William Hung
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A very interesting article from Foreign Policy. Its a long article, here’s an abridged version.
‘Why Won’t Anyone Play With Us?’ China’s Internet Erupts With TPP Angst | Foreign Policy
Wow, many misconceptions here, lots of Chinese netizens for some reason see the TPP deal as a slap in the face for Xi and an insult against China.
Now I finally understand why so many Chinese PDF members here are so hurt about the TPP and constantly post insults about Vietnam and the TPP. So sad.
China, I actually think you are welcomed to join TPP, don’t be so angry.
@Nihonjin1051, time for us to work hard to get rid of this misunderstanding about the TPP.
‘Why Won’t Anyone Play With Us?’ China’s Internet Erupts With TPP Angst | Foreign Policy
Word of the trade alliance has citizens asking why Chinese reforms have stalled.
by DAVID WERTIME OCTOBER 9, 2015
On Oct. 5, U.S. authorities, in concert with those from 11 other nations bordering the Pacific Ocean, announced the completion of negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping free-trade deal that would more closely bind the economies of countries as diverse and far-flung as the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, and Australia. But China, despite having the world’s second-largest economy and a land mass very much bordering the Pacific Rim, wasn’t included. With major deals of its own in the works, such as “One Belt One Road” — a massive initiative that would create new infrastructure linking China and India’s economies more closely with those of Central Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East — Chinese policymakers have been eager to project something bordering on indifference to TPP.
The day of the announcement, state news agency Xinhua issued language that hinted at tacit approval and downplayed TPP’s role as “one of many free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region.” But on social media, Chinese commentators aren’t taking the recent news so well. They believe it constitutes a slap in the face for President Xi Jinping, a setback for Chinese interests, and a possible comeuppance for a China that has played fast and loose with international rules for too long.
The TPP news came during China’s “Golden Week,” a weeklong vacation period that celebrates National Day, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. That break gave citizens extra time to engage the topic on their smartphones, perhaps while stuck in a massive highway gridlock or a packed train car. While TPP did not top the social media charts, interest in the announcement was strong: TPP was the fourth most searched term on massive mobile chat platform WeChat, where a post translating the TPP’s provisions into Chinese had been read over 90,000 times.
On Weibo, a popular Twitter-like platform, “TPP” has been discussed over 1.2 million times. In contrast to Beijing’s sang-froid, citizen commenters variously depicted TPP as a “sucker punch” that is “obviously directed” against China, a “smack in the face” to Chinese President Xi Jinping after his late September state visit to the United States, and an effort to “contain China’s development.” They said the deal was “new colonial territory” and the United States’ “own wall” around itself after years of trade deficits with China.
On Weibo, Feng Wei, a professor of history at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, agonized that “TPP creates an integrated supply chain among the United States, Japanese technology, Australian resources, and Vietnamese labor. What is China to do?” Most striking of all, commenters spoke critically of Chinese political and economic reform with a candor not often seen in the midst of a crackdown on social media and Internet speech that’s now over 2 years old. Sun Liping, a professor of sociology at Tsinghua, asked on Weibo why so many Chinese were “reveling in the misfortune” of having been excluded from the TPP. “Behind it,” he wrote, “are dissatisfactions with the status quo and demands for reform.”
Indeed, much of the online hand-wringing about TPP evinced anxiety about Chinese leaders’ evident recent turn away from certain elements of international society, from their declarations of “internet sovereignty” and increasingly harsh regulations on online speech to Education Minister Yuan Guiren’s now-famous denunciation of Western values in a January speech. Generally speaking, these moves are not in keeping with the earlier promise of Chinese reform.
The TPP has brought forth Chinese voices critical of the gap between the potential of their country’s reform and its reality. One Weibo comment said China’s TPP exclusion “traces back to China’s entry into the WTO, when China made many promises, like ending tariffs on cars within a certain time, opening markets for telecom, oil, media, protecting IP … now they know China’s promises aren’t dependable, no one in China respects the spirit of contract, so they won’t play with us.” Another added: “If you don’t follow rules, other people won’t want to play with you; this is very normal.”
On Weibo, one complained that state media had “puffed up the fruits of the Xi-Obama meeting — then just days later,” Obama “smacks [Xi] in the mouth.” It’s not just foreigners who seem to be questioning China’s chops. In September, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, one of Asia’s richest men and known for his close ties to former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, endured scathing state media coverage and allegations of being “unpatriotic” over his investment empire’s steady turn away from Asia and toward Europe. Some appear to hope that the TPP will have the effect of reinvigorating some stalled reforms.
Xu Zidong, a scholar of Chinese literature, asked hopefully whether “TPP will have any outside force — can it become a kind of turning point?” Another wrote: “China can lower taxes and keep people here to spend. It can open administrative monopolies and allow anyone to enter oil and telecom. It can lessen [administrative] approvals, seriously eliminate administrative personnel, and increase efficiency.” He added, quite boldly, that “to protect private property, we should not talk about communism anymore. It’s just driving more Li Ka-shings away.”
That sense of isolation was particularly acute when citizens discussed the sensitive topics of democracy and the Internet. One widely shared blog post, censored from parts of Weibo but preserved elsewhere, was deeply critical of China’s turn away from reform. “It’s obviously been over ten years [since WTO entry], and we’ve clearly had time to reform,” the pseudonymous author wrote. “We feel the stones, but when are you bureaucrats going to cross the river? It’s the age of the Internet; knowledge and information are exploding. We needed time, but the age of the Internet doesn’t give us time.”
In a censored post captured by mirror site Freeweibo, Wang Jianguo, a management professor at Peking University, wrote that TPP is “the bitter fruit” from China’s “expulsion of Google, its lockdown on the Internet, and its breaking the international rules of the game.” When Yang Jinlin, who works for Hong Kong Satellite Television, wrote that the reaction to TPP should be “self-confidence,” not fear, the top response argued: “TPP is not scary. What’s scary is how the masses are pushed aside, which implies an inability to cooperate genuinely with others. In a world dependent on globalization, shouldn’t that terrify us?”
The debate over TPP now unfolding inside China has exposed an internal ideological division, well-known to China watchers, between liberal reformists, who are often accused of being U.S. apologists, and the conservative voices that often invoke patriotism in service of their arguments. It’s also shown that anxiety about China’s future is not hard to find among Chinese citizens themselves, even as the country’s GDP and military spending continue to march upward. Many comments about TPP were so critical of China itself that one web user wondered at the ranks of “so many people with negative views of their country and their people” coming forth. “If it wasn’t the TPP,” he wrote, “it would have been something else.”
Wow, many misconceptions here, lots of Chinese netizens for some reason see the TPP deal as a slap in the face for Xi and an insult against China.
Now I finally understand why so many Chinese PDF members here are so hurt about the TPP and constantly post insults about Vietnam and the TPP. So sad.
China, I actually think you are welcomed to join TPP, don’t be so angry.
@Nihonjin1051, time for us to work hard to get rid of this misunderstanding about the TPP.
