With U.S. federal funding sources for renewable energy sources already drying up, coupled with a newfound antipathy towards “green” issues issue here in Washington, some are suggesting that China could offer an important opportunity for the future of renewables in the United States and around the world.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

While the U.S. and China have been vying for the top spot in spending on green technologies in recent years, China looks set to make massive gains – or at least spend massive amounts of money – in the near future.

The Chinese surpassed the U.S. in wind turbine deployment in 2009. By 2020, the country is supposed to have more solar energy-related infrastructure than the rest of the world combined.

As part of its latest five-year development plan, Beijing has also defined a list of seven strategic emerging industries to receive “special treatment” adding up to some 1.7 billion dollars in government investment. According to Allen, six of those seven areas deal with energy issues.

Allen’s presentation came a day after a high-level British government official made a similar announcement, urging the British private sector to use China as an “incubator” for the development of new green technologies.

“There are big opportunities to partner with Chinese companies and pioneer new technologies in the Chinese market,” John Ashton, the U.K. government’s special representative on climate change, said on his return from an official trip to China. “That will cost you less and get your prices down … faster than it would elsewhere.”

U.S. companies are facing a similar spectrum of concerns. While the United States continues to lead globally in terms of coming up with new innovations in renewable energy, the issue of how to proceed beyond that phase has become increasingly problematic.

According to a study released in late April by the Brookings Institution, state-backed support for the U.S. clean energy sector is set to drop by 75 percent, from 44.3 billion dollars in 2009 to just 11 billion dollars.

While much of this defunding is coming from government programmes that are scheduled to sunset in coming months, in the lead-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential elections green tech has become highly politicised.

In particular, the issue of “wasted” government spending has been strongly linked to funding for renewable energy, making it almost impossible to assume that significant U.S. government support for the sector will be continuing.

While none of this sounds a death knell for renewables in the U.S. in the long term, the uncertainty is making investors highly skittish about dealing with the sector for the time being. In turn, that’s gumming up the pipeline for new and potentially important innovations.

“U.S. companies have inventions that they can’t get off the shelves – they can’t deploy them here, they can’t get financing for demonstration projects,” says Joanna Lewis, an assistant professor of science, technology and international affairs at Georgetown University here in Washington.

“Whereas in China, often they can get these projects built in a short amount of time, get them up and running, and allow investors to get a sense of how viable they are. Then, they can bring that technology back to the U.S. or other markets.”

Lewis, speaking along with Allen and others at a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars here, highlighted the examples of LP Amina, and engineering company, and several car manufacturers, which she said have successfully used this model.

“I think there’s a lot of merit in the idea of the United States working with China to test out technologies and approaches that for whatever reason have the potential to work better or faster in China but that would benefit the U.S. economy,” Nigel Purvis, a visiting senior associate with the Center for Global Development here, told IPS.

“The key, of course, is ensuring that such programmes do in fact benefit U.S. companies and workers, and working out strong intellectual property arrangements is essential.”

Indeed, there are notable and well-documented obstacles to any attempt by foreign entities to invest in China, over and above the tricky politics. As Purvis notes but in a view held by many, the issue of intellectual property remains one of the most sensitive.

According to Craig Allen, many of the investment regulations in place in China today appear to constitute “a mechanism that the Chinese government uses to facilitate the transfer of technology” to its own state-owned entities.

Such chicanery has turned some entrepreneurs off completely. “I don’t think American companies can work in China,” says Jigar Shah, president of the coalition for Affordable Solar Energy. “I find the whole notion of American companies working in China in a way that is in any way meaningful to be ridiculous.”

Shah notes that there is tremendous and growing opportunity in many countries in Africa, as well as India and Brazil. “All of these places are safe to do business,” Shah says. “There’s just no need to work with China.”

Still, other observers note the possibility of achieving a studied balance.

“I am very bullish on ‘co-opetition’ between the U.S. (or Europe) and China in the clean tech space, but we can’t be naive about it,” Peter Adriaens, a professor of engineering and of entrepreneurial strategy in the Business School at the University of Michigan, told IPS.

“Western companies have to not just look at ‘the huge market’ – a simplistic view – but clearly understand China’s long-term strategy to make considered decisions,” Adriaens continues. “Not doing so has already shown to negatively impact the value of East-West partnerships.”

On Friday, a panel discussion in Washington called on the U.S. government to stop treating the question of Tibetan human and civil rights violations as a moral issue.

Instead, they urged the government to focus on Tibet as a strategic issue, and one of central importance to the United States.

“Tibet has been turned into a moral issue and been pushed to the sidelines,” said Brahma Chellaney, an analyst at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “We need to take it back to centre stage and recognise that Tibet is tied to Asian and international security.”

“We can’t make progress if we treat Tibet as a moral rather than a strategic issue,” agreed Michael J. Green, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington.

The remarks came during a panel discussion on Capitol Hill organised by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank.

According to Green, the administration of President Barack Obama sees Tibet only through a moral lens, and thus is prone to making decisions in deference to the bilateral relationship with China.

He noted his disappointment in President Obama’s public decision, in 2009, to delay meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, and suggested that the decision had long-term implications for how other governments felt about dealing with Chinese anger over Tibet-related issues.

“When asked to meet with the Dalai Lama, the three previous U.S. presidents agreed to do so – that was the right direction,” Green said. “After Obama’s decision, however, the European Union countries started to get ‘picked apart’ by China.”

Green pointed to the examples of Denmark, France and Australia, where Chinese diplomatic bullying in the aftermath of President Obama’s decision succeeded in getting those governments to make various concessions to Beijing on meeting with the Dalai Lama.

“I strongly suspect that the U.S. decision had a ripple effect,” Green said.

Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s special envoy and a long-time mediator between the Chinese and the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, warned governments not to “shy away from discussing Tibet”.

“We need to see more visible engagement by world leaders,” he said.

In the past, Gyari noted, “there has been a lot of people expressing their sympathy” for the Tibet cause. “But Tibet has rarely been seen as relevant for those in Washington.”

With both India and China playing such central roles in current U.S. foreign policy, the panellists each pointed out that Tibet constitutes a natural – and critical – component of both trilateral and bilateral talks between those three countries.

“For India and the U.S., no issue constitutes more shared interest than Tibet,” Lalit Mansingh, an ambassador and former foreign secretary of India, said at the panel discussion. “Tibet must be acknowledged as an area for discussion in any India-U.S. talks.”

According to analysis put forth by the panellists, the centrality of Tibet in security-related discussions could grow substantially under certain contingencies.

“We can’t rule out that Tibet will be the next Asian battlefield,” Mansingh warned. “There is a growing sense that relations between India and China are not getting better.”

For the Indian government, Mansingh said, of the seven most pressing issues of concern between India and China, five are in Tibet.

“First and foremost are territorial disputes,” he said. “Currently, there are 4,000-plus kilometres of unsettled border issues, on which there are no solutions in sight. These negotiations have been going on for 60 years and are currently going nowhere. That’s worrying.”

According to Chellaney, such tensions could be exacerbated by what some suggest is increasing belligerency on the part of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In the future, he suggests, the military could be calling more of the shots.

“PLA generals have been increasingly public about their own role,” Chellaney said, pointing to a recent series of articles in the press written by serving army officers “calling for discipline” on the part of the ruling Communist Party of China “and alluding to the military’s role in ensuring that discipline”.

Activists and scholars have expressed guarded enthusiasm at the prospect of any greater U.S. strategic engagement on the Tibet issue. But they caution that a balance would need to be struck between a focus on strategic and human rights priorities.

“The promotion of human rights must be an essential component of all U.S. diplomatic relations with China,” Kate Woznow, deputy director of Students for a Free Tibet, told IPS. “Indeed, the Chen Guangcheng case has elevated human rights to the centre of strategic and economic discussions.”

Likewise, notes Mary Beth Markey, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, “As this week shows, human rights have a prominent place in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. We don’t see a trade-off between human rights and economic and security issues – they are intertwined.”

If there are strategic issues at play for the U.S., many stem from the human rights issue, Woznow says. “If we can’t trust China on these basic issues – of rule of law, of guaranteeing the rights of the individual – how can we trust them to deal with larger international agreements?”

Students for a Free Tibet would urge the U.S. administration to bring together complementary issues of human rights and strategic concern.

“We would like to see the Obama administration take this opportunity to say to Beijing, ‘Until you address the Tibet situation, it will continue to be an impediment to our overall relationship – political and economic,” Woznow says.

Still, many see little hope of any broad change in U.S. policy in the immediate future. “The reality is also that Tibet is not of strategic importance to the U.S.,” says Thierry Dodin, the director of TibetInfoNet.

“And at the end of the day, we haven’t seen the U.S. engage significantly in anything that has no strategic meaning for them. I don’t see that changing for the time being.”

Disabled activists hold banner reading Return Freedom to Chen Guangcheng and His Family, on a thwarted visit to his village in October 2011. Credit: Ted Lipien/CC BY 2.0

By Correspondents
DOHA, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has said he wants to leave for the U.S. rather than stay in China, throwing into doubt a deal used to coax him out of the U.S. embassy in Beijing and defuse an impasse that has strained China-U.S. ties.

That stalemate appears all the more troublesome for the U.S., with Chen saying on Thursday that he feared for his and his family’s safety if he stayed in China under an agreement that U.S. officials initially said he was happy with.

Chen, a self-taught legal activist, is under Chinese control in a Beijing hospital, having left the embassy on Wednesday.

He had taken refuge at the mission for six days after escaping house arrest, and left under a diplomatic solution in which the U.S. said China promised that Chen could join his family and be allowed to start a new life in a university town, safe from the rural authorities who had abused him in prison and under house arrest for nearly seven years.

But Chen told the Reuters news agency on Thursday by telephone from hospital, where he was escorted by U.S. officials after leaving the embassy, that he had changed his mind after speaking to his wife who spoke of recent threats made against his family.

“I feel very unsafe. My rights and safety cannot be assured here,” he said, adding that his family supported his decision to try to get to the U.S.

The activist, citing descriptions from his wife, Yuan Weijing, said his family had been surrounded by Chinese officials who menaced them and filled the family home.

Chen, from a village in rural Shandong province, has two children.

“When I was inside the American embassy, I didn’t have my family, and so I didn’t understand some things. After I was able to meet them, my ideas changed.”

Precarious situation

Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from Hong Kong, said that Chen’s new situation does not necessarily offer him much safety.

“At the moment he does seem to be in a fairly precarious position. Almost, you’d have to say, back in the position he was in before he sought sanctuary in the U.S. embassy,” he said.

Chen’s decision puts more strain on U.S.-China relations, at a tense time for both countries.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself in the eye of the diplomatic storm on Thursday, turning up for the opening of annual bilateral talks in Beijing which have been overshadowed but not derailed by the Chen case.

She used the occasion to urge China to protect human rights, but made no specific mention of Chen, whom she had spoken to on Wednesday after he left the embassy.

“We believe that all governments do have to answer to citizens’ aspirations for dignity and the rule of law, and that no nation can or should deny those rights,” Clinton said as she opened on Thursday the annual strategic and economic Dialogue.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said in his speech that China and the U.S. must respect each other even if they disagree.

Hu said that “given our different national conditions it is impossible for both China and the United States to see eye to eye on every issue”.

Apology sought

China has demanded that the U.S. apologise for sheltering Chen in its embassy, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said: “China is very unhappy over this. The U.S. action is an interference in China’s internal affairs and China cannot accept it.”

“Chen Guangcheng, a native from Yinan County of eastern China’s Shandong province, entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing in late April and left of his own volition after a six-day stay,” he said.

Chen, who has been blind since childhood, has long been a high-profile figure, and international rights groups have frequently expressed alarm at the treatment of him and his family.

Chen exposed how local authorities in Linyi, in Shandong province, forced thousands of women to have abortions or be sterilised as part of China’s one-child policy

He was placed under house arrest in 2010 after spending more than four years in jail for disrupting traffic and damaging property.

Chen’s colleagues said the escape from house arrest had taken months to plan, and was carried out with the help of a network of friends and activists.

He had jumped over the wall that the authorities had built around his house, and was taken to Beijing, where supporters say he stayed in safe houses before fleeing to the embassy. * Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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China is notorious for containing some of the world’s deadliest mines – a reputation that has been corroborated in recent months by a series of fatal accidents. China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of coal. But the mining industry is beset by illegal operations, dangerous working conditions, local corruption and cover-ups of fatalities.

Nine coal miners died and 16 were injured in an explosion in Inner Mongolia in the latest disaster Apr. 23.Twenty-one persons were detained for allegedly attempting to cover up the deaths of miners, a crime punishable with a fine and imprisonment.

At least ten workers in an illegal coal mine in China’s northern Shanxi province died in a flood. In a separate accident in central Henan province last month at least five miners were killed in a flood.

Safety conditions at China’s mines have advanced considerably. But they continue to be counted as among the world’s most dangerous. According to official figures last year there were 1,973 fatalities, down from 2,433 in 2010 and 7,000 in 2002. In 2010, estimates saw six die a day in China’s mines – compared with just 48 deaths a year in America.

Activists, however, believe the real numbers are higher still. Reporting of accidents is hampered by cover- ups and lack of free press.

Human rights activist Pen Fei claims that a high percentage of mine accidents are covered up. Mine owners often offer victims’ families private compensation at a far higher price than official legal compensation as a pay-off to keep quiet.

“That the local government is corrupt is not a matter of yes or no – it is a matter of how much,” Pen tells IPS. “(Mine workers suffer from) abuse of power, low wages, and a lack of public supervision. They choose their jobs to relieve financial burdens for their families, but they end up miserable.”

Pen points out that many miners are forced to work as virtual “slaves” underground for periods that can stretch to as long as 48 hours. The result is severe long-term health problems.

Measures enacted by the government to improve safety standards include an order to mines to build and improve underground emergency shelter systems by June 2013. The shelters must contain airtight doors, oxygen machines and protective walls.

