Most recently, repeated reports by the Chinese media about the slaughter of thousands of dogs in China to prevent rabies has sparked a backlash from Chinese citizens calling for China’s first animal welfare law that could see the criminalisation of this brutal animal slaughter and other mistreatment of domestic animals.

Currently only endangered species are protected in China and this lack of welfare legislation is a major hurdle for NGOs such as Animals Asia and grassroots groups in China.

Chang Jiwen, the law professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, leading the drafting of animal welfare legislation, said, ‘China has begun to be aware of the importance of animal welfare because it touches on the economy, trade, religion, and ethics …’ he added that enacting such legislation will be no easy task, ‘The future is bright, but the path ahead will be tortuous.’

This ‘tortuous’ path is something Animals Asia knows only too well. While discussions with the Chinese authorities elicit tacit support, the authorities cannot act because they have no legal framework for any action. For Animals Asia, it means a long-term commitment and approach through developing key relationships with government officials, lawyers, academics and the public, to generate support and encourage development of such legislation. It’s an approach we believe will bring about positive changes.

Grassroot call for animal welfare laws

Hope often develops from tragedy and in February 2002, the horrendous act of a Beijing college student, arrested at Beijing Zoo, for pouring sulphuric acid on five black bears saw people across the world united in their criticism. It was also widely condemned within China with discussions developing in internet chat rooms calling for action to be taken against the student. For the first time, bloggers also called for laws to stop other acts of cruelty against animals – the call for China’s animal welfare legislation had begun.
Similar acts of cruelty over the past six years have led to the same responses: in 2005 while the rest of the world were turning their backs on bullfighting, China was on the verge of accepting it. But the promoters had not bargained for the strength of feeling within China. China’s animal welfare movement, growing ever stronger, protested and ultimately barred bullfighting from China. Zhang Luping, head of the Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Centre, said in the Los Angeles Times, ‘This is a very significant victory; it shows that ordinary people’s voices can be heard in China and that policies can be changed.’

In the last five years, the movement to end cat and dog eating has also grown. In 2006, 40 protesters swarmed the Fangji cat meatball restaurant in Shenzhen forcing it to close. Just eight months later Chinese campaigners confiscated 400 cats from a market in Tianjin – all had been destined for slaughter. Since 2007 further confiscations have taken place with over 2000 cats recently rescued in Shanghai destined for transport to the animal markets in Guangzhou. And in June 2009, following the slaughter of over 40,000 dogs by the Hanzhong City authorities; Chinese welfare groups held candlelight vigils in Hanzhong to honour the dogs killed. Campaigners also organised the development of a ‘Rabies Forum’ to work alongside government departments to introduce humane stray dog population management and end the mass slaughters so common across the country.

These acts of individual and group compassion show the strength of commitment to end animal suffering – coming from within China. These actions are not led by international animal welfare groups but planned and executed by Chinese citizens.

Emerging signs of hope

The first real hope for legal protection for China’s animals came back in 2004 when a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Beijing committee proposed that China urgently draft a law protecting animal welfare nationwide. Expressing particular concern for livestock, especially at the time of slaughter, saying ‘if animals die in a great panic, their blood can secrete toxins which are harmful to people’s health …’. Proposals stipulated that ‘no one should harass, maltreat or hurt others [animals]‘ and that ‘while carrying animals from one place to another, the vehicles used must be kept clean and animals must be protected from suffering shock, torture or hurt. If animals are killed for disease control they must be killed in a humane way and must be isolated while being killed.’
Disappointingly no law was accepted, but that this draft was presented to the national government showed that China was ready – and eager – to develop animal protection legislation.

Animals Asia’s work to end bear farming brought further political action in 2007, when Zhou Ping, a member of China’s National People’s Congress Party, proposed new legislation to protect Black Asiatic bears (moon bears), specifically calling for a halt in the collection of bear bile, an ingredient used in Chinese medicine. Ms Zhou Ping, a representative from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, challenged the practice, which was encouraged in the 1990s as a way to stop the hunting of endangered wild bears for their bile. This bill wasn’t passed, but helped to raise the issue of bear farming and the need to outlaw this practice to over 3,000 NPC delegates from across the country.
In the last 12 months further political hope has emerged. In December 2008, the University of Politics and Law in the ancient city of Xi’an organised a conference discussing international animal welfare legislation and the development of similar legislation in China. The forum was co-hosted with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), RSPCA International, and the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (OCAE). Some 300 delegates attended, including representatives from government departments, law societies and Chinese universities.

Encouragingly, the conference also marked the establishment of the Animal Protection Law Research Center at the Northwest University of Politics and Law in Shaanxi – a first for China. And lawyers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, led by Professor Chang Jiwen, are discussing with the RSPCA and IFAW, proposals for a national animal welfare law. This could criminalise the brutal culling of dogs and other forms of companion animal maltreatment. We hope the National Congress of the Communist Party of China will accept the final version within the next three years.

After more than 20 years working in China, we know how fast things are changing – and we know from working with various government departments in Beijing and Sichuan Province that there is a growing recognition and sympathy towards the issue of animal welfare – which did not exist 10 years ago. And, like with our Moon Bear Rescue, which is progressing as a result of good relations with the government and local community, we feel that the issue of cruelty to other animals can be similarly addressed.

