Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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BEIJING (Reuters) – China will promote the sales of export products in domestic markets, as foreign trade faces unprecedented challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, an assistant commerce minister said on Friday.
As the coronavirus spreads to almost all of China’s trading partners, the world’s second-largest economy is set to reach a grim milestone for full year growth, with the pace of expansion likely to be the slowest since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. And, the export sector is facing millions of job losses and factory shutdowns.
“Due to the rapid spread of the epidemic in the world, foreign demand has slumped and the biggest difficulty facing foreign trade companies is the plunge in orders,” said Ren Hongbin, the assistant minister at the Ministry of Commerce.
He said firms across the board have had their orders cancelled or delayed, and new orders are “very hard to sign”.
“The uncertainty about the pandemic has become the biggest uncertainty for foreign trade development.”
Forecasters expect China’s 2020 growth could be nearer the 2.0% mark – the slowest in over 40 years – due to the sweeping impact of the pandemic both at home and overseas. The economy grew 6.1% last year.
China’s overseas shipments fell 17.2% in January-February from the same period a year earlier, marking the steepest fall since February 2019. Imports sank 4% from a year earlier.
Among the government measures to support the sector, China is accelerating efforts to build online trade fairs and guiding exporters to work with e-commerce retailers for sales in domestic markets and coordinating with its trading partners to stabilise supply chains, said Ren.
The Canton Fair, China’s oldest and biggest trade fair due to take place online, will feature live-streaming services for participants, Li Xingqian, another commerce ministry official, told the same briefing. The fair was originally scheduled to begin on April 15, but was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
China is willing to boost trade relations with other countries, including the United States, under the new circumstances, said Ren, adding that Beijing hopes to work together with Washington to promote bilateral trade.
Both countries have been engaged in a near two-year long trade war with tit-for-tat tariffs on each other’s goods, before negotiators called a truce with an interim trade deal in January.
Education ministry says they will be held a month later than planned – on July 7 and 8 – when there is ‘a lower risk’ for students and staff
It will also give them more time to prepare after months of online learning due to school closures
Students were back in class at the Xian Middle School in Shaanxi province on Monday after a nationwide closure because of the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: Xinhua
China’s all-important annual college entrance exams have been postponed by a month because of the coronavirus crisis – the first time they have been disrupted since the Cultural Revolution.
Universities in mainland China base enrolments solely on the results of the gruelling examinations, known as the gaokao, and they are seen as tests that can make or break a student’s future.
This year, they will be held on July 7 and 8 for most of the country – a month later than planned, the Ministry of Education announced on Tuesday.
A date has not yet been set for the capital Beijing or for Hubei, the province worst-hit by the virus. The ministry said authorities in the two places would decide later when they would hold the gaokao, based on their public health situations.
Wang Hui, a ministry official who handles the university sector, said 10.71 million students were expected to sit the exams this summer.
He said the ministry decided to postpone this year’s gaokao to put students’ “health and fairness first”.
Coronavirus: Decoding Covid-19
Wang said although the spread of the coronavirus had slowed to almost a halt in the mainland, there was still a risk of isolated cases and localised outbreaks. China’s focus now is preventing imported cases among people who arrive in the country from overseas.
“[Disease control and] prevention experts suggest that if the gaokao is postponed for a month, there will be a lower risk from … the epidemic,” Wang said.
“We must adopt the most appropriate and the least risky plan in order to protect the safety and health of the students as well as the staff involved in the tests.”
The ministry official said the delay was also about fairness, by giving students more time to study at school and prepare for the exams.
“We hope to reduce the impact of the epidemic on students, especially those from rural and poverty-stricken regions, as much as possible,” Wang said.
“Third-year high school students have had to stay home [because of the coronavirus outbreak] so their preparation for the gaokao has been affected,” he said. “The internet [access] divide between urban and rural areas means some students in rural and poorer regions have been more affected by this epidemic.”
With schools remaining closed during coronavirus outbreak, China launches national remote learning platforms
18 Feb 2020
Beijing imposed a nationwide school closure after the Lunar New Year holiday in late January as the pneumonia-like illness rapidly spread. Schools were told to postpone the new term that was due to start in mid- or late February, meaning millions of students – from primary school to university – had to turn to online learning. Several provinces began reopening schools this month and more are set to follow in early to mid-April, but authorities in Beijing and Guangdong have yet to set a date for classes to resume.
The last time the gaokao was disrupted was during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political and social turmoil that ended in 1976. It was cancelled during this time and since it resumed in 1979 until 2002 it has been held nearly every year from July 7 to 9. From 2003, the ministry moved the gaokao forward to June 7 and 8 to avoid hot weather and potential natural disasters. The severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak (Sars) in 2002-03 did not delay the exams.
China’s university entry exam, gaokao: elliptical, obscure and confusing
8 Jun 2018
According to an online survey conducted by microblogging website Sina Weibo on Tuesday, some 537,000 users said they were “shocked” by the ministry’s decision and were “experiencing history”.
About 282,000 people said it was a good thing for students since it gave them more time to prepare for the exams. But it was bad news for another 153,000 users, who said they would have to endure an extra month of exhausting preparation.
Plunges in official and private sector purchasing managers’ indices amid the coronavirus outbreak prompted sharp revisions of economic forecasts
Analysts expect China to enact additional fiscal and monetary stimulus but stop short of massive support enacted after the global financial crisis in 2008
Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, the once unthinkable scenario in which China’s economy posts a zero growth rate or even an absolute contraction compared to the previous quarter is now seen as a real possibility. Photo: AP
The odds are rising that China will report a sharp deceleration in growth – or even a contraction in the first quarter as a result of the impact of the coronavirus epidemic.