The government has also worked to close down illegal mines and to fire officials who flout safety rules. The 2009 Heilongjiang catastrophe, in which 104 miners died in a methane and coal dust explosion, saw the sacking of three top officials.

In 2010 China pushed through a new law stating that supervisors must go down the shaft with workers or face severe fines of up to 80 percent of their annual income and a lifetime ban on supervision work.

The law is a move to hold bosses accountable. It has also opened the doors for elaborate attempts to conceal abuses and avoid the shafts. In September 2010, Chinese media reported that one mine simply hired substitutes to stand in for the supervisors.

Most notoriously in November last year a mine boss smeared coal over his face to pretend he had been down the shaft with his staff when 34 miners died in a powerful gas leak.

Qi Guming, deputy head of Sizhuang Coal Mine in southwest Yunnan province, “rushed down the shaft and smeared coal on his face to pretend he had escaped from underground,” state media reported at the time. The mine was operating illegally and its licence had previously been revoked.

“We say lots of mines are illegal because the government doesn’t want to issue all the documents needed when mine owners file for applications,” says He Bing, law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law.

“For example, the government will hold back and not issue the permit (to operate a mine). In that case, if accidents happen, the government can always stay out of it and let the mine owners take all the responsibility,” says He. “At the same time, government officials are shareholders in local mines…under such conditions the local government will not be democratic and legal.”

For conditions to improve, He believes that the government must intensify efforts to enforce the law and increase the legal compensation rate for victims and their families to prevent underhand pay-offs.

Pressure from the public in an increasingly vocal Internet age is crucial in China to push through reforms and highlight specific cases. The Internet – which now has over 500 million users in China – has become a platform for whistleblowers.

“The government has made efforts, but not enough,” says Pen. “The (impetus) from public opinion is crucial. The senior leaders in the system should make responses. Changes only take place when the government and society interact.”

A dissident Chinese author has expressed dismay at the lack of independent and exiled authors represented at this year’s London Book Fair (LBF), where China is guest of honour. An ensuing public spat, revolving around accusations that the Fair’s organisers have bowed to Chinese authorities, has thrust the thorny issue of censorship to centre-stage.

In a letter sent to the British Council and LBF, Bei Ling, founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC), said that he is “astonished that no independent literature voice nor exiled writer from China is being represented at the London Book Fair programme.”

He goes on to state amazement that the state-run Chinese Writers’ Association have chosen the 31-strong author delegation travelling to London to represent China, which is this year’s market focus country.

“Also shocking is the London Book Fair’s cooperation with GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publication which overseas the Writers’ Association) – the very ministry that’s responsible for censorship,” Bei writes in the letter.

Missing voices at the fair Apr. 16-18 include the exiled novelist Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, and poet Liao Yiwu, who escaped China last July. Nobel Peace prize winner and poet Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence, will also be unrepresented.

“This is very embarrassing, because the London Book Fair should be choosing writers to join the panels independently,” Bei tells IPS. “Sure, LBF may consult the opinions of GAPP, but it doesn’t mean that it has to blindly follow GAPP’s instructions…LBF should show that they are independent instead of being manipulated.

“Exile literature, underground literature, and independent writings are also a part of Chinese literature,” he adds.

The argument echoes the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair scandal in which Bei and investigative journalist Dai Qing were cut from the list of authors invited following pressure from China. The two writers were restored after a media furore, leading to walkouts from Chinese representatives at the Fair.

Moves have been made to counter the official list in London. Bei will be sharing a stand at the LBF for the ICPC alongside a Hong Kong-based publisher. English PEN also held their own event Mar. 29 , “China Inside Out”, for authors not invited in the approved delegation.

Tibetan poet and blogger Tsering Woeser, 46, who was placed under house arrest last month, is another author excluded from LBF. Woeser was granted both the Norwegian Authors Union’s Freedom of Expression Prize and a freedom of speech medal by the Association of Tibetan Journalists in 2007. She was invited to Frankfurt in 2009, but was unable to attend because she did not have a passport.

“I am used to getting ignored,” Woeser says from her home in Beijing. “This is the reality of China. If you are a writer within the system, for example you are a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, you will have opportunities for publishing and attending literary events like book fairs. But if you are outside the system, even if you are a good writer, the chances for publishing are few and book fairs are more unlikely.”

Woeser publishes her thoughts in an influential (and blocked in China) blog which has helped expose the rash of Tibetan self-immolations and unrest over the past year in south-west China.

Authors who are part of the delegation, however, have complained that the media furore has taken the emphasis away from literature to politics.

Alice Xin Liu, managing editor of Pathlight, a new English language literary magazine featuring translations from top contemporary Chinese writers, says the LBF features many of today’s most exciting authors. Examples include Bi Feiyu, winner of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize.

“Writers such as Han Dong (author of the Cultural Revolution novel ‘Banished!’) are quite daring. So it’s quite murky – (Bei’s) distinctions are actually way too clear cut,” the Beijing-based translator and editor tells IPS.

She adds that while listening to the voices of exiled authors is important, “the large majority of the population are reading writers not like him – they are reading writers like Mo Yan and Sheng Keyi, the writers who are going (to the fair).”

Regardless, Bei Ling is holding out optimism that dissident writers will be heard. “I still have hope they can include an independent writer or exiled writer to join a panel,” he says.

Zhang Haxia and her husband received a knock on the door in the middle of one night last December. They were dragged from their home in south-west China and forced into a van. When they returned nothing was left.

The case against forced evictions – which have fast become the primary source for unrest in China – was thrust into the limelight this week with the announcement of severe prison sentences for two rights activists who have fought a lengthy battle to help victims.

Ni Yulan, 52, and her husband Dong Jiqin were detained last April after helping victims of land grabs. Ni has been sentenced to two years and eight months, while Dong will serve two years.

The couple – who lost a six-year battle to save their traditional courtyard home in Beijing from demolition in 2008 – were charged in December with “picking quarrels, provoking trouble and willfully destroying private and public property.”

At the verdict hearing, which lasted just ten minutes according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), the Xicheng District People’s Court convicted the couple with “creating a disturbance”.

Ni, who was left disabled after alleged torture during previous imprisonments, has already served a year- long and separate two-year prison sentence for “obstructing official business” in 2002 and “harming public property” in 2008, as she fought to save her home.

Property developers and corrupt local officials eager to cash in on booming development frequently coerce residents into vacating valuable land for minimal compensation. Such evictions lead thousands to protest across the country every month. Many protests lead to run-ins with the police.

The story of Zhang (whose name has been changed) is a common one. “On Dec. 4, at 3am, local government officials, along with the mafia, dragged me out of my house, put me and my husband in a van, and took us to a remote place that I didn’t recognise,” the 55-year-old farmer told IPS on phone from her home in the city Chengdu.

“But I stumbled and fell, and it was then I saw the village party secretary’s son. Four hours later, at 7am, we were taken back. Our house was already gone and the bricks and tiles had been moved to somewhere else.”

When Zhang travelled to Beijing to petition the central government, the police detained her and her husband and sent them back to their local police station in Sichuan province. She claims she was then beaten up before being released.

“We were asked to sign a paper. I didn’t want to because I know if I did, it means I would have agreed to be detained. I was beaten up. My husband called the superior police, then we got out,” says Zhang.

Zhang is not alone. This week a website in Sichuan reported that three activists petitioning for compensation for forced evictions from their properties in the eastern province Jiangsu have disappeared.

Mao Jianzhong, Gu Xingzhen and Xia Kunxiang travelled to Beijing to petition the central government. Officials from Jiangsu brought the three back to their hometown Suzhou. They have not been heard of since, according to a report by Radio Free Asia.

Such petitioners, who often face rampant corruption from police and officials at home, see no choice but to take their quarrels to the central government. They are routinely swept up by law enforcers, says activist Huang Qi who first reported the incident on his Tianwang website.

Huang claims that many protestors are taken to one of the country’s thousands of “black jails” without trial or arrested on trumped up charges. Petitions are often blocked at the local level for fear that the claims and unrest will damage local officials’ reputations, expose corruption or prevent a promotion.

“Since the Hu-Wen (Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao) administration, land-grabs have increased. Therefore, cases regarding compensations and petitions have increased too,” Huang tells IPS.

“Land grabs are not over. I received a call (last week): a Sichuanese farmer’s home was destroyed at 2am. Land grabs often happen at night, because the government doesn’t want people to take photos, recordings or videos as evidence.

“Those not in the know think the hot topics (in China now) are the Cultural Revolution (revival, propagated by ousted politician Bo Xilai) or the reform of the political structure. Actually, common people are more concerned about protecting their rights.”

Flares of rural unrest over land grabs are common. Last week, a website reported clashes with police in north and south-west China. Some cases, such as the village protests in Wukan, located in the southern province Guangdong, have made international news.

In Wukan, villagers succeeded in ousting corrupt officials and winning the right to local elections following land seizures.

The village has become the symbol for protest against land grabs in China, and is widely seen as a successful example of how the government should be acting to defuse widespread unrest.

Change is in the works, according to the NGO Landesa, which works to improve land rights for farmers in developing countries. Landesa claims on their website to have worked alongside the central Chinese government to enact a series of historic legal improvements.

According to the NGO, the government has begun guaranteeing farmers 30-year-land rights, and has started to document and publicise farmers’ rights. But many rural citizens are unaware of their rights, and the law is widely ignored by local governments who often abuse their power.

Back in Chengdu, Zhang has bought land and built another house. Like many she believes that the root of the problem lies with greedy local officials, rather than with the central government.

“I will continue to petition in Beijing because I have hope in the government – it is just the grassroots government that is too corrupt,” says Zhang. She refuses to give up. “I am not asking for a ridiculous price, only for reasonable compensation.”

By Dean Baker and - -
WASHINGTON, Apr 4 2012 (IPS)

Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the U.S. is and always will be the world’s leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolution, but it has nothing to do with the real world.

Dean Baker Credit: CEPR

However, there is a considerable degree of uncertainty about these numbers. It is difficult to accurately compare the output of countries with very different economies. By many measures China is already well ahead of the U.S.

It passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market in 2009. In most categories of industrial production it is far ahead of the United States and it is a far bigger exporter of goods and services. The number of people graduating college each year with degrees in science and engineering far exceeds the number in the U.S. And China has nearly twice as many cell phone and internet users as the U.S.

China still has close to half of its population living in the countryside. The living standard of the 650 million people living in rural areas is much lower than in urban areas and also much more difficult to measure. The main reason that living standards are difficult to gauge is that prices are much lower in rural areas.

A new study that carefully examined China’s prices and consumption patterns concluded that it is far wealthier than the widely used data indicate. According to this study, China’s economy may already be as much as 20 percent larger than the U.S. economy.

Furthermore, even if its growth rate slows to the 7.0 percent annual rate that many now expect, China’s economy may be close to twice the size of the U.S. economy in the span of a decade.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions about the future of the U.S. and China in international relations. Regardless of whether or not China’s economy is bigger than the U.S. economy, it clearly does not exercise anywhere near as much influence internationally. China’s leaders have been content to let the U.S. continue to play the leading role in international bodies and in dealing with international conflicts, intervening only where it felt important interests were threatened.

This pattern should not be surprising since the U.S. was slow to assert itself internationally, even though by every measure it was the world’s pre-eminent power following World War I. The result was that for the next quarter century, the United Kingdom ended up imagining itself to be far more important to the world than it actually was. Perhaps, the U.S. is doomed to play a similar role.

The growing power and influence of China will have both positive and negative aspects. On the negative side, democracy in the U.S., even with the corrupting impact of money on politics and the abuses of freedom carried out in the name of the War on Terrorism, still presents a better political model than one party rule in China.

Fortunately, China has shown no interest in trying to impose its political system elsewhere. For this reason, the ascendency of China may not pose a threat to the spread of democracy elsewhere. (Of course, in spite of its ideals, the United States has hardly been a consistent supporter of democracy in other countries.)

The growing power of China has already increased the options available to many countries in the developing world. Since China can provide far greater amounts of capital than the IMF, World Bank and other U.S.- dominated institutions, it provides developing countries with an important alternative. They need not adopt policies to appease these institutions to weather economic storms.

One area in which China’s policy can have an enormous impact is intellectual property. The rules on patents and copyrights that the U.S. has sought to impose on the rest of the world are incredibly wasteful. This is most apparent in prescription drugs, where patent monopolies allow companies to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for drugs that would sell for five to 10 dollars in a free market.

Not only do patents make cheap drugs incredibly expensive, they also lead to bad medicine, as huge patent rents encourage drug companies to lie and cheat to sell more of their drugs. It’s rare that a month passes when we do not hear of a scandal where a drug company concealed information about the safety or effectiveness of its drugs.

Of course, the problems with the U.S. system of intellectual property go well beyond drug patents. Patents in high tech are primarily about harassing competitors. The difficulty of enforcing copyrights in the Internet Age has led to absurdities like the Stop Online Piracy Act.

China does not itself enforce intellectual property with the same vigour as the U.S. Rather than following the U.S. blindly and impose the same sort of archaic and inefficient system domestically, China could do the world an enormous service if it would promote alternative mechanisms for supporting research and creative work.

It’s clear that the rise of China will lead to many changes around the world. Political leaders in the U.S. will no doubt catch up with the reality of the new U.S. position in the world – probably about the time that they accept global warming and evolution.

*Dean Baker is co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, based in Washington, DC. He is the author of several books, including Plunder & Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich, Get Richer and The United States Since 1980 and The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Excerpt:

In a first in years, snow blessed the Holy City last month. For a moment, hail metamorphosed into a paltry three-millimetre layer of white, liquid, light. Children and parents and snowmen relished the wonders of an almost real, though usually ephemeral, winter. But then, the Ice Age befell Jerusalem…

A replica of the Tower of David at the Ice City in Jerusalem. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

Some 30 ice sculptors have been flown in especially from China. “We brought in our finest team from Harbin, a very faraway place with a long history and a rich culture,” says Bai Liang proudly. “These artists have at least 15 years of experience. Since it’s our first time in Jerusalem, we have to be on our best.”