We’re also working with Chinese welfare groups to aid their grassroots educational work. This is a vital step towards mass improvement in China’s animal welfare. In 2006, we hosted China’s first Companion Animal Symposium. This groundbreaking event saw 32 Chinese animal welfare groups – from across the country- join together to share the many problems they face and call with one voice for new solutions to help dogs and cats in China. It is estimated that these 32 groups represent 250,000 people!

The success of the China Companion Animal Symposium continues to grow and in 2009 we held the third symposium, which saw 130 delegates, representing 63 animal welfare groups and veterinary clinics attending. At the end of the symposium, all representatives agreed to call on the Chinese government to ban the consumption of cats and dogs countrywide. Once again this is message coming from within China.

China is now on the verge of developing animal welfare legislation and this is the time to provide the support needed to the Chinese animal welfare groups. There is a long way to go, but the wheels are in motion, and we believe it will eventually lead to a brighter future for all animals in China.

For more information about Animals Asia and how you can help see [www.animalsasia.org
->www.animalsasia.org]

Colombia is still the deadliest country in the world for trade unionists: 78 were murdered last year, while 33 died during police repression of strikes in the Philippines and 21 in Guinea. According to the ITUC survey, the number of workers and trade unionists who are killed, arrested or ‘just’ dismissed is increasing alarmingly. Deaths have increased from 115 in 2005 to 144 in 2006 and the various forms of abuse and intimidation do not concern only developing countries but, more and more, also parts of the global North, like Europe and United States.

The ITUC survey seems to describe a situation of ‘war on labour’. Would you say that the anti-union culture is growing among companies and governments, that there is an attempt to deunionise labour globally?

The so-called ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of social standards, pursued by investors and governments alike in many, if not most, parts of the world, is certainly one of the main causes for a steadily rising hostility towards trade unions and trade union action. At the same time, more and more workers worldwide see the advantage of a collective defence of their social and economic interests. So, repression increases while unions grow stronger.

Beyond that, however, the ITUC itself is larger than the international trade union movement ever was before. So it naturally has more access to more information and the increase of information in our 2007 survey reflects that proportionally.

And yet, corporations claim to be more and more committed to the respect of human rights though corporate social responsibility …

Well, there are various views on that, but one view is predominant in the union movement, which is that the best way of monitoring employers’ compliance with national labour legislation and international labour standards in the workplace is to have it done by the workers’ legitimate representatives, i.e. trade unions.

Unilateral management initiatives cannot make up for the failure of governments to fulfil their responsibilities. Nor can CSR [corporate social responsibility] substitute for the role of trade unions in defending and advancing workers’ interests. CSR is only valuable where it helps governments do their job and creates room for workers to organise and to bargain collectively. Unfortunately, in the labour area most CSR activity seems to be directed at showing that it is possible to be ethical while doing business in countries where governments do not permit respect for workers’ human rights.

In regions like Asia, the GDP is growing incredibly fast, but there is still a very poor redistribution of wealth in terms of salaries, better conditions and social services. And your report shows that there’s a heavy repression against workers’ protests. How much are the single companies and governments responsible and how much have the market-driven policies of international institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO contributed to this unbalanced growth?

Most Asian governments have prioritised economic growth over the creation of decent work and this has created the current imbalance. These priorities were certainly consistent with IFI [international financing institutions] recommendations. The facilitation of exchanges through WTO liberalisation has accelerated the move of production to Asia and many Asian countries have competed between each other to attract companies on the basis of cheap labour costs, to the detriment of workers’ rights and wages.

The fact that China does not recognise freedom of association and trade union rights is one of the reasons why Asian workers have not received a fair share of economic growth. This applies within China itself, where inequalities are growing exponentially and where the number of social protests is on the rise, but this also applies to the whole continent because of this race to the cheapest labour costs country. It is also important to mention that growth in Asia has had extremely detrimental effect on the environment. China’s environmental degradation is alarming. Unions in Asia are negotiating with their governments and bargaining with companies to address these issues.

Many governments in western Europe, including centre-left ones, are privatising services and deregulating labour in the name of competitiveness. In fact, they do not create flexibility (or flexicurity) but a growing number of casual and temporary jobs. How do you think that trade unions in developed countries should respond on the issue of competitiveness?

On competitiveness, responses have to include training development, lifelong learning or employability as Europe cannot win by competing on the basis of cheap labour costs. It can only remain competitive by investing in its workers, making them better equipped and more productive in the global economy. Trade unions in developed countries have also to work in close solidarity with unions in developing countries to help them build their capacities and bargaining abilities, so that they can demand fair wages and working conditions for the exports they produce and so influence the whole global chain supply.

At the founding congress in Vienna, in November 2006, the new confederation has set out a list of priorities. What is ITUC’s current programme of action?

Our June meeting set out several special action programmes for the ITUC, which will require clear commitments and intensive action to realise. These areas of work we will deal with are migration, for instance, including building partnerships between trade unions in sending and receiving countries. Also, we will work for the organising of workers and trade union recognition in the world’s export processing zones, where some 60 million people, mostly women, are frequently subjected to intimidation and exploitation.