The outbreak has paralysed the country’s manufacturing and service sectors, putting Beijing in the difficult position of either forgoing its economic growth goal for 2020 or returning to its old playbook of massive debt-fuelled economic stimulus to support growth.
The larger-than-expected deterioration in the official and private sector purchasing managers’ indices for both the manufacturing and services sectors to all-time lows in February – the first available economic indicators showing the extent of the economic damage done by the epidemic – has prompted economists to slash their Chinese growth forecasts.
Several are even expecting the once unthinkable scenario in which China’s economy posts a zero growth rate or even an absolute contraction compared to the previous quarter, even though the weakness is likely to be only short-lived.
A contraction in first quarter growth would be the first since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
A report published by the East Asian Institute at the National University Singapore noted that China could report a contraction of 6.3 per cent in the first quarter from the first quarter of 2019, while the growth rate for 2020 is set to fall well short of the 5.6 per cent needed by Beijing to meet its economic goal.
If China still wants to achieve an average 5.6 per cent growth for 2020, it would have to engineer a growth rate of as high as 12.7 per cent in the second half of the year, according to the report by Bert Hofman, Sarah Tong and Li Yao.
“The question is whether this is feasible and whether the consequences in terms of increased debt and potentially less productive investment are worth the price,” according to the report.
What is gross domestic product (GDP)?
China’s headline year-over-year gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has hovering in a narrow range between 6 per cent and 7 per cent for 18 consecutive quarters until the end of 2019, but a sharp dip in the otherwise steady growth trajectory in the world’s second largest economy would send fresh warning signs about the risks of relying excessively on China as a production base and consumption market, particularly for large multinationals from Hyundai to Apple.
An official recognition of an economic contraction, even a brief one, would break a long tradition of China reporting consistent growth to prove the Communist Party’s ability to manage the economy and to rally the whole country to achieve one historical milestone after another.
insisted last week that China would realise the vision of building up a “comprehensively well-off” society by 2020, an inheritance from China’s former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and a major gauge of progress to realise Xi’s grand “Chinese dream” by the middle of the century.
One key but loosely defined parameter for achieving a “comprehensively well-off” society is that the size of the economy at the end of this year will be double that of 2010.
To achieve that, economists calculate that China must achieve a 5.6 per cent growth this year, although Beijing has been vague about the specific target, although this now seems out of reach barring massive stimulus or a redefinition of the goal.
Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, said his group has cut its forecast for the year-on-year growth rate to 2.3 per cent for the first quarter and 4.8 per cent for 2020 overall, adding that it would be next to impossible for China to make up the lost ground during the reminder of the year given the impact of the coronavirus
on the rest of the world, particularly South Korea, Japan and Italy, who are all major trading partners.
It will be extremely difficult, to say the least, to meet the annual growth targets for 2020 set previously. It would require massive, unreasonable amounts of stimulus, if it is at all possible, given the headwinds Louis Kuijs
“It will be extremely difficult, to say the least, to meet the annual growth targets for 2020 set previously. It would require massive, unreasonable amounts of stimulus, if it is at all possible, given the headwinds,” Kuijs said.
Instead, it would “make much more sense” for the Chinese leadership to play down the need to literally meet the previously set economic target,” he added.
Beijing’s social and economic development targets for this year have not yet been made public, even though Xi has pledged that the government would still achieve them despite the challenge posed by the virus outbreak.
The full-year targets covering growth, employment and inflation are usually released at the National People’s Congress, the ceremonial gathering of China’s legislature in early March, but this key annual event has been postponed due to the threat of the coronavirus, which has infected over 80,000 people and killed more than 2,900 in the country as of Tuesday.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics is due to publish first quarter GDP growth data in mid-April, with combined industrial production, retail sales and fixed-asset investment data for January and February due next week.
They will offer a clearer picture of how much the coronavirus epidemic has damaged China’s growth in the first two months of this quarter, although the damage it has caused in China and the rest of the world is hard to measure because the epidemic is still evolving.
Production among manufacturing companies across China, except in the virus epicentre of Wuhan, Hubei province, have been gradually returned to normal, with firms that have close ties to local governments and access to financial resources resuming production faster than the much larger number of small businesses.
Chinese diaspora fights coronavirus discrimination in the US
The latest data from China’s industry ministry showed that only 32.8 per cent of
had restarted production as of the middle of last week, an increase of just 3.2 percentage points from three days earlier. But even among the larger enterprises the government is trying to help, many are not running at full capacity due to disrupted logistics that have impeded the delivery of raw materials to factories and finished products to customers.
A shortage of workers due to travel barriers erected to stem the spread of the virus, or local regulations that prevent factories from resuming full operations until they have implemented sufficient health safeguards, are also hampering efforts.
Foxconn, which assembles most of Apple’s iPhones in China, said normal production is not expected to resume until the end of March.
China, though, has limited its economic aide policies to “targeted” fiscal and monetary moves, avoiding the massive stimulus it undertook in 2008 in response to the global financial crisis that led to the negative side-effects of high debt and unproductive investments.
[China] will be cautious about the scale of any intervention. The size of the stimulus will likely depend on how quickly economic activity recovers on its own Andy Rothman
Andy Rothman, a San Francisco-based strategist for investment fund Matthews Asia and a long-time watcher of the Chinese economy, said China will report a sharp fall in economic activity in the first quarter and that it “is prepared to implement a stimulus”.
“But [China] will be cautious about the scale of any intervention. The size of the stimulus
will likely depend on how quickly economic activity recovers on its own,” Rothman said.