Assisted by local artists, the Chinese masters have designed and installed the first international festival of sculptures on ice in a covered space near the disused train station located close to the old no-man’s-land that used to divide the city into Jewish and Arab sectors before Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war.

“We exchanged ideas, plans and sketches with Israeli artists in order to reach a tight concept that integrates the local culture and architecture in our creations,” explains Liang, the exhibition director.

With hundreds of tons of ice, walls have been erected carefully, one ice block at a time. Within one month of hard work, a palace of wonders, a frosty replica of Jerusalem of Ice, came to light – “Ice City”.

“Temperatures are low, ice is heavy,” ice sculptor Liu Qi acknowledges as he supervises the lifting of a replica of a limestone of the walled Old City. “An ice sculpture artist has to be in good physical condition, resistant to cold. And, knowledge of the art is certainly critical.”

At a cosy ten degrees Celsius below zero (minus 14 degrees Fahrenheit), life is a fairy tale when coats are received on entrance to the site. So, dress warmly, enter a world of ice and misty lights.

“The people here are interested in snow entertainment and ice. We’re happy to bring happiness,” says Qi while now combing a reproduction of a flying camel with a special metal rake.

Visitors pass through a replica of Jaffa Gate, one of the seven opened monumental gates to the Old City.

The exhibition grounds feature historical monuments such as the Ottoman walls built in the 16th century during the rule of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent; the Tower of David, a citadel originally raised above earlier fortifications in the second century BC; the Montefiore Windmill built in 1857 and designed as a flour mill, but actually unproductive due to a lack of winds. Qi saws another square chunk of translucent ice. Vapours of frost sprinkle his face. Though it breaks up easily, ice stands for unity, purity, and strength.

If the infamous monster – the “Golem” moulded in cement by French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle – is a favourite Jerusalem playground, the amiable beast in its frozen version offers an even more slippery slide.

“No, I’ve never seen such beauty before,” six-year old Iris shakes her head from left to right. “Yes,” she nods – she simply loves it.

“The colourful ice sculptures are made with food colouring. It doesn’t matter if kids taste the popsicles- like sculptures,” smiles Liang.

Jewish and Arab schoolchildren can be seen playing side by side. In Ice City, the walls are emblazoned with two interlaced peace doves. Co-existence seems no arctic mirage.

Meander in the ice forest; wander around the fairy tales of your childhood; encounter ice figurines from the Wizard of Oz – the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Cinderella, the little glass slipper is metamorphosed into a little glacial slipper. The pumpkin transformed into the golden carriage is transformed into an ice carriage; mice are frozen into horses.

Not just children are marvelled. The attraction emulates ice festivals in Harbin, China, or Bruges, Belgium. Like their equivalents around the world, Ice City draws people from around the world.

“They do this in China? That’s cool!” exclaims a young tourist from Chicago ostensibly in awe of a menacing black bear adorned with an emerald glint.

“My wife gave me a present for my birthday and brought me here,” explains Tomer Gur-Arieh, a Jerusalemite.

But all this shimmering world of crystal and diamonds is pure evanescence.

These metamorphoses, of pandas, of giraffes and camels – even the lion king, the city’s emblem – will surely melt away. Don’t worry, next year, we’ll be back, assures the Chinese team.

“They’re very satisfied with our work,” confirms Liang, “especially Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat; he came here five times; he was shocked by the ongoing change.” At the Mar. 6 opening, Barkat maladroitly hailed the ice festival as a “cultural revolution”.

“Never cast a thread until April is dead, Never cast a clout, until May be out” has never been so true here – the “cultural revolution” heralded by the Israeli Mayor will have to be watered down on the last day of April.

“We’re talking about further cooperation,” says Liang. “We’ve signed a five-year contract to bring ice sculptures back to Jerusalem.”

In the meantime though, to add a glow to cold cheeks you might want to have a drink on the rocks at the local ice bar…

By John Feffer and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

The geopolitical centre of gravity, as measured in arms spending and transfers, has shifted to Asia.

The top five arms importers over the last five years, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), are from Asia. And, led by deep-pocketed China, Asia is poised to overtake Europe for the first time in modern history in overall military spending.

The Cold War ended in Europe in the early 1990s. But Asia continues to buy and sell weapons as if the Cold War never went out of style.

The biggest pull factor for the global arms trade is now South Asia. India is the world’s top weapons importer, accounting for 10 percent of the global total, with Russia as the top supplier. Pakistan is number three on the list, with China and the United States providing the bulk of the weapons.

After being the world’s largest arms importer from 2002-2006, China is now surging as an arms exporter. But the top five global arms suppliers remain non-Asian countries. The United States accounts for nearly one-third of all military exports, with Russia at the number two spot, supplying nearly one-quarter. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom round out the list.

“Those top five have been at the top for decades,” explains Paul Holtom, director of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme. “If you go back to the SIPRI data from the 1950s, they were always there. The one thing we’ve noted is that their share is declining. So there is now competition with the dramatic increases of China.”

So far, China’s major purchaser is Pakistan. The two countries have teamed up to produce the JF-17 Thunder combat aircraft, a rival to the U.S. F-16. If other countries begin to purchase this big-ticket item – and several countries including Azerbaijan have so far expressed interest – then China will continue to rise in the ranks of arms exporters.

Other changes affecting arms sales in Asia include Japan’s decision at the end of 2011 to further relax its 1967 ban on arms exports to facilitate participation in missile defence and fighter jet production.

South Korea, meanwhile, doubled its arms sales last year and is on pace to reach a record three billion dollars for 2012. As the United States executes its “Pacific pivot”, it has asked allies to spend more money on the military either as part of burden-sharing or to promote the interoperability of allied weapons systems.

“Arms sales are following the general global shift in power to the Asia,” explains Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security.

“More impressive than the arms trade to and from Asia is the rising indigenous production capabilities. The qualitative advances in Asian arms are gradually leveling the playing field with arms produced in the United States and Europe. These trends are likely to continue, even if the pace varies from year to year. ”

China’s increased military spending is also driving up the regional numbers. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Asia spent 262 billion dollars on military expenditures in 2011 (excluding Australia and New Zealand).

China accounts for approximately one-third of that figure. With 12 percent annual growth over the first decade of the 21st century, Chinese military spending may well surpass all of Asia combined by 2015, the research firm IHS reports.

For many years analysts resisted calling the increased military spending in Asia an arms race because the budget increases were not necessarily a response to the spending patterns of rival countries. But the dynamic is changing.

“If a country sees that a rival in a soft sense is acquiring a particular weapon system, it wants it as well,” says Holtom. “It’s the keeping-up with-the-Jones effect, and it’s setting off some alarm bells because of the ability of these systems to project power.”

Asia, moreover, is the locus of numerous simmering conflicts – between India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, and North and South Korea. Border issues, which are largely settled in Europe, continue to plague Asia, whether between China and India or over disputed islands between South Korea and Japan and between Japan and China. A multi-party dispute over islands and drilling rights in the South China Sea has resisted multilateral resolution.

The lingering global economic crisis has done little to dampen the arms race in Asia. The region, compared to Europe, has recovered economically. And many countries justify arms sales as a boon to their economies and a way to underwrite domestic military spending.

The United States, too, has rationalised arms sales as a way to compensate arms manufacturers who are losing Pentagon contracts at a time of austerity.

“U.S. companies have said that they’re going to increase foreign sales by 25 percent to offset what they say are deep cuts in Pentagon spending, but which is really just a leveling off,” explains William Hartung, the author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex”.

The arms export market doesn’t necessarily translate into more U.S. jobs, as industry representatives claim.

“You may see some more competition in terms of offsets,” adds Hartung. “In other words, if you buy our plane, we’ll build part of it in your country or make investments in your country to compensate for your buying our equipment. But this undercut the jobs argument, since the manufacturers will be exporting some of these jobs.”

In 2010, the world spent approximately 1.6 trillion dollars on global military expenditures. On Apr. 17, SIPRI will release its figures for 2011. The numbers for Asia will likely be up.

To coincide with the release of the SIPRI figures, the Global Day of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS) will take place in dozens of countries around the world. Participants will focus on the huge sums spent on the military at a time when the gap between rich and poor is widening and threats like climate change remain largely unaddressed.

“Major arms importers like India and Pakistan also have some of the most urgent development needs,” explains GDAMS organiser Noah Gimbel. “The people taking part in GDAMS demand a different set of priorities both nationally and globally.

“On the one hand, the combination of climate change and increased militarisation is certain to exacerbate human crises in nutrition, health and education. But on the other hand, if seriously addressed, these problems can be solved on the cheap compared to the more than 1.6 trillion dollars spent worldwide on war and preparations for war.”

Excerpt:

By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore and - -
BEIJING, Mar 15 2012 (IPS)

Millions of Chinese micro-blog users will be forced to hand over their details this week in a real-name registration drive. The new state regulations – piloted in five Chinese cities – have created uproar amidst fears the move will bring heightened censorship and a crackdown on users.

China has witnessed an explosion in social media over recent years, with the number of micro-blog users quadrupling in 2011. Around 300 million are registered on micro-blogs across the country, and many use the Twitter-like posts to verbalise anger over subjects ranging from corruption to pollution. Until now they have been allowed to post their views anonymously.

Sina Weibo, which was launched in 2009, has become the favourite mirco-blogging site in China with over 250 million registered users. Despite censors blocking sensitive words on the site – such as Tibet or Tiananmen – it has become a haven for whistleblowers.

But in December the Beijing city government announced that all micro-blog operators based in the capital, including Sina Weibo, must force users to provide a verifiable real name and mobile telephone number within a three-month deadline, which expires Mar. 16. Those who fail to comply will no longer be able to post comments on the site.

The pilot scheme will be extended to other areas if successful, Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Information Office, stated in January.

The regulations are an attempt to prevent “the spread of rumours”, Wang said. Micro-blogging, he added, “can spread information rapidly and have a big influence. It covers a wide population and can mobilise people.”

“This is a violation of privacy and security,” Wang Junxiu, CEO of Blogchina, tells IPS. “It will have negative effects, for sure. The government said it will maintain social stability – they must have meant maintain their stability.”

Wang adds that the rules are bound to turn away users. “Web portals are not very keen on this policy, because strict applications will decrease their users.”

With media strictly controlled by the state, the public have few outlets to express opinions. Past hot topics on Weibo have ranged from the abuse of local power to land grabs.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) warns that the rules will curb public empowerment and prevent individuals from highlighting contentious issues for fear of retaliation.

“In terms of real name registration, there are two angles. For those individuals who are known to the authorities for perceived dissent or challenges to the status quo – the most famous being people such as Ai Wei Wei – this real name registration doesn’t make a difference because they are already on the grid,” says Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at the New York-based HRW.

“The real concern is that real name registration will have a chilling effect by discouraging individuals from making disclosures based on a not unfounded fear that there might be official reprisals from such actions.”

Liu Wenbing, a 32-year-old IT worker, is just one of the many who opposes real name registration. Liu will no longer use Sina Weibo and will instead turn to Twitter. The site is blocked on the mainland, but many Twitter-users get around the Great Firewall via use of a proxy.

“Weibo is a platform to publish and spread information – real identity is not necessary. The government just wants to control citizens and interfere with personal freedom. It is an expression of un-confidence,” Liu tells IPS.

“The government said it is for maintaining social stability. It sounds hypocritical and typical with ‘Chinese characteristics’. It is really designed to undermine the platform. Citizens should be able to say whatever they want to say. People like freedom. Registration is a way of depriving it.”

Online reaction has been just as vehement. “Weibo is a tool to spread information,” said a user named Leo- Majia on Sina Weibo. “It brings surprises to our lives, such as anti-corruption, the Guo Meimei scandal (in which a 20-year-old girl who claimed to work for the Red Cross of China flaunted her designer lifestyle in pictures on Weibo, sparking a national crisis of confidence in Chinese charities), crackdowns on abducting and selling children etc. If it goes real name, I am afraid Weibo will lose its charm and value too.”

Despite such concerns, Sina Weibo has announced that it expects 60 percent of its account holders to meet the deadline. Forty percent have failed to complete the registration, according to Sina’s chief executive Charles Chao.

A spokesperson at the Sina headquarters tells IPS: “It is a government move. Sina isn’t in the right place to say much.”

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet and - -
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

China is looking to Latin America to experiment with the yuan, or renminbi, to replace the dollar, taking advantage of the growth in Chinese trade and investment in this region. But because the volume is still insignificant, it is not yet clear what impact the currency will have on economies in the region.

China is expanding loans to Latin America using the yuan instead of the dollar. Credit: Kit Gillet/IPS

“This change was mainly due to the need to guarantee steady supplies of commodities, and also because of the instability of the industrialised economies,” which have been hit hardest by the crisis, added Branco, with the Foreign Trade Studies Centre Foundation (FUNCEX).

China, which joined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2008, has seen a 16-fold increase in its trade with the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean over the last decade, to a total of 188 billion dollars a year in 2011.

Trade with Brazil alone climbed to 77 billion dollars last year, 37.5 percent up from 2010.

China is now Brazil’s largest investor and trading partner.

“The Asian giant is financing infrastructure in the region to expand its production and thus guarantee its sources of raw materials, while trying to cut the prices of imports,” the director of Brazil’s Foreign Trade Association (AEB), José Augusto de Castro, told IPS.

This influence is seen, for example, in loans to countries like Venezuela, with which it has a strategic relationship, in the words of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, China’s policy banks are seeking to expand their loans to Latin American countries that are suppliers of key food and mineral commodities using the yuan instead of the dollar, as part of a strategy to promote use of the Chinese currency in international trade.

The Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim Bank) is in negotiations with the IDB to set up a fund that would provide one billion dollars worth of yuan to finance infrastructure projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The two institutions signed an agreement in September under which the China Exim Bank committed itself to offer up to 200 million dollars to finance trade between China and Latin America. Part of that funding will be in yuan.