Then we will focus on the role of China on the world stage, in particular given the lack of freedom of association in that country. One example which is high on our agenda right at the moment is our work in the ‘FairPlay 2008′ alliance, which is putting pressure on the International Olympic Committee and the Beijing Olympics organisers to ensure that fundamental rights are fully respected right throughout the supply chains of the sports merchandise sector.

Our campaigns will range from the issues of climate change, to the ‘financialisation’ of the world economy in order to bring about real change in the policies and activities of the global institutions such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank. And through all of this, we will maintain and build our work at the International Labour Organisation, keep gender equality and anti-discrimination actions at the heart of our work, and support our affiliates in reaching out to young workers, who are increasingly under-represented in trade union membership, and thus exposed to exploitation.

In 2008, we are planning to hold an international day of mobilisation, to bring home to the world at large the values and objectives of the trade union movement, and to strengthen even further the bonds of international trade union solidarity.

Useful links

Vittorio Longhi video on the ITUC founding congress

The Chinese government’s anti-pollution initiatives look good on paper but lose potency and are rarely implemented once filtered down through the various bureaucracies to the local level. International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol have no traction as China believes its status as a developing economy exempts it from being bound by regulatory agreements. Business, with its short-term, profit-oriented focus, cannot be counted on. The damage to China’s environment is getting worse and worse.

According to many, hope lies with ‘civil society’, led by a new breed of non -governmental organisations (NGOs) that are already campaigning to reform Chinese environmental practices.

Reaching out

The very concept of an NGO seems to contradict China’s governmental structure: an authoritarian state ruled by a communist party. However, as the government wakes up to a massive environmental crisis and the prospects of associated economic losses, it is reaching out for anything that can help. In this case it is granting tacit acceptance, or even direct endorsement, of NGOs.

In 1994 the Chinese government passed regulations that for the first time granted legal status to independent NGOs. Environmental groups were the first to register and now form the largest sector of civil society groups in China. There are more than 3,300 Chinese NGOs in operation, among them Friends of Nature and Global Village Beijing. Additionally, many international NGOs such as Greenpeace, WWF and the Natural Resources Defense Council have set up offices in China’s big cities.

However, even as environmental NGOs increase in visibility and influence, the government still has considerable latitude to determine their fate. NGOs are watched carefully and heavily regulated – their role circumscribed by political sensitivities and a heavy-handed big brother. A government sponsor must be procured as a prerequisite to legal registration – necessary before an NGO is able to operate inside the
country.

This can be tricky. If an NGO is considered politically charged or capable of doing work outside the narrow and specific environmental campaigns assigned to it, its leaders will have difficulty finding a sponsor. Likewise, if a government-sponsored NGO takes actions that are perceived as provocative or outside its mandate, then its sponsorship can be terminated and it can be shut down instantly. To avoid this difficulty, many NGOs register as for-profit organisations.

Even then, funding remains a problem. Regulations state that NGOs cannot have donor members. Financial support from the central government is often insufficient and the culture of philanthropy is yet to develop, mostly because there are simply no old-moneyed Rockefeller types in China. As a result, NGOs turn to whatever sources they can – sometimes forcing them to accept funds from multinational corporations
that are themselves big polluters. In the process, they sacrifice their ability to sink teeth into the corporate world. For example, Friends of the Earth and Global Village Beijing have accepted money from Royal Dutch Shell and Dupont.

‘Typically, they [NGOs] avoid confrontational methods and adopt approaches that encourage learning, co-operation and participation,’ says Yang Goubin, associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Friends of the Earth spokesperson Mei Ng agrees that a wide spectrum of values need to be addressed as a means to avoid confrontation: ‘The best way to engage China is not just to go in there saying ‘I am green, I am a green NGO’ … If you go in with the goal of reducing poverty, helping with literacy problems, helping women’s health, helping productive health, and at the same time sewing the seed of environmental protection, ecological protection and sustainability, then you are seen not to be pointing a finger at the bad environmental record, but as coming to help the poor, help the deprived, and at the same time, help the environment.’

NGOs and the government

Why would an authoritarian government want to allow NGOs to exist?
As China’s government structure becomes increasingly decentralised and the power of authority and decision-making is handed down from the central government to the provincial levels, local protectionism, corruption and unenforced central government policies have become major issues. NGOs compensate for the central government’s diminished ability to oversee and manage local-level activity.

Thus, NGOs serve as the eyes and ears of government. ‘China is very concerned about instability due to public unrest,’ says Mei Ng. Incidents of public unrest due to pollution rose by 20 per cent in 2005/06, according to official figures. ‘They are facing a time bomb,’ she says. ‘China knows that to defuse this time bomb, it is very important to involve the public.’ So the government allows NGOs to operate but keeps them on a tight leash. In this way, NGOs are sometimes able to win protection and status through their closeness with the government.

NGOs are limited to three functions. First, they organise clean-up campaigns. This is very helpful to the government, because it relieves the party of the burden of this messy and sometimes labour-intensive task. NGOs are better at getting volunteers. No- one would work for the government for free, but giving time to a NGO makes people feel like they are part of an altruistic elite. When a pollution disaster breaks, the media coverage of volunteers diligently working away to clean up the mess looks good for the government. It makes it appear that they are taking the problem seriously, thus calming concerned citizens and making it less likely that they will take to the streets.

