Jasmine might still shock China - Howard French

Howard French by Fantake via Flickr

Most commentators have dismissed the so-called Jasmine revolution as an instant failure. Howard French argues in The Atlantic there is more to it than those easy analysis suggest.

At the simplest level, it is hard to understand how a call to protest can be declared a failure if it virtually causes a nation's entire security apparatus to come out in force and to take extraordinary measures of one kind after another, as has happened in China.
Ever the great builder of walls, China responded to last week's call for protesters to gather at a McDonalds in central Beijing by erecting barriers around the fast food establishment and deploying sanitation workers to hose down the streets to shoo people away. Watching over the scene were large numbers of policemen, both uniformed and plain-clothed, who didn't hesitate to use muscle to bundle away suspected foreign correspondents, many of whom were then subjected to interrogations on camera...

On reflection, this might be a good time to take the Chinese authorities at face value. By their actions, they have all but declared this Jasmine moment to be of tremendous importance. By the same token, this is a good time to reconsider the hasty verdict of failure that many attached to this phantom movement.

More in The Atlantic.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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How Cairo shocked China - Howard French

Howard French by Fantake via Flickr

While China was busy repatriating its citizens from Egypt, writes Howard French in The Atlantic, "nowhere have these stories attempted an honest explanation of why an evacuation was needed in the first place. To do so would require getting into some deeply messy topics in post-Tiananmen China about popular demands for democracy and accountability and about the military's ambivalent relationship to the political leadership."
And more:

It is hard, though, to overstate the difficulties of spinning the Egypt situation from the perspective of the star of the Authoritarian International, in the delightful phrase of Chrystia Freeland, of Reuters. Things were so much simpler when so-called Color Revolutions swept a number of constituent parts of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans in the early 2000s. Beijing could indulge in the paranoid or cynical fantasy that this was a case of the West using its insidious non-governmental organizations and funding for civil society to undermine authoritarian regimes that had traditionally been in the socialist orbit. This was cast as a hostile takeover, and Beijing used this as an excuse to tighten controls on association both real and virtual. It also spread its word of caution in the non-democratic world: "Beware. If you let your guard down, this is what the West will do to you."

More in The Atlantic.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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Chinese roads into Africa - Howard French

Howard French via Wikipedia

Former New York Times correspondent Howard French tells Radio Open Source extensively of how China is successfully building inroads into Africa, after the failure of the West.

I was struck every time I got on a plane: the Westerners tend to be rich American tourists on their way to seeing lions and giraffes; or aid workers and NGO people — coming with a mission to minister to Africans about capacity-building or democracy and what my father used to do: public health. I say none of this with scorn, but the Chinese have a very different mission. The Chinese that I saw on the planes — and by the way, ten years ago I saw no Chinese; now they’re maybe a fifth of all the passengers — are all, almost to a person, business people. They’ve pulled up their stakes wherever they lived — in Szechuan province or Hunan province — and they have come to make it in Africa. And they’re not leaving until they do. Whatever it takes for them to make a breakthrough in farming or in small industry, they’re going to work 20 hours a day till they make it.

Much more at Radio Open Source.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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How Ivory Coast dropped in wealth, compared to China - Howard French

Howard French by Fantake via Flickr

When Howard French arrived in the 1980s arrived as a foreign correspondent in Ivory Coast it was doing much better than China, he reports in The Atlantic. Now the former Shanghai-correspondent goes back to a depressing country.

My frustrations, though, went back even further. I had moved to the country in December 1979, when Ivory Coast was still well ahead of China in per capita wealth, its main city, Abidjan, reflected both a polish and ambition seldom associated with the continent, and Cote d'Ivoire, as its leaders insist on calling the country, was the sub-region's surest engine, drawing economic migrants from far and wide.

That country, a place with a seeming bright future, began to come unraveled before my eyes after I returned there for The New York Times after a nearly decade-long absence, in 1994.

And on China and Ivory Coast now, Howard French reports:

An interesting footnote here is a notably quiet China, which has famously claimed non-interference as the basis for its foreign policy; a point it drives home in its relations with African countries. In the real world, where situations like that of Ivory Coast proliferate, with a stance like this, can China be the friend of African peoples and not just of governments?

Increasingly, with China's profile fast rising on the continent, the answer, like the open question of how the United States engages the continent, will make an enormous difference in the lives of millions.

Much more in The Atlantic.

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Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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China's rising online civil society - Howard French

Howard French by Fantake via Flickr

China has changed profoundly, since its first high-profile internet case, the police killing Sun Zhigang in 2003, till today's opinion blogger Han Han, writes former New York Times correspondent Howard French in the Columbia Journalism Review. But not only its over 400 million online citizens have changed, also the government adapted.
Take the recent Japan-China spat, and Han Han's take on it:

Given the size of China’s online audience, which is roughly 400 million and still rising fast, Han Han could also be the world’s most popular blogger—his 425 million cumulative hits place him at the top of Sina.com’s rankings....

Beijing has played a complicated hand in the matter, ardently fanning the embers of nationalism in the state-controlled press, while carefully censoring Internet discussion of the issue with an eye toward preventing big demonstrations in the streets and other mass mobilization, which the state fears could get out of control.

With the crisis with Japan deepening, Han Han mercilessly probed the contradictions in the government’s position while warning his followers of the dangers of manipulation by the state. “In my opinion, if everyone and everything is doing well, life is as one wishes, the wife, kids, home, car, work, leisure, health, all are okay, one can, under the guise of national sentiment, go and make a fuss about protecting the Diaoyu Islands. But if you have something of your own that you haven’t protected, first protect that and then we can talk. Don’t worry about something so far off.”

To those who decide to protest anyway, he continued: “Don’t be surprised when after the battle, you, mortally injured, see the leaders and the invaders [the Japanese] cheerfully discussing a big business deal.”

Howard French quotes many other observers, whose opinions on the direction China is taking vary a lot. But he ends with a fairly positive note:

Democracy may be too big a short- or even medium-term expectation for China, even with its burgeoning Internet culture. But from my perspective as a longtime observer of this country, if China’s civil society is the key factor in the country’s evolution toward a future in which the Communist Party must accept greater limits to its power, the Internet is this evolution’s beating heart.

Much more in the Columbia Journalism Review.

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Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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