China’s decision to strengthen the IDB also shows its priority interest in beefing up infrastructure in Latin America, de Castro said.

Branco said “the most important aspect of this is the change in stance on the part of the Chinese government, which previously did not want to internationalise the yuan because its possible volatility would leave the country hostage to the external economic situation.”

Unknown effects

“The effect on Latin America’s economies of an internationalised yuan is not yet clear. We will have no way to gauge the impact until there is a market in place in which the currency is being freely traded,” the economist added.

Branco pointed out that China has shown interest in this region in three ways: through the direct purchase of minerals and crops from countries with comparative advantages, like Brazil, Argentina and Chile; through mergers or the creation of binational companies; and by means of loans and capital, with credit lines in yuan, to finance imports and infrastructure.

“The increase in trade in yuan has the aim of diversifying risk with respect to the dollar and the euro, given the volatility of the latter two,” Branco said.

“Furthermore, the increased international use of the Chinese currency is designed to complement the implementation of a new currency, which is already being traded in important markets like Hong Kong,” he added.

But de Castro does not believe the new loans in yuan will have an effect on the region’s trade or monetary policies in the short term, because political conditions would have to be different in China in order for the yuan to become an international currency.

“China has a closed system,” he said. “We all know the government adjusts the exchange rate according to its interests. It would have to build up international credibility in order for its currency to become convertible in practice and not just theory.”

Mauricio Claverí, an economist with the Argentine consultancy Abeceb, said that in order to analyse the eventual effects of the introduction of the yuan in regional trade, it is necessary to look at what happened in the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

“With respect to trade in local currencies between Argentina and Brazil, only a very small portion, between two and 2.5 percent of trade, is done in local currencies,” he said. “But large firms continue using the dollar.”

Argentina and Brazil were even considering bringing Uruguay and Chile – an associate member – into the initiative, but they refrained from doing so, and “the system never took off, because companies are very attached to the dollar,” the expert told IPS.

But the possible expansion of the yuan in Latin America raises other doubts. For example, what would the Chinese currency be used for?

Branco said the yuan would initially be used in future trade deals with China itself. “The currency could be used as a guarantee for contracts when the euro or the dollar are more volatile, as in recent times,” he said.

But the accumulation of reserves in yuan, he said, would only occur later, after the consolidation of a global financial market in that currency.

De Castro warned that “because the yuan is not a convertible currency, it would have difficulties being traded in the domestic market.”

In the case of Brazil, the Central Bank would have to absorb the yuan and later try to place them on the international market, which implies a financial risk, he said.

A report published this month by Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based centre for policy analysis, exchange, and communication on Western Hemisphere affairs, says China extended 37 billion dollars in credit to Latin America in 2010 – more than the loans from the World Bank, IDB, and United States Export-Import Bank combined.

More than 90 percent of that total went to Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador, especially to finance the purchase of commodities and towards Chinese companies that have investments in those countries.

Countries like Venezuela and Ecuador, which have a harder time obtaining multilateral loans, have particularly benefited from this assistance.

In the context of a 20-year strategic plan, China has loaned Venezuela more than 40 billion dollars since 2007, when a China-Venezuela fund was established, for four billion dollars. The fund, which has been renewed several times, finances investment in infrastructure and social programmes, for which precise figures are unavailable.

And in 2010, a 20 billion dollar credit line was negotiated, half of which is in dollars and half in yuan, mainly to buy goods and services from China.

The Chinese oil companies CNPC and CNOOC also made several billion dollars available to Venezuela’s state-run oil giant, PDVSA, for oil industry projects.

China’s investments in Venezuela have ranged from oil production to railways, infrastructure works, construction of housing, and car, motorcycle and mobile phone assembly plants.

* With reporting by Marcela Valente in Buenos Aires and Humberto Márquez in Caracas.

Excerpt:

When Hu Jintao took over as the leader of China in 2002, U.S. companies welcomed his accession as a “good sign for American business”.” Political analysts described Hu as a member of the fourth generation of Communist party leadership who might very well turn out to be a “closet liberal”.

Playing it safe, the media tended to portray him as a pragmatic enigma. In the wake of 9/11 and high-level cooperation on counter- terrorism, Hu proved to be a reliable U.S. partner, prompting Colin Powell to remark in 2003 that U.S.- China relations were the best since 1972.

It didn’t take long, however, before the media and the punditry turned sour on Hu. By 2005, The Economist was labeling him a “conservative authoritarian” for tightening party discipline and cracking down on intellectuals. Hu came under fire for holding firm against the United States around disputes over trade, currency, intellectual property, and human rights.

On counter-terrorism, U.S.-Chinese interests converged. But on this issue and most others, Hu turned out not to be a closet liberal at all.

Now, with China gearing up for another leadership transition, Hu’s putative successor Xi Jinping has embarked on his own grand tour of the United States. As with Hu, Western sources admit that they don’t know very much about Xi beyond his generally “pro-business” approach. He has a celebrity wife; he doesn’t like corruption. Aside from these tidbits, journalists have been forced to sift through the recent appearances – Xi’s meetings with the Obama administration, his return to the Iowa town he visited 25 years ago, his attendance at an LA Lakers game – for clues to the new Chinese leader’s true political nature.

Xi Jinping has done what he can to frustrate the media. He has been careful to tailor his remarks in Washington to satisfy both his Western hosts and his colleagues back home. So, for instance, he spoke of U.S.-Chinese relations as an “unstoppable river that keeps surging ahead” and of Beijing’s willingness to engage with Washington on a broad agenda of issues from counter-terrorism to North Korea.

At the same time he was careful to warn his hosts to “respect the interests and the concerns of China”.

This latter point, that China has its own national interests, invariably eludes Western observers no matter how often Chinese leaders repeat it. However much a Chinese leader might like basketball or admire U.S. business, he leads a political, economic, and military apparatus dedicated to preserving itself and the country’s territorial integrity.

The same can be said for the leaders of most countries. Certainly no one in Beijing expects the 2012 U.S. elections to produce a president who embraces state capitalism, a trade order that disproportionately favours Chinese economic growth, or a ceding of U.S. military power in the Pacific to the up-and-coming superpower.

China’s national interests are perhaps most visibly on display around security issues. During the early Hu years, the discussion in the West centered on China’s “peaceful rise”. More recently, the talk has gotten darker, as pessimists point to China’s recent purchase of an old Ukrainian aircraft carrier, its ambitions in the South China Sea, its confrontation with Japan over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and of course its increased spending on the military.

By 2015, according to IHS Jane’s, Chinese military spending will reach 238 billion dollars, more than all the projected spending in the Asian region as a whole.

But there are no real indications that Beijing has abandoned its “peaceful rise” approach. The refurbished aircraft carrier is not terribly impressive (particularly compared to the U.S. Navy’s 10 such vessels). South Korea and Japan have a similar row over a disputed island.

China’s claims to islands in the South China Sea, however dubious, are longstanding and date back to the pre-communist era. And it’s been more than 30 years since China has conducted a significant military intervention overseas, an overall pattern of risk-averse behaviour it shows no sign of abandoning.

The United States, meanwhile, continues to outspend China militarily by at least five-fold and is in the midst of a “Pacific pivot” to reorient its security policy away from the Middle East and toward Asia. Increased U.S. military cooperation with Australia, the Philippines, and even Vietnam makes China nervous.

The overarching priorities of Chinese leaders remain nationalist: to keep a vast and fractious country together, maintain influence in Taiwan, and ensure a steady supply of energy through its neighboring regions to sustain high levels of economic growth. Hu and now Xi consistently tell their U.S. interlocutors that closer U.S.-Chinese relations are possible and desirable as long as Washington recognises these national imperatives.

The underlying threat from China, of course, is not military but economic. Now the second largest economy in the world, China could very well surpass the United States during the next presidential term. Washington complains about unfair trade practices, manipulated currency, and a culture of intellectual piracy.

Like all late modernisers and following the example of Japan and South Korea, China has realised that making the jump from underdeveloped to developed requires some breaking of the rules.

Critics might point out that China, as an economic powerhouse, is no longer an underdog. But much of China remains underdeveloped. And China’s economic power is not reflected in its voting power in international economic institutions.

At both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the United States commands approximately 16 percent of the votes, with China is much further down the list at around four percent. China, in other words, has been invited to the table but is not part of setting the rules of the game. No surprise, then, that it is still bending these rules.

Xi Jinping no doubt has is own thoughts about how to maintain what the Chinese might call the Three Balances: China’s domestic harmony, its relations with the near abroad, and the push-pull dynamic with the United States. He is not, however, that mythic figure that the West hopes that China will one day produce. Xi is partly his own man, partly a Party man.

But he is by no means Washington’s man in Beijing.

No road leads to Motuo County. There is no post office or newspaper. But, for the 10,000 residents of one of the planet’s remotest corners, a local radio station serves as the vital link to the outside world.

The Motuo County Radio Station (MCRS), broadcasting daily on FM 106.0 megahertz in the Tibetan language, is one way that the residents of China’s “island on the plateau”, mostly Monpa or Lhoba ethnic minorities learn of events outside the isolated county.

“It’s one of the main ways that we keep in contact with the outside world and know what is happening to the rest of China,” says Ai an ethnic Tibetan who works as a technician at the station.

“MCRS is the main channel for those who can’t speak Mandarin to learn what is going on outside the county,” Ai adds, asking that only his family name be used.

Founded in 1982, MCRS, which is government-approved, is one of a handful of localised radio stations providing China’s minorities with news and entertainment in their native languages. Presently, local state-run stations serve five out of 46 ethnic minorities with a population over 10,000.

Located on the southeast corner of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), Motuo – which means “hidden and mysterious lotus” in Tibetan – is cut off for approximately half the year by ice and snow.

Apart from translating news and entertainment shows from China’s national stations (China National Radio, China Radio International and China Central Television), MCRS produces news and information programmes that directly affect the largely rural Motuo community.

“As it’s so remote, the radio programmes help to fill knowledge gaps for local farmers,” says Ai.

Agriculture is Motuo’s mainstay. “The agriculture programmes are mainly instructive, for instance teaching the farmers how to fix their machinery. They are eager for higher levels of technical skill,” says Ai.

For farmers working on the region’s isolated mountains, the station provides daily entertainment, radios being both cheap and portable.

Though it has been running for 20 years (with government funding), keeping the station alive is a challenge. “The conditions in which our station runs are poor… we have five to six staff and only some received training from outside provinces,” says Gao Jianling, director of MCRS.

Because of the remote location of Motuo, other media such as newspapers are too expensive to produce and distribute. “But conditions still don’t permit us to set up our own programmes,” says Gao.

As with all national media in China, the radio waves are controlled by the powerful Communist Party of China.

Failure to adhere to the rules set out by the watchdog State Administration of Radio, Film and Television – which bans discussions on democracy, the Dalai Lama, Taiwanese independence and references to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 – invites heavy punishment.

In 2008, an ethnic Uyghur woman, Mehbube Ablesh, 29, was removed from her post at Xinjiang People’s Radio Station and detained for apparently criticising the local government.

According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), which is supported by the United States government and broadcasts news to nine Asian countries with restricted media, Mehbube has not been heard of since.

Despite the censorship, radio is being utilised by news organisations and activist groups to deliver news to oppressed communities in China.

Spaces such as RFA and TibetOnline.tv – which are blocked in China but are accessible via a proxy server – host news bulletins in the Tibetan and Uyghur languages.

The East Turkestan Independence Movement – a separatist group advocating an autonomous East Turkestan, currently incorporated into Xinjiang province – hosts two radio stations on their (also blocked) website.

“(Tibetans do not) get news stories of events happening in other parts of Tibet that they simply didn’t know about, until they hear from us,” Dan Southerland, executive editor at RFA, tells IPS over phone from the U.S.

RFA broadcasts in three Tibetan dialects, Uke, Amdo and Kham, and while they cannot be sure how many listeners they have within the TAR, Southerland says the number is “significant”, with most listeners picking up broadcasts via satellite, despite the government’s efforts to block signals.

“We try to let people know what’s happening and try to get it accurate, which is very difficult,” says Southerland. “Our sources are quite often frightened, they talk to us for two minutes and then they hang up. A monk was arrested simply for telling people he was listening to RFA.”

“The thing that’s missing in coverage by state media,” says Southerland, “is that you can’t talk about Tibetan culture without talking about Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama.

“It’s a campaign (by the Chinese government); monks are being forced to renounce him. We report on the Dalai Lama. When he travels, we try to be there. Listeners tell us: give us more of the Dalai Lama, we want to hear his voice. It’s very touching.”

The Internet is one space that groups marginalised by mainstream Chinese culture are beginning to broadcast over. “Our radio station acted like a think tank for our audience,” says Xiaodai, an ethnic Uyghur from Ürümqi, Xinjiang province, requesting that only his first name be used.

In 2008, his non-government organisation founded the Colourful Xinjiang Gay Love Broadcast (CXGLB) – without seeking government approval – in response to the conservatism of state-run media.

Though CXGLB relied heavily on volunteers, it broadcast daily gay-themed programmes between 10-11pm online for nearly a year. But with the outbreak of rioting in Xinjiang in July 2009, a spooked Beijing cut off the region’s access to the Internet, and the station folded up.

(With additional research by Qiu Cheng)

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO

An escalating number of unprecedented self-immolations and violent protests that have gripped Tibetan regions of Western China over recent weeks show no sign of abating, as the country reels from the worst Tibet crisis since the 2008 riots.

Tibetan prayer flags in Zhong Lu village, China's Sichuan province. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

Radio Free Asia reported that the three herders called for freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet. However the Chinese government denies that the immolations took place.

If reports are confirmed, then the immolations will be the first by ordinary people, rather than monks or nuns, demonstrating the depth of discontent that has spread beyond the clergy to the wider population.

On Monday a 19-year-old monk, named Lobsang Gyatso, set himself ablaze in Aba county, Sichuan. According to rights groups, police allegedly beat the monk as they extinguished the flames and it is as yet uncertain whether he is still alive.