Second, NGOs raise public awareness. So far, ‘awareness’ doesn’t depart from consumer-based conservation campaigns. The Environmental Friends Association for Public Welfare and the Green Volunteer League publish materials, which advise: ‘People should avoid random purchasing and should not purchase based on desire.’ This type of activism runs the risk of sounding like a thinly-veiled Mao-style austerity campaign, which might have a hard time in a country where many people have newly-earned cash burning in their pockets. The idea is that climate change and pollution are a result of the people’s consumption patterns, not of an unsustainable government-led growth strategy.

The awareness campaigns are geared toward the wealthiest class with hopes that it will trickle down. ‘Rich people are the first to buy things like environmentally friendly houses and electric cars. Then it will become more affordable for other, less wealthy people,’ says Sun Liping of the Green China Consumer Union.

Third, NGOs serve an important financial role. They are able to devote more resources to international fundraising and can accept money from organisations that won’t work directly with the Chinese government. There are political considerations here, too: NGOs can ask for donations but the government could never do that for fear of ‘losing face’.

In effect, the Communist Party outsources much of the environmental burden to NGOs. NGOs are adept at detecting and surfacing pollution-related incidents of unrest that may be threatening to the government. As such, NGO campaigns are limited to reactions to already existing pollution and there are little or no opportunities to pre-empt environmental degradation or to lobby for more effective environmental laws.

On one of my last days in Beijing I went to Tsinghua University to meet
with Dan Guttman, currently a visiting professor at Tsinghua University. We sat in the basement of the School of Public Management and had coffee at a small café. When I told him I was writing a story about political participation and NGOs in China, he looked at me incredulously. ‘China is still a government-focused society,’ he said. ‘Not in the western parlance, a civil society-focused society. In this setting, NGOs are often organisations attached to the government – non-profit organisations but not non-governmental organisations.’

If this is true, it is possible that no one will save the world from China’s pollution.

At the World Trade Organisation (WTO) conference this month in Hong Kong, some of the key questions on the ministers’ agenda, as they look across to the mainland, will concern China’s intentions on currency liberalisation, the challenge of its cheap manufactures, the future of its amazing 9 per cent annual GDP growth, and whether it will continue to bankroll the huge US debt with its equally huge trade surpluses.

It is easy these days to talk about Mao ‘turning in his grave’ at China’s central role in the globalised capitalist economy, yet he would not necessarily have disapproved. Already in 1945, he had sought to woo Washington’s neutrality in the coming civil war with Chiang Kai-shek by telling US diplomats that a communist China would offer tempting markets for American goods. Mao has now been proved right in reverse: it is the US consumers who are tempted by Chinese goods.

Nor should those who believe that a Maoist purity has been sullied by his successors forget that what we regard as ‘Maoism’ – the ‘self-reliant’ strategy of socialist transition in the 1950s and 1960s – emerged in a highly abnormal context. In those years of acute cold war, US containment of China helped (and was partly intended) to tilt Beijing into dogmatic and destructive isolation.

Mao abandoned the gradualist approach of the early 1950s and sought to ‘catch up’ with the west by ‘leaping forward’, with well-known disastrous results. But it was Mao who would welcome Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972, just as he had also approved previous, unsuccessful, diplomatic overtures to the US in the mid-1950s.

If one of the principal objectives of the Chinese revolution – to build a China strong in both economic development and global status – has been achieved, a second goal – to give the labouring Chinese people a real voice in their future – remains almost as far away as ever, and those who call for it risk being labelled ‘subversive’.

Yet on that famous day of 1 October 1949 in Tiananmen Square, Mao uttered another phrase that did not enter the official record and is never quoted today. Leaning over the balcony before the ceremony began, he surveyed the vast crowd, waved and shouted out to them the simple words ‘Long live the people!’ He did so, he told someone later that evening, because ‘it was the only way I could do justice to them’.

‘Long live the people’ was no empty phrase. Mao had just completed a revolution, which depended for its success upon active popular support. He had lived since 1927 deep among ordinary Chinese in remote rural areas. Without the people, as Mao often said, there would have been no revolution, no Red Army and no Communist Party. China’s tragedy (and that of Mao himself) was that ‘Long live Chairman Mao’, not ‘Long live the people’, became the obligatory slogan for the next quarter of a century. To hail the Chinese people became not only rare but frequently subversive. In the Cultural Revolution, the spirit of ‘Long live the people’ was conveyed not through its dogmatic polemics denouncing the ‘class enemy’ but in the manifestos of dissenting Red Guards, alienated by the perversion of its original ideals.

Significantly, the only time that ‘Long live the people’ ever appeared in an official statement was two years after the Cultural Revolution, when a new, more open-minded leadership was attempting to undo the damage. Inspired by the reformist general secretary, Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily published a long editorial in December 1978 under that headline. It urged party cadres to respect the ‘democratic spirit’ of the ordinary people and to understand that sometimes the masses could be ahead of them. This had happened, it said, two years earlier when a popular demonstration in Tiananmen Square (in April 1976) was staged against the then leaders of the Cultural Revolution.

This official endorsement for spontaneous initiative is unique in the history of a party whose instinct is to repress, not approve, independent mass action. When Tiananmen Square was occupied again, by the pro-democracy student movement in April-June 1989, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow veterans sent in the tanks. The most significant feature of this episode was the support given to the students by the laobaixing, the ordinary working people of Beijing. And when the students were hailed by them with approving shouts of ‘Long live the students’, they replied with one voice ‘Long live the people’. The same slogan appeared on banners in the square alongside ‘Long live democracy’, another deeply subversive idea. Neither has been heard or seen since then on the streets of Beijing.

