CHINA – POLITICS

1. Zhou Yongkang’s probe is alive again, almost official

   1. NY Times and Mingjing both quoted sources with elite political ties that President Xi Jinping and other party leaders have authorized a corruption inquiry against the powerful former head of the domestic security apparatus, Zhou Yongkang,
      1. NY Times: “Mr. Xi and other leaders agreed by early December to put the elder Mr. Zhou directly under formal investigation by the party’s commission for rooting out corruption and abuses of power, the sources said. They said a senior official went to Mr. Zhou’s home in central Beijing to inform him about the inquiry, and Mr. Zhou and his wife, Jia Xiaoye, have since been held under constant guard….The people who gave the account were an official with a state broadcaster, a former province-level party corruption investigator, a lawyer with family connections to the party elite, a businesswoman with similar ties and a businesswoman who is the granddaughter of a late leader. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the risk of recriminations for discussing sensitive politics.”
   2. Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily reported that another high level official, former Politburo member and former CMC deputy chairman Xu Caihou, was also implicated in Zhou’s probe.

2. Wintry climate for foreign journalists in China

   1. Journalists working for the China bureau of the New York Times and Bloomberg News are facing visa delays and possible expulsion. Foreign journalists working legally in China need to renew their visa every year, a procedure which usually happens in December. As of Dec 10, the Foreign Ministry had not yet begun to process the applications. In the Times bureau, many are not even able to apply for a visa because their press cards have not been renewed yet. Foreign Policy reviews the history of foreign media operation in China and analyzes the current episode. It says that Hong Kong will be an obvious choice for China journalists to take refuge if they are expelled when their visa expires on Dec 17 or 18, and the experience of NY Times reporter Chris Buckley is likely to be repeated.
   2. Meanwhile, Joe Biden complained to Xi Jinping about the crackdown on foreign news media, warning that there would be consequences from the US Congress.
   3. There have been discussions on possible ways for the US government to retaliate.
      1. Washington Post suggested in a Sunday editorial that the time might have come to take such steps (reciprocal visa policy), which have been proposed in Congress before but never gathered critical momentum.
      2. One NY Times journalist suggested Washington could slow down the approval process for U.S.-based executives for Chinese state media companies, like Xinhua and CCTV.
      3. However, both the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China and the Committee to Protect Journalists do not support this position, arguing that not retaliating with a symmetry in visa policy can “ remind their Chinese counterparts that Chinese journalists [in the US] face none of the obstacles that foreign reporters in China are faced with. ”
      4. China Daily USA deputy editor Chen Weihua also argued against it, saying that “[r]etaliation with a similar action only means that you endorse such action. It simply weakens your original argument for press freedom.”
      5. Orville Schell, on the other hand, proposed a two-step approach: first open negotiation and then, as in Bishop’s own earlier recommendation, attacking the issue from an economic angle if necessary.
      6. Elizabeth Lynch at China Law and Policy, on the other hand, examined the existing legal foundation for visa reciprocity, and found it sound. She argued against the policy on principle, however, suggesting that officials from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Public Security Bureau—”the entities that are responsible for U.S. journalists’ current mistreatment”—would make more appropriate targets than reporters, state-employed or not.
      7. The China File conversation is found here
   4. A roundtable event was held by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China last week. Attendees included the New York Times’ Edward Wong, TIME’s Hannah Beech, Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Sarah Cook of Freedom House.
   5. “Critical to understanding developments in China has been the ability of journalists to cover that country. Domestic journalists operate under heavy censorship while foreign journalists now report a worsening environment under President Xi Jinping. In November, Chinese officials denied a visa to Paul Mooney, an American journalist who had spent the past 18 years in China and had reported on environmental problems, Tibet, Xinjiang, the plight of human rights activists, and kidnapped children, among other stories. Currently some two dozen journalists from the New York Times and Bloomberg have yet to receive their visas as a year-end deadline approaches, and the Web sites of both news organizations have been blocked in China after publishing articles detailing the wealth of the relatives of China’s top leaders. Foreign journalists report concern over government retaliation, harassment of sources, and physical threats, and allegations of self-censorship in the face of pressure from Chinese authorities have also surfaced.”
   6. CPJ’s Bob Dietz argued against retaliatory visa restrictions on Chinese reporters in the U.S. during the meeting. He pointed out that “The way the current issue is resolved is important — it can set the tone not just for journalism but for other forms of interaction between these two powerful countries. A front page piece in today’s New York Times, U.S. Colleges Finding Ideals Tested Abroad, deals with the issues confronting U.S. universities that partner with Chinese schools. Both issues — academic freedom and journalism— represent more than just a clash of culture and ideals.”

