that meted out to Duch [a low-level Khmer Rouge official]. Bou Meng, a survivor of the Tuol Sleng prison, described Duch’s sentence to reporters as “a slap in the face.”
The U.N. legal experts and their cheerleaders in the human rights industry have lost sight of a basic fact: No matter how procedurally perfect the ECCC is, if it outlives the people it was supposed to try, it cannot be judged a success.
My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on their First Encounters with China, edited by Kin-ming Liu, includes an essay by Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and more recently the author of China’s Search for Security. 
