@randomradio @Viet et al....When you need to use it, please do:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/21/nobody-knows-anything-about-china/
Nobody Knows Anything About China
Including the Chinese government.
BY
JAMES PALMER | MARCH 21, 2018, 2:59 PM
As a foreigner in China, you get used to hearing the retort “You don’t know China!” spat at you by locals. It’s usually a knee-jerk reaction to some uncomfortable modern issue or in defense of one of the many
historical myths children in the mainland are taught as unshakeable facts about the world. But it’s also true. We don’t know China. Nor, however, do the Chinese — not even the government.
We don’t know China because, in ways that have generally not been acknowledged, virtually every piece of information issued from or about the country is unreliable, partial, or distorted. The sheer scale of the country, mixed with a regime of ever-growing censorship and a pervasive paranoia about sharing information, has crippled our ability to know China. Official data is
repeatedly smoothed for both propaganda purposes and individual career ambitions. That goes as much for Chinese as it does for foreigners; access may sometimes be easier for Chinese citizens, but the costs of going after information can be even higher.
We don’t know the real figures for GDP growth, for example. GDP growth has long been one of the main criteria used to judge officials’ careers — as a result, the relevant data is warped at every level, since the folk reporting it are the same ones benefitting from it being high. If you add up the GDP figures issued by the provinces, the sum is
10 percent higher than the figure ultimately issued by the national government, which in itself is tweaked to hit politicized targets.
Provincial governments have increasingly admitted to this in recent years, but the fakery has been going on for decades. We don’t know the extent of
bad loans, routinely concealed by banks. We don’t know the makeup of most Chinese
financial assets. Sometimes we don’t know the
good news of recoveries because the concealment of bad news beforehand has disguised it. We
don’t know China’s real Gini coefficient, the measure of economic inequality.
But economic data may be, ironically, more reliable than most just because so much attention has been paid to its unreliability. China’s National Bureau of Statistics itself has repeatedly called out instances of bad data reportage and now attempts to
gather provincial data directly itself. There have been
clean-ups and attempts at rectifying past mistakes — although the increasingly ideological and paranoid turn of the party-state may be obstructing these efforts.
But what we don’t know goes far beyond just economics. Look at any sector in China and you’ll find distorted or unreported public information; go to the relevant authorities and they’ll generally admit the most shocking practices in private.
We don’t know the true size of the Chinese population because of the
reluctance to register unapproved second children or for the family planning bureau to report that they’d failed to control births. We don’t know where those people are; rural counties are incentivized to overreport population to receive more benefits from higher levels of government, while city districts report lower figures to hit population control targets. Beijing’s official population is 21.7 million; it may really be as high as 30 or 35 million. Tens — perhaps hundreds — of millions of migrants are officially in the countryside but really in the cities. (Perhaps. We
don’t know the extent of the recent winter expulsions of the poor from the metropolises.) We don’t know whether these people are breathing clean air or drinking clean water because the environmental data is
full of holes.
We
don’t know anything about high-level Chinese politics. At best, we can make — as I have —
informed guesses. We don’t know how the internal politics of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Kremlin equivalent, operate. Chinese politicians don’t write tell-all memoirs; Chinese journalists can’t write a
Fire and Fury, a
What It Takes, or even a
Game Change. We don’t know whether Xi Jinping truly values China’s
wealth and power or only his own.
We don’t know whether the officials targeted in the “anti-corruption” campaigns were really unusually
corrupt,
lascivious, or treacherous — or whether they were just
political opponents of Xi. We don’t know the extent of factionalism within the Chinese Communist Party, though we do know how often its
existence is
condemned — by Xi and his faction. We don’t know whether officials who lather
slavish praise on Xi actually believe anything of what they say or are acting out purely out of fear and greed.
We don’t know what people really think. We don’t know whether interviewees really support the government or give cautious answers when asked questions by a stranger in a politically repressive country. We don’t know why Chinese
tell pollsters they are more trusting of others than any other country in the world, while in practice
paranoia about the intentions of others is so rampant that old people
aren’t helped on the streets for fear they’re running a scam and children like toddler Wang Yue are
left to die after being hit by cars.
We don’t know the real
defense budget. We don’t know the everyday conditions of the Chinese army because the restrictions placed on military coverage and the ability of soldiers to talk are even more tightly limited than for civilians.