Yet the spirit, if not the slogan, of ‘Long live the people’ is still very much alive in China today. When laid-off workers demonstrate against corrupt officials who asset-stripped their factories, or peasant communities protest against illegal levies imposed by local officials, they are not calling for western-style democracy. They are asserting the values that infused the revolution and the early years of post-1949 socialism at their best, and that resonate with a deeper sense of communal equity dating back to traditional Chinese society.

Since the crisis of 1989, the Communist Party has itself moved some way towards recognising that it is only entitled to rule if it can deliver results – a modern version of the ancient theory of the ‘mandate of heaven’, which the emperor would forfeit if he failed to provide for his people. The party no longer describes itself as the vanguard of the proletariat but as the ‘ruling party’, whose continued right to rule depends on satisfying ‘the material and spiritual requirements of the people’.

The current leadership under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao is now more willing to recognise that maintaining a trade surplus and boosting GDP growth are no measure of success unless serious efforts are made to tackle rural poverty, income inequality, corruption and environmental degradation. But so far, their efforts have failed effectively to confront the vested interests of the new forces of bureaucratic capitalism, which have flourished under the ‘Get Rich First’ policy, first proclaimed by the late Deng Xiaoping 20 years ago.

Nor is it likely that Hu and Wen or any future leaders will manage to bridge these dangerously widening gaps in Chinese society as long as the ‘democratic deficit’ allows so few avenues for popular scrutiny of government. While argument and even protest is now tolerated on the environment and to some extent on rural poverty, critical areas such as labour relations and official corruption remain closed to public argument. The official rationale for suppressing public dissent is that there is an over-riding need to maintain ‘social stability’. More often this is an excuse for preserving elite privilege and protecting family or business connections.

For socialists abroad, it has never been easy to decide how to judge progress in post-revolutionary China, far less whom, if anyone, to support. In the polarised decades of the cold war those who defended China and Mao to the hilt – sometimes known as ‘110 per centers’ – argued that criticism would play into the hands of Beijing’s external enemies. Cold war attitudes still persist in the west, particularly in the US, where the neo-con view of China as a future ‘strategic threat’ is echoed in parts of the media. But Beijing can now look after itself.

Today’s ‘110 per centers’ are those who condemn root and branch the entire Maoist era, ignoring the extent of popular support for an admittedly flawed socialist agenda, and blaming everything on one man. This approach has been taken to new lengths in the biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, published this year.

China has become much more complex and diverse since the Mao era, but there is still significant continuity with the past. Many Chinese who are critical of the party resent foreign efforts to write off the socialist decades as nothing but ‘chaos’, or to label Mao as no more than a ‘monster’. Nor can China and its problems be viewed in isolation from the international environment – indeed, as argued above, the external context has always been an important factor and remains so today.

How can the western consumer enjoy a constant supply of ridiculously cheap electronic goods assembled in China and then berate the country for its sweatshop production lines? Is it not hypocrisy for the World Bank to urge Beijing to close down ‘uneconomic’ state-owned enterprises, and then lament the plight of the laid-off workers? Are the WTO rules obliging China to open its markets to foreign agricultural products really in the interests of impoverished rural producers? And how can we deplore the growth of a consumerist culture that is demanding more energy, and creating more pollution, when its values are modelled on our own?

Books and articles used to be written about ‘China and the World’. Now, even more than before, China is in the World, and its problems are our problems too. But if there is one principle still to assert amidst all the complexities of 21st century life, it remains the one proclaimed by Mao Zedong in 1949 – but unhappily neglected by him as he became more distant from the real makers of the Chinese revolution. It is to declare, above all other considerations: Long live the Chinese people.John Gittings first visited China in 1971 and was China specialist and foreign leader-writer at The Guardian, 1983-2003. His latest book is The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (OUP, 2005)

For 16 years the Chinese authorities have done everything in their power to whitewash those events, but the world still remembers. And, more importantly, China itself remembers. There are those who point to the economic gains that China has made over the past decade, as if to say: ‘Perhaps the government was too harsh then, but don’t the ends justify the means?’ I ask such people to take a closer look at China’s ‘economic miracle’, at a country rife with corrupt officials getting fantastically wealthy through the abuse of power and authority, while the people for whom they ostensibly work languish in poverty. While actively working to suppress democratic reform in China (‘because the Chinese people are not ready for democracy,’ they claim), these same officials are throwing the door wide open to any business, regardless of its nature. And so the morally corrupt and ethically bankrupt are rewarded, while many of those who strived in 1989 to bring China into a new era of social justice and accountability are still behind bars or under police surveillance.

In November last year, 166 coal miners were killed in a horrific gas explosion in Shaanxi Province, at the Chenjiashan coalmine in Tungchuan city. On 14 February this year, in the Fuxin coalmine in Liaoning Province, a further 214 miners died in a similarly appalling explosion. These events are not anomalies: they are happening with increasing frequency across the country today. But who accepts responsibility for the deaths of these workers? Sadly, in today’s China, the answer is nobody. From the owners of the mines, who place personal profit ahead of human life, to the corrupt government officials who accept bribes from the owners in exchange for looking the other way, the real culprits in the deaths of these workers are the same evils that so many gathered in Tiananmen in 1989 to fight against: official corruption, cynicism and the blind pursuit of profit.