3. Rights Advocate Xu Zhiyong Indicted

   1. His lawyer expected that the charges would be similar to what the police recommended, primarily that Mr. Xu helped “assemble a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” Zhang also expressed frustration with the way the authorities have handled the case so far. In comments he posted online Friday evening, he noted the unusual speed with which prosecutors issued their indictment, which was based on 129 case files that they had received from the police a week earlier. In one barbed comment, he questioned how officials could have read all the documents given that his office was still in the process of having them photocopied. “Why don’t you at least have some decency?” he wrote.

4. Stability and sovereignty in cyberspace?

   1. China Real Time’s Josh Chin highlights one novel aspect of a police recommendation for the prosecution of New Citizens’ Movement activist Xu Zhiyong:
      [… A]s Human Rights Watch researcher Maya Wang points out, the document doesn’t limit its attention to Mr. Xu’s real-world activities. It accuses him on three occasions of “severely disturbing order in…public spaces on the Internet.” The inclusion of that allegation, tied to the uploading of photos from the demonstrations, is made possible by a judicial interpretation issued in September that added online space to the definition of public space for the purpose of criminal prosecution. The interpretation has been widely described by rights advocates and legal scholars as an effort to lend legal backing to the government’s campaign against online criticism and dissent.
   2. Adam Segal writes on the Council on Foreign Relations and cites a recent speech by Lu Wei of China’s State Internet Information Office as “a bracing reminder that the norms of cyberspace remain highly contested.” Lu spoke of the need to safeguard network security sovereignty. Sovereignty, in Lu’s conception, was an evolving concept. Just as the 17th century saw the extension of national sovereignty over parts of the sea, and the 20th over airspace, national sovereignty is now being extended to cyberspace. Information services could cross borders, “but cyberspace cannot live without sovereignty.”

5. Law Professor Fired for “Spreading Political Views”

   1. In a case that echoes that of Professor Xia Yeliang, an outspoken professor has been dismissed from the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, allegedly for his writings which criticized the Communist Party.
   2. The Global Times explains the university’s position on Zhang’s dismissal: … Zhang has breached school regulations and the law school decided not to renew his contract. …Zhang used the school’s automatic communication system to publish a book entitled New Common Sense, the notice said, adding he also took advantage of his identity as a professor to transmit his political thoughts during classes.
   3. In an interview with the New York Times, Zhang called his dismissal part of a “witch hunt”. According to AP, Zhang has said that the university failed to provide evidence of his behavior that violated regulations. He said that that exchanging political views with students as equals should be allowed. He also said that he already noted to school officials that the university has forced the government-sanctioned political views upon students.
   4. Zhang’s June article “The Origin and the Perils of the Anti-constitutionalism Campaign of 2013″criticized XiJinpingas anti-constitutional, anti-free media and anti-judicial independence. His online book, “New Common Sense”, says one-party rule is illegal. In October last year, Zhang’s weibo accounts were deleted, and the Guangdong Department of Propaganda banned reporting on him after he wrote about plans to introduce patriotism classes to Hong Kong schools.
      
      