On Saturday, an 18-year old Tibetan nun called Tenzin Choedron also self-immolated in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture. The state mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency confirmed that the nun, who was a member of the Mamae Nunnery, died on the way to hospital.

Her death follows the self-immolation of a 19-year-old former monk from Kirti monastery, located in Ngaba county, Sichuan province, last week. The total number of Tibetans known to have self-immolated over the last year now stands at 20.

According to Tsering Woeser, the three herders self-immolated in Seda county, Sichuan province, on Friday, Feb. 3. It is believed that of the three, one has died and two remain seriously injured.

Seda county witnessed fatal protests late last month, as police fired into demonstrating crowds. While the number of deaths is unconfirmed, some human rights groups believe two died and others say up to 11 were killed.

Exact numbers are hard to verify as journalists and rights groups have been locked out of the area and authorities have cut off both the Internet and telephone connections in an attempt to contain the unrest. Other protests took place in Luhuo and Rangtang counties, also in Sichuan, Western China.

Xinhua, who blames “overseas forces” for attempting to “fabricate rumours”, reported that two protestors were shot dead by officers in an act of self-defence after violent rioters stormed police stations.

Robert Barnett, a Tibetan scholar at Columbia University, believes that growing protests and immolations testify to the spread of unrest.

“Before (protests) used to be just in the main city among the lower middle class groups, but now we are seeing also farmers and nomads in the countryside, and even some student demonstrations. It’s not just monks anymore. And there have been trials of famous leaders from the Tibetan business community too, extremely wealthy Tibetans who stood to gain the most from loyalty to the state,” Barnett tells IPS.

“Many more people than before are referring to independence openly or waving the forbidden Tibetan flag – perhaps people are bolder now, or perhaps nationalism has become more widespread,” he says.

A drastic step-up of security, combined with the increasing encroachment of police officers into monasteries – which are central to Tibetan communities – has provided a tipping point for many Tibetans.

Kirti monastery, home to the former monk Rinzin Dorje who self-immolated last week, has just celebrated the Great Prayer Festival (Monlam Chenmo in Tibetan), held from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, in which locals partake in ritual dance, prayer and the unfolding of religious scrolls.

According to a report from the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), far-reaching security was stepped up for the festivities. ICT quotes exiled Kirti monks in Dharamsala, India, who say around 400 police disguised as officials planted themselves in the monastery for the festival.

“Ngaba people were searched, questioned and harassed wherever they went or wherever they stayed. From the early morning of Feb. 8, people were being stopped, searched and questioned one by one as they travelled into Ngaba county town and in the town itself, and the streets were filled with army, police and special police,” the source was quoted as saying in the report.

Ahead of the recent Chinese New Year, more than one million Chinese flags and portraits of Communist leaders were distributed by the regional government to Tibetan monasteries, schools and homes.

The government’s preemptive crackdowns, increased surveillance and invasion into everyday life demonstrates a starkly different response to the recent protest in the Chinese village Wukan. When villagers challenged widespread corruption and land-grabs late last year the government orchestrated a peaceful resolution.

“I am very concerned that if current policies continue unchanged, there will be a rise in self-immolations and in the Chinese government’s crackdown. It is even more worrying to think of things getting worse, like a possible massacre. It is clear that Tibetans are set on confrontation and (will not) give in,” Kanyag Tsering, an exiled Kirti monk living in Dharamsala, India, tells IPS.

“(Tibetans) must endure the most unbearable injustice and discriminatory cruelty and oppression day after day, month after month and year after year, until in the end they make this choice (to self-immolate and protest). Recently someone from Tibet told me ‘Even if all the Tibetans in Ngaba have to set themselves on fire, or be killed, we will have no regret’,” he adds.

“People are asking whether the government is listening, whether it is a deaf system,” says Barnett. “The worrying thing is that if the state continues to act aggressively, the situation could become severely polarised, making a solution much less likely in the foreseeable future.”

A recent series of public spats between Hong Kong locals and mainland Chinese have highlighted escalating tensions between Beijing and the former colony – and heralded in one of the most conspicuous anti-mainland campaigns seen in Hong Kong since the handover.

An outspoken Peking University professor called Hong Kong natives “dogs of British colonialists” last month; in return, protesters in Hong Kong have labelled mainland locals as “locusts”.

The clash has called into question the ‘one country, two systems’ formula agreed when Hong Kong was returned to China by the British in 1997 and raised issues about a growing identity crisis in the territory amid China’s increasing global and cultural clout.

The arguments kicked off when a video showing a Hong Kong man berating a mainland visitor for eating on the subway went viral, receiving thousands of hits across China.

In a controversial interview Prof. Kong Qingdong – who claims direct lineage to the philosopher Confucius and is well known for espousing heavy nationalist views – waded into the altercation on the news website v1.cn.

“As far as I know, many Hong Kong people don’t regard themselves as Chinese. Those kinds of people are used to being the dogs of British colonialists – they are dogs, not humans,” said the professor of Chinese studies. He added that in the handover the British handled the “Hong Kong dogs by spanking them.”

Kong stated that “everybody should have a duty to speak Mandarin.” In the subway argument the man used his native tongue Cantonese, rather than Beijing’s official Putonghua, to scold the girl.

In retaliation, a group of 800 Hong Kong donors raised over 100,000 Hong Kong dollars (12,900 dollars) online through Facebook and the Hong Kong Golden Forum to take out a full-page ad in the Hong Kong based Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily. It depicted a locust looking across at the Hong Kong skyline.

The ad, which refers to the millions of Chinese who travel to Hong Kong to use resources ranging from the education and healthcare system to designer shops, read: “Hong Kong people, we have endured enough in silence”.

During the Chinese New Year holiday period locals launched an “anti-locusts” crusade, shouting and singing at mainland Chinese who had travelled across the border to buy up luxury goods.

The protests highlight increasing concern over Beijing’s encroaching powers.

A recent poll showed that the number of Hong Kong residents who consider themselves Chinese citizens is currently at a 12-year low. Despite nearly 15 years having passed since the handover, just 16.6 percent consider themselves Chinese citizens as opposed to 38.6 percent three years ago.

Fears over Hong Kong’s ability to conduct a free press, fury at the perceived lack of manners of Chinese tourists, and frustration at the scramble over public resources have escalated worries.

In a recent argument, the designer store Dolce & Gabbana was forced to apologise after it stopped local Hong Kong visitors from taking snaps outside while allowing mainlanders to continue. Over the Chinese New Year, 69 percent of luxury consumption in Hong Kong came from Chinese buyers who spent a record 7.2 billion dollars overseas on luxury goods, according to state media.

Public anger in the territory has largely concentrated on the growing amount of wealthy pregnant Chinese women who travel from the mainland to Hong Kong hospitals to give birth. Numbers have soared from just over 700 in 2000 to more than 33,000 last year.

Dr Grace Leung, a professor of media history and society at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, explains that China’s growing confidence as a global power and second-largest economy in the world has fanned the flames.

“Chinese people have become more conscious of China emerging as a world power. They believe that economic prosperity of Hong Kong solely relied on the financial support from the mainland.

“On the other hand, Hong Kong people are dissatisfied with the huge influx of mainland consumers who bought away all the formula milk powder, pushed up the property prices, and pushed up the rental market,” says Dr Leung.

“The (subway) argument was very trivial… However, it became the last straw on the camel’s back that led to the outburst of recent Sino-Hong Kong conflict,” she adds.

Web users on both sides have responded with fury. “Everything they drink, eat, and use is produced and subsidised by the mainland…(yet) they treat us as below them,” said one user on Sina Weibo, China’s largest micro-blogging site.

“Mainland mothers…have been seen so often lifting up their little emperors and empresses to urinate into McDonald’s and KFC wash basins which are meant for customers to wash their hands after enjoying a great meal of ‘finger licking goodness’!” railed a user on the China Daily forum, referring to the common complaint among Hong Kong locals that mainlanders have no social graces.

“Even though Hong Kong was handed over to China many years ago, the local people here still don’t have the feeling that they are Chinese,” Xiao Shuang, a 20-year-old Guizhou native studying film at Hong Kong Baptist University tells IPS over the phone. “If we speak Mandarin, they always treat us differently to other local people.

“We are mainlanders but we study in Hong Kong, so when Hong Kong local students show their anger in front of us we don’t know how to respond,” she says.

Prof. Kong had a much more direct message. “If you keep (discriminating)…then we won’t provide you with water, vegetables, fruit and rice. Can you Hong Kongers still survive? Go to seek help from your British daddy.”

The government of Philippines President Benigno Aquino may be wading into choppy diplomatic waters by turning to the United States to counter China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

A protest outside the U.S. embassy in Manila over the weekend by local leftwing and indigenous groups is an indication of what can be expected in the run-up to planned combat drills involving U.S. and Filipino forces in the troubled waters of the South China Sea.

“The combat drills with U.S. and Philippines marines have certainly worried many sectors here,” noted Walden Bello, a first-term congressman from the Citizens’ Action Party, which is part of the Aquino administration’s coalition in the national legislature.

“The Philippines is unfortunately playing a dangerous game in entertaining a U.S. military presence,” he added in a telephone interview from Manila.

Giving Washington a military foothold will “convert a territorial dispute, where the Philippines has a stake, into a superpower conflict,” Bello said. “We should rely on regional and multilateral mechanisms.”

A verbal volley fired by an ultra-nationalist Chinese newspaper brings such warnings into relief. The Philippines should be targeted with “countermeasures” and “punishment” for offering the U.S. military an expanded role in the South China Sea, raged the English-language ‘Global Times’ in a commentary last week.

“A reasonable yet powerful enough sanction can be considered,” added the paper. “It should show China’s neighbouring area that balancing China by siding with the U.S. is not a good choice.”

The planned military drills off the Philippines coast, scheduled for late March or early April, will be staged near an oil rig in the South China Sea. This news, following a mid-January bilateral defence dialogue, came after the Philippines got another boost from U.S. foreign policy heavyweights to contain China.

“What we’re talking about is maritime security,” U.S. Senator Joseph Liberman said at the end of a trip to the Philippines capital with three other senators last month. “We simply cannot allow one nation, in this case China, to exercise disproportionate control over these waterways.”

This body of water has increasingly become a flashpoint following China’s strident assertion in 2009 that it had control over a stretch of ocean that has a spread of reefs, coral atolls and slivers of land that are hardly habitable.

Yet, what has raised stakes in the South China Sea, whose waters are shared by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines, are reports that its bed contains huge deposits of oil and gas – in addition to supplying nearly one-tenth of the world’s seafood catch.

The Parcels Islands archipelago and the Spratly Islands have, consequently, become important for energy security.

China controls the Parcels, having edged out Vietnam in a 1974 battle that left 18 people dead. And, Manila fell victim to Beijing’s bullying when the Asian giant occupied the Mischief Reef in 1995, once part of the Philippines.

The dispute led to the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DoC), the first political agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc that includes Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia and South China Sea littorals – the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.

Neither the 10-year-old declaration, nor the diplomatic breakthrough in July last year to create “guidelines for implementing” the DoC, has done enough to ease the tension through 2011. Both Vietnam and the Philippines accused China of asserting its territorial claims by sending fleets of vessels into disputed areas.

“The Philippines has become the most outspoken on this issue with the ASEAN members,” says Kavi Chongkittavorn, a regional affairs commentator, in ‘The Nation’, an English daily in Thailand. “It has been boosted by the defence treaty it has with the U.S.”

But efforts by Manila to raise the diplomatic stakes against China “will not have wide support in ASEAN,” Kavi told IPS. “ASEAN will not want to be dragged into a conflict with China.”

The imminent diplomatic challenge Manila faces comes nearly a year after the Philippines government turned to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLoS) to resolve its territorial disputes.

“The Philippines has called on ASEAN to support the idea that the issue must be resolved on the basis of the rule of law, particularly UNCLoS,” reveals Herman Kraft, associate professor of political science at the University of the Philippines.

“Using UNCLoS to advance its argument allows the Philippines to take the moral high ground and hopefully (win) the sympathy of the international public,” he explained in an interview. “(China’s push to resolve the problem bilaterally) is a non-starter for a small state dealing with a larger and more powerful state.”

There is an international treaty which can help “break the deadlock between China and other countries over territorial disputes in the South China Sea,” says Kumar Chitty, a former senior U.N. official at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a Hamburg-based judicial body created to resolve disputes between countries about the oceans and their resources. “This is how Australia and East Timor resolved their dispute,” Chitty said.

But China is avoiding such an international judicial route, preferring the ASEAN-led DoC resolution.

“China will seize this opportunity of making efforts with ASEAN countries to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea and bring benefits to the people in the region,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Weimin said following last month’s ministerial meeting in China to reduce tensions in the South China Sea.

The illegal trade in ivory continues in Egypt, with ivory products sold openly in local tourist markets by traders who operate with impunity, a new study by the conservation group Traffic has found.

The report, published in the group’s journal, suggests that while the volume of elephant ivory seen in Egyptian tourist markets has declined over the past decade, the country remains a major hub in the global ivory trade. Investigators who surveyed two of the country’s main tourist centres found ivory craftsmen and vendors operating with little risk of arrest.

“Egypt is one of the largest illegal markets for elephant ivory in Africa,” the study noted. “Tusks are smuggled in, mostly through Sudan, and sold to ivory workshops in Cairo…(where they are) openly carved and displayed without any prosecution ensuing.”

Trade in ivory was banned in 1990. An Egyptian ministerial decree issued in 1999 makes it illegal to import, export, or possess ivory products, or to offer them for sale.

“The trade in ivory (in Egypt) is completely illegal without a permit, which has never been given,” said endangered wildlife consultant Esmond Martin, the lead author of the report. “Unfortunately, there is absolutely no law enforcement.”

While customs officers have occasionally seized elephant tusks at Cairo airport, there have been no documented confiscations of ivory items from retail outlets since 2003. The last spot inspection of Cairo’s main tourist bazaar, carried out in 2010, reportedly turned up only legal camel bone items, leading the study’s authors to suspect “market surveillance is not spontaneous.”