We don’t know how good Chinese schools really are because the much-quoted statistics provided by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that placed China first in the world were taken from the study of a small group of elite Shanghai schools. As soon as that was expanded merely to Beijing — another metropolis — and two rich provinces, the results
dropped sharply. (PISA’s willingness to accept only this limited sample is typical of the
gullibility and compliance of many foreign NGOs, especially in education, when dealing with China; I have seen numerous foreign educators fall victim to obvious Potemkinism, including believing that
Beijing No. 4 High School — the rough equivalent of Eton — was a “typical Chinese public school.”) We don’t know the extent of the
collapse of rural education. We don’t know the real literacy figures, not least because rural and urban literacy is measured by different standards — a common trick for many figures.
We don’t know the real crime figures, especially in the cities, which
may represent as little as 2.5 percent of the actual total. We don’t know the death toll for the ethnic Uighur insurgency in Xinjiang, where local officials, in the words of one government terrorism expert, “bend figures as much as during the Great Leap Forward,” nor do we know how
many people are currently held in “re-education camps.” (Incidentally, we don’t know how many people died in the Great Leap Forward, piled up in village ditches or abandoned on empty grasslands: the 16.5 million once given in official tolls or the
45 millionestimated by some historians.)
And we don’t know what we don’t know. These are the known unknowns, but the unknown unknowns are equally worrying. We may be missing the biggest future stories, the ones that will shake or transform China and the world, right now. Foreign reporters are limited to residence in a few major cities, chiefly Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen; they are
followed and harassed when they travel elsewhere in the country and find it particularly difficult to reach the countryside. (According to the official population figures, Beijing and Shanghai, often portrayed as the norm for the new China, house less than 4 percent of the country’s residents.) The situation for Chinese journalists is far worse; a limited ability to conduct investigative journalism in the 2000s has been almost obliterated by authorities determined that there will be no oversight beyond the party. Fear grips throats; those who would once give names now talk anonymously, where many others do not talk at all.
Our sources of information, always a thin stream, have dried up almost entirely under an increasingly tight censorship regime of the last few years. Social media platform Weibo was once a limited window into provincial complaints and scandals; it is now
massively censored. Private messaging groups on WeChat, an all-conquering messaging service, replaced it; last year, they were massively censored in turn.
All this makes the work of those who manage to successfully extract meaningful economic or political data, such as the masterful researcher
Adrian Zenz, all the more impressive. And as the government closes down any source of information outside its control, we can only wonder at how much it knows itself. Local officials have always demanded enormous amounts of data — it’s not uncommon to receive requests like: “List everybody who attends religious services in your district and where.” But the system has
always distorted the information it sends up even internally and may be doing so even more as Xi
establishes outright dictatorship. Li Keqiang, the increasingly irrelevant (we think) Chinese premier, complained to U.S. diplomats in 2007 of his inability to know basic economic information about the province he then ruled and his need to send out friends and colleagues on surreptitious data-gathering trips.
The government’s solution to this is an increasing faith in big data, a belief that by circumventing lower-level officials it can gather information directly from the source. Huge amounts of money are
being poured into big data, including efforts at
predictive policing and the
widespread monitoring of dissidents. The government requires Chinese firms, and
foreign firms with a Chinese presence, such as Apple, to store and hand over data on a vast scale. But big data itself is prone to
systematic distortions,
misplaced trust, and the oldest rule of coding: garbage in, garbage out.
As the economist Josiah Stamp recounted of another power trying to control a vast territory through oppressive means, “The Government [of British India] are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the
nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the
chowty dar (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases.” Will technology let the Chinese government today do any better? We don’t know.
===========================
And another oldie but goldie, esp when CPC troll Nanking complex is boiling over:
https://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt speaking in 2007
“Five thousand years of history.” It’s a phrase repeated by both Chinese and non-Chinese. Somehow we are supposed to believe that China has more history than other places. A slightly strange concept anyway, and, regardless of whether you want to define “history” as starting with written records or by the emergence of “civilization” as seen in the first large settlements, the five thousand figure is wrong.
The Shang dynasty (founded around 1600 BC) of the Yellow River valley in northern China is as far back as we have solid archaeological evidence and positive proof of the first written records. Earlier than that, history disintegrates into mythology. But even if you accept the preceding mythical Xia dynasty as the start, it takes you back only to around 2000 BC.
In terms of age, civilizations in other parts of the world precede China. Writing systems in Egypt and Mesopotamia predate Chinese writing by a thousand years. The world’s first city, Uruk, in modern-day Iraq, dates back seven thousand years. Even in comparison to Europe, China isn’t that old. Confucius’ life overlapped with those of Pythagoras and Socrates. China was first unified in 221 BC, a century after Alexander the Great had created the Hellenistic Empire, and just a few centuries before the zenith of the Roman Empire.
