Just noticed this on Xu Zhiyong’s blog:

Quick translation:

On Aug. 21, 2010, in the afternoon, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau decided to dismiss the case of suspected tax evasion against Gongmeng Company [i.e., Xu's organization, known in English as the Open Constitution Initiative] on the grounds that Gongmeng Company had paid the fine. The PSB returned the company account books as well as other confiscated materials. At the same time, the release on bail of Zhuang Lu and Xu Zhiyong was dissolved [i.e., they are free unconditionally and not just out awaiting trial].

To date, the court has not accepted Gongmeng Company’s case over its disputed legal status. But whatever Gongmeng Company’s legal status, we citizens will continue just as before to promote the establishment and growth of civil society.

Thanks to everyone for your constant concern and support! This is our incentive to keep going. No matter what problems we encounter, we will stubbornly maintain our ideal of a good society.

Background for those who don’t know: Here’s a news story from the L.A. Times about the case, which began last summer.
2010年8月21日下午，北京市公安局以公盟公司已缴纳罚款的理由，决定撤销公盟公司涉嫌偷税一案，发还了公司账目和扣押物品。与此同时，庄璐和许志永的取保候审解除。

公盟公司主体资格争议诉讼法院一直没有受理，直到现在还没有结果。但无论公盟公司主体资格是否存在，我们公民都将一如既往地推动公民社会的成长和建设。

感谢大家一直以来的关心和支持！！这是我们继续前进的动力，无论经历了什么困难，我们执着地坚守一个美好社会的理想。

by Isaac Stone Fish and Tony Dokoupil, newsweek.com

It had all the trappings of a globally significant confab: big-deal appearances (by Google, BBC), a weighty theme (“the digital age”), and speechifying by international pooh-bahs. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., even delivered a peppery keynote, vowing war on “content kleptomaniacs.” But despite its name, the World Media Summit was itself a media bust, especially in the English-speaking press, which barely covered the three-day event held last fall in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The problem? The conference was a propagandafest, a “media Olympics” hosted by the Xinhua News Agency, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party. If China has its way, however, ignoring Xinhua won’t be an option for long.

For decades Xinhua has been an unavoidable presence in China. It has a monopoly on official news and the regulatory power to complicate life for other media outfits. But as China has grown in wealth and international stature, Beijing has tired of feeling overlooked or maligned by the Western press. So Xinhua’s role has been redefined, as a means for China to wield soft power abroad. In the last year alone, the 80-year-old outlet launched a 24-hour English-language news station, colonized a skyscraper in New York’s Times Square, and announced plans to expand its news-gathering operation from 120 to 200 overseas bureaus and as many as 6,000 journalists abroad. Not to be outdone by its Western peers, Xinhua has also released an iPhone app for “Xinhua news, cartoons, financial information and entertainment programs around the clock.”

With a price tag estimated in the billions of dollars, the new Xinhua is an expensive megaphone. But it’s key “to breaking the monopoly and verbal hegemony” of the West, according to remarks released last year by Xinhua’s president, Li Congjun, who often sounds like he’s channeling Noam Chomsky. Xinhua declined to make officials available for this story, citing “holiday season.” But clearly the effort has to do with the new rules of propaganda, too. Where the game was once about suppressing news, it’s now about overwhelming it, flooding the market with your own information. Airbrushing photos is for amateurs.

The challenge is finding an audience for “news” that is best known for its blind spots. The typical Xinhua sentence is thick on the tongue (“out of which 20 percent were the HIV-infected persons”) and often inaccurate by design. In Xinhua’s world, the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened, Falun Gong is an evil cult, and the Dalai Lama is the Guy Fawkes of Tibet. Xinhua also gathers sensitive news—such as the full heads-rolling horror of the Uighur riots last summer—and releases it to Chinese officials alone. It’s as if The New York Times were to stamp its scoops “internal reference reports” and file them to President Obama.

Nevertheless, Xinhua may be the future of news for one big reason: cost. Most news organizations are in retreat, shuttering bureaus and laying off journalists. But the former “Red China News Agency” doesn’t need to worry about the inconvenience of turning a profit. As a result, it might do for news what China’s state-run factories have done for tawdry baubles and cheap clothes: take something that has become a commodity and foist it onto the world far more cheaply than anyone else can. “It gives them an inherent competitive advantage” says Tuna Amobi, a media analyst for Standard & Poor’s, who thinks Xinhua’s cheap news “might fly.” A subscription to all Xinhua stories costs in the low five figures, compared with at least six figures for comparable access to the Associated Press, Reuters, or AFP. For customers who still can’t afford the fees, a Xinhua aid program offers everything—content, equipment, and technical support—for free.
Ask a Reporter Anything (On Chatroulette) NEWSWEEK puts the nail in the coffin of the Chatroulette.com trend as staffers log on in an attempt to discuss newsworthy topics. Few, it turns out, are looking for our intellectual experience.

It’s an alluring deal in the Middle East, Africa, and the developing world, where newsprint sales are up and there’s hunger for non-Western perspectives. Xinhua operates in areas uncovered by the ratings agencies, so its hard to gauge audience size. But in recent months, Xinhua has signed content deals with state-run outlets in Cuba, Mongolia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Turkey, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, making it a leading source of news for Africa and much of Asia, with more boots on the ground in those continents than any other organization. “They are literally everywhere,” says Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

It helps, of course, that Xinhua’s spin diminishes when the news doesn’t involve China. “I read them quite a lot,” says Daniel Bettini, foreign editor for Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s largest newspapers. Editors in Pakistan and Turkey also praise Xinhua, noting that the language is simple and the quality has improved. “In the second Gulf war they were very good,” says Kamil Erdogdu, China correspondent for Turkey’s state news agency. “They got many things first; I used them many times.” AFP and the European Pressphoto Agency recently agreed to sell Xinhua images abroad. “I’m not convinced [censorship] makes a whole lot of difference” for video and pictures, says Jim Laurie, a former ABC and NBC correspondent who now consults for China Central Television (which is also expanding abroad). “Bottom line is so important,” Laurie continues, that “if you see a source of video that is reasonably good, reasonably reliable, and reasonably inexpensive, you’ll access it.”

