"When East Meets South": China’s African Gambit

Nearly six centuries after Zheng He first reached the Horn of Africa, China once again turns its attentions to the African continent. Leaders of 48 of the 53 African countries, including 40 heads of state, plan to arrive this weekend for perhaps the biggest diplomatic event China has ever organized.

The official purpose of the three-day China-Africa Forum is to expand trade, allow China to secure the oil and ore it needs for its booming economy, and help African nations improve roads, railroads and schools.

The unofficial purpose is to redraw the world’s strategic map, forming tighter political ties between China, now the fastest-growing major economy, and a continent whose leaders often complain of being neglected by the United States and Europe.

This is of course not the first time in recent memory China has courted African leaders. During the Cold War, China would frequently reach out to Socialist states (shaky though they were) and the bidding wars between the PRC and the ROC for UN votes too often focused on cash-poor African nations.

This time though, the Chinese want trade and commerce. They want raw materials. And they’re not particularly finicky about with whom they do business.

November 2nd, 2006

NYT: Rights Advocate Wins a Retrial, a Rarity in the Chinese Courts

In a stunning move, an appeals court has overturned the guilty verdict of activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng. Chen was sentenced to four years in prison this past summer after launching a crusade against the forced sterilization of peasant women. Local officials had ordered the sterilizations as well as forced abortions in an effort to meet population growth targets for their districts. Chen sued and organized demonstrations against the policies. Within weeks he was under house arrest. Then he was taken into custody. 10 months later, he was on trial for ‘distrubing the peace’ and ‘inciting unrest.’ Oh yeah, did I mention that Chen has been blind since childhood?

Mr. Chen’s first trial was widely condemned as a travesty. Beijing-based lawyers whom Mr. Chen chose to defend him were harassed before the trial and then barred from the hearing. The court assigned Mr. Chen two local attorneys who introduced no evidence, called no witnesses and did not contest the charges against him.

It is unclear why an appeals court in Linyi, which is the same urban area where local officials ordered the crackdown on Mr. Chen, would decide to overturn the verdict against him.

It is possible that higher authorities

October 31st, 2006

Corruption Purge could claim Standing Committee Member

NYT reports this morning that the Hu/Zeng crime fighting dynamic duo have turned their sites on Beijing–and Standing Committee Member, Beijing party secretary, and Jiang Zemin ally Jia Qinglin could become the first member of that elite club to be purged for corruption since the CCP took power in 1949. “A widening Chinese anti-corruption probe has targeted Beijing’s party leaders, a sign that President Hu Jintao intends to continue removing officials he considers insufficiently loyal, people told about the leadership’s planning said. Some 300 Communist Party investigators have been examining property deals and procurement practices in the capital city since at least late September and have uncovered suspicious dealings that implicate top Chinese leaders, the people said…

If the investigation results in the removal of one or both of the men, it would make the ongoing housecleaning the most sweeping since the shake-up after the 1989 suppression of democracy protests.”

This past week, Jia Qinglin has been in the UK, meeting with British PM Tony Blair. Jia is scheduled to be in Europe until November 3 but there’s no word on whether the timing of the trip and the announcement were *ahem* coincidental.

Per the NYT, Standing Committee members have

October 26th, 2006

Sunday NYT: The Chinese Go After Corruption, Corruptly

Interesting take by Jim Yardley in today’s NYT on the recent corruption purges and crackdowns in the PRC. Yardley argues that the endemic nature of corruption in China makes fighting corrupt practices difficult–if not impossible–without serious structural reforms.

In an economic boom gilded with excess and profiteering, official corruption is so widespread, and increasingly so brazen, that it is almost taken for granted. The latest World Bank governance survey found that China had seriously backslid in the category of “containing corruption” when much of the rest of the world, if not improving, was basically unchanged on the issue.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have warned that corruption threatens the credibility and legitimacy of Communist Party rule and have vowed to stamp it out. But many experts say that truly stamping out corruption would involve the type of broad political reform and a full embrace of the rule of law that the party has long resisted. The current corruption sweep authorized by Mr. Hu in Shanghai and other cities is widely viewed as more of a purge of allies linked to his predecessor, President Jiang Zemin, than an unfettered crackdown.

“The

October 22nd, 2006

Morning Tea: Taiwan’s Maori connection…Archaeological find in Vietnam…Shinzo Abe’s views on history

Some random notes courtesy of the History News Network: A recent study shows important DNA and linguistic links between the native peoples of Taiwan and those of the Pacific Islands.

“The 12 original tribes of Taiwan are Austronesian by language and culture, as are the great majority of the island peoples who settled the Pacific islands. Since most historians now believe the Pacific was settled from East Asia, the island of Taiwan seems to have been their main place of origin. Work on DNA is backing this thesis up. About 60 per cent of Maori DNA is in common with Taiwanese aboriginal DNA. The aborigines also have anthropological connections to the Malay people of Southeast Asia.”

Archaeologists have found urns dating from nearly 2500 years ago in Vietnam. Archaeologists claim the finds, “provide further evidence that an early Metal Age culture had once existed in central Vietnam.” Finally, new Japanese PM Shinzo Abe signalled ahead of summit meetings with the leaders of South Korea and China (I wonder if they’ll have anything to talk about…) that he has no plans to retract or dilute previous apologies for Japanese wartime atrocities.

October 11th, 2006
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