Naked Officials? (裸体做官，luo ti zuo guan)

A recent corruption case has immediately caught the attention of Chinese netizens.

Pang Jiayu, former vice chairman of the provincial political advisory body (the CPPCC of Shanxi province) , was sentenced a 12-year jail and his personal assets worth RMB 200,000.00 was confiscated. Pang's case was widely reported last September because of the saying that he was brought down by his own 11 mistresses (Ernai, 二奶 in Chinese). He was also labelled as 'Zipper Mayor' after the story was exposed.

What makes the case so hot among netizens in China is the fact that Pang's wife and son already immigrated to Canada in 2002 when he was still the party boss in Baoji, a city of Shanxi province, which means he probably had already transferred most of his illicit money to his wife before he was charged of bribery. Netizens have coined the phrase '裸体做官 luo ti zuo guan' (naked officials) to describe such a phenomenon that a corrupted official would arrange his/her family members to immigrate overseas secretly, as a means to mitigate the possible severe effects if he/she is found guilty later on.

Pang's case is not a singular one. In fact, some observers have pointed out that becoming-a-naked-official has evolved into a subculture in Chinese officialdom, and some even characterizes it as 'the more corrupted, the less remorseful officials are'.

Although there is a mechanism within the officialdom to record the personal and family members' assets, lacking transparency virtually creates a lot of loop holes to prevent such phenomenon.

The latest movement to tackle rampant corruption problems by the Chinese authority is to amend the Criminal Law. The report says the legislative body of China is currently reviewing the draft of an amendment, which would add clauses oriented to relatives and people who have 'intimate relations' with corrupted officials, if they abuse the officials' positions to accept bribes or otherwise profit illegally.

A positive step indeed, but allowing media to perform the checks and balances is also quite critical.

orderly, but soulless

Yesterday evening, when I was watching the well-coordinated movements of thousands of performers in the closing ceremony, I suddenly thought about some mise-en-scenes in the film the Lord of Ring, in which the intimidating force is represented in the similar manner. The only difference is that the later one is a simulacra created on the screen with the help of computers, while the former one is a real event happened in the Bird's Nest.

Today, quite exceptionally, the headline of the top story appeared nearly all newspapers in Beijing, and Internet news portals as well, has unanimously used IOC chief Roggae's word 'truely exceptional' (in Chinese it's translated as '无与伦比', which plays up a bit to the meaning 'best ever' from Roggae's words, like this story from the Australian indicates) to praise the Beijing Olympic Games. Although it's amusing to see the gap btw the Chinese expectation in the translation and what's been given in reality by Mr. Roggae's, I'm really sick of such self-intoxication in such a shoddy unanimity and order, so depressing and distasteful that when I heard Boris Johnson poking fun to his audience at the London House by saying it's the 1908 Games, I couldn't help laughing.

It makes me feel better, and I swear, it has nothing to do patriotism or nationalism. I'm just cheered up a bit by his sharp and humorous comment, like suddenly you are granted to breathe freely after having been confined in a tightly controlled space for a while. This somewhat eccentric London mayor just behaves like that lovely child in the story of Anderson's emperor's new cloth, by simply pointing out a matter of fact, while most of us are silent. Of course, the speech given by him as a whole is full of Londoner's pride, but it's not offensive to my ears.

What a relief! I know he thinks the aesthetic taste of the ceremony is quite outdated, even philistine.

There is another story from WP that has made my head even cooler. Probably it is the first insider's account on the weirdness of services he was provided.

'As sports spectacles go, I've never seen one more efficiently or soullessly executed than this one. I have no idea where they put the real people for 17 days, but I felt like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show." Where's Ed Harris saying: "Truman is going to turn left on Main Street: Cue the smiling girl and the hearty hot dog vendor." '

Very personal indeed, but it gives me a sense of truth about how good it is.

Really a cool stuff!

Farewell, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games!

Thanks, Chen Jie, for this wonderful photo.

Chinese collectivist mentality? Too simple to say so...

When I first read Mr. Brooks' essay on the societies with individualist mentality and the ones with collectivists mentality several days ago, I sensed something wrong in it. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will be over tonight. Since that essay has something to say about the opening ceremony, it would be interesting to review it from the final result of the Games.

The following presuppositions for Brook's argument are especially problematic.

1. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
2. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

Brooks draws evidence from some scientific research for the above-mentioned presuppositions, but by presuming such a flawed generalization as the truth, Brooks himself falls into a collective mode of thinking, a typical problem of the external reflection where the content goes against the form.