China’s ruling Communist Party has never reported a contraction in economic growth since the country started the reform and opening up movement in 1978.
Even in 1990, when China was hit by Western sanctions following the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement, the country still reported an annual growth of 3.8 per cent.
The larger-than-expected fiscal and monetary policy stimulus will help make meeting the targets for 2020 less challengingLiu Li-Gang
In the history of quarterly GDP growth rates – China started to report such data in 1994 going back to 1992 – the lowest growth rate on record of 6.0 per cent was in the third and fourth quarters of 2019.
The most recent year that China admitted to an economic contraction was 1976, the final year of the Culture Revolution and the year when chairman Mao Zedong died.
Liu Li-Gang, the chief China economist for Citigroup Global Markets Asia in Hong Kong, said Beijing has the policy reserves to keep economic growth on track, including increasing the fiscal deficit and loosening monetary policy.
“The lower GDP growth [in the first quarter] means that larger fiscal and monetary policy easing will be needed,” Liu said. “The larger-than-expected fiscal and monetary policy stimulus will help make meeting the targets for 2020 less challenging.”
Purchasing managers’ indexes for both manufacturing and service sectors drop to all-time lows
Steep falls raise questions over extent of damage epidemic has caused to China’s economy and how long it will take the country to recover
Many Chinese factories have faced a labour shortage as migrants have been unable to return to work because of the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: AFP
The damage caused by the coronavirus outbreak to China’s US$14 trillion economy could be much worse than Beijing hoped, as official measures for the country’s factory and service activity indicated on Saturday, threatening President Xi Jinping’s vision for 2020 and underscoring his urgent appeal to get production back to normal.
Monthly economic indicators for February sank to all-time lows as the coronavirus halted China’s manufacturing machine and froze activity in the service sector – from retailing to recycling – painting a bleak picture of the world’s second-biggest economy and challenging Beijing’s repeated assurance that the impact would be manageable and short-lived.
Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus – was first reported in Wuhan in December. Since then it has spread to more than 50 countries and more than 85,000 people have been infected. The outbreak has disrupted travel and cargo shipments, and caused stock markets to slump.
China’s official February purchasing managers’ indexes (PMI) for both manufacturing and services, released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Saturday, confirmed fears that China’s economy was in bad shape and fanned speculation that it may even contract in the first quarter.
Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Capital in Hong Kong, said in a note that Beijing might report negative growth for “the first time since the Cultural Revolution”.
The manufacturing PMI, which measures factory activity, dropped to 35.7 in February – below the previous all-time low of 38.8 set in November 2008 during the global financial crisis – from 50 in January when the impact of the epidemic was not apparent.
A reading below 50 indicates a contraction in activity.
The February PMI figures confirmed fears that China’s economy was in bad shape. Photo: AFP
All of the sub-indexes of the PMI pointed to the difficult situation facing Chinese factories. Output plummeted, new orders vanished, exports and imports stopped, and logistics were badly disrupted. Input prices, which reflects the costs factories must pay, was the only sub-index that remained above 50.
The non-manufacturing PMI – a gauge of sentiment in the services and construction sectors – also dropped, to 29.6 from 54.1 in January. This was also the lowest on record, beating the previous low of 49.7 in November 2011, according to the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, which produces the index with the National Bureau of Statistics.
The declines in the February reflect the difficulties businesses are having in bringing production back online due to shortages of labour as well as difficulties receiving supplies or shipping goods to market because of transport restrictions enacted to contain the spread of the virus.
An extended slump would put upwards pressure on unemployment, especially among small, private sector service firms. Beijing, which worries that rising joblessness could cause social unrest, has called on local governments to remove unnecessary restrictions to get businesses back to work.
The employment sub-index in the manufacturing PMI fell to 31.8 in February.
“It is not because factories have stopped hiring migrant workers, it is because the flow of migrant workers to factories has been blocked,” said Hua Changchun, an analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities. “There’s no point talking about resuming production if workers can’t return to their jobs.”
Zhang Qiqun, a researcher with the Development Research Centre of State Council, said in a statement that the major economic indicators for this quarter would see “obvious drops” and China must “be prepared”.
The employment sub-index in the manufacturing PMI fell to 31.8 in February. Photo: AFP
How quickly China can dig itself out of the coronavirus hole is a matter of debate.
According to the PMI survey, about 90 per cent of medium and large-sized manufacturers are expected to resume production in March, meaning about 10 per cent will still be closed four weeks from now.
As for small firms, the industry ministry said this week that two-thirds would still be closed at the end of February.
China’s production difficulties have resulted in economic problems for nations around the world that rely on supply chains that begin or pass through the country. The global spread of the coronavirus will only exacerbate the problem.
Barclays and Nomura forecast China’s first-quarter growth at 2 per cent, while Capital Economics said it would contract in year-on-year terms.
“The sharp drop in China’s manufacturing PMI in February reinforces our view that the normalisation in economic activity will be delayed,” said Xing Zhaopeng, an economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group.
“There’s scant chance for a V-shaped rebound – the authorities are using targeted aids more than stimulus to stabilise the economy and that will lead to a gradual bounce.”
The National Bureau of Statistics tried to put a brave face on the data, saying there would be a substantial improvement in March.
“The resumption of work is ramping up and market confidence is steadily recovering,” said Zhao Qinghe, a senior statistician at the NBS.
“Although the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic has caused a larger impact on production and operations of Chinese enterprises … currently the epidemic has come under initial containment, and the negative impact on production is gradually weakening.”