So far the more established wire services seem to be taking a philosophical approach. The AP declined to comment, and AFP didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time. But Reuters sees Xinhua’s expansion as a sign of “the viability of the global landscape,” a view shared by many media analysts, who believe Xinhua’s popularity in emerging markets will be fleeting, a stop-gap until private news outlets can afford the higher-quality wires. To help companies make the jump, all three agencies offer coverage on a more affordable, à la carte basis (just global sports news, for instance). But this view assumes that Xinhua will be seen as a propaganda outlet for years to come.

In recent months, Xinhua has worked to change that image, opening its first bookstore in London, partnering with the United Nations Children’s Fund to cover the well-being of children on six continents, and installing dozens of public flat-screen televisions around Europe to show its feed. And even if the agency fails to improve its image, naked bias is not a handicap the way it was for TASS, the Soviet Union’s 100-bureau news agency during the Cold War. True, Xinhua’s coverage of the United States is hardly fair and balanced. Earlier this year, when the Pentagon unveiled a report on China’s military ambitions, it was brushed aside by Xinhua, which called it “ ‘unprofessional,’ guilty of ambiguities and inconsistencies.” But to many the Chinese perspective now seems like just another ideological choice on the dial, an option as valid as Al-Jazeera, Fox News, or MSNBC. An African or Asian newspaper editor might find the bias less annoying than the Pentagon does, says Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A bigger problem is the fact that Xinhua is often face-rakingly boring, as one would expect from an organization that believes “news coverage should help beef up the confidence of the market and unity of the nation.” A recent piece about Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao revealed how he had “mixed up his rock types” during a talk with schoolchildren and then owned up to it. CHINA’S PREMIER WINS PRAISE AS ROCK OF RESPONSIBILITY Read the headline. For real information, even government officials are known to read Western outlets. The rest of the world may continue to do the same.

With Angela Wu and R. M. Schneiderman

Sitting at a sidewalk coffee shop a block from the White House, Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, is reflecting on a series of visits he’s made since 2002 to China, where he has discussed organizing and collective bargaining with leaders of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). China’s economic transformation is a profound challenge to the United States, and to American workers in particular, Stern says. "We have to recognize that China is the first real economic competitor that has ever threatened America’s standing as the global economic superpower."

Few would argue that the rise of China has world-altering significance. But across the American left there are sharp, sometimes acrimonious differences about what constitutes appropriate and principled responses to China’s emergence as a great power, and whether the country’s ascendance is promising or ominous. Even Stern’s visits to China over the past decade have drawn withering fire from other labor leaders, along with human rights and globalization activists, who vilify the ACFTU as an instrument of antiworker repression by China’s ruling Communist Party. "Andy Stern seems to think he can find progressive elements within the ACFTU. And the SEIU is OK with that?" asks Sophie Richardson, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. Jeffrey Fiedler, a longtime activist on China, an official at the International Union of Operating Engineers and a member of the Congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (ESRC), is scathing. "Andy Stern threw away all principle and started dealing with the ACFTU. The head of the ACFTU is on the fucking Politburo!" he exclaims. "He’s a thug."

Many in the labor movement, of course, are riled by their belief that export factories in China, often managed by US and other multinational corporations, are stealing American manufacturing jobs. They view China as the biggest player in a worldwide rush by US and other corporations to take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulatory regimes in much of the developing world, whose producers stock the shelves of American shopping malls with imported goods. "The global imbalances generally—with Germany, Japan, China, Korea and others focused on an export model and relentlessly wedded to it without concern for moving to a more balanced marketplace—have a direct destabilizing effect on the global economy, and on this economy in particular, and can’t be sustained," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. "And so the United States has to move into a series of much more fraught confrontations and challenges, not just with the Chinese."

The implications of China’s rapid ascent go far beyond those concerns. It is fast becoming an economic giant, moving from low-end assembly lines and garment sweatshops to high-end products and innovative approaches to green technology, including wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars. Despite the uncontrolled, almost Wild West nature of capitalism in China, for many developing countries its muscular combination of top-down political control and state-guided industrial growth represents a palpable challenge to the dominant post–World War II paradigm of American-style development, and it is an attractive one in many quarters. "I am concerned that there are other places in the world where China’s form of authoritarian capitalism is taking hold," says Carolyn Bartholomew, vice chair of the ESRC and a former aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi. "Look at how China is engaging in Africa."

"It’s almost as if the continental plates of global politics are shifting beneath our feet," says Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. "We suddenly have this other model of authoritarian capitalism that is proving to be remarkably successful, and it is even posing a challenge, not just economically but politically, to our belief that our system of democratic governance is the one that’s best able to deliver a good life."