In many ways, things have become worse. Public health policy in China is failing dismally. How many retired and unemployed workers die daily, unable to afford increasingly expensive medical treatments that might save their lives? And how many more workers have died, and are dying, of occupational diseases that could be minimised – or in many cases avoided entirely – by improving basic workplace health and safety? Worse still, how many of these victims of occupational diseases wind up intentionally misdiagnosed by corrupt, bribe taking, government-run occupational health agencies so that the companies whose criminal negligence caused their illnesses can avoid paying compensation? Such things are daily realities nowadays for countless Chinese people.

Though told in different accents and dialects, the stories coming from all over China are remarkably similar in nature: workers are losing their health because factory owners are able to bribe their way out of providing adequate health and safety protection. Children from rural villages are forced by rising school fees and skyrocketing living costs to work in factories to help feed their families. Their parents are being mangled and even killed, all because of the bosses’ criminal negligence.

But despite continuing suppression, the victims of injustice and corruption are once again refusing to keep silent. The past few years have seen migrant workers across the country struggling for their rights and slowly advancing their causes. And there have been real victories. In October 2004, tens of thousands of farmers in Hanyuan city, in Sichuan province, were dislodged from their land by a government-sponsored hydroelectric project and corrupt local officials confiscated their compensation money. The farmers’ mass protests actually succeeded in stopping construction of the dam, despite an attempt by the local government to quell the protests by sending in the military police.

In Zhejiang province, farmers blocked the entrance of a factory and covered the surrounding area with industrial waste. The factory owner called on cronies in the local government to quell the disturbance, and the government again responded by sending in military police. But the farmers were fighting for their very lives, and in their struggle for survival they didn’t merely hold their own but actually blocked the military police from entering their village. Similar scenes occurred in towns in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and elsewhere when villagers refused to roll over and accept being cheated out of their land by corrupt local officials hoping to sell it for a quick profit.

In cities, the peaceful struggles by ordinary Chinese citizens against oppression and corruption are also multiplying. Joining the list of workers fighting against poor working conditions, wage arrears and unfair dismissal in recent years are workers at the Daqing petroleum factory in Heilongjiang province; workers at the Ferro-alloy factory of Liaoyang city; textile workers in factories in Suizhou and Xianyang; electronics and shoe factory workers in Shenzhen; and teachers in Shandong, Hubei and Guangxi, to name but a few. The government responds by handing out longer prison sentences to organisers, as in the case of the Ferro-alloy factory workers, two of whose leaders are now serving prison sentences of four and seven years.

But in the cities, too, there have been victories. After 50,000 retrenched Daqing workers staged a three-month protest, the local government finally promised increased payouts for workers made redundant and promised to hire the children of retrenched workers. And at the Japanese-owned Uniden electronic factory in Shenzhen, workers demanded to be allowed to set up a trade union to fight for legal working hours and reasonable wages. After a large and well-publicised protest, the factory owner caved in. Sixteen years on from 4 June 1989, the social struggle that took such a bloody turn on that day has continued to deepen and intensify, in the face of all the efforts to suppress it.

These problems have not gone unrecognised: the 11th Five Year Plan, covering 2006 to 2010, includes plans to reduce emissions and develop energy-saving practices on the domestic front. China is also aiming to construct a world-first – an entire eco-city, mostly powered by renewable energy and as close to carbon neutral as possible. Unfortunately, in a not so eco-friendly way, the city will be built in the mouth of the Yangtse river, on land that currently provides a home to thousands of rare birds, plants and other species.

In terms of the supply of energy, China’s grandly titled National Plan for Medium and Long Term Scientific and Technological Development prioritises the development of renewable energy sources. And next year a law will come into force aimed at sourcing one-tenth of energy from renewables by 2020. China’s size means that the significance of this commitment lies as much beyond, as within, national borders. Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association, points out that: ‘China’s anticipated entry into the global renewable energy market is expected to have a profound impact on the global industry.’

More ambitious plans are afoot for another component in China’s energy mix – coal. Even though coal is a polluting fossil fuel, China has huge reserves and relies on it for approximately three quarters of its power generation. So it is unlikely to give it up any time soon. Instead, the Chinese are looking to two technological steps to get out of their pollution pickle: producing less general pollution by burning ‘cleaner’ coal, and releasing fewer greenhouse gas emissions by capturing carbon emissions from coal-burning plants and storing them underground. The EU is working on these plans with China, while the UK is funding a £3.5 million feasibility study for a near zero emissions coal generation project.

While a focus on using – but ‘improving’ – coal is part of securing China’s energy supply, these measures are yet to cut the mustard when it comes to the pollution side of things. The effectiveness of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is still not known. Meanwhile, China’s State Environment Protection Administration has closed polluting factories only to see them re-open weeks later, possibly with local authorities turning a blind eye. China’s local authorities need to have energy generated in their region, not least because they need the taxes from the industries that rely on the energy. Despite good intentions by national policy-makers, the pressure and demand for energy may well mean that standard coal and polluting production methods get used anyway.