Young Chinese girls in Hunan province used Nushu, a language that no men could read, to communicate with one another. Now a new film aims to tell us more about it
Gianna Jun and Binbing Li, in the film Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Photograph: Fox Searchlight Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
A decade ago Chinese-American author Lisa See was researching an article on footbinding when she found a reference to Nushu, the world’s only “women’s writing”. Though the origins were murky, the script revealed a culture of women’s relationships and sparked the idea for her novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, the film of which, co-produced by Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng, is released tomorrow.
After having their feet bound at around the age of seven, girls in Jiangyong County in Hunan province would live indoors – first in the “women’s chamber” of their own homes, and later in the homes of their husband’s family. To ease their isolation and offer support in their pain, girls from the same village were brought together as “sworn sisters” until their weddings. But a more serious relationship, almost akin to marriage and expected to last for life, could be arranged between two girls by a matchmaker, with a formal contract, if the pair shared enough of the same “characters” (being born on the same day, for example). In See’s book she writes: “A laotong relationship is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose — to have sons.”
Women used Nushu – a script unique to the area – to write to their laotongs after they “married out” into different villages. Yet until the 1960s few outside the province knew about it, and no men could read it, says See. “In the mid-60s an old woman fainted in a station,” she says. “The police went through her things to see who she was and found a piece of paper with what looked like a code, so she was arrested on suspicion of being a spy.” In the midst of the cultural revolution, the experts who finally identified the script were sent to labour camps, not emerging to study the writing until the 80s. Following the success of See’s book, the film aims to allow people to learn more.
It took China less than 70 years to emerge from isolation and become one of the world’s greatest economic powers.
As the country celebrates the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we look back on how its transformation spread unprecedented wealth – and deepened inequality – across the Asian giant.
“When the Communist Party came into control of China it was very, very poor,” says DBS chief China economist Chris Leung.
“There were no trading partners, no diplomatic relationships, they were relying on self-sufficiency.”
Over the past 40 years, China has introduced a series of landmark market reforms to open up trade routes and investment flows, ultimately pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The 1950s had seen one of the biggest human disasters of the 20th Century. The Great Leap Forward was Mao Zedong’s attempt to rapidly industrialise China’s peasant economy, but it failed and 10-40 million people died between 1959-1961 – the most costly famine in human history.
This was followed by the economic disruption of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a campaign which Mao launched to rid the Communist party of his rivals, but which ended up destroying much of the country’s social fabric.
‘Workshop of the world’
Yet after Mao’s death in 1976, reforms spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping began to reshape the economy. Peasants were granted rights to farm their own plots, improving living standards and easing food shortages.
The door was opened to foreign investment as the US and China re-established diplomatic ties in 1979. Eager to take advantage of cheap labour and low rent costs, money poured in.
“From the end of the 1970s onwards we’ve seen what is easily the most impressive economic miracle of any economy in history,” says David Mann, global chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank.
Through the 1990s, China began to clock rapid growth rates and joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 gave it another jolt. Trade barriers and tariffs with other countries were lowered and soon Chinese goods were everywhere.
“It became the workshop of the world,” Mr Mann says.
Take these figures from the London School of Economics: in 1978, exports were $10bn (£8.1bn), less than 1% of world trade.
By 1985, they hit $25bn and a little under two decades later exports valued $4.3trn, making China the world’s largest trading nation in goods.
Poverty rates tumble
The economic reforms improved the fortunes of hundreds of millions of Chinese people.
The World Bank says more than 850 million people been lifted out of poverty, and the country is on track to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020.
At the same time, education rates have surged. Standard Chartered projects that by 2030, around 27% of China’s workforce will have a university education – that’s about the same as Germany today.
Rising inequality
Still, the fruits of economic success haven’t spread evenly across China’s population of 1.3 billion people.
Examples of extreme wealth and a rising middle class exist alongside poor rural communities, and a low skilled, ageing workforce. Inequality has deepened, largely along rural and urban divides.
“The entire economy is not advanced, there’s huge divergences between the different parts,” Mr Mann says.
The World Bank says China’s income per person is still that of a developing country, and less than one quarter of the average of advanced economies.
China’s average annual income is nearly $10,000, according to DBS, compared to around $62,000 in the US.
Slower growth
Now, China is shifting to an era of slower growth.
For years it has pushed to wean its dependence off exports and toward consumption-led growth. New challenges have emerged including softer global demand for its goods and a long-running trade war with the US. The pressures of demographic shifts and an ageing population also cloud the country’s economic outlook.
Still, even if the rate of growth in China eases to between 5% and 6%, the country will still be the most powerful engine of world economic growth.
“At that pace China will still be 35% of global growth, which is the biggest single contributor of any country, three times more important to global growth than the US,” Mr Mann says.
The next economic frontier
China is also carving out a new front in global economic development. The country’s next chapter in nation-building is unfolding through a wave of funding in the massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
The so-called new Silk Road aims to connect almost half the world’s populations and one-fifth of global GDP, setting up trade and investment links that stretch across the world.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption China’s version of its past is a story of prosperity, progress and sacrifice for the common good
China’s extraordinary rise was a defining story of the 20th Century, but as it prepares to mark its 70th anniversary, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Beijing asks who has really won under the Communist Party’s rule.
Sitting at his desk in the Chinese city of Tianjin, Zhao Jingjia’s knife is tracing the contours of a face.
Cut by delicate cut, the form emerges – the unmistakable image of Mao Zedong, founder of modern China.
The retired oil engineer discovered his skill with a blade only in later life and now spends his days using the ancient art of paper cutting to glorify leaders and events from China’s communist history.
“I’m the same age as the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” he says. “I have deep feelings for my motherland, my people and my party.”
