China General News and Discussion

[Daredevil]

China's UN diplomat in drunken rant against Americans:emot15::emot15:

China's top-ranking UN diplomat embarked on a drunken rant against the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, telling his boss he'd "never liked" him, and adding for good measure that he didn't like Americans either.

The outburst by Sha Zukang at a retreat for top UN officials in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach left senior UN officials cringing in embarrassment as others tried to convince him to put down the microphone, according to Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine.

"I know you never liked me Mr. Secretary-General – well, I never liked you, either," said Mr Sha as Mr Ban looked on, smiling and nodding awkwardly during the 15-minute toast attended by the UN's top brass.

Mr Sha, who was appointed the UN undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs in 2007, also made no secret of his fractious relationship with Mr Ban, although did say he'd grown to respect the South Korean.

"You've been trying to get rid of me," said 62-year-old Mr Sha according to the senior UN official present, "You can fire me anytime, you can fire me today."

Later in his impromptu speech Mr Sha turned to an American colleague, singling out Bob Orr, from the executive office of the secretary-general.

"I really don't like him: he's an American and I really don't like Americans," he said.

A second senior UN official who was at the dinner said: "It went on for about ten or fifteen minutes but it felt like an hour."

Officials present at the dinner suggested that Mr Sha might have been the victim of a misguided attempt at humour.

The next morning Mr Sha requested a meeting with Mr Ban during which he was "deeply apologetic" according to Farhan Haq, the acting deputy UN spokesman.

Mr Farhan said: "Mr Sha told the Secretary General that he realised that the way that he spoke, coming as it did after he had had a few drinks, was inappropriate, as it went too far. He was also aware that his statements had embarrassed and irritated other senior advisers."

It is not the first time that Mr Sha, a career diplomat, has let the mask of diplomacy slip. In a BBC interview in 2006 he was goaded into a furious, shrieking attack on American criticisms of China's rapidly growing defence budget.

"It is much better for [America] to shut up, keep quiet. Are you the number one? Is it true that the US has almost 50 per cent of the world's military budget?"

The Chinese population is five or six times bigger.

"Why blame China? Forget it. It's high time to shut up. It's America's sovereign right to do whatever is good for them. But don't tell us what is good for China."

 

[Ray]

Coping with a Conflicted China

2009-2010 will be remembered as the years in which China became difficult for the world to deal with, as Beijing exhibited increasingly tough and truculent behavior toward many of its neighbors in Asia, as well as the United States and the European Union. Even its ties in Africa and Latin America became somewhat strained, adding to its declining global image since 2007. Beijing's disturbing behavior has many observers wondering how long its new toughness will last. Is it a temporary or secular trend? If it is a longer-term and qualitative shift toward greater assertiveness and arrogance, how should other nations respond?

What the world is witnessing in China's new posture is in part the product of an ongoing intensive internal debate, and represents a current consensus among the more conservative and nationalist elements to toughen its policies and selectively throw China's weight around. Although there seems to be domestic agreement at present, China remains a deeply conflicted rising power with a series of competing international identities. Many new voices and actors are now part of an unprecedentedly complex foreign-policymaking process. Consequently, China's foreign policy often exhibits diverse and contradictory emphases. Understanding these competing identities is crucial to anticipating how Beijing's increasingly contradictory and multidimensional behavior will play out on the world stage. Each orientation carries different policy implications for the United States and other nations.

Coflicted China

Download the full article, available in Adobe Acrobat [.pdf] format.
http://www.twq.com/11winter/docs/11winter_Shambaugh.pdf

Worth a dekko.

 

[Ray]

China's National Insecurity

Beijing sees Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize as part of an international strategy to contain China's rise.

By JOHN LEE

Events of the past year have put new dents in China's claim of a "peaceful rise." Beijing has embroiled itself in various territorial disputes with neighbors. It has also started employing coarse rhetoric against those who disagree with it. In a July Asean meeting, foreign minister Yang Jiechi ominously reminded smaller Southeast Asian counterparts who wanted American involvement to help negotiate a settlement over disputes in the South China Sea that, "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that is just a fact." China's leaders have not only lashed out against Japan for the September trawler incident, but also abused those who gently disagreed with the way it handled the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo earlier this month. It even seems to have bullied some nations into not attending the award ceremony in Oslo.