The unique opportunity that China does have, and that other countries need to support, is the chance to pursue its inevitable development in a way that actively seeks out the world’s most environmentally conscious options. This includes a stronger focus on energy efficiency and renewable power – not including nuclear power, which, as is the case around the world, is being promoted as an environmental measure. Rixin Kang of the China National Nuclear Corporation has said that: ‘To meet the need of energy supply and environmental protection, nuclear power will play a more active role in China.’

With that traditional indicator of increasing consumer aspirations, car ownership, growing at 60 to 80 per cent a year, it remains to be seen whether the tension between environmental protection and the demand for western consumer lifestyles can be resolved. Stronger campaigns in already industrialised countries, which show that we too are committed to re-thinking resource use, and which highlight how western patterns of consumption are destructive (as opposed to ‘modern’) could support Chinese grassroots movements aiming for a sustainable core to the country’s development.

China knows that it has serious environmental problems – yet is also focused on growth. How this conflict is resolved is still up for grabs: China’s development does not have to be a carbon copy of the west.

The first, on 19 February, was the adoption of an official declaration calling for enhanced security ties between the United States and Japan. The very fact that US and Japanese officials were discussing improved security links was deeply troubling to the Chinese, but what most angered Beijing was the declaration’s call for linked US-Japanese efforts to -encourage the peaceful resolution of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through dialogue.

The second key event was a speech Rumsfeld gave on 4 June at a strategy conference in Singapore. With consummate disingenuousness, he stated, ‘Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?’ Rumsfeld continued to question China’s military intentions when he visited Beijing in October.

To Beijing, these comments must have been astonishing. No one threatens China? What about the US planes and warships that constantly hover off the Chinese coast, and the nuclear-armed US missiles aimed at China? What about the delivery over the past ten years of ever more potent US weapons to Taiwan? What about the US bases that encircle China on all sides?

The third notable event was the release, in July, of the Pentagon’s report on Chinese combat capabilities, The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. In many ways the published version is judicious in tone. Nevertheless, the main thrust of the report is that China is expanding its capacity to fight wars beyond its own territory and that this constitutes a dangerous challenge to global order.

The Pentagon is shifting to a more belligerent, anti-Chinese stance – one that greatly increases the likelihood of a debilitating and dangerous military competition between the United States and China. What lies behind this momentous shift? At its root is the continuing influence of conservative strategists who have long championed a policy of permanent US military supremacy. This outlook was first expressed in 1992 in the first Bush administration’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for fiscal years 1994-99, a master blueprint for US dominance in the post-cold war era.

In this new century its injunction to prevent the emergence of a new rival ‘that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union’ can apply only to China, as no other potential adversary possesses a credible capacity to ‘generate global power.’ Hence the preservation of American supremacy into ‘the far realm of the future,’ as then-Governor George W. Bush put it in a 1999 campaign speech, required the permanent containment of China – and this is what Rice, Rumsfeld and their associates set out to do when they assumed office in early 2001.

This project was well under way when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Those events gave the neoconservatives a green light to implement their ambitious plans to extend US power around the world. However, the shift in emphasis from blocking future rivals to fighting terrorism was troubling to many in the permanent-supremacy crowd who felt that momentum was being lost in the grand campaign to constrain China. For at least some US strategists, not to mention giant military contractors, the ‘war on terror’ was seen as a distraction that had to be endured until the time was ripe for a resumption of the anti-Chinese initiatives begun in February 2001. That moment seems to have arrived.

Why now? Several factors explain the timing of this shift. The first, no doubt, is public fatigue with the ‘war on terror’ and a growing sense among the US military that the war in Iraq has ground to a stalemate. So long as public attention is focused on the daily setbacks and loss of life in Iraq – and, since late August, on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina – support for the President’s military policies will decline.

At the same time, China’s vast economic expansion has finally begun to translate into improvements in its net military capacity. Although most Chinese weapons are hopelessly obsolete – derived, in many cases, from Soviet models of the 1950s and ’60s – Beijing has used some of its newfound wealth to purchase relatively modern arms from Russia, including fighter planes, diesel-electric submarines and destroyers. China has also been expanding its arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles, many capable of striking Taiwan and Japan.

Under these circumstances, the possibility of a revved-up military competition with China looks unusually promising to some in the military establishment. No American lives are at risk in such a drive. Any bloodletting, should it occur, lies safely in the future. These moves are supported by a recent surge in anti-Chinese popular sentiment, brought about in part by high gasoline prices (which many blame on China’s oil thirst), the steady loss of American jobs to low-wage Chinese industry, and the (seemingly) brazen effort by China’s leading oil company to acquire Unocal. There is a growing recognition that the United States and China are now engaged in a high-stakes competition to gain control of the rest of the world’s oil supplies.

Initially, discussion of China’s intensifying quest for foreign oil was largely confined to the business press. But now, for the first time, it is being viewed as a national security matter – that is, as a key factor in shaping US military policy. This outlook was first given official expression in the 2005 edition of the Pentagon’s report on Chinese military power. ‘China became the second largest consumer and third largest importer of oil in 2003,’ the report notes.

While none of this is likely to produce an immediate rupture in US-Chinese relations -the forces favouring economic cooperation are too strong to allow that – we can expect vigorous calls for an ambitious US campaign to neutralize China’s recent military initiatives.