Three, three-and-a-half, four millennia — surely all ancient enough. Does it really matter that China doesn’t have five thousand years of history? Yes, it does matter, and not because it’s annoying to have this inaccuracy spouted ad nauseam as historical fact, not to mention the hypocrisy of glorifying history yet so poorly preserving it. The myth is important because of the inference that China is uniquely old and so deserves special consideration. This has real-life consequences. When dealing with China — whether trying to turn a profit or awaiting democratic reforms — the implication is you need to be more patient and just wait a little bit longer. After all, the country has five thousand years of history.
In 1991 former American president Richard Nixon told his biographer, “Within twenty years China will move to democracy” and explained the need for America to have patience: “You can’t rush them. The Chinese look at history and the future in terms of centuries, not decades, the way we do, because they’re so much older as a culture.”
The quotation from the Google CEO at the start of this chapter was also a reference to the need for patience. Here is the full quote: “China is a nation with a five-thousand-year history. That could indicate the duration for our patience.” The year before, Google had set up a Chinese site, Google.cn, which self-censored search results in order to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) happy. Searches on sensitive subjects like Tibetan and Taiwanese independence and the Tiananmen “tank man” came up empty or with sanitized material. So much for Google’s informal company motto of “Don’t be evil.” Despite tarnishing their reputation by caving in to Chinese demands for censorship, there was no commercial pay-off. Google struggled to gain market share and had problems with the Chinese authorities. Events came to a head in 2009 with a series of cyber attacks against Google, targeting the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents; the attacks originated in China and were tracked to state institutes. Google’s patience finally ran dry; deciding they would no longer censor search results, they redirected their website to Hong Kong.
Aside from patience, the “five thousand years of history” mantra implies the need for extra respect and cultural sensitivity. A good example of this is when Chris Patten, the last Governor General of Hong Kong, was preparing a speech for his swearing-in ceremony. He recounts: “The reference in my draft to the shared historic responsibilities in Hong Kong of ‘two great and ancient civilizations’ was scored out on the grounds that Chinese civilization was much older than the West’s and China might feel offended by the assumption of parity.” Patten, showing the backbone and bluster that would soon have him branded by the CCP as “a whore, a criminal, a serpent,” and, bizarrely, “a tango dancer,” ignored his advisors and went with “two ancient civilizations.”
Chinese history is long and fascinating; there’s no need to spin it, and it’s a shame to see it used by the government and media as an instrument of nationalism. The implied superiority of such a long history begets a dangerous sense of entitlement. And it’s just plain silly. Imagine if we applied the logic of “old civilizations deserve special treatment” to Egypt and the modern Mesopotamian nations of Iraq and Iran, places that actually do have five thousand years of history. Imagine executives explaining, “Our joint venture in Cairo is losing money but we have to be patient — they built the pyramids four-and-a-half-thousand years ago.” Or picture political commentators urging caution along the lines of: “Can’t push the Iranian government too hard for democratic reforms — they had cities when we were still living in caves.”
Lazy writers continue to churn out falsehoods about China’s glorious past and to contrast it against our own “upstart” cultures. They paint hyperbolic vignettes juxtaposing Oriental sophistication with Western crudity; silk-robed scholars sip tea and contemplate poetry while far away in darkest Europe the inhabitants run around in furs. In a recent biography on Sinologist Joseph Needham, author Simon Winchester contrasts the engineering masterpiece of a two-thousand-year-old Chinese irrigation waterworks with Westerners who “still coated themselves in woad and did little more than grunt.”
As well as its sheer age, China being the “longest continuous civilization” is often said to make it unique. The idea of Chinese civilization as a monolithic unchanging entity stretching in an unbroken line through the millennia is another myth that colours perceptions of China past, present and future. Sometimes the falsehoods are not just quaint asides, but the very foundations of narratives. Martin Jacques’ 2009 bestseller,
When China Rules the World, is a case in point. Jacques regurgitates the line that China is special because of its antiquity and continuity, and adds his own take on it: China as a “civilization state” rather than a nation state. He sees an ascendant China ruled by Confucian authoritarianism, and, as it becomes more powerful, the reassertion of the age-old sense of superiority and a return to tributary-style relationships with lesser nations. This sort of commentary is demeaning to Chinese people, turning them into passive victims of their history forever condemned to repeat it.