Along with China’s growing economic power comes an inevitable corollary: China’s eventual emergence as a political and military power wielding its influence from East Asia to the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

Among progressives, there’s certainly no consensus over how to respond to the rise of China. "This drives a wedge right through the progressive community," says John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Well aware that US policy toward China is driven by the multinational corporations and banks that invest there and by the military-industrial complex, which sees China as a rival and potential adversary, progressives know they have only limited power to affect national policy. Still, they debate choices: confront China or accommodate its rise? Slam China with tariffs and sanctions or invite its sprawling, state-owned enterprises to buy up US companies and build factories in the United States? Engage the ACFTU and other Chinese institutions or avoid them? And what about human rights, including worker rights, religious freedom and minority rights for Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs in western China? Will labor shortages, which have helped spark a wave of strikes and protests, lead China to give greater freedom to workers to organize, to secure higher wages and a better standard of living?

To answer at least some of those questions, I interviewed several dozen progressive policy analysts, economists, environmentalists, labor and human rights activists and officials, and academic specialists on China. Nearly all of them agree on one thing—namely, that to compete with China the United States must adopt a clear-cut set of industrial policies, investing in infrastructure, job creation, education and training, high-tech manufacturing, and research and development, especially in green technology.

"The first priority is to get our own house in order, so we’re not filled with so much anxiety that is easily transferred onto the rise of another country," says Schell. But even on this point there is disagreement, because many activists on the left argue that it’s difficult to promote a US industrial policy—taxing the rich, subsidizing favored industries, spending a lot more on infrastructure and training—without simultaneously taking on the dominant ideology of neoliberal globalization and free trade, and that includes the China problem. "It’s almost impossible to have a domestic industrial policy without addressing the trading regime," says Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect.

For many in the US labor movement, there’s little doubt that China is a grave menace, at the very least, to American jobs and prosperity. At the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Alliance for American Manufacturing (a project supported by the United Steelworkers), the book on China is this: it’s a bullying, mercantilist power, competing unfairly with other countries by artificially keeping the value of its currency low and by suppressing labor rights and trampling on environmental standards, cannibalizing a generation or two of poor migrant workers to churn out cheap products for export. In this narrative, China exploits the willingness of multinationals to set up unregulated factories along its industrial southern coast, meanwhile blackmailing those firms to share trade secrets and technology with China as the price of admittance. It’s a sweeping indictment, and the remedy they suggest involves some combination of daunting and punitive tariffs—as much as 25 percent across the board on imports from China, some say—along with sanctions and other measures to force China to revalue the renminbi, its currency, by 40 percent or more.

Advocates in this camp discount fears of a confrontation or a trade war with China, and in fact they insist that the longer the United States waits before taking on China, the harder it will be. "I would say to the Chinese, ‘We are not going to allow the free access of Chinese goods, as long as you are pirating technology, requiring American companies to produce in China only for export and not for the Chinese market, extracting technology transfer agreements that are plainly coercive, and manipulating your currency.’ Then the fat would be in the fire, and the Chinese would have to decide what they’re going to do about it," says Kuttner. "It might lead to some conflict," he says. "If we took a harder line on Chinese mercantilism, it might get kind of ugly in the short term."

Robert Scott, an economist at EPI, published a study in March claiming that between 2001 and 2008 nearly 2.5 million American jobs skedaddled to China, including more than 600,000 in computer and electronics manufacturing alone. Like many in the AFL-CIO’s orbit, Scott takes a frankly nationalist stance in defense of measures to rebalance the US-China trade deficit. "The US government has an obligation to US workers to develop policies that are in our national interests," he says during an interview in his office. When I point out that over the past three decades China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty, and that his attitude might sound chauvinistic to some, he nods. "It does. I view my job as being concerned with the living standards of American workers." And he insists that only a threat to close the US market to Chinese imports will be enough to get Beijing’s attention.

It’s possible to make the case that China’s success in bringing masses of peasants out of poverty—as many as 400 million and counting—is the single most important event in the world in the past quarter-century. To be sure, much of China’s growth since the late ’70s has come at the expense of the environment and of workers laboring under atrocious conditions. But many advocates of getting tough with China dismiss the vast improvement in living standards there or question whether it has happened at all. They argue that China has achieved its stunning record of growth, averaging close to 10 percent annually since 1979, by cannibalizing its workforce, with little or no material benefit for the average Chinese. "I don’t view it as a success story," says Scott Paul, founding executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a longtime labor lobbyist and former aide to David Bonior, a former Congressman from Michigan. Paul argues that Chinese workers are often not paid proper wages and that they labor under weak or nonexistent environmental and workplace safety rules. By compelling China to revalue the renminbi, Paul and others argue, the United States can force China to absorb more of what it produces, which will raise Chinese wages, consumption and living standards. "This will allow China to enjoy the fruits of its growth," says EPI’s Scott.

Over at the AFL-CIO, Thea Lee also isn’t ready to acknowledge that China’s growth has been a boon to its population. Lee, the federation’s assistant director for public policy, is part Chinese herself, and she’s intimately familiar with US policy toward China, which she faults as too accommodating and too driven by the interests of American corporations that operate there. "I don’t call it a success for working people," she says. "It’s a disgrace. The regulatory system is like the Wild West, and nobody cares. You have long-term environmental damage, you have child labor, you have forced labor, the destruction of workers’ health." Like Fiedler, Lee rolls her eyes when she talks about the ACFTU, which has nearly 200 million members. "We don’t recognize the ACFTU as a real union," she says. "I consider them to be the government. They’re management."