This campaign will take two forms: first, a drive to offset any future gains in Chinese military strength through permanent US military-technological superiority; and second, what can only be described as the encirclement of China through the further acquisition of military bases and the establishment of American-led, anti-Chinese alliances will continue.

Elements of this strategy can be detected, for example, in the 8 March testimony of Admiral William Fallon, Commander of the US Pacific Command (PACOM), before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

To counter China’s latest initiatives, Fallon called for improvements in US antimissile and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) capabilities, along with a deepening of military ties with America’s old and new allies in the region. With respect to missile defense, for example, he stated that ‘an effective, integrated and tiered system against ballistic missiles’ should be ‘a top priority for development.’

Note that Fallon is not talking about a conflict that might occur in the central or eastern Pacific, within reach of America’s shores; rather, he is talking about defeating Chinese forces in their home waters, on the western rim of the Pacific. That US strategy is aimed at containing China to its home territory is further evident from the plans he described for enhanced military cooperation with US allies in the region.

Typically, the cooperation will include the delivery of arms and military assistance, joint military manoeuvres, regular consultation among senior military officials and, in some cases, expansion (or establishment) of US military bases.

Chinese leaders are fully aware of their glaring military inferiority vis-à-vis the United States, and so can be expected to avoid a risky confrontation with Washington. But any nation, when confronted with a major military build-up by a potential adversary off its shores, is bound to feel threatened and will respond accordingly. For China, which has been repeatedly invaded and occupied by foreign powers over the past few centuries, and which clashed with US forces in Korea and Vietnam, the US build-up on its doorstep must appear especially threatening.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Beijing has sought modern weapons and capabilities to offset America’s growing advantage. Nor is it surprising that China has sought to buttress its military ties with Russia – the two countries held joint military exercises in August, the first significant demonstration of military cooperation since the Korean War – and to discourage neighbouring countries from harbouring American bases. Even if defensive in nature, these moves will provide additional ammunition for those in Washington who see a Chinese drive for regional hegemony and so seek an even greater US capacity to overpower Chinese forces.

This is all bound to add momentum to the pendulum’s swing towards a more hostile US stance on China. But that outcome is not preordained. Future economic conditions – a sharp rise in US interest rates, for example – could strengthen the hand of those in Washington who seek to prevent a breach in US-Chinese relations.

The debate over China’s military power and the purported need for a major US build-up to counter China’s recent arms acquisitions will become increasingly heated in the months and years to come. Questioning inflated Pentagon claims of Chinese strength and resisting the trend toward a harsher anti-Chinese military stance are essential, therefore, if we are to avert a costly and dangerous course.Michael T. Klare is defence correspondent of The Nation. A version of this article originally appeared in that magazine’s 24 October 2005 edition.

What is particularly worrying is that in most cases, no comprehensive planning for the development and environmental protection of the valleys involved has been undertaken. Each dam builder administers its own affairs, with no regard for the collective interest.

Cascades of dams are being built all over the river valleys of southwest China. In the upper reaches of the Yangtze, for example, starting from the Three Gorges project, strings of dams are planned for the main channel of the river, including 21 dams with a generating capacity of more than 150,000 kw each that are proposed for the Jinsha River (as the upper Yangtze is known).

If the current trend is allowed to continue, the Yangtze, Pearl, Lancang, Nu and Hongshui will no longer be natural rivers; they will be like staircases – a series of sections interrupted by hydro stations. So the water of the Yangtze will no longer come from heaven but from these “steps,” and our free-flowing rivers will disappear forever

The driving force behind this messy free-for-all in southwest China is the pursuit of economic gain. Driven by the profit motive, the dam builders are racing ahead with scant regard for environmental safety in the river valleys or possible changes in the power market. Such hortsighted and unchecked development could lead to endless trouble in the future.

The above situation has attracted the attention not only of ecologists and environmentalists, but also of economists, sociologists and the media. They are calling for more attention to be paid to improving comprehensive planning, scientific feasibility studies and good governance — but unfortunately nobody is willing to listen. It has become routine in China that the decision-makers and the builders of hydropower projects pay close attention to the proponents of such schemes, but turn a deaf ear to critics.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic, the unfortunate fact is that the construction of dams, large or small, has resulted in many “leftover problems,’ with those problems outweighing the project benefits. Over the past 50 years, more than 16 million people have been displaced by dams of various types, and as many as 10 million of those people are still living in poverty. And the reason is simple: Peasants living in hills and mountains lost the very ground on which their lives depended when the rising reservoirs flooded their farmland in the river valley.

While it is true that local governments can benefit from the project-related resettlement schemes and from the construction of new towns, it is also the case that local officials associated with resettlement operations tend to grab the opportunity to pocket some of the public funds earmarked for the schemes. Dam construction projects have become breeding grounds for corruption and degenerate behaviour.

Things have changed, however, especially in recent years. Ordinary people in China now have a growing awareness of democracy and have started to learn how to protect their interests. You know why more and more people displaced by dams are now seeking redress from higher authorities? People affected by these projects have come to realize that their rights, to survival and development, have been attacked and harmed.Chen Guojie is senior researcher at the Chengdu Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Translation from Probe International’s Three Gorges project : www.threegorgesprobe.org