The Sinocism China Newsletter – March 22, 2015

Bill Bishop , March 23, 2015 5:15pm

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THE ESSENTIAL EIGHT

1. China’s ‘comfort women’ – FT.com Thousands of Chinese women were forced into sex slavery during the second world war. Here is one survivor’s story

Related: Japanese historians contest textbook’s description of ‘comfort women’ – The Washington Post Saying that the women were simply prostitutes, the group is taking up an official Japanese effort to win support for its perspective on the euphemistically known “comfort women,” a particularly sensitive part of its wartime legacy. “There are women in Amsterdam who sit in windows displaying their services and in Japan we have Soapland, which is part of the sex trade,” said Ikuhiko Hata, a Harvard- and Columbia-educated emeritus professor at Nippon University, likening the comfort women to those working in the red light districts in the Dutch and Japanese capitals.

2. The Biggest Threat to America’s Future Is … America – The New Yorker the widespread recognition that America can’t do everything coexists with a set of outdated presumptions and practices, which still dominate many policy discussions in Washington and are already doing considerable harm to the U.S.’s standing. If these nostrums and patterns of behavior aren’t updated, they will end up doing far more damage. Indeed, it’s barely an exaggeration to say that the real threat to American power and influence comes from within America itself, specifically from its increasingly dysfunctional political system.

3. The Trouble with Factions | Hoover Institution Alice Miller challenging convention wisdom as usual… // The political and party agenda the Xi leadership pursued in the wake of the congress thus could not have surprised anyone among the party elite involved in the 18th Party Congress and its preparation. The foreshadowing of much of Xi’s policy agenda at the party congress indicates that Xi has been pursuing a mandate bestowed on him and his Standing Committee colleagues to achieve the CCP’s 2020 goals and to address what authoritative party statements and leadership speeches have forthrightly called a crisis of governance facing the party. The coherence with which the Xi leadership has pursued this agenda itself points to this interpretation as well. Xi’s enhanced prominence as party leader also comports with the effort to lend impetus to the agenda the Xi leadership has been mandated to press. While a great deal of personal attention has been attached to Xi in PRC media over the past two years, it has still stopped well short of the sort of personality cult that attached to Mao Zedong in the 1960s and that attached to Hua Guofeng during his brief tenure as party leader after Mao’s death. Xi is still operating well within the trappings of collective leadership that prevailed during Hu Jintao’s tenure as party chief. He has never been called the “core” of the party leadership collective, nor has he yet been credited with an ideological departure as his own intellectual property. Xi is strong because he enjoys a powerful consensus among the broader party elite—active and retired—behind the agenda he is pursuing.

Related: Winter 2015: Issue 46 | Hoover Institution always an interesting read

4. Why Western economics fails to explain China’s economy (Translation) | chiecon A popular viewpoint is that Western economics reflects the workings and laws of developed economies, held up as universal values, which China’s opening up and reform must follow in order to be successful. This view is a mistake. We know that at the basis of generality lies individuality, and that universality resides in specific circumstances. It can be seen from the general rules of its market economy that modern Western economics contains general or universal values, which as a developing socialist market economy we must carefully research and learn from. On the other hand, lets not discuss the limits and shortcomings of Western economics, even if its assumed to be correct, if attempting to explain China’s reform and development, it must be combined with China’s reality, not ‘cut the feet to fit the shoes’, or blindly imitate. China is a large developing socialist country, with a long history and age-old cultural traditions. Our goal is to build a prosperous, strong, democratic, civilised and harmonious, modern socialist country, realise the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. One can only take the general rules of a market economy, and combine with the specific circumstances in China, in order to find a feasible approach to reform, and understand and grasp the essence and logic of China’s economic development. Only by basing upon China’s conditions and practices, summing up from experience, constructing arguments, refining thought, and innovating new theories, can Chinese scholars obtain robust theoretical achievements, that contribute to the development of mankind. (Author: Peking University, School of Economics Dean)

Related: “西化”的经济学教育不能成为主流 _学习与实践 _光明网 People’s University School of Economics professor Qiu Haiping writes in the CASS Newspaper that “westernized” economics education can not become the mainstream

5. More than meets the eye to Xi aide’s Moscow visit|WantChinaTimes CPC General Office head and member of the CPC Central Secretariat Li Zhanshu met with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on March 19 at the Kremlin, purportedly to lay the groundwork for Chinese president Xi Jinping’s Moscow visit in May to attend the 70th anniversary ceremony of the end of World War II in Europe, according to Hong Kong-based Phoenix New Media.

6. Hackers Attack GreatFire.org, a Workaround for Websites Censored in China – NYTimes perhaps just a coincidence, or perhaps a significant violation of the principle of internet sovereignty // On Thursday, GreatFire.org said it was receiving 2.6 billion requests an hour for its mirrored websites. On Friday, access to the mirrored websites was inconsistent in China. “We are under attack and we need help,” GreatFire.org said. “This kind of attack is aggressive and is an exhibition of censorship by brute force. Attackers resort to tactics like this when they are left with no other options.” Meanwhile, the Reuters news agency reported that its website was inaccessible in China on Friday.

Related: Report highlights cyber attacks on Chinese websites – Xinhua Chinese authorities found 36,969 websites had been tampered with in 2014, and backdoors implanted in 40,186 webpages, according to a report released by Internet Society of China and the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China on Friday. Last year, 4,761 IP addresses in the United States controlled 5,580 Chinese websites through backdoor programs, which can allow them to bypass normal authentication to secure illegal remote access to a computer.

7. Bishop says China has ordered an end to church demolitions–ucanews China’s central government has ordered an end to a demolition campaign that targeted churches in Zhejiang province, according to a senior official of the state-sanctioned Catholic Church. Bishop Paul Meng Qinglu of Inner Mongolia, a vice-chair of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, said he heard the news during a recent religious meeting in Beijing. “Church leaders across China had complained about the demolitions over the past year,” he told ucanews.com. Bishop Meng said the orders to end the demolition campaign were supposed to have taken effect “early this year”.

8. Amid Worsening Pollution, Gov’t Moves toward Law on Ecotaxes – Caixin An official at the Ministry of Finance said that works on legislation supporting ecotaxes is gaining pace and expected to be done in two years. However, experts and regulators are pushing forward with work in the hopes that it can be finished as soon as this year, the official said. Ecotaxes – levies on pollution and environmental damage – were put on the government’s agenda in June 2007 when the State Council, the cabinet, said it wanted studies done on how the taxes might work. Late that year, the Ministry of Finance, the State Administration of Taxation and the Ministry of Environmental Protection started researching ecotaxes. The launch of ecotaxes was also part of the tax reform plan included in the reform blueprint set by the third full meeting of the Communist Party’s 18th Central Committee – its nexus of national power – in November 2013.

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Bill Bishop

Author and curator of the daily Sinocism newsletter.