Anti-thesis to such a fault statement is quite obvious when one looks into the Olympics medal table. China's version focuses on the number of gold medals, while America's more on collective overall figure of all medals. That will lead America into the No.1 sports country. It is indeed. China stands at the top of the gold medal list, largely because of its unique national sports system - a highly efficient champion making mechanism, if not an elite one. But strangely, most of the gold medals won by Chinese athletes are from individual competitions, collective wise, US performs much better in team-work games, such as basketball, volleyball, women's football, baseball, softball, relay competitions in swimming and running. Brooks' argument certainly can't explain such a phenomenon.

In addition to sports, business world also sees something contradictory. Anyone who attends American business school to get MBA degree would find that networking and team spirit is the central theme in their studies of successful multi-national companies. They are influential now in China as well, and I'm shuddered to find out how popular the American style corporate training programmes are in China, in which the team spirit is instilled by the slogan 'we are the one'! To say successful MNC secretly adopts the ideology of fascism and brainwash their employees in such a manner might go too far, but its impact on the mentality of anyone in the economic sphere across national borders and cultural boundaries can't be ignored. Does the great convergence happen in both countries as this interesting essay argues?

The paradox is that although the Chinese authority heavy-handedly maintains the public order, individuals' desire to reach their full potentials is not repressed in the economic sphere, which has made it very vibrant and energetic, but also brutal and primitive.

One of the following readers has keenly observed that Chinese are rather in conformist mentality, instead of collectivist one. I would add that this is more or less in the political sphere.

Here are some noteworthy readers' comments on Brooks essay:


'A society that is either too individualistic or too collective will not prevail. As a Chinese-born American, I have seen the downfall in both. The Chinese have learned to be more individualistic over the past few decades (and probably want to continue moving in that direction). Perhaps it is time for the U.S. to put a little more emphasis on the collective. (And then maybe we can actually get some meaningful health care reform.) '— Michelle, Princeton, NJ

'Let's not confuse "collectivist" with "conformist." Conformity may be a virtue in the East, whereas it may be a character defect in the West, (except that everyone's conforming in the West, too!)' — G, Tucson, AZ

'The tension between individualistic behavior and collectivist behavior is very fundamental to how the world thinks - it is not a simple East-West cultural binary. The very fundamentals of the Scientific method, are rooted in reductionist thinking that isolates subjects from their contexts in order to objectively study them.' — Alan, Houghton, MI

'If we replace the word 'collectivism,' which has a more negative connotation in the West, with a word like 'communitarism,' which emphasizes 'cooperation,' 'interdependence,' and 'civil society,' the importance of a balance between 'Harmony and the Dream' becomes clearer to Western ears.' — D.B. Borsody, New York

'Has David never considered that the left has always been collectivist and the right individualistic since the dawn of the industrial age or that the working class tends to be collectivists while the middle class is individualistic. Unionism, suffrage, abolition,and grass roots movements for the living wage, universal health, and so on are collectivist in aim and method. Read Raymond Williams for starters.' — patrick finn, buffalo, ny

'As I see it, collectivism and individualism, far from being mutually exclusive, are complementary and both necessary for a healthy society and culture. The idea of them being separate opposites may be, after all, due to that American way of perceiving things, as Mr. Brooks himself points out: one that fails to see the relationships but focuses, instead, on categories.'— Diogo, Portland

Some of comments have entered into the determinate reflection, like the last one. Good to see such a cool head!

The prize for each olympic gold medal

Chinese gold medalist will be rewarded by an unprecedented amount comparing to their peers in the previous Olympic Games.

Here is the list (per gold medal) base on this report:

China: USD300,000 on average (from the central and local governments, corporate sponsorship, possible bonus including apartments, government jobs, cars and instant admission to university etc);

US: USD25,000 (from the US Olympic Committee);

Russia: USD150,000 (promised by Putin);

Germany: 50 litres of beer/month (German do love beer!);

Belarus: a lifetime worth of sausages (vow!);

India: USD 1 million (plus a doubling of pension and a life time go-anywhere free first-class train pass);

Mongolia: telephone number 9999-9999;

North Korea: something like 'hard-working hero' award.

How about other countries? Any feedback is welcome.

The undertone of western nationalism

Yesterday, when I talked to a friend of mine on China's nationalism, I said that the strong sense of national pride, achieved by compromising or undermining individual citizen's rights can't be called patriotism. Some of my friends prefer the word 'patriotism' to avoid negative connotation of 'nationalism', which in my view is just self-cheating. Actually, such a strong sense of national pride held by the most of Chinese, which in general is disproportionate to the development of civil society in China, is a worrisome sign.