Even as officials and activists within the labor movement and among its allies call for a confrontational stance against what they regard as predatory trade practices by China, at times they fall into what can only be called cold war–style rhetoric. AAM’s Paul expressed grave concern about China’s efforts to enhance its military power. "The trade surplus is being used by China to build up a military. They want to build a blue-water navy in the Pacific, to develop sophisticated nuclear weapons, satellite-killing weapons. What does that say about peace?" he asks. "Their stated goal is, they want to have a presence in the Pacific Rim and challenge US supremacy in the Pacific. That has enormous implications." And on Fiedler’s list of steps to be taken to show China that the United States means business is a slowdown or suspension in US-China military ties and sharp limits on Chinese students studying in America. Fiedler tosses out words like "fascist" in regard to China, adding, "I would continue to sell arms to Taiwan."

Of course, there is another view. Some argue that it’s impractical to try to bring jobs back from China, and that in any case the United States must make room for Beijing’s rise as a great power. For these analysts, any talk of boosting America’s military response to China is alarming.

The liberal bête noire of the labor movement and its allies is James Galbraith, the heterodox economist and professor at the University of Texas, who is sharply critical of those who think that jobs can be coaxed back home via any combination of pressure tactics against China. People like Galbraith are rudely dismissed as "panda huggers" by some, and even their motives are called into question. ("He’s an apologist. His wife is Chinese. He’s done some consulting for the regime. For God’s sake, don’t quote me on that," says one left-leaning critic.) Galbraith represents a diametrically opposite point of view from the AFL-CIO/EPI/AAM nexus, and his views are echoed by people like Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, MIT’s Alice Amsden and others.

Galbraith dismisses the claim that China’s economic growth has not brought massive material benefits to hundreds of millions over a short time. "It’s clear that you have vast populations that are a generation removed from grinding poverty—and with an existence that they understand very well is vastly better." He argues that a great deal of what China manufactures is produced for its domestic market, that wages and working conditions are improving (especially for those in the export sector) and that forcing China to upvalue its currency would have no effect whatsoever on US job creation.

A central argument among US labor officials and their allies is that by suppressing the value of its currency, China is also suppressing domestic consumption far too severely. And, they argue, China’s sky-high savings rate—more than 40 percent annually, one of the highest in the world, compared with US levels, which have mostly fluctuated in the zero to 5 percent range—is accomplished only by squeezing the living standards of its 1.3 billion people. So, they say, by compelling China to revalue the renminbi and direct its wealth inward, they’re only doing what’s best for China—and meanwhile helping to create Chinese demand for US goods.

Galbraith ridicules the idea that Americans know better than the Chinese what’s good for them. "The notion that China could somehow increase its consumption in ways that would materially benefit American workers is not plausible," he says. "First, consumption in China has been rising rapidly for decades. Second, raising it more rapidly means what? Having more cars and fewer roads to drive on? It doesn’t make any sense from a development standpoint. Why should they want to slow the pace at which they build infrastructure relative to the purchase of consumer goods? Why would they build fewer power plants and have more appliances in order to have brownouts?"

Some, like Galbraith, who question labor’s unblinking anti-China stance don’t shy away from accusing many of China’s most vehement critics of xenophobia, racism and Yellow Peril–style alarmism, which echoes the fearmongering about Japan’s supposed threat to US prosperity and jobs two decades ago. Progressive critics of the AFL-CIO’s China policy often make two intertwined points: that China ought to get more credit for its accomplishment in bringing so many people to the threshold of a prosperous urban life, and that it’s wrong for the United States to inflict pain on China in order to compensate for its own decades-long history of economic mismanagement. "We’re talking about a country that has the continuing potential to pull a huge number of people out of poverty," says IPS’s Feffer. "I don’t think it can do that by competing ‘fairly’ according to the rules of international policy." Compared with workers in China, never mind steelworkers in Nigeria or textile workers in Brazil, American workers are vastly better off, he says. "If you look at American workers, they’re doing pretty well."

"There is this longstanding Yellow Peril discourse in the United States, and a lot of this stuff fits into it comfortably," says Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of the Left Business Observer. "Yeah, they’re competitive, but…that history of Yellow Peril–ism makes it seem sinister and virulent. It’s a lot easier to blame China than it is to look at what’s wrong with the United States. There’s a kind of nationalism that is a little too close to xenophobia that fuels this sort of thing, and populists on the left and right can agree on not liking China."

Such a tendency is all the more regrettable in that it fuels saber-rattling arguments from the right. For years the Pentagon has been issuing increasingly dire warnings about China’s emergence as a strategic challenge to the United States, and since the end of the cold war neoconservatives and the promilitary right have raised the specter of a Chinese boogeyman to compensate for what Charles Freeman, a Mandarin-speaking former senior US diplomat, likes to call "enemy deprivation syndrome."

Selig Harrison, a former journalist and director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, suggests instead that progressives ought to support an accommodation with China’s legitimate national interest in its region. "The idea that we should accept China’s interests in East Asia, I would think, should be readily understood by liberals," he says. "The fact that China is going to have a navy with a long reach, that it’s going to be a superpower, just as India is, well, America has to adjust."

But America doesn’t adjust well. It’s hard to imagine a US politician making the case that Washington should pull back from its overextended posture in Asia and the Pacific or cede an expanded presence to China. Only this summer, the Obama administration started laying bricks in a Great Wall of Containment around China by mending ties with a brutal Indonesian special forces unit and taking sides against China in a potentially dangerous dispute over Beijing’s claim to a string of islands in the South China Sea. "It would be disastrous for progressives to provide fodder for the military-industrial complex by demonizing China," says Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. "There are very powerful interests in Washington who want to set us on a path of confrontation."