Image caption For people like Zhao Jingjia, China’s success outweighs the “mistakes” of its leaders
Born a few days before 1 October 1949 – the day the PRC was declared by Mao – Mr Zhao’s life has followed the dramatic contours of China’s development, through poverty, repression and the rise to prosperity.
Now, in his modest but comfortable apartment, his art is helping him make sense of one of the most tumultuous periods of human history.
“Wasn’t Mao a monster,” I ask, “responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen?”
“I lived through it,” he replies. “I can tell you that Chairman Mao did make some mistakes but they weren’t his alone.”
“I respect him from my heart. He achieved our nation’s liberation. Ordinary people cannot do such things.”
On Tuesday, China will present a similar, glorious rendering of its record to the world.
Beijing will tremble to the thunder of tanks, missile launchers and 15,000 marching soldiers, a projection of national power, wealth and status watched over by the current Communist Party leader, President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen Square.
An incomplete narrative of progress
Like Mr Zhao’s paper-cut portraits, we’re not meant to focus on the many individual scars made in the course of China’s modern history.
It is the end result that matters.
Image copyright XINHUA/AFPImage caption Mao Zedong pronounces the dawn of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949
And, on face value, the transformation has been extraordinary.
On 1 October 1949, Chairman Mao stood in Tiananmen Square urging a war-ravaged, semi-feudal state into a new era with a founding speech and a somewhat plodding parade that could muster only 17 planes for the flyby.
This week’s parade, in contrast, will reportedly feature the world’s longest range intercontinental nuclear missile and a supersonic spy-drone – the trophies of a prosperous, rising authoritarian superpower with a 400 million strong middle class.
It is a narrative of political and economic success that – while in large part true – is incomplete.
New visitors to China are often, rightly, awe-struck by the skyscraper-festooned, hi-tech megacities connected by brand new highways and the world’s largest high-speed rail network.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Those in China’s glittering cities may accept the trade-off of political freedom for economic growth
They see a rampant consumer society with the inhabitants enjoying the freedom and free time to shop for designer goods, to dine out and to surf the internet.
“How bad can it really be?” the onlookers ask, reflecting on the negative headlines they’ve read about China back home.
The answer, as in all societies, is that it depends very much on who you are.
Many of those in China’s major cities, for example, who have benefited from this explosion of material wealth and opportunity, are genuinely grateful and loyal.
In exchange for stability and growth, they may well accept – or at least tolerate – the lack of political freedom and the censorship that feature so often in the foreign media.
For them the parade could be viewed as a fitting tribute to a national success story that mirrors their own.
But in the carving out of a new China, the knife has cut long and deep.
The dead, the jailed and the marginalised
Mao’s man-made famine – a result of radical changes to agricultural systems – claimed tens of millions of lives and his Cultural Revolution killed hundreds of thousands more in a decade-long frenzy of violence and persecution, truths that are notably absent from Chinese textbooks.
Image copyright GETTY/TOPICALImage caption Tens of millions starved to death under Mao, as China radically restructured agriculture and society
After his death, the demographically calamitous One Child Policy brutalised millions over a 40-year period.
Still today, with its new Two Child Policy, the Party insists on violating that most intimate of rights – an individual’s choice over her fertility.
The list is long, with each category adding many thousands, at least, to the toll of those damaged or destroyed by one-party rule.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Beijing still regulates how many children families can have
There are the victims of religious repression, of local government land-grabs and of corruption.
There are the tens of millions of migrant workers, the backbone of China’s industrial success, who have long been shut out of the benefits of citizenship.
A strict residential permit system continues to deny them and their families the right to education or healthcare where they work.
And in recent years, there are the estimated one and a half million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang – Uighurs, Kazakhs and others – who have been placed in mass incarceration camps on the basis of their faith and ethnicity.
China continues to insist they are vocational schools, and that it is pioneering a new way of preventing domestic terrorism.
The stories of the dead, the jailed and the marginalised are always much more hidden than the stories of the assimilated and the successful.
Viewed from their perspective, the censorship of large parts of China’s recent history is not simply part of a grand bargain to be exchanged for stability and prosperity.
Getty
Timeline of modern China
1949 Mao declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China
1966-76 Cultural Revolution brings social and political upheaval
1977 Deng Xiaoping initiates major reforms of China’s economy
1989 Army crushes Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
2010 China becomes the world’s second-largest economy
2018 Xi Jinping is cleared to be president for life
It is something that makes the silence of their suffering all the more difficult to penetrate.
It is the job of foreign journalists, of course, to try.
‘Falsified, faked and glorified’
But while censorship can shut people up, it cannot stop them remembering.
Prof Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is one of the few scholars left trying to record, via oral histories, some of the huge changes that have affected Chinese society over the past seven decades.
Her books are banned, her communications monitored and her social media accounts are regularly deleted.
“For several generations people have received a history that has been falsified, faked, glorified and whitewashed,” she tells me, despite having been warned not to talk to the foreign media ahead of the parade.
“I think it requires the entire nation to re-study and to reflect on history. Only if we do that can we ensure that these tragedies won’t be repeated.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Can progress really be attributed to the leadership?
A parade, she believes, that puts the Communist Party at the front and centre of the story, misses the real lesson, that China’s progress only began after Mao, when the party loosened its grip a bit.
“People are born to strive for a better, happier and more respectful life, aren’t they?” she asks me.
“If they are provided with a tiny little space, they’ll try to make a fortune and solve their survival problems. This shouldn’t be attributed to the leadership.”