Posing as tourists, two Traffic researchers counted more than 8,000 ivory items openly for sale in Cairo’s bazaars, hotel souvenir shops and other tourist outlets. Nearly 1,000 more ivory items were seen in the southern Egyptian tourist city of Luxor.

The survey, conducted in March and April 2011, only counted ivory products on display. The authors did not include ivory items that traders showed to them if they had been concealed from view when they entered the shop.

“We saw many more ivory items in drawers, at the back of shops, and in people’s homes,” Martin told IPS. “In keeping with the methodology of earlier studies, and to allow comparison of the data sets, we did not include these items in the count.”

The most common ivory products seen in Cairo were animal and human figurines, jewellery, and carved scarab beetles. Local craftsmen working with elephant tusks of Central African origin were also found producing ivory walking sticks, chopsticks, and hieroglyphic name seals known as cartouches.

“Traders, usually Sudanese, bring their ivory directly to workshops and retail outlets and sell according to the weight and quality of the tusks,” the report said.

It added that large tusks could fetch over 360 dollars per kilogramme, while damaged tusks and fragments were selling for about 150 dollars per kilogramme. Retail prices ranged from about 20 dollars for a simple ring to over 15,000 dollars for a one-metre carved ivory barge.

Earlier Traffic studies, completed in 1998 and 2005, found the biggest buyers of ivory in Egypt were Europeans, particularly Italian and Spanish tourists. Western visitors continue to buy, but the latest study revealed a new consumer with growing spending power and a strong taste for carved elephant tusks: the Chinese.

“In 2005, the Chinese were hardly buying any ivory. Now they account for over half of all sales,” said Martin.

The number of Chinese tourists and expatriates in Egypt has grown significantly in the past decade as the two countries increase commercial ties and air links. In 2001, there were only about 100 Chinese expatriates in Egypt. By some estimates, there are now over 60,000 Chinese expatriates and 100,000 tourists a year.

Ivory traders told researchers that Chinese expatriates and tourists were their principal buyers. One vendor said groups of Chinese buyers would often spend 50,000 dollars on ivory during a single bargaining session.

According to Martin, lax enforcement and the influx of heavyweight buyers is reversing gains made against Egypt’s illegal ivory trade in the early 2000s and fuelling the poaching of Africa’s elephants. Tourism was down at least a third in 2011 due to political instability associated with the uprising that led to the ouster of president Hosni Mubarak last February.

“We can only expect the volume of ivory traded to increase as tourist numbers go up,” Martin said.

The Traffic report offered a number of recommendations aimed at curtailing the ivory trade in Egypt. It urged local authorities to increase public awareness of the illegal ivory trade and to prosecute those engaged in it. The authors also noted that Egyptian law enforcement officers received extensive training in 2010 to help them identify elephant ivory.

“It is time these newly learned skills were employed to confiscate raw and worked ivory, in order to bring this flagrant trade to an end,” they said.

China’s response to calls from the West to join an oil embargo penalising Iran for its nuclear programme so far has been to choose the middle course typical of its non-interfering foreign policy of the last 30 years – denouncing sanctions on one hand yet working to protect its national interests on many fronts.

But the decision by India, another major buyer of Iran’s oil, to continue importing from Tehran despite the Western sanctions, will shine uncomfortable light on the powerful nationalist sentiments among the Chinese public and the internal debate raging in China about the future course of its foreign policy.

As Tehran’s largest trading partner and biggest oil customer, China’s position is crucial if the West’s plan to use oil embargo to force Iran to stop uranium enrichment is to succeed.

When the EU announced a ban last week on the 600,000 barrels a day it imports from Iran beginning Jul. 1, the state-owned National Iranian Oil Co. said it “will easily replace European customers.” China, which imports about 20 percent of the Iranian oil and is 50 percent dependent on Middle Eastern oil, has been seen as a natural replacement for the loss of EU purchases.

But Beijing is walking a fine line.

The EU and U.S. sanctions have been widely denounced by a vocal nationalist public that harbours suspicions the West is keen on containing the rise of emerging countries. On Internet forums Chinese netizens have criticised the leadership for “caving in” to western pressure and betraying its allies and true national interests.

“China has been under some sort of U.S. sanctions or other for several decades now,” wrote one. “How can the (Chinese) Communist Party think that abandoning Iran and ganging up with the Americans serves China’s interests?”

Political commentators have noted that the new round of Western sanctions came on the heels of Washington unveiling a new military strategy seeking to counter potential attempts by China and Iran to block U.S. capabilities in areas like the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

“Beijing has always made the stability of U.S.-China relations the centrepiece of its foreign policy,” says commentator Zhang Liwei. “It is about time that our leadership rethinks this. At a time when the U.S. is clearly trying to contain China, this U.S. focus is not helpful in protecting the country’s global interests and China will lose even more friends. What is happening in the South China Sea should serve as a warning signal.”

Officially, Beijing has shown little enthusiasm for the sanctions. “To blindly pressure and impose sanctions on Iran are not constructive approaches,” China’s foreign ministry was quoted as saying by the state news agency Xinhua, in response to a question on the EU measures.

Beijing modus operandi favours “dialogue and consultation” and Chinese leaders shy from outright public confrontation, bans or military intervention.

Beijing’s strong negative reaction suggests too that despite growing calls internationally for China to become a responsible global stakeholder, it is not ready yet to side with the West on Iran.

“Beijing is in no position to ignore Iran’s position in its energy mix,” says Dr. Harsh V. Pant, professor in the Department of Defence studies at King’s College, London.

“At the moment China’s priorities are energy security and secure oil supplies, especially as the economic climate in China is becoming tenuous. So cooperation with the West on the nuclear issue is not really on the agenda. And often the West forgets that China itself has been one of the biggest proliferators at least until its signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

Moreover, the Asian economic powerhouse has benefited handsomely from the withdrawal of Western companies from Iran by signing a series of contracts in the oil and gas sector worth up to 40 billion dollars.

Other analysts believe that Beijing has been preparing for years for the forthcoming sanctions and a possible military offensive on Iran by shifting some of its Iran oil imports sources to other suppliers like Saudi Arabia.

In a 2010 research with the Jamestown foundation on China’s Iran policy, analyst Yitzhak Shichor argued that the creation of “counter-dependencies” has been underpinning China’s foreign policy since the mid- 1990s. Beijing has worked to offset excessive dependence on other countries, especially suppliers of energy and raw materials, by “offering generous aid programmes, transferring arms, investing in infrastructure and expanding export.

“Consequently, China is not as dependent on Sudan or Iran as Sudan and Iran are on China,” he concluded.

So even as Beijing blasted the European Union’s oil sanctions on Iran last week, it also had a strong warning for Tehran.

During a tour of the Middle East in mid-January, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao voiced firm objection to Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz – the strategic waterway between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf through which 35 percent of the world’s oil shipments passed last year. Wen also publicly stated that “China adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.”

Wen’s trip took him to the oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar where he negotiated energy deals expected to boost China’s imports from the Gulf countries. Saudi Arabia is already China’s biggest supplier of oil, selling it 1.12 million barrels per day in December, almost twice as much as Iran.

Six countries that share the Mekong River are being drawn into a development turf war, exposing initiatives by the United States government and its Asian allies – Japan and South Korea – to contain China’s growing influence in the region.

Unquiet looms up as the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) celebrates the 20th anniversary of its flagship Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) development programme, which, since its launch in 1992 has attracted close to 14 billion dollars in investments.

The Manila-based international financial institution hopes that its new ‘Strategic Framework for 2012-2022’ will broaden the sub-regional benefits under the GMS for Burma (or Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, China’s Yunnan province and the Guangxi autonomous region.

“The Chinese government values the GMS programme. It is another way for the central government to strengthen its multilateral engagement in the region,” Yushu Feng, senior economist for regional cooperation at the AsDB, said at a recent media workshop for journalists from the region. “China will be hosting the GMS ministerial meeting this year.”

It is a sentiment shared in a commentary in the English language ‘China Daily’ newspaper to mark the “golden development” during the first 20 years of the GMS, where over 220 projects in the areas of transport, energy, telecommunication, environment, agriculture and tourism were launched on terrain once divided by wars,

“These initiatives have brought real benefits to the people in the area and contributed significantly to local economic growth and poverty reduction, paving the way for a prosperous, integrated and harmonious sub-region,” the paper remarked as the AsDB readies a new ten-year development blueprint.

Regional affinity through the Mekong has been pivotal for China’s deepening ties with the larger, more politically and economically significant regional bloc – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that includes Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, in addition to the GMS countries.

But, there are other international players on the block and they include the U.S. government’s Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI), the Japan-Mekong Partnership Programme and the South Korea-Mekong development cooperation.

For development analysts monitoring progress in the Mekong region, these new initiatives do more than challenge the monopoly enjoyed by the AsDB through its GMS programme. They have geopolitical implications since China has been excluded from a seat at the table.

“Japan’s growing development role in the Mekong region since 2007 was an independent initiative of the Japanese foreign ministry,” says Toshiyuki Doi, senior advisor to Mekong Watch, a Japanese non-governmental organisation. “Their main focus was on China – to exclude China.”

“The foreign ministry was nervous about China becoming bigger and bigger in the region,” he explained to IPS. “They had to cook up something to get involved to check China’s increasing influence.”

While Japan pledged to put in close to 6.5 billion dollars in development assistance from 2009-2012 to strengthen trade and infrastructure from the eastern to the western end of the region, South Korea made an entry in October last year with a development blueprint aimed at reviving railway transport in the Mekong.

Warming ties with Washington have earned Burma entry into the U.S. government’s LMI. During her December visit to the Southeast Asian nation, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton invited Burma to join the LMI, which has set its sights on environment, health, education and infrastructure development through annual assistance worth over 220 million dollars.

Such competition has raised concerns about an inevitable clash of interests. “We are witnessing power play and there is a danger of overlapping agendas,” says Ruth Banmonyong, director at the Centre for Logistics Research at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. “The interest of the Mekong countries should be a priority in these efforts to counterbalance China.”

“It is okay to have all these various initiatives, but the problem is coordination,” the Mekong logistics specialist told IPS. “We don’t want to see duplication.”

Even senior government figures prefer cooperation than competition. “We think that partnerships between the Mekong sub-region and bigger countries would help,” Thai foreign minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul told IPS. “I don’t think there should be competition… the sub-region needs help.”

Standing to gain from cooperation are 60 million people living in the lower basin of the Mekong, which begins its 4,660 km- long journey from the Tibetan plateau, snakes through Yunnan province and Burma, before touching Laos, Thailand and Cambodia before emptying out into the South China Sea off southern Vietnam.

Economic cooperation under GMS has seen the gross domestic product in the sub-region hit an annual average of nearly eight percent, “while real per capita incomes more than tripled between 1993 and 2010,” states the regional bank.

But geopolitics is not the only reason that sets the new Mekong initiatives apart from the older venture of the AsDB. Even the projects approved by the new development partners reveal an aid culture different from the GMS.

“The AsDB is seen as an honest broker and its agenda is the agenda of the GMS countries,” remarks Yushu, the bank’s economist. “But when Japan comes in, it is with Japan’s agenda, and when the U.S. comes in, it is with the U.S. agenda.”

Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has been placed at the forefront of the fight for human rights in China once again with a new collection of works published in translation this January.

‘No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems’ (Harvard University Press), edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, features poems and essays penned by Liu spanning a time period of two decades. The 345-page volume also includes documents citing the claimed “evidence” that the Beijing courts used to imprison the activist.

Liu, 56, is the first Chinese citizen living in China to win the Nobel Prize, and is a national embarrassment for the Chinese authorities, who view his peaceful campaign for democracy as dangerous criminal activity.

In 2009, Liu was handed an 11-year-prison sentence for “incitement to subvert state power.” He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but was barred from attending the event.

In 1989 the veteran activist was imprisoned for over 18 months for his part in the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1995 he spent a further seven months in jail, and in 1996 was sent to a labour camp for three years for “re-education”.

‘No Enemies, No Hatred’ comes as China steps up its repression of dissidents and activists across the country. China’s approaching leadership transition, combined with the upcoming first anniversaries of the so-called Jasmine Revolution and Arab Spring, have led to severe crackdowns.

The book serves as a potent reminder of the harsh punishments dealt out to those who oppose the government.

But while ‘No Enemies, No Hatred’ has garnered critical acclaim abroad, publishing a book about the Nobel Prize Laureate has serious consequences in China itself.

This month, a prominent Chinese writer and dissident who is currently writing Liu’s biography, fled to the United States.

Yu Jie, a close friend of Liu’s and an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed in a protracted statement to have suffered repeated harassment, house arrest, and torture at the hands of the authoritarian government.

Yu, author of a blistering attack on China’s premier Wen Jiabao titled ‘China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao’, left China on Jan. 11 with his family after over a year of government intimidation.

At a news conference in Washington, D.C, Yu said that he was placed under house arrest in October 2010 following the announcement that Liu had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The writer also claims to have been detained for four days in December 2010 during which time he was nearly “tortured to death”.

According to the 38-year-old Christian, an officer told him: “Right now, foreigners are awarding Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, humiliating our party and government. We’ll pound you to death to avenge this. As far as we…can tell, there are no more than 200 intellectuals in the country who oppose the Communist party and are influential. If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture them all in one night and bury them alive.”

Yu claims to have been abducted and beaten severely by plainclothes officers the day before the Nobel Prize ceremony. The officers allegedly stripped, slapped and kicked Yu before threatening to break his fingers, leaving the writer hospitalised.

“(Plainclothes officers) began beating me in the head and the face without explanation. They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online,” he said in the statement.

“They forced me to spread out my hands and bent my fingers backwards one by one. They said, ‘You’ve written many articles attacking the Communist Party with these hands, so we want to break your fingers one by one’.”