Many China watchers and foreign officials were stunned that Beijing would jeopardize the gains made over 15 years of "smile diplomacy" by reacting so fiercely to the judgment of the non-governmental Nobel Prize Committee. On the one hand, China is praised globally for its economic pragmatism, having denounced communist ideology in 1978 to pick and choose from the most successful economic policies of East Asia and the West. Yet, despite thirty years of economic contact with other nations, Beijing's frenzied response is evidence that the Chinese Communist Party remains a deeply insecure and even paranoid regime.

As a starting point, Beijing sees tension between itself and America, Japan and Western Europe as not only inevitable but also "structural." Chinese political leaders and strategic thinkers begin from the realist premise that established powers will always seek to contain the economic and military capabilities of emerging states. This is apparent in my survey of over 100 recent articles by Chinese strategists, in which four-fifths were about responding to the ongoing "strategic containment of China" by diluting, binding, overcoming or circumventing American and allied freedom of action in Asia. Indeed, if China continues to rise and its interests expand, this provides a structural reason for greater, rather than less, insecurity as far as the Party is concerned.

Yet, for the Party, the attempt to contain China is not just about "guns, butter and alliances," as one prominent Chinese strategist put it to me. The leadership is convinced that the United States, Europe and American allies in Asia have stumbled upon a further, more subtle, and extremely effective two-pronged strategy. The first prong is to weaken and divide China internally. The second is to deny authoritarian China the legitimacy required for it to assume its natural place as regional leader. And this is where the Nobel Peace Prize comes in.

As Chinese leaders such as Premier Wen Jiabao have repeatedly argued, "foreign devils" seek to weaken China by dividing it. Just as awarding the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama was an attempt to strike a blow against Beijing's control over Tibet in a year when nationwide protests brought the Party to its knees, awarding this year's prize to Liu Xiaobo is an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of China's political system and values.

Beijing is convinced that Nobel Peace Prizes have long been used as a weapon by "foreign devils" against authoritarian regimes. Many Chinese leaders warily observed that awarding the prize to past winners like Poland's Lech Walesa, Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi and Iran's Shirin Ebadi weakened the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes in those countries.

In some respects, the Party has a point. Established Western democracies and some Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea will find it difficult to accept that China can be a "responsible stakeholder" unless there is significant political reform in the country. President Bill Clinton justified American economic engagement with China and support for its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 on the basis that participation in the global economic system would speed up the pace of democratic reform in China—a logic that has since been reaffirmed by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Liberal democracies believe that domestic political values significantly shape foreign policy means and ends. This means that an authoritarian China is destined to remain outside the "democratic community" that has been a hallmark of the American-led liberal order.

But is there really such a powerful conspiracy intricately designed to weaken and divide China? Beijing should itself realize the gaps in this accusation. Since the 1990s, China has benefited more from economic engagement with the West than any other country. Besides, when it comes to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident (or "criminal" as Beijing calls him) is not a product of a Western conspiracy. He is instead a Chinese citizen that has lived in China for all but one year of his life. Liu's advocacy of political reform, constitutional restrictions on the government, and other political and social freedoms enshrined in the Charter 08 that he endorsed in December 2008 is little different to what Beijing has been promising to the West—and, more importantly, to its own people—for over two decades.

The official line has always been that these reforms will only occur "when the time is right." In 2007, Wen provocatively suggested that China may not be ready for democracy for another 100 years. That time may be coming sooner. China's reform period is entering its 32nd year, already having outlasted Mao Zedong's terrible reign by five years. Its economy has doubled in size every eight years for the past three decades and is now the second largest in the world.