‘Our happiness comes from hard work’
As if to prove the point about how the unsettled, censored pasts of authoritarian states continue to impact the present, the parade is for invited guests only.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Mao’s portrait will, as it always is, be watching over the events in Tiananmen Square
Another anniversary, of which Tiananmen Square is the centrepiece, is also being measured in multiples of 10 – it is 30 years since the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy protests that shook the foundations of Communist Party rule.
The troops will be marching – as they always do on these occasions – down the same avenue on which the students were gunned down.
The risk of even a lone protester using the parade to mark a piece of history that has largely been wiped from the record is just too great.
With central Beijing sealed off, ordinary people in whose honour it is supposedly being held, can only watch it on TV.
Back in his Tianjin apartment, Zhao Jingjia shows me the intricate detail of a series of scenes, each cut from a single piece of paper, depicting the “Long March”, a time of hardship and setback for the Communist Party long before it eventually swept to power.
“Our happiness nowadays comes from hard work,” he tells me.
It is a view that echoes that of the Chinese government which, like him, has at least acknowledged that Mao made mistakes while insisting they shouldn’t be dwelt on.
“As for the 70 years of China, it’s extraordinary,” he says. “It can be seen by all. Yesterday we sent two navigation satellites into space – all citizens can enjoy the convenience that these things bring us.”
Media caption What was China’s Cultural Revolution?
Deity has all the necessary travel documents for seven-day journey bringing blessings to coastal communities
The statue of Chinese sea goddess Mazu on board the train for her seven-day tour of eastern China. Photo: Weibo
High-speed rail travellers in eastern China may find themselves in exalted company this week as one of China’s most beloved deities is on a seven-day tour.
Mazu, protector of seafarers, boarded the train at Putian in Fujian province on Friday with an entourage of 230 worshippers for one of her regular “inspection tours”. And, like any modern traveller, the sea goddess had the necessary identity card and ticket for the journey.
Mazu, known as Tin Hau in Hong Kong, began life more than 1,000 years ago as a mortal named Lin Mo, according to Chinese folk belief. As a girl she is said to have saved some of her family members when they were caught in a typhoon while out fishing. In another version of the myth, Lin Mo died while trying to rescue shipwreck victims.
She fell out of favour in mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, when her ancestral temple on Meizhou Island in the southeastern province of Fujian was destroyed to make way for a People’s Liberation Army garrison. In the late 1970s the temple was rebuilt and in 2009 the beliefs and customs surrounding Mazu were recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco.
Inspectors on China’s high speed rail will find everything in order if they ask to see the goddess Mazu’s ticket during her seven-day tour. Photo: Weibo
Staff at the Meizhou Mazu Temple applied for an ID card for the goddess, in her earthly name of Lin Mo. Tickets were also organised for two other fairy figures who traditionally protect her, according to Chinese folklore.
“Not only Mazu but Thousand-Mile Eye and Wind-Accompanying Ear were all bought tickets,” a temple representative told the Southern Metropolis News.
This is not the first time the trio have been bought travel tickets. Two years ago their airfares were paid for when they visited Malaysia and Singapore and, a year later, they took a cruise ship to the Philippines.
This year’s tour includes a visit to Kunshan in Jiangsu and Shanghai, before Mazu returns to her home temple on the island of Meizhou. At each stop, devotees believe Mazu blesses the location with her presence and protects its residents from harm.
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The tour has been organised jointly by the Meizhou Temple as well as the Huiju Mazu Temple in Kunshan and the Lugang Mazu Temple in Taiwan.
News of the celestial train journey quickly went viral on Chinese social media, with posts on Mazu receiving 460 million views on Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging platform, since Monday. “First, respect. Second, she takes up a seat so it’s not crazy to buy her a ticket,” one comment read.
Civil affairs ministry reaffirms plan to eradicate names that ‘violate the core values of socialism, damage national confidence’
One man says it reminds him of the dark days of the Cultural Revolution
Beijing wants to eradicate place and property names, like “East Rome’s Garden”, that are influenced by foreign or “weird” words. Photo: Weibo
Beijing has reiterated its commitment to rid Chinese cities of “big, foreign and weird” property and place names, sparking a backlash from the public.
The campaign began last year when six government departments introduced a joint policy requiring provincial and county authorities to identify all such properties within their jurisdictions and rename them by the end of March.
On Friday, the Ministry of Civil Affairs reaffirmed its support for the plan, but reminded local governments to implement it “prudently and appropriately”.
Many Chinese properties, especially hotels and apartment buildings, incorporate famous foreign places, like Manhattan, California or Paris, into their names, but under the new rule they all have to go. According to a report by local newspaper Sanqin Metropolis Daily, in one city in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province, at least 98 apartment projects, hotels, townships, communities and office towers need to be rebranded.
Many Chinese properties, like the Vienna International Hotel, incorporate famous foreign places into their names. Photo: Weibo
But for some people, the plan is nothing more than a waste of time and money.
“If projects are forced to change their names, what about the name on the property certificate, the enterprise licence and tax registration? Do they have to be changed too?” asked Zhu Yun, a woman who lives in Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province.
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“And what’s the standard for the new names, and who’s going to do the renaming? It’s just a waste of people’s energy and money, and will do nothing for the national culture or confidence.”
Zhu Min, an octogenarian who also lives in Guangdong, said the scheme had echoes of a darker time in China’s history.
“It reminds me of the bad times of the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “At that time, a great number of streets, roads and stores were forced to rename, because they contained elements of old customs and old culture.”
The debate has also been raging online, with tens of thousands of people airing their views on social media.
“Cultural and national confidence is about respect for multiculturalism,” one person wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
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Despite the outcry, the civil affairs ministry said the implementation of the scheme was “an important measure … to carry forward the national and local culture”, Xinhua reported.