In particular, the issue of Taiwan is a flash point, and if relations between Beijing and Washington spiral downward, a conflagration between the two nuclear powers could erupt over the Chinese island. According to Harrison, an end to US military support to Taiwan ought to be the starting point for improved US-China ties, including on economic issues. "We’ll never get China to behave economically on key issues like the currency peg and their position in the future on holding our securities if we continue to fuck them on Taiwan," he says.

Where one stands on China depends, in part, on whether one thinks China can evolve from its authoritarian system to a freer, more democratic one—and if so, how quickly.

The bible for many of those who believe that China isn’t about to change is James Mann’s 2007 book The China Fantasy. Mann, a former Los Angeles Times reporter now at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, argues that China is unlikely to disintegrate or democratize. Instead, he says, it’s most likely that decades from now China will be both superrich and undemocratic, and he says those who believe in the possibility of democratization are "hopelessly gullible." China, he says, "is still a Leninist regime, run by a Communist Party governed, in hierarchical ascending circles, by a Central Committee, a Politburo, and a Standing Committee of the Politburo."

It’s beyond the scope of this article to examine the various paths that China’s political system might follow in the coming decades. But if change does come about, the working class will be a driving force, and lately there are signs that Chinese workers are starting to flex their muscle. Over the past several years, they have staged an escalating series of job actions, strikes and protests, culminating in headline-grabbing shutdowns at Honda assembly plants in May. And despite those who see China in black-and-white terms—an oppressed working class beaten down by a monolithic regime and its captive ACFTU union—recent labor actions present a far more nuanced picture. At the very least, the recent wave of strikes is a sign that all the players—workers, provincial and local governments, the ACFTU, the regime in Beijing—are engaged in a complex dance. Perhaps most surprising, in many parts of China, workers, the central government and enlightened provincial authorities are united in an effort to raise wages and improve working conditions.

"More than twenty provinces have introduced increases in the minimum wage of around 20 percent," says Geoffrey Crothall, the spokesman for China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a prolabor activist group based in Hong Kong. "When strikes have broken out, many local governments have interceded and tried to get management and workers to negotiate." Crothall says there is no doubt the central government wants wages to rise, to contribute to social stability. And there are other factors that are pushing wages upward: among them, China’s need for a higher-quality workforce as it moves into high-end manufacturing, along with early signs of a labor shortage resulting from slow population growth, the one-child policy and the fact that so many millions have already left the countryside for factory jobs. The ACFTU, which has long seen itself as a defender of the party and as a "trade union with Chinese characteristics," is now being pressured to change from below by striking workers and from above by the government in Beijing.

Crothall, whose organization was founded by Han Dongfang, who set up China’s first independent union during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, points to the ferment in Guangdong province, site of many of China’s most important manufacturing facilities. "The ACFTU is evolving. It’s not a monolith," says Crothall. "It is a government institution. But in Guangdong, the federation is quite progressive and pragmatic-sounding." And in Guangdong, according to CLB, the provincial government is experimenting with new regulations that would allow Chinese workers to engage in collective bargaining.

That’s why Andy Stern’s efforts in China, despite the criticism, seem so valuable. "I get in trouble on Glenn Beck saying, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ It’s not just a slogan," Stern says. It’s critical, he adds, for US and Chinese workers to see each other as allies, and he argues that efforts such as his can help shift the ACFTU in a direction that will make it much more representative of its hundreds of millions of members. "There’s a big evolution going on," says Stern. "And to me, the question is, Where does the union end up, not where it started." Like Crothall, Stern emphasizes that it isn’t just workers who want the ACFTU to change the way it operates. "The government is pushing them to transform, too."

Katie Quan, a former union leader and associate chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, backs Stern’s effort to engage the ACFTU. "The policy of the AFL-CIO to boycott China, to have nothing to do with China, has only kept the working class behind," she says. She proposes a three-pronged approach to China and the ACFTU, involving union-to-union dialogue, worker-to-worker exchanges and talks among scholars. In recent years, she says, China has made enormous changes in labor policy, starting with a law governing contract labor that took effect in January 2008. These changes have made workers more aware of their rights and, in fact, helped spark the recent upsurge in strikes. And there are future reforms in the works, including a collective-bargaining law.

A recent report by CLB, "Going It Alone: The Workers Movement in China, 2007–2008," concludes by saying that despite the ACFTU’s history, there’s no alternative to trying to reshape the federation. "It is essential that the formal organizing power of the ACFTU somehow be integrated with the strength and support of the workers," says the report. "The two sides will have to find a way of coming together."

Of course, it’s fair to ask whether change will come fast enough. Ralph Nader, who’s inspired a generation of global-justice activists and who has long campaigned against a trade regime dominated by rules written by and for big banks and corporations, strongly advocates confronting China and other low-wage exporting countries, such as India, with a social tariff designed to compensate for the lack of collective bargaining, a decent minimum wage and poor or nonexistent regulations. He acknowledges that in the end China might change, especially if modernization causes workers to demand more rights and the growing middle class exerts pressure for more democracy. But Nader is not prepared to be patient. "If we wait long enough, in thirty-five years wages and working conditions and all that may equal out," he says. "But look at the hollowed-out communities in the United States in the meantime."

In the end, however, there is probably very little that the United States can do to change China’s trajectory. Few, if any, of the economic measures suggested to force China to make changes are likely to work, at least not without backfiring and causing massive dislocation in the United States as well. "Any attempt to get tough with the Chinese would also bite us in the ass," says Left Business Observer’s Henwood. If a trade war begins to develop, China can, among other things, wield its vast holdings of dollars and US Treasury bills as a weapon and can look elsewhere for imports that it now buys from the United States. Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch says the United States ought to place democratization and human rights far higher on its agenda, even in meetings on other topics, without fear that China will be insulted: "There are all sorts of ways of saying it in meetings between the two countries without it being a giant Fuck you! in the middle of the meeting." So far, President Obama seems to have sidetracked human rights.