But as social unrest rises exponentially each year throughout China, the Communist Party remains as insecure as it has ever been. A regime that is awkward in its own skin and uncomfortable among its own people is always in danger. Lech Walesa once said that democracy is about having a conversation with your people. If Beijing doesn't start doing that, its own paranoid backlash against the Peace Prize will end up as a backlash against the Party.

Mr. Lee is a foreign policy fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is author of "Will China Fail?" (CIS, 2007).

Insecurity

An insight in understanding the Chinese psyche.

 

[notaname]

@L1551L @rockdog @SexyChineseLady and other Chinese members.

What is the story about this route 375 in Beijing? Is this true? What exactly is the background? Is the story published in below article is true?


Rough translation ---

Truth Of Bus And 5 Dead Bodies: An incident is claimed to have happened in Beijing city of China, due to which people are still afraid to travel in buses late at night. For more than two decades, the story of the Route 375 bus has been told. How true this story is is not clear, but this story is viral on many English websites including Beijing websites. It is a puzzle for the police even today. It has been almost 27 years since this incident happened. Even the Chinese police have not been able to solve this mystery till date. Hearing this story sounds like a ghost, but it has a timeline. Police investigations and many other things will seem just fictional to you.

Mysterious story of November 14
This is a mysterious story of one night which happened on 14 November 1995. This story starts from Beijing, China. It was the month of November. It was also very cold and there was fog outside. A bus on route number 375 runs on the same night. China bus number 375 departs from Yuan Ming Huan's Bus Terminal for Xiang Shan (Fragrant Hill) at its scheduled time. The bus was full of passengers and after walking a few kilometers, the passengers slowly got down from the bus at their respective bus stops. Now the bus was completely empty. Now a driver and a female conductor were left in the bus. The journey to Fragrant Hill was still long as there were still 7 more stops left. It was almost midnight, there was silence all around and the road by which this bus was going was also passing through the village and the forests. After passing 1-2 stops, bus number 375 stops at the Summer Palace bus stop. Here an old lady, A 19 year old boy and a couple climb. The young couple sit on the seat behind the driver and the boy sits on the side seat (which is near the gate of the bus) and the older woman sits on the seat immediately behind the boy.

What is the story of this bus?
Now there were a total of 6 people in the bus, 4 passengers and 2 bus workers. The bus starts again towards its destination and the atmosphere inside the bus is absolutely calm. The road through which the bus was going, no human could be seen anywhere on that road because the fog outside was also thick. After passing about 4 stops, the driver of the bus saw 2 people standing on the side of the road. Seeing this, at first the driver thought that he would not stop the bus because there was no bus stop where he was standing, but on the persuasion of the female conductor, the driver stopped the bus. The woman said that this is the last bus on this route and she will not get any other bus. As soon as the bus stops, those two people enter through the rear door of the bus. But then the surprising thing happened that the passengers traveling in the bus and the bus staff were blown away. He saw that not 2 but 3 people had entered the bus. The faces of 2 of them were completely white. He kept the third person standing by giving him the support of his shoulder. The third man had his head down, his hair scattered and his face completely covered. All three people were wearing clothes of the ancient times of China. These three passengers went and sat on the back seat of the bus.

The conductor explained to the people
The female conductor explained to the people so that there was no disturbance in the bus. He said that maybe these people work in some drama company and because it is late at night, they forgot to take off their clothes in a hurry to go home. Bus number 375 proceeded further. Now there were a total of 9 people in the bus. The old lady who was already traveling in the bus was looking back again and again. When the next stop came, the young couple got down at this stop. Bus number 375 again proceeds towards its destination. Now there were a total of 7 people in the bus. Still the old lady was turning again and again and looking at those 3 people. Those people seemed a bit strange to them, but all the other people present in the bus were busy with themselves. The lady conductor was busy talking to the driver. The boy sitting in front of the old lady was busy watching the view outside the bus window. After going about 2-3 km like this, the old lady screams loudly and gives a slap to the boy sitting in front of her and says where is my purse? Hearing this, the lady conductor comes towards the old lady and says that she did not steal your purse. It is sitting in front of you. The boy also explained the same thing to the old woman, but the old woman was adamant on her words and started talking about handing over the boy to the police. The driver and the lady conductor explained a lot to the old lady but she did not understand and asked the driver to stop the bus at the next stop.