China has attempted to delete all mention of Liu Xiaobo’s works from the public eye while concurrently printing state-backed slurs on his reputation in state media.

Government censorship has left Liu’s supporters and contemporary human rights campaigners who speak out against abuses by the Party marginalised – and with little choice but to flee, quieten up, or face lengthy jail terms.

Last July, Liao Yiwu, author of the Tiananmen Square poem ‘Massacre’, fled overland via Vietnam to self- exile in Germany. Since December, three seasoned dissidents have been sentenced to unusually harsh prison sentences, with a fourth, the poet Zhu Yufu, charged with subversion late this month.

“In China today, outspoken writers and artists who challenge the status quo of authoritarian one-party rule are increasingly being forced into a stark choice – prison, exile or intimidated silence,” says Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“Yu Jie’s difficult decision – like that of fellow writer Liao Yiwu – to go into self-exile highlights how the deepening hostility of the Chinese government to writers who won’t self-censor their works in line with the official narrative.”

Perry Link, professor of comparative literature at the University of California and an editor and translator of ‘No Enemies, No Hatred’, describes the choice to self-exile as “complex”.

Link tells IPS: “It is a very complex decision of course, to decide to go into self exile. I am sure for (Yu’s) family – his child, his wife – it feels more secure outside of China.

“The main cost of putting oneself outside in China is cutting off influence in China. There are a whole list of activists who have fled abroad and who can now write more freely but have less influence within China – I am sure Yu Jie realised that when he made the calculation.”

But, Link adds, “one reason Liu Xiaobo is admired in his circles is that he won’t leave. He wants to stay. He has made a different decision.”

Chinese fengshui masters have been busy advising edgy followers how to optimise their luck in the auspicious but volatile Year of the Dragon, which according to the lunar calendar begins on Jan.23. In the West though, Chinese superstitions about the precarious nature of Dragon years don’t hold court, and 2012 will arguably mark the largest by far Chinese New Year celebrations in many world capitals and major cities.

Lavish celebrations in London, Liverpool, Hawaii and Vancouver follow long and well established traditions set by large Chinese communities. In recent years though, in a slight nod to China’s rise and its omnipresent clout, the festivities marking the beginning of Chinese New Year are spreading beyond local Chinese communities and becoming hip events to draw diverse crowds.

“Celebrations in London have certainly grown and now claim to be the largest celebrations outside Asia,” says Theresa Booth, director of the London Chopsticks Club, which promotes cultural exchanges between Britain and China. “The celebrations are listed as a special event on the Visit London website, which suggests they see it as a way of tapping into the ever growing interest in China and attracting more tourists to London.”

Five years ago celebrations in London featured only a dragon dance around London’s Chinatown, a concert in Leicester Square and the restaurants doing a roaring trade, Booth recalls. In 2012 there are performances in Trafalgar Square to cater for increasing numbers of people attending, fully supported by the Mayor’s office and a speech by the Mayor, Boris Johnson.

Red lanterns are appearing on Regent Street and Oxford Street – London’s leading luxury shopping destinations. Waterstones – the upmarket British book retailer, now features a Chinese new year selection of books for its discerning customers. Some cities like Bristol are hoping to have Chinese markets emulate the success of Christmas markets in offering a mix of Chinese delicacies and arts and crafts.

Part of the allure of Chinese New Year celebrations in 2012 stems from the association with the Dragon – the only fictional animal in the Chinese zodiac. In the Middle Kingdom the Dragon is revered as the mythical ancestor of ancient Chinese people and often seen as a symbol of China itself.

It is little surprise then that China Post’s decision to issue a special edition stamp commemorating the Year of the Dragon, which depicts the iconic Dragon as a fearsome creature, has drawn fire at home for “scaring” the world.

Stamp designer Chen Shaohua has been attacked for depicting the Chinese dragon as a fang-baring, paw- brandishing creature sending a belligerent message to China’s neighbours and rivals.

The artist, who also designed the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games emblem, has defended his work saying the authoritative image of the dragon was meant to demonstrate a confident and rising China. On his personal blog Chen said that unlike the two previous Dragon years – 1988 when China was in the midst of painful economic reform and 2000 when the country was making still tentative steps on the world stage, China of 2012 is in an entirely different situation.

“As one of the most influential major states in the world, China is rebuilding its national confidence,” he wrote.

But Chen’s bellicose rendition of the dragon as an emblem of 21st century modern China has stirred emotions. Writer Zhang Yihe noted on her popular micro blog she was “scared to death” of the beast while another netizen sarcastically suggested that the dragon stamp should be used as the “foreign ministry’s mascot”.

Many of the critical tweets and micro blogs seem to dwell on the dragon’s history as a representation of Chinese imperial power (emperors used golden insignias of it to signal their authority) while others worry about cultural misunderstanding in the West.

The dragon has long roots in Chinese culture where it is held in high esteem for its power for good. Unlike traditional Western beliefs that it is a ferocious creature bent on destruction, in China it is revered as a source of well-being for the people.

But views in the West have changed too.

Celebrations of the Chinese New Year of the Dragon with their “sentiments of enjoying peace, good luck and good fortune” are the ones people in the West are searching for in these unsettled times of austerity,” according to Dianne Francombe, vice-chair of the Bristol-China partnership, an association which works to link British and Chinese communities in the twinned cities of Bristol and Guangzhou.

“The imperial dragon symbolises strength, solidity and magnificence,” she says, at a time when “the skies are grey and the news headlines are so gloomy.”

The Chinese Ministry of Culture seems to have seized on the mood. At a press conference on Jan. 10 it announced an ever bigger campaign to celebrate the Chinese New Year overseas and use it as a springboard to promote China’s traditional values.

The campaign, titled “Happy New Year”, was first launched in 2010 capitalising on rising global interest in China. This year it will feature some 300 activities in more than 80 countries around the world – the largest in scope by far, reaching destinations in Africa in addition to Europe and America.

Renowned pianist Lang Lang and one of China’s most famous TV anchor women Yang Lan have been chosen as cultural ambassadors for the Happy New Year event.

President Hu Jintao of China made headlines in the early days of the new year saying China and the West were engaged in an escalating culture war, and calling on Chinese people to strengthen cultural production to defend themselves against the assault.

His call has struck a chord with local government officials eager to jump on the culture bandwagon as a new way to spur economic growth. But liberal intellectuals and culture heavyweights have expressed misgivings about Beijing’s new culture blueprint, warning that state promotion of “cultural industries” will lead to a new property boom under the disguise of developing “cultural experimental zones”.

“Culture is perhaps China’s last uncut economic pie,” says Zhu Dake, culture researcher at Shanghai Tongji University. “In a year of leadership transition when everything is politically sensitive, promoting culture is easy and uncontroversial. Everyone is eager to get their share of the pie but big state companies are in for the gain from property development only, and the whole thing is doomed.”

Beijing-based art critic Carol Lu is equally sceptical: “A government drive to promote culture means we will have more physical features of cultural development. There will be a boom in large-scale galleries and other art spaces but this does not necessarily mean we will have high-quality works.”

President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao first announced the major cultural drive last October at an annual party meeting, which set the policy priorities for the new year. Against expectations that he will announce measures to tackle China’s challenges on the economic front, Hu unveiled instead an initiative to bolster China’s cultural power overseas and make cultural industries a pillar of the national economy.

Reflecting a consensus among the ruling party that China’s cultural power does not match its growing economic clout, the October plenum highlighted the need for culture to be pursued as a “source of national unity” and a “key part of comprehensive national power.”

In his January speech Hu expanded on that theme, warning that “international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernising and dividing China…Ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu said in the speech published in the magazine Seeking Truth, one of the Communist Party’s flagship publications.

“It is the first time the leadership has put cultural development on equal footing with the economic one,” says Zhang Guoxiang, researcher at the China Cultural Soft Power Research Centre. “We talk of the economy as a ‘hard power’ and worry that without a strong economic base our country will be easily dominated. But now there is a clear understanding that without soft power our country will collapse on its own.”

The party has been unnerved by a series of safety and corruption scandals, and worried about escalating unrest in a year which marks the largest transition of leadership power in ten years. The Arab spring revolutions of last year and online postings calling for a “jasmine revolution” in China have also alarmed Beijing.

Despite appearances though, China’s cultural influence overseas has been expanding steadily. Through state-funded travelling exhibits and performances and with the help of a widening network of Confucius institutes around the globe, Beijing has been promoting the virtues of Chinese traditional culture and the arts.

Nevertheless, party leaders continue to fret about their sway over the hearts and minds of Chinese people. “The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak,” Hu Jintao lamented in his Jan. 2 speech.

But that weakness is self-inflicted, argue Chinese writers and artists, pointing fingers at state censorship. Han Han, a 29-year-old hip celebrity in China whose blog has millions of fans, caused a stir recently when in an essay called ‘On Freedom’ he lectured Chinese leaders on the reasons for China’s failure to emerge as a cultural giant.

“The restriction on cultural activities makes it impossible for China to influence literature and cinema on a global basis or for us, culturati, to raise our heads up proud,” Han Han wrote.

Zhu Dake says censorship is only one side of the complex picture. The party believes in the power of money and is not ashamed in using it to its own advantage. “The party is well versed in using the power of money in foreign policy and firmly believes it can buy the creativity of intellectuals too,” he says.

Yet it is not only a sophisticated exchange of loyalty for perks and benefits to coax the intelligentsia that is underpinning the current cultural drive. Local government officials see more incentives to pursue cultural development than the Ministry of Propaganda, which spearheads the campaign and decides on matters of censorship.

Even before the new cultural blueprint was unveiled in October many localities in China have realised promoting cultural and creative industries could provide a convenient new platform for more real estate development.

According to a survey conducted by the Institute for Cultural Industries at the Peking University, in 2010 already there were 1,300 Cultural Industries Experimental or Demonstration Zones in the country. And despite a circular from the Ministry of Culture calling on local governments to control growth in such zones and promote only those that are truly unique and deserving, the same survey found many of them “uniform and dreary”.

A Tibetan ‘Living Buddha’ who set himself on fire in protest against Chinese rule died this week, sparking a vigil of thousands of Tibetans and creating fears that self-immolations are spreading.

The monk is the third Tibetan to have burned himself to death in 2012, and the 15th since March last year. Nine of the 15, two of whom were nuns, have died.

Sonam Wangyal, a monk in his early forties, set himself alight last Sunday in the northeastern province Qinghai and was reported dead on Monday.

In a sign that the recent unprecedented wave of Tibetan self-immolations is spreading, this was the first incident in Qinghai. The majority of immolations have occurred in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture, the site of an important Tibetan monastery that has experienced increasingly harsh crackdowns.

Referred to by local Tibetans as the ‘Living Buddha Sopa’, Sonam Wangyal is the first reincarnate lama to have turned the flame on himself, and the oldest Tibetan to have died so far. Most so far have been in their twenties or teens.

Earlier this month two Tibetans named Tsultrim and Tennyi, both aged around 20, died after setting themselves on fire in the courtyard of a hotel in Ngaba County, Sichuan province. As they burnt themselves, they shouted out, ‘His Holiness the Dalai Lama must return to Tibet’ and ‘May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live for 10,000 years!’

Suicide is frowned upon in Tibetan Buddhism, but there is a tradition of self-sacrifice for the ‘benefit of others’, advocacy groups say.

“Sunday’s self-immolation was the first by a reincarnate lama. This was someone who is older, a mature person and an esteemed figure in his community. He would have been acutely aware of the ramifications for such an act in Tibetan Buddhism, and still chose to take his life in this way,” Kate Saunders, communications director for the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), tells IPS.

Radio Free Asia reported that the monk wrote he was acting “not for personal glory but for Tibet and the happiness of Tibetans” in leaflets he handed out prior to setting himself on fire.

He then drank kerosene and doused himself in it before setting himself alight. “His body exploded in pieces (and the remains were) taken away by police,” said Radio Free Asia.

According to the Tibetan exile government in Dharmasala, India, thousands of locals staged a candlelight vigil demanding the release of his body following its confiscation by the police.

“Due to his position as a local spiritual leader, approximately 2,000 local Tibetans are said to have held a candlelight vigil urging the local police authorities to release his body,” the exile government said in a statement. The state-run Xinhua News Agency has since reported that the body has been handed to relatives.

“On the afternoon of Jan. 9, many fully-armed policemen showed up in the town, with guns, sticks, shields etc. The policemen dispersed the people demonstrating and did not allow the people to mourn in the temple,” Tsering Woeser, the Tibetan activist and author, wrote on her blog.

Earlier this week there were further signs of Tibetan unrest in a separate incident whena man was shot dead by police, sparking fierce protests in Gansu province, located in China’s northwest.

Xinhua reported that the man, Gurgo Tsering, was killed accidentally by police after he allegedly stole from a construction site.

ICT, however, cites local sources who claim the Tibetan died after police fired through the windows of his friend’s house. According to Radio Free Asia, Tibetans then attacked a local police station before police fired tear gas to stop the assault.

Both the immolations and protests have occurred during a growing period of unease between the government and Tibetan populations in China. Following protests in the 2008 Beijing Olympic year, the Communist Party has overseen a severe clampdown on religious freedom among Tibetans, who view their rightful leader as the exiled Dalai Lama.

Beijing blames the Dalai Lama for inciting unrest and has called the immolations “terrorism in disguise”.

Just hours after Sonam Wangyal’s self-immolation, Xinhua wrote that senior officials had “pledged stepped-up efforts to strengthen the management of monasteries in the fight against the Dalai Lama group.”

Officials must “push forward the patriotic and legal education among monks and nuns… and dissuade them from being duped by separatist forces,” it said.

The newswire also reported that Sonam Wangyal set himself alight after a clandestine love affair with a local woman was discovered.

“(Crackdowns) are certainly counterproductive, but the Chinese have been at loss how to handle the Tibetans for the past 60 years,” Claude Arpi, author of The Fate of Tibet: When Big Insects Eat Small Insects, tells IPS. “Today, the ‘collective’ leadership in Beijing believes that the more they will relax their grip, the worse will the situation become.”