The United States may have little choice but to get used to the fact that China is coming into its own. If that’s the case, though, we may be able to use the Chinese challenge to make sweeping changes in the way America does business at home. "It isn’t just China’s rise, which is tectonic, but it’s our own financial, political and cultural collapse that is cause for even more consternation," says Orville Schell. "We need to find ways to accommodate China, and to influence it. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will be easy, or even peaceable."

[NOTE: In our recent piece on Wen Jiabao's Shenzhen speech, in which the Premier spoke about the need for political reform, we took issue with the idea that this was a radical departure of some kind, pointing out that Wen's remarks fall within a tradition of Party discourse on "political system reforms." We also said, however, that "any statement on political reform is significant" and that "at the very least, Wen's statement offers an opportunity for Chinese media to push more searchingly on this issue." More professional Chinese media in particular are already seizing Wen's speech as a pretext for more exploration of the issue. The following editorial, by former Caijing magazine editor-in-chief Hu Shuli, who is now running New Century News and China Reform, is an excellent case in point.]

August 26 marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Shenzhen’s anniversary has lately stirred up thinking about reform in China, and in this flurry of activity Premier Wen Jiabao’s recent Shenzhen speech has no doubt drawn the most attention. In his speech, Wen Jiabao reaffirmed the importance of political system reforms, or zhengzhi tizhi gaige (政治体制改革), saying that we “must promote not only economic reform, but must promote political system reforms as well. Without political system reforms, the gains of economic reform will come to nothing, and the modernization drive cannot be achieved.”

Wen’s remarks on political reform were not given prominent play in official press releases, but they echoed strongly inside and outside China, and this interest is more than sufficient to demonstrate just how ardently the public waits for action on reform nearly three years after the objective of political system reform was described in a section of the political report to the 17th National Party Congress entitled “Building Socialist Democratic Politics.”

Knowledge is easy, but action is difficult. Reforms in China have already reached a juncture where pushing ahead with political system reforms is absolutely critical. While economic reforms have technically made strides in recent years, there have still been no real breakthroughs in key areas where the government has made solemn prior commitments — such as taxation and factor pricing reform. The reasons for this are of course complicated, but the principal obstacle is lack of progress on political reform.

As political reform has lagged, it has proven difficult to make reforms to China’s social system. And the steady piling up of obstacles to further reforms has divided the public on the prospects and value of reform itself. As China moves into position as the world’s second-largest economy, our leaders must reaffirm the idea that “only by firmly promoting reform and opening can our nation have a bright future.” Political system reforms cannot be delayed any longer; we cannot wait.

Economic reforms and political reforms are complementary and mutually dependent. Deng Xiaoping, the original architect of China’s economic reforms, recognized this fact early on. He said: “The question of whether all of our reforms can ultimately succeed is still to decided by the reform of the political system.”

If we go back to the beginning of reforms, we see that economic reforms and political reforms ran in parallel. Abolishing the system of life-long tenure in leadership posts, promoting the separation of the functions of the Party and the government, strengthening the function of the National People’s Congress, government dialogue with the public on major issues — these were all early trials.

In the past twenty years, however, political reforms have been far from sufficient, a fact that is undeniable.

We must beware this idea that has lately reared up — that China’s economic strength and successes are themselves a demonstration of the success of China’s political system. According to this logic, China’s political system has not changed in the past 60 years, and it is suited as well to the planned economy as it is to the market economy. Given the “political advantage” represented by this “China model,” reform was never necessary before, and reform is equally unnecessary in the future. This argument is blind to the fact that our political system is unsuited to China’s economic development right now. Moreover, it gainsays the CCP’s pronouncements on political reform, and shows blatant disregard for public feeling on this issue.

The failure of forward progress on political reform also has something to do with our apprehensions. No doubt the greatest apprehension among these is the fear that political reform, if not done carefully, will lead to social unrest. This concern is entirely understandable, and it deserves an ear. But if this fear is permitted to carry the day, the factors of social instability in China will only continue to pile up.

We should recognize that our market economic system has been basically established in the past 30 years of reform, and that the social and economic makeup of China has been fundamentally transformed. The sense of personal independence is growing among our citizens, as is consciousness of their rights and the appetite for participation in current affairs. Non-governmental organizations and other social networks are increasingly active in China. A new generation of citizens hopes for the opportunity to create a rational society through a process of enlightenment.

There is no need for concern that the country will descend into chaos and dissension if the process of political reform is gradual and orderly. The experiences of neighboring countries and regions instruct us that while small ripples are unavoidable in the process of political reform, our modern social and economic mechanisms will continue to hold strong if only we advance steadily toward the formation of a truly democratic society. Moreover, political reform must advance in concert with social and cultural reforms, and work in complement to deepening economic reforms.

The founding of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone thirty years ago brought fierce debate inside China, the heart of which was whether reform should come at all. The dispute at that time centered largely on questions of ideology. Today, our reform debate centers on complex and competing interests. If we hope to promote comprehensive reform, we must build the mechanisms by which various interest groups can consult and interact, in order to prevent arbitrary actions by the few, and to avoid the “tyranny of the majority.” In China today, conflicts over rights and interests have intensified, and mass incidents are breaking out with ever greater frequency. Clearly, the people want change, and their enthusiasm can be harnessed.