woman told scary thing
As soon as the bus stopped, the old woman grabbed the boy's collar and dragged him down. The bus went back towards its destination. The boy was very upset by this incident that happened to him. The boy said to the old woman, 'I did not steal your purse and because of your wrong accusation I missed this last bus. Now how will I go home and to which police station are you taking me because there is no police station nearby? Then the old lady, after taking a long deep breath, tells the boy, 'I didn't get you off the bus to take you to the police station and you didn't steal my purse. I made this charge to save your life.' Hearing this, the boy was shocked and said, 'How did you save my life?' The old lady says, 'Do you remember those 3 people who got on the bus at the end. I kept an eye on them all the way. They seemed strange to me from the beginning. While I was looking at him on the way, his clothes blew in the air for a while due to the strong winds. I got scared seeing this because he had no legs and I could not believe my eyes. It was as if I had a dream. Then I saw the face of the third person. Seeing this, I understood that she was not a human being. I had to get off that bus as soon as possible and save your life too, so I falsely blamed my purse on you.' Hearing this, when the boy asked her why she had not told this to the driver and the conductor, the old lady told that they did not take this matter seriously and started saying that the eyes had been deceived. Then I saw the face of the third person. Seeing this, I understood that she was not a human. I had to get off that bus as soon as possible and save your life too, so I falsely blamed my purse on you.' Hearing this, when the boy asked her why she did not tell this to the driver and conductor, the old lady told that they did not take this matter seriously and started saying that the eyes had been deceived. Then I saw the face of the third person. Seeing this, I understood that she was not a human being. I had to get off that bus as soon as possible and save your life too, so I falsely blamed my purse on you.' Hearing this, when the boy asked her why she had not told this to the driver and the conductor, the old lady told that they did not take this matter seriously and started saying that the eyes had been deceived.

both went to police station
After this, the old woman and the boy immediately go to the police station and tell the police personnel about the incident that happened to them. But the police personnel do not believe his words and advise him to go home. Along with this, the police assure that if such an incident happens, then the police will definitely take action against it. The old woman and the boy go to their respective homes and the next morning on November 15, police receive information that bus number 375 of the route from Yuan Ming Huan's bus terminal to Fragrant Hill is missing. She has not reached her designated bus terminal yet. After getting this information to the police, it was understood that what the old woman and the boy were saying was true. Immediately the police call the old woman and the boy to the police station and record what they said. Soon the news spread like fire in Beijing, all over China that the bus of route number 375 was missing. Even after a lot of effort and investigation by the police, no information about bus number 375 was being found. Even the police checked all the CCTV cameras but there was no sign of that bus anywhere. On November 16, the police get information that a bus has fallen in the river. The police go to the spot and get that bus out of the river. The police are shocked to see this because the bus which had fallen in the river was bus number 375. This bus was found in a river about 100 km from Fragrant Hill.

mystery of many questions
The police take the bus out of the river with the help of a crane. There were a total of 2 dead people inside the bus, including a driver and a female conductor. The shocking thing was that the dead bodies of both of them (conductor and driver) were absolutely fine but the remaining 3 dead bodies were completely rotten. There was a strong smell from those dead bodies. Now many other things were shocking. On contacting the depot, it was told that there was not enough fuel in the bus that it could go further 100 km. When the policemen opened the fuel tank of the bus, they found the fuel tanks were full of fresh blood. Of all the CCTVs installed on the route, that bus was not captured in any of the CCTVs. This incident was the biggest incident of 1995 and this incident was shown by the newspaper of Global Times on its channel. People started considering the old woman and that boy as lucky. But the question is still there, who were those three people after all?

 

[Blademaster]

Sounds like a great campfire story.

 

[rockdog]

some city scary tales...