CHINA – SOCIETY

1. Demographic costs of One-Child Policy

   1. Economist argues that “[in] the end demography was the reason Chinese leaders had to act.”
      1. “China’s fertility rate of 1.5 to 1.6 children per woman is below the replacement rate (of about 2.1), and the fertility rates in the biggest Chinese cities are among the lowest in the world at well below 1.0. The demographic costs are becoming painfully obvious. China’s labour pool declined in 2012 (by 3.45m) for the first time in almost 50 years.
      2. “The ratio of taxpayers to pensioners is expected to drop from almost five to one to just over two to one by 2030. China now faces a different population fear than Malthus imagined: a quickly aging society with too few young people to support their parents and grandparents. Chinese demographers, including some who advise the government, believe the policy should have been relaxed long ago—if not, a few dare to say, scrapped altogether. A move this March to combine the family planning bureaucracy with the health ministry gave hope to some that the one-child policy was in its twilight.”
   2. Journalist Mei Fong, who is writing a book about the broad implications of the policy, discusses the issue of China’s aging population in an interview in Dissent Magazine, while also mentioning the global impact China’s population policies
      1. “Many Westerners see the one-child policy as more of a domestic issue in China—yet it has had a global effect, big and small. Recently, I talked to a population expert who fumed about how China’s coercive policies cast a long shadow, depressing funding for international population control activities. Subsequently, there’s been a population boom in sub-Saharan Africa. So that’s an interesting question: what if the one-child policy averted millions of births in China, but indirectly caused a population boom in Africa?”
   3. In an effort to deal with the shifting demographics of China’s aging population, the government has floated plans to progressively delay retirement age.
      1. “Hu Xiaoyi, deputy minister of Human Resources and Social Security, told Xinhua in an interview that considering China’s current development stage and some emerging problems, raising the retirement age must go on the government agenda. According to Hu, the average retiring age for Chinese men and women working in enterprises are only 54. “This is obviously too low,” he said. […] In 2012, the size of China’s working population, or those from 15 to 59 years old, dropped for the first time by 3.45 million from a year earlier. The proportion of working people in the total population dropped by 0.6 percentage point, a recent report showed. The shrinking labor pool is cutting into China’s traditional advantage in labor cost, which is partly credited for its rapid growth over the past three decades.”

2. China announces principles of urbanization plans

   1. Central Party Committee organized a meeting on urbanization on 12/12 and 13/12 The main task concluded from the meeting includes
      1. 推进农业转移人口市民化
      2. 提高城镇建设用地利用效率
      3. 建立多元可持续的资金保障机制
      4. 优化城镇化布局和形态
      5. 提高城镇建设水平
      6. 加强对城镇化的管理
   2. Nothing very new. The statement mainly repeated what has already been planned and reinforced the commitment to improve the quality of the process, without mentioning any new policies or timetables. But emphasis is placed on the quality of « human-centred urbanization » in an orderly manner, on dealing with the problem of rural poverty, on environmental protection during the process and on the efficient use of land.

1.  
2. The government plan, according to a paper called 《国家新型城镇化规划》, is that 60% of China’s population of almost 1.4 billion will be urban residents by 2020 as the country’s new leaders seek to sustain growth and to help restructure the economy by boosting consumer demand.
3. Reuters highlighted the government’s dilemma in the push for urbanization: “the leadership is struggling to balance multiple, occasionally conflicting goals such as encouraging the migration of millions of former farmers into cities without creating the slums and unemployment problems that have occurred in other countries experiencing similar migration. // Restrictions on migration, which have created a de-facto illegal immigrant population in many Chinese cities, composed of Chinese citizens who have migrated without permission, have proven a significant source of social instability and have highlighted the uneven distribution of the fruits of China’s economic growth. // At the same time China wants to maintain an agricultural sector capable of keeping the country fed independently without recourse to imports, and some officials worry that this will become impossible if too many farmers leave their farms.”

HONG KONG – POLITICS

1. The Court of Final Appeal dismissed the 7-year requirement for CSSA benefits

   1. The judicial review began in 2008, when Madam Kong, 64, was a homeless new immigrant whose husband died the next day she arrived Hong Kong from mainland through the One-Way Permit (OWP) scheme. She applied to the Department of Social Welfare for Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) benefits but was rejected on the grounds of not meeting the 7-year requirement, which changed administratively in 2004 from the previous 1-year requirement. Her case, however, was dismissed twice in lower courts.
   2. The top court ruled that the seven-year residency rule breached Article 36 of the Basic Law, which says every citizen has a right to social welfare benefits under the CSSA scheme. The government’s explanation that the seven-year policy was intended to save money and ensure the sustainability of the social security system was not reasonable. The judges ruled that the policy conflicted with the one-way permit policy designed to promote family reunions in Hong Kong and the population policy aimed at rejuvenating the ageing population.
   3. The ruling means that new arrivals will no longer be required to live in the city for at least seven years before they can apply for Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) benefits. While some cheered for the decision and argued that it would not add too much expenditure to the government, others are worried that the ruling will lead to unsustainable increases in Hong Kong’s welfare spending and, worse, a flood of immigrants who join the OWP scheme because of the CSSA benefits.
   4. One of the key issues is that the application, approval and issue of OWP fall within the remit of the Mainland authorities, instead of the HK authorities. The ruling thus results in a strange situation where the HK government has no approval and issue rights on the OWP application on one hand but has to review new immigrants’ applications for the CSSA benefits upon their one-year residency on the other.
   5. The court ruling is worth reading, and can be found here.