Owing to the sensitivity of the political reform issue, the reform discussion over the past couple of years has focused on more limited ideas like “government reform” and “administrative reform”, which have actually served to distract from the real and critical tasks of reform.

In his recent speech, Wen Jiabao said political system reforms “must protect the democratic and legal rights of the people; must broadly mobilize and organize the people to manage the affairs of the state, the economy, society and culture in accordance with the law; must resolve on a systemic level the problem of over-concentration of power and unchecked power, creating the conditions for allowing the people to criticize and monitor the government, firmly punishing corruption; must build a fair and just society, in particular protecting judicial impartiality and prioritizing the assistance of weaker elements in society, so that people may live with a sense of safety, and have confidence in the development of the nation.”

These four “musts” are a significant contribution, and can be seen as breakthrough points for political reform. The most important thing, however, is that we act quickly.

This editorial appeared originally in Chinese at Caixin Media.

HONG KONG - When seven-foot, six-inch Yao Ming dunks a basketball, does the world smile on China? When pianist Lang Lang, the Chinese Liberace, sparkles in concert, does China’s political star glow a little brighter in the firmament of nations? And when Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, the richest person of Chinese descent in the world, banks another billion dollars on shrewd investments, is the image of the Chinese nation also enriched?

That’s what China’s leaders are hoping for as they enlist 50 Chinese celebrities in an unprecedented international advertising campaign to improve the country’s global image. The charm offensive is set to begin this September, ahead of celebrations for 61st birthday of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, and will also feature Olympic diving diva Guo Jingjing, film director John Woo and movie star Jackie Chan. The famous 50 will appear in 30-second television commercials as well as a 15-minute promotional film selling China’s virtues to the rest of the world.

In the words of the State Council, China’s cabinet, the campaign will present an image of "prosperity, democracy, openness, peace and harmony" as a counter to the negative stereotypes about the country that its leaders have long blamed the Western media for promulgating. How effective this strike will be, however, remains highly uncertain.

For years now, Beijing has been struggling to use its so-called "soft power" to raise its global image, aiming to match its growing economic clout with a heightened appreciation of Chinese culture and political ideals. This glitzy international celebrity troupe is just the latest public-relations gambit in a strained, ongoing effort that has, so far, fallen flat. While there is no question that China’s remarkable economic success over the past 30 years has stunned the world, a recent BBC poll shows that people in an increasing number of countries have a negative view of China’s rise.

Yet this is the country that, in 2008, staged what were arguably the most successful Olympic Games ever and is currently hosting the World Expo in its gloriously reborn financial center, Shanghai. The frustrated Chinese leadership team, from President Hu Jintao on down, must be scratching their heads and wondering what they have to do to earn some international respect.

After all, other polls show that Chinese people, both in China and in the vast Chinese diaspora, have never been more patriotic. They clearly think it’s cool to be Chinese in the 21st century in the same way that it was cool to be American in the 20th. When, they wonder, will the rest of the world catch on?

The celebrity-powered promotional campaign is intended to convince the doubting global public that the Chinese model, from top to bottom, is worthy of admiration and emulation. But it, like all previous efforts to present a false image of the country, is doomed to fail until the new, economically triumphant China drops its geriatric propaganda strategies and truly engages the international community in an honest dialogue.

For several years now, Beijing has been engaged in a public-relations blitz in a multiplicity of languages. Confucius Institutes teaching Chinese language and culture have sprouted up across the world while state media have greatly expanded their global reach.

Last year alone, the central government spent 45 billion yuan (US$6.6 billion) to increase the international influence of the Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV) and China Radio International (CRI). CCTV added a Russian-language service and an Arabic-language channel that reaches 300 million people in 22 countries. CRI can now be heard in 43 different languages, and Xinhua is adding 117 bureaus around the world.

In addition, last year saw Chinese leaders welcome international media bigwigs such as News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch and the former British Broadcasting Cooperation’s former executive, Richard Sambrook to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for the first World Media Summit, dubbed the "Media Olympics". It also witnessed the international launch of the English-language version of the Global Times, as well as a US edition of China Daily, the primary English-language mouthpiece for the Chinese government.

In July, Xinhua launched CNC World, a global English-language news channel that is modeled on CNN, the BBC and al-Jazeera, with one significant exception: its total lack of objectivity on any story even remotely related to China.

But apparently this extravagantly expensive media onslaught was not enough to win the world’s affection. So now Yao, Lang, Li and a host of celebrity comrades have been asked to do their part to soften the global image of China. And there is every reason to expect that they will do a superb job in a slick production that makes an irresistibly strong case for their rising nation. Remember, this is the country that last week surpassed Japan as the second largest economy in the world and that for three decades has averaged double-digit annual growth, lifting tens of millions of people out of abject poverty and into the middle class. There’s a lot to brag about.

The problem, however, is that, no matter how winning the new promotional campaign turns out to be, China will also continue to make news in a variety of unflattering ways. While it is true that Beijing often does not get a fair shake in the Western media - China-bashing and fear-inspired stereotypes abound - that is not the main reason for all those negative poll ratings.

Let’s face it: it’s hard for the world to warm to a country that is the only friend and supporter of regimes such as that of Kim Jong-il in North Korea and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Chinese leaders have stood by Kim as his country defied international sanctions to develop nuclear weapons. Beijing also single-handedly blocked a condemnation of North Korea by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for a torpedo attack last March that sank the South Korean naval vessel, Cheonan, killing 46 sailors.