For now there are fears that the death of the ‘Living Buddha’ will only lead to more protests and subsequent crackdowns.

“(The Living Buddha) is a religious leader who enjoys a much higher reputation and a greater influence than a normal monk. (His) death is different from a normal monk’s. It brings much greater shock and influence to Tibetans,’ Woeser tells IPS.

“The increasing deaths of monks means the situation of Tibetan areas is getting worse and worse.”

While much of the world’s attention has been focused on U.S.- Iranian tensions over the Strait of Hormuz, a key think tank is urging Washington to devote more focus and resources on another key hub for international commerce several thousand kilometres to the east.

US and Singapore Navy ships transit South China Sea in formation in August 2011. Credit: U.S. Navy

The 115-page report, “Cooperation from Strength: the United States, China and the South China Sea”, also calls for the U.S. to increase its naval fleet from 285 warships to 346 vessels over the coming years in order to counter regional perceptions that it is a declining power.

“Diplomatic and economic engagement with China and others will work better when backed by a credible military posture,” according to the report, which was pulled together by Patrick Cronin, the senior director of the Asia-Pacific Programme, who also stressed that any naval build-up “must be contingent on healthy economic growth in the future – a strategic priority for the United States”.

“As the decades-old rules-based system fostered by the United States is being called into question by a rising China, the South China Sea will be the strategic bellwether for determining the future of U.S. leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.”

The report follows last week’s release by President Barack Obama of a new, cost-cutting national defence strategy that confirmed his intention to “pivot” or “rebalance” Washington’s global military forces “toward the Asia-Pacific region”, and is certain to be read carefully by regional specialists due to the close ties that exist between CNAS and the administration.

CNAS’s co-founder, for example, was Kurt Campbell, the senior Asia aide at the Pentagon during the Bill Clinton administration, who currently serves as the top Asia hand at the State Department. CNAS’s other co-founder, Michele Flournoy, served in the top policy post in the Pentagon under Obama before stepping down late last year.

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and wider Indian Ocean and through which about 40 percent of the world’s exported oil passes, the South China Sea is considered one of the world’s most valuable and strategic bodies of water.

Long a rich fishing ground and now perhaps the world’s single most important trading route, the South China Sea connects the Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific through the Strait of Malacca.

Its seabed covers at least seven billion barrels of proven oil reserves (China has calculated as much as 130 billion barrels) and 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making its waters and the tiny, rocky Paracel and Spratley island chains that dot its surface the subject of conflicting or overlapping territorial claims by no less than eight countries: China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines.

Over the past two years, China has become increasingly aggressive in asserting its sovereignty claims over virtually the entire Sea, sometimes taking military action to enforce them, such as last May when its coast guard cut the cable being laid by a Vietnamese oil exploration vessel.

Coupled with the rapid build-up of its naval capabilities, Beijing’s actions and intent have spurred growing concern among the other claimants, driving some of them, notably Vietnam and the Philippines, to seek closer security ties with Washington.

They were heartened in July 2010 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared at an Asian forum that Washington itself had a “national interest” in preserving freedom of navigation in the region and open access to its maritime commons. She also suggested that Washington could “facilitate” regional talks to resolve territorial disputes.

Beijing was infuriated by her statement both by its assertion of a U.S. national interest so far from its borders and its implicit endorsement of a multilateral approach to addressing the conflicting claims that Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei had long favoured. China has preferred to address disputes with each country on a bilateral basis.

Since then, Washington has, among other steps, upgraded military ties and conducted joint exercises with Vietnam and the Philippines.

It has also reached an agreement with Singapore to base two littoral combat ships there and another, announced during Obama’s swing through the region in November, with Australia to continuously rotate up to 2,500 Marines on a military base closest to the South China Sea in the Northern Territory in the first long-term expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Asia/Pacific region since the Vietnam War.

The CNAS report’s authors clearly approve of these steps but suggest that more will be needed in order to reassure the smaller states that Washington stands by them even as China will likely expand its own military and naval capabilities at a faster rate.

“The inability of the United States to project sufficient power into the South China Sea would alter the security calculus for all of the countries in the region,” according to the report. Such a situation, it went on, could lead to the “Finlandization” by China of the littoral countries states, a reference to Finland’s Soviet-enforced neutrality during the Cold War.

“We want the U.S. to maintain the present correlation of forces,” said Robert Kaplan, co-author of the report’s introductory chapter which compared Beijing’s larger strategic ambitions in the South China Sea to Washington’s at the end of the 19th century.

“Remember, it was dominance of the Greater Caribbean Basin that effectively gave turn-of-the-20th-century America’s dominance over the Western Hemisphere, with power to spare for affecting the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere. Something similar might ensue were China to ever become the hegemon of the South China Sea,” according to the report.

To maintain its primacy, Washington should not only reverse the decline of its navy, according to the report, but also encourage its partners and allies in the region to strengthen their own military capabilities and establish new security partnerships with each other so that the burden on the U.S. is reduced.

“Nationalism in South China Sea countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia – as well as countries further afield like India, Japan and Korea – may be the best basis for stitching together common interests in a loose, almost invisible network of like-minded and increasingly capable maritime state that are willing to deflect Chinese hegemony,” the report states.

At the same time, Washington should be respectful of the desire by those states to remain on good terms with Beijing.

“With China striving to dominate the Western Pacific, East Asian countries are keener than ever to partner with the United States,” according to the report. “Yet these same countries also wish to avoid conflict with an increasingly powerful China that is also a principal trading partner.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

For much of last year world politicians and market watchers dreamed of China coming to the rescue of a stumbling global economy while Beijing mandarins sat on the fence fretting about high inflation and social instability inside their country. As China prepares to greet the Year of the Dragon later this month, many predict more gloom and doom, and some are expecting that the battle to stave off recession will be fought closer to home.

“It is entirely possible that 2012-2013 will see the third chapter of the world economic crisis after the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008 and the EU sovereign debt crisis in 2010-2011,” Mei Xinyu, a well- respected adviser to the Chinese government on trade issues, said at a recent briefing in Beijing.

“The emerging economies could well become the centre of it. They are vulnerable because of their inherent instability but also because in the wake of the recent crisis the economic powers of the day are attempting to contain their growth.”

These fears come as China itself enters a period of slowing growth, with weakening exports (due to depressed demand in the euro area), plunging property prices, heavy debt in local government and widespread public fears over inflation.

Chinese leaders have warned that the world’s second-largest economy will face an “extremely grim and complicated” global outlook in 2012, with the world economy heading towards a “double-dip” recession and the widening euro-zone sovereign crisis making the fate of China’s biggest trade partner uncertain.

Adding to the uncertainty is the change of leadership due over this year and next as China prepares to change control of the Communist party, the organs of government and the People’s Liberation Army. The last leadership change, which took place in 2002-2003, was the first time the communist country managed to stage a peaceful handover of power.

What complicates the current one is the fact that 2012 is a politically sensitive year, which will see transfer of power over the whole of Greater China – on the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. By the whim of fate the United States will have a presidential election this year too, which could potentially alter one of China’s most important relationships.

The year 2012 is also not void of political superstition stemming from Chinese people’s belief that the Year of the Dragon, though generally auspicious, could also sometimes be calamitous. The year 1976 for instance, witnessed China’s most disastrous earthquake in modern history killing over 250,000 in the city of Tangshan. That Year of the Dragon brought the death of China’s paramount leader Mao Zedong too, unlocking the potential for China’s rapid economic change that followed.

Unlike the time of Mao’s rule when the country was controlled by a powerful individual and successions were decided by the incumbent leader, the China of today is run by a team of party apparatchiks, often rivals, and the ruling process relies on consensus-building among those powerful interests groups.

“The next generation of Chinese leaders will be very different,” says Prof. Su Chi, China observer at the Institute of China Studies at Tamkang University in Taiwan. “The power dispersion process is continuing and where in the past power was concentrated in the hands of few strong leaders, now there are up to 400 people in the party elite making the decisions. Taiwan and the whole world will have to prepare for this.”

If President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan – who has overseen four years of rapprochement with Beijing, loses to Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party which is favouring independence from mainland China, that will present a real problem for Beijing.

Similarly, if the presidential elections in the U.S. hand victory to the Republican Party, this could mean a change in climate between the two big countries, with Washington taking a much tougher line with China over trade and currency issues.

But the main challenge for Beijing remains the country’s internal situation. Economic problems such as stubborn inflation and a deflating property market are mounting, and the government is trying to subdue social unrest ahead of the party leadership change scheduled to begin in October.

President and party chief Hu Jintao – who promoted social harmony but stifled political reform – is set to retire along with Wen Jiabao, the premier, a populist leader who has himself described the country’s current economic situation as “unsustainable”.

Both leaders are seen as wary and cautious, lacking both the charisma and the boldness of some of China’s former political figures like premier Zhu Rongji. When Zhu, who in 2001 cajoled China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation through marathon gruelling negotiations, published his memoirs late last year, they became an instant bestseller.

Much of his blunt talk about corruption eating away China’s money and public trust and the lack of change over the last ten years were interpreted as an oblique criticism of the country’s current leaders.

But the new leaders tipped to succeed Hu and Wen are likely to be equally cautious and watchful to eliminate any potential threats to the communist party retaining political control.

Vice-President Xi Jinping – regarded as the anointed successor to party chief Hu Jintao – has just called for tougher measures for ideological control of students and young lecturers. This is the social group that in 1989 led peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations against the communist party rule and suffered recriminations after the armed assault on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Xi’s call came only days after Hu Jintao published a speech warning that the West is trying to dominate China by spreading its culture and ideology and the party must remain vigilant about the “international hostile forces”.

Among its Central Asian neighbours, China these days is more often feared than loved. This attitude is perhaps most apparent in Kyrgyzstan, where despite an overwhelming dependence on Chinese imports, Chinese-owned malls and mining pits have been the subject of attacks in recent years; nationalist editorials in the local press play on fears of the Middle Kingdom.

But all the negative press isn’t deterring Beijing’s efforts to win friends and promote Chinese culture in the region.

A cornerstone of China’s cultural diplomacy is Confucius Institutes at both Bishkek Humanities University and the Kyrgyz National University. Established in 2007 and 2008 respectively, the Beijing- funded institutes have infused their host universities with a Chinese flavour, paying for instructors and tailor-made course books that help some 3,000 local students grapple with the tonal challenges of the Chinese language.

Wang Zhe, director of the Confucius Institute at the National University, claims there are now 38 native Mandarin-speakers teaching in schools and universities across the country.

Increasingly, the students are looking to China when they graduate. Many don’t come back, says Vladimir Lu, dean of the Kyrgyz-Chinese Faculty at Bishkek Humanities University, who estimates 100 of his graduates head to China every year, either to perfect their language skills or pursue graduate degrees.

“They stay there, make contacts and find work for themselves in international firms. Some of them speak four languages, so they understand their market value. Working in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou they can earn 10 times as much as a dean does here,” said Lu, who is ethnically Korean-Chinese from eastern Russia.

According to Wang at the National University, the opportunities for his students are not limited to China. In an increasing number of cases, local students with a strong command of Mandarin find work in third countries. Wang cites Ilyas Sabirov, the faculty’s star graduate this year, who found work at a Kazakhstan-based steel firm trading between China and Russia.

“He knew over 4,000 (Chinese) characters. Considering that I know only 6,000, that isn’t bad,” said Wang, who is from Urumchi in China’s western Xinjiang Province.

With fluent Russian and Mandarin, Ilyas was able to command over 1,000 dollars a month, more than five times the average monthly salary in Kyrgyzstan. Last year, several gradates used their language skills to find jobs in the United Arab Emirates, where Chinese businesses are rapidly expanding.

While this is a trickle compared to the hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz nationals working in Russia, Lu says China is looking for quality, not quantity, providing spots for the smartest, as well as those who can pay their own way.

Beijing funds two travel programmes – through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Kyrgyzstan’s president’s office – offering approximately 50 talented Mandarin-speaking Kyrgyz students a fully paid year abroad studying in China. To earn a place, students must score well on a Chinese proficiency test, as well as examinations in mathematics and other fields.

Other students with no knowledge of Mandarin, mainly children of wealthy Kyrgyz, can pay up to 9,000 dollars for the same opportunity, says Lu. The two Confucius Institutes in Kyrgyzstan help arrange suitable placements.

For Mandarin speakers and Sinologists who do wish to return home, high-ranking government jobs await. Jyldyz Satieva, who graduated from the Bishkek Humanities University in 2006 and subsequently earned a masters degree from Jilin University in Changchun, in China’s northeast, now works as an international affairs consultant in the president’s office.

When Satieva first began her studies, Bishkek Humanities University was the only higher education institution in Kyrgyzstan where native speakers of Chinese taught classes. Now native speakers, funded by China, can be found teaching at smaller institutions in provincial towns such as Jalal-Abad and Karakol.

Kyrgyz society remains more inclined toward Russia, Satieva acknowledged. But she believes anti-Chinese sentiment in the Central Asian country is easing.

“This (anti-Chinese feeling) will change with time as more people start learning Chinese, and information about Chinese culture becomes more widespread. Chinese firms are opening up here, and there are jobs for people who understand the country and speak the language,” she said.

Rafaello Pantucci, a China scholar at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says China is in no hurry to leave its cultural and economic imprint on the region. Beijing is playing a “slow game” as it increases its appeal to Central Asians. While still a less- prestigious destination than Europe, North America, or even Russia for Kyrgyz elites to send their children, “China is increasingly attractive to locals,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

And while Sinophobia presents a potential hurdle in China’s attempt to make friends, over the longer term, Central Asian leaders will do better to squash the phenomenon than foster it, Pantucci contended.

“The key point is that for these countries, China is their huge neighbour with lots of money and a keen interest in their good development, so they will have to, and want to, work with it,” Pantucci said.

Editor’s note: Chris Rickleton is a Bishkek-based journalist.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.