“The relevant regulations and guidelines of the campaign should be strictly observed to prevent the campaign from being expanded in an arbitrary manner,” it said.
The plan announced last year stated that “big, foreign, weird” place names and those based on homonyms “violate the core values of socialism, damage national confidence, and affect the production and lives of the people, and must be rectified and cleaned up”.
‘There’s no need for a confrontation in technology because science has no borders,’ says the founder of CloudMinds
Huang has watched from up close as the US gradually descended from its telecoms supremacy and China caught up
Bill Huang in 2018. Photo: YouTube
Bill Huang, a Chinese-American telecoms industry veteran, used to target China and its vast, untapped market with the technological know-how he had learned in the US.
But over the past few years, the tables have turned. In his latest business endeavour, the engineer turned entrepreneur is relying on China for a key technology that would transform mobile communication for the next decade – and it is a technology the US has fallen behind on.
As one of the first young mainland Chinese to attend graduate school in the US after diplomatic relations were resumed 40 years ago, and as one of the early participants in Beijing’s global recruitment programme to attract top talent in science and technology, Huang has a unique perspective on the current bilateral stand-off that centres on technology.
CloudMinds Technology, a privately held robotics sector company he founded in 2015, needs the superfast 5G network to support its cloud-based platforms for operating intelligent robots. The next-generation wireless technology has become a flash point in the escalating US-China tech rivalry, and Huang is at the forefront of it all.
“It’s kind of like a one-sided rivalry. Because the US doesn’t have the [5G] technology,” Huang said on the sidelines of a recent conference on China in Philadelphia.
For months, the US government has waged a campaign to block the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from dominating global 5G networks, lobbying allies to shun the company for what it says are risks of espionage or sabotage by Beijing.
Huawei is already ahead of its European rivals in market share thanks in part to its lower prices. But so far no companies in the US – which has long led the telecoms industry – can make the equipment needed to build the next generation of networks.
Huang, 57, who spent three decades in the mobile communication sector, has watched from up close as the US gradually descended from its telecoms supremacy and China quietly caught up.
Technology is not like martial arts, or Shakespeare’s book, it’s not like everything is copyrighted Bill Huang, CEO of CloudMinds Technology
In its heyday, US giants like AT&T sold network equipment to countries around the world. Huang himself once worked at AT&T’s research hub Bell Labs, a dominant leader in telecoms innovation known as “the idea factory” and arguably the most innovative scientific institution for a long stretch of the 20th century.
“In the last 20 years, the US went from [being] No 1 in the telecommunications industry to now almost exiting telecommunications equipment manufacturing,” Huang said, citing the acquisition of Lucent and Motorola by European counterparts.
It was a decline Huang witnessed with an initial sense of sadness. As a veteran of Bell Labs, he said, he had felt extremely proud of the company’s contribution not only to America, but to telecoms technology worldwide.
“But secondly I also felt a level of pride for China,” he said, “because it went from nothing in telecommunications to lead the world in telecommunications in less than 30 years.”
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Glenn O’Donnell, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the decline of major US telecoms providers had little to do with politics, but was a function of inadequate interest in innovatation because of their dominance in the field.
“The long lease cycles and until recently the relative maturity of the market really didn’t lend itself well for real innovation,” he said.
“And that’s now changing, and all of those players that decided not to play in telecommunications are now wishing they had a stake because there’s a lucrative new market.”
Also drastically different today is the state of relations between China and the US. As they fight their costly trade war, tensions and acrimony have spilled into other aspects of bilateral relations, from technology, defence and geopolitics to ideology. There are even warnings of “decoupling” – something almost unimaginable to Huang, whose personal trajectory has been shaped by the intertwined ties between his homeland and his adopted country.
Fifth-generation mobile telecommunications technology, or 5G, enables data to be transferred at a speed that is 20 times faster than current standards. Photo: Reuters
He calls himself “a product of China-US relations”. Such was his proud conviction that he gave his son the middle name “Nixon”, after the president who put relations with China back on track in 1972 with a historic trip to Beijing that ended over two decades of antagonism and isolation since the Chinese Communist Party took power.
The visit by Richard Nixon – who died in 1994, the same year Huang’s son was born – not only mended bilateral relations, but created an opportunity for Huang and many others like him: to learn the most advanced science and technology from the world’s leading innovation powerhouse.
Born in 1962 into an intellectual family in southwestern China, Huang spent most of his childhood in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
“As professors, my parents had a very difficult time during the Cultural Revolution. But they insisted that we spend time to study,” he said.
Huang recalled being a “wild kid”, going to school to “have fun”. But when the time came to study, he was able to pick up the pace, which he attributed to the academic minds that run in his family.
Hailed as a “child prodigy”, he passed the country’s first university entrance exam in a decade at the age of 15. A year later, in 1978, he was in the first batch of students to enter university after the disruptions of the decade-long upheaval. He chose to major in electrical engineering, following in his father’s footsteps.
In his sophomore year at the Huazhong Institute of Technology, his parents told him to apply for graduate programmes in the US.
“They think the US has the best technology in the world, and they wanted me to come here to study,” he said. “I read everything about the US … and I was very eager to come.”
Arriving at the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus in 1982, at age 20, Huang was one of the first new Chinese graduates to further their studies in the US after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. He did not speak English (although he could read it), and had to enrol in a three-month language training program before he could attend lectures.
He studied computer science in addition to electrical engineering, working day and night on projects in the lab – a time he looks back on with fondness.
“It was some of the most intense time in my life, I suppose,” Huang said. “But I was young and relentless, and I could go on for three days without sleep. … I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
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Despite their vastly different cultural backgrounds, Huang made friends with his American classmates and fellow foreign students, some of whom were from India and what was then the Soviet Union.