Just this month, the 86-year-old Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1987, made yet another pilgrimage to Great Hall of the People, where he was greeted as an old friend by Hu. Mugabe followed up his hobnobbing with Chinese leaders in Beijing with a shopping spree in Hong Kong; meanwhile, his country is falling apart, and his callous indifference to the plight of his people stands as an affront to humanity.

Note that Chinese leaders did not ask Kim, Mugabe or any of Beijing’s other despot-buddies to make cameo appearances in their latest public-relations bonanza. Nor will there be any mention of China’s support for another international pariah, Myanmar, whose military junta has held the country’s rightfully elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for 14 of the last 20 years.

At home, the leadership’s heavy-handed suppression of protests in the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang continues to draw international opprobrium and, underscoring the wrongheadedness of Beijing’s approach, serves only to further alienate the people of those regions from the central government and to flame even more dissent.

In the end, the greatest self-defeating irony of China’s global media blitz is the shackles that its leaders place on national media and the great firewall of censorship they have attempted to erect in cyberspace. China’s state propaganda machine may be reaching out to the world, but an army of censors at home is busy blocking the world from reaching China. This was the harsh lesson learned by Internet
giant Google this year when its China contract was threatened by a censorship dispute that ended with no guarantee that the central government will not continue to censor the company’s China website.

Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk

Over the past few years, Beijing’s repressive policies have increasingly
alienated Tibetans. One indication was the March 2008 uprising and riots
across Tibet. Yet Beijing responded not by moderating its policies but by
intensifying repression-launching a "patriotic education" campaign and
targeting members of the educated elite, many of whom have long gotten along
with, and even flourished within, the communist system. Among these are the
writer Tragyal, long associated with the state publishing house, who awaits
trial on charges of "splittism," and Dorje Tashi, a businessman and hotel
owner, who received a life sentence in June for allegedly collaborating with
human-rights groups abroad.

Beijing has taken the same approach to criticism from abroad over its
handling of Tibet, significantly raising the stakes by identifying Tibet as
a "core interest." Beijing has given notice that unless the world adopts a
"correct understanding" of Tibet by spurning any view contrary to the
Communist Party line, there will be consequences for bilateral relations and
it will be difficult for China to cooperate on the global economic recovery
or other issues.

Washington has bent under the pressure. President Obama refused to schedule
a meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his November 2009 visit to
Beijing, although he did speak about Tibet there. Afterward, U.S. Ambassador
to Beijing Jon Huntsman adopted Beijing’s line, stating that the president’s
meeting with the Dalai Lama, and recent U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, had
"trampled on a couple of China’s core interests." These actions have serious
implications for U.S. support for Tibet, for activists for freedom inside
China, and the Dalai Lama and his democratic government in exile.

Often, when Chinese officials present their position on Tibet, senior U.S.
officials cede ground by saying nothing publicly. Indeed, the words "Tibet"
and "Dalai Lama" have gradually disappeared from the administration’s
vocabulary. Washington’s official statements about the April earthquake in
Yushu, an area that is 97% Tibetan, did not refer to Tibetans or Tibet.

The silence was even more troubling at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue,
major talks the U.S. and China held in Beijing in May. State Councilor Dai
Binguo presented China’s view on Tibet in his remarks at a joint session but
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not respond or mention Tibet
publicly. It was left to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, to state
the U.S. position.

At a routine press briefing several days later, State Department Spokesman
P.J. Crowley deflected a question about the way Tibet was handled during the
talks, saying "It’s hard for me from halfway around the world to describe
everything we discussed," despite having just given remarks on the U.S.
positions on Burma and North Korea presented during the S&ED.

The silence of the Obama administration is peculiar since U.S. policy on
Tibet is clear. Spelled out in the Tibet Policy Act, it supports, among
other things, talks between the Dalai Lama and Beijing and respect for
Tibetans’ human rights and religious, linguistic and cultural heritage.

Past administrations have faithfully carried out this policy. The 2009
annual report on negotiations between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, required
under the Act, recounts extensive contacts about Tibet between President
George W. Bush and General Secretary Hu Jintao as well as between Chinese
interlocutors and other American officials, such as the coordinator for
Tibetan affairs, a position first created by Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright.

The current Tibet coordinator, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
Maria Otero, was not included in the giant U.S. delegation to the Strategic
and Economic Dialogue. Her predecessor in the post, Paula Dobriansky,
traveled to China four times and met with the Dalai Lama 13 times. The 2010
report, due in March, was only submitted to Congress on Wednesday.

The administration’s downplaying of Tibet undermines Chinese liberal
intellectuals and activists who have criticized Beijing’s policies on Tibet
at great risk to themselves. After the March 2008 uprising, a Chinese think
tank called the Open Constitution Initiative issued a report challenging
Beijing’s position that the riots were incited by the Dalai Lama and
criticizing the crackdown that followed. This organization was later shut
down and its staff harassed.

In addition, 29 intellectuals, lawyers and activists signed an open letter
in March 2008 supporting dialogue with the Dalai Lama and urging and end to
official propaganda vilifying him and Tibetans. One of them, Liu Xiaobo was
later prosecuted on subversion charges for his writings and sentenced to
jail for 11 years.

American officials should know by now that nothing is gained by acquiescing
to China’s overbearing behavior on Tibet or any other issue. Adapting to
Beijing’s "correct understanding" of Tibet undermines not only the Dalai
Lama and human rights for Tibetans, but also America’s own "core interest"
in seeing these respected in Tibet and China as well. To be credible,
America must clearly and publicly pursue a well-established policy on Tibet.