China's strong sense of national pride after the Olympics might play a very important role in re-instating the sense of western nationalism if the development of civil society in China fails to eliminate doubts from the outside world. The division of the Self and the Other at the national level has never been so prominent since the end of the cold war. Coincidentally, Russia now might be another important factor in shaping western nationalism, especially after its invasion of Georgia, as conservative Robert Kagan argues in his recent essay that 'nationalism, and the nation itself, far from being weakened by globalization, has returned with a vengeance'.

The tricky thing is such a western nationalism is always a latent one, hidden behind universal values with the aim to differentiate You and Me, like Kagan's democracy vs. autocracy, but when one looks into the argument one would find what's really important to him is actually power play.

I think any argument tinged with such a mentality of the national power play, in the name of defending democracy, is a kind of nationalism, because it hijacks the universal notion - democracy to serve the writer's national interests, presumably western. It is for this reason that I'm very suspicious about Kagan's divisive thinking, as it might fanfare confrontation instead of promoting peace.

I'm not so sure what Kristof's view is about Kagan's history-is-back (I myself agree that history is back, but not in a sense of Kagan's argument about democracy vs. autocracy), and I'm not very comfortable either about his way of argument in his latest essay on China's rise. I even think he might fall into the trap of western nationalism by saying 'now it will be our turn to scramble to compete with a rising Asia'.

Does he? Granted that China's success so far in its development lies largely in its flexibility to cope with pressures either from the outside or from the inside, but the standpoint of Kristof is quite ambiguous. In fact, one can sense a bit his conservative undertone by playing up the rise of China, which nevertheless underlies his strong identification with the US (patriotic feeling as he may argue) instead of liberal values per se.

Interestingly, there is another critique from Gulf News by Amir Taheri, which sheds some insightful light on the similar concern about China after the Olympics. Instead of portraying China as a major competitor, threatening to gain more from other nations' existing interests in a zero sum game, Taheri poses questions rather from internal problems that China is currently facing without the reference to his own country. In a very concise way, Taheri touches three urgent issues that largely would shape the future of China.

The first one is the political reform,

'The Chinese ruling elite is divided between reformists and supporters of the status quo ante. Portraits of the Great Helmsman may have disappeared from public view for the duration of the games. But a good chunk of the elite, still drunk on the heady wine of Maoism, is biding its time. The final purge, both in terms of policy and personnel, has not yet taken place.'

The second one is the concern about China's role in the international arena,

'the international system needs a positive input from China. A policy of nay-saying and prevarication cannot deal with dangers, such as nuclear proliferation spearheaded by North Korea and Iran, that could ultimately affect China’s own security.'

And the third one is how to assimilate so large amount of migrant workers in Chinese society into a stable social stratum,

'The 300 million or so poverty stricken seasonal workers roaming from one end of the country to another could emerge as a veritable human tsunami, destroying all that China has built since the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping a generation ago.'

The analysis is insightful, problems are better articulated, and the questions posed by the writer are sharper. Sorry, Mr. Kristof, it is such a vigorous thinking without too much concern of the self-interest sets up the standard. Instead of some shallow cliches with the tone of nationalism, be it eastern or western, such an insightful argument is in need now. Quality matters!

Legal problems of protest

Here is the story of a brave lawyer who are against all odds to pursue his ideal. Another story tells about two elderly women, who had some problems in settling down the compensation fee with the real estate developer for the demolition of their old houses, applied for the permission to protest in the specified zones by the local authority but only received ridiculous punishment. Sadly, it's impossible to look into the details of these two cases. So it's just for the reference here.

However, some Chinese legal experts do write up something on the protest issue. In his essay about citizen's rights to protest in China, Gao Yifei, a professor in Xiangtan University of Hunan province, elaborates the legal basis on the citizen's right to protest, particularly the historical context for the protest law passed in 1989. More importantly, he also points out that there are some flaws that need to be re-addressed in that law. For example, there is no clause in the current law to grant citizens the right to litigate the government to the People's Court if their applications are rejected by the government, which means under the current situation, if citizen's application is rejected by the government, he/she basically has no means to obtain further legal support. It's the dead end. Obviously, such a law is not sufficient to fully guarantee the citizen's right.

I must say it's a timely analysis which is very helpful to understand the issue of protest right. The problem is when lawmakers in China will write a bill to amend the current assembly and demonstration law.