“I experienced zero racial prejudice,” he said. “That was Chicago in the 1980s. I don’t know what happened today, [but back then] it was thoroughly what I thought was the ‘melting pot’.”
In his computer science classes, Huang learned Unix – a state-of-the-art operating system developed by Bell Labs – from adjunct professors who had helped create the program.
Little did he know he would later become a researcher at Bell Labs. “That was the holy ground of telecommunications,” he said, still beaming with pride when speaking of his former employer, which invented, among other things, the communications satellite and the cellular telephone system.
Bill Huang as a graduate student in Chicago in the early 1980s. Photo: CCTV
In 1994, Huang joined 10 other former Bell Labs engineers at a California-based telecoms infrastructure provider that targeted the vast and underserved Chinese market. A year later, the company merged with a telecoms software company to become UTStarcom, with Huang as its co-founder and chief technology officer.
UTStarcom tapped into the fast-growing Chinese telecoms market with a low-cost, limited-range wireless service known as the Personal Access System (PAS). It went public on the Nasdaq exchange five years later. In 2001, China passed the US as having the most mobile phone customers. The rapidly expanding market propelled UTStarcom’s growth; its revenues increased tenfold between its IPO and 2003, when it controlled 60 per cent of China’s PAS market.
In 2007, having lived in the US for longer than he did in China and having become an American citizen, Huang moved from Silicon Valley to Beijing with his wife and son. China Mobile, the country’s largest telecoms operator, had asked him to help build a “Bell Labs for China” – a request he readily accepted.
“It was not only a simple job, but a responsibility, a challenge I thought I should accept no matter what,” he told Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in 2017.
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As the head of the China Mobile Research Institute, Huang led the carrier’s leap from 3G to 4G, and he was also at the centre of 5G research. “We put a lot of effort into researching what standards are required for the future network,” he said.
His return to China preceded the “Thousand Talents Plan”, a state-backed recruitment drive to lure the world’s brightest scientists and experts – especially those with roots in China – with lavish grants. But when the plan was set up in 2008, Huang was among the first batch of researchers to be enlisted.
“I express my heartfelt thanks to the state and the people for giving me such a good opportunity and condition to return home and serve the country,” Huang was quoted as saying at a forum for recipients of Thousand Talents awards hosted by People’s Daily in 2010.
“I worked for over 20 years abroad, and all my work was in the field of technology. I hope to bring the whole set of things I know back to China,” he added.
The recruitment scheme, much celebrated at the time, has become a sensitive subject today as tensions between the US and China escalate. It has drawn growing scrutiny and suspicion from the US, where investigators are looking for any connection to theft of American intellectual property. In response, China hushed up or deleted references to the programme in universities, companies and cyberspace.
A robot made by CloudMinds Technology showcased at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona in February. Photo: Handout
When asked about US complaints regarding China’s alleged technology theft, Huang gave a vehement defence of China.
“I think these are just basically blatant accusations with no ground,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent [of the technologies] are not stolen. There are industrial espionage cases … but they’re not systematic cases, and they’re not [the result of the] rivalry between China and the US – they’re the result of competition.”
Huang also dismissed accusations that Chinese scientists and experts have “stolen” US technology.
“Technology is not like martial arts, or Shakespeare’s book, it’s not like everything is copyrighted,” he said.
“Everyone in Silicon Valley in the last 50 years started from somewhere, and then they become an entrepreneur and they move [on] to start their own companies. So in the early days, everyone took a little bit from what they have worked on.”
“It was customary, and then it became very litigious. Then people started saying: wait a minute, you can do that? So there were many exemplary cases, then it became more and more refined in what you can take and what you cannot take; what is protected and what is not protected. All of these things are happening industry-wide, it’s not a single US and China issue.”
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But intellectual property theft is not the only American grievance. Many US companies have accused China of forced technology transfers, with foreign businesses required to hand over technology to their Chinese partners in exchange for access to the market.
Huang said that complaint “has been there since day one”.
“Chinese companies will always complain about American companies. American companies will always complain about Chinese companies. The reason is very simple: every company would want to use regulations and law to their advantage,” he said.
A trained engineer, Huang holds a “globalist” view of technology – at odds with the national security perspective that has become prevalent in Washington.
“There’s no need for a confrontation in technology because science has no borders,” he said.
“In Huawei labs, there are many American engineers. In Intel and Qualcomm’s labs, I can assure you there are many Chinese engineers, and there are many German, French, Swedish engineers in all of these organisations. The fact they’re sold by a Chinese company or they’re sold by an American company has no meaning because behind the technologies is an international effort.”
To make his point, Huang calls the technology created by CloudMinds a “US and China technology”.
“I mean, how do you categorise it? Is it created by China or the US? It’s created by both. Because we have engineers in Silicon Valley, and we have engineers in Beijing.”
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The company has dual headquarters, with its global operation based in Santa Clara, California, and its China operation based in Beijing – a structure Huang says now “makes perfect sense”.
“That was by design, by our lawyers. They kind of foresaw, if there [are] going to be trade tensions, this would be the right way to do it.”
But Huang questions if these tensions – a large part of which he said had been “politicised” – are so deeply embedded in every corner of society.
“I come to the United States very often, and I talk to the industry. I still feel it is the same America.”
“I encountered no scrutiny, no warning, and everyone is encouraging us, both from the US and from China, to continue our practice,” he said, adding that he only felt the tension when speaking to lawyers and government officials.
“But I am worried by all these stories. I think that’s why I said earlier: in the media it all looks very scary, but in practice, it’s all business